ABOVE:  Backside View of Outbuildings and Garden

ABOVE:  Original Copy of First Issue of The Arkansas Gazette, November 20, 1819.  Click on Picture on the Left for Short Video

ABOVE:  Two-Room Brick Outbuilding Housing the Printing Press

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On this site, in a two-story brick print shop, William E. Woodruff published the Arkansas Gazette newspaper from 1824-1827.  Ironically, the building did not survive the 1939-1941 restoration, and why remains a mystery.  Pre-restoration photographs clearly show the two-story brick office, connected to and sharing the front elevation (Second Street) with a two-story frame house.  Once the restoration was completed in 1941, the print shop was gone, the frame house was redesigned into a one-story, and the brick addition in the back of the house (facing Cumberland Street) was razed.  Today, the Gazette print shop is being interpreted in a two-room brick outbuilding, possibly constructed by Woodruff.

William Edward Woodruff (1795-1885) a native of Long Island, New York, apprenticed to Alden Spooner, the celebrated New England printer. Upon completion of his training in 1816, he worked with a New York book publisher.  In 1818, Woodruff, like thousands of other restless Americans, looked WESTWARD to secure his future.

In the summer of 1818, 23-year old Woodruff bid family and friends farewell, and began his great adventure in the west.  He traveled first to Louisville, working briefly at a local paper before moving to Nashville, and the Tennessee State Gazeette.  After a year as a press foreman at the Gazette, he made the fateful decision to start the first newspaper in the newly created territory of Arkansas.  He would later write:

I saw that the country was new, that it possessed incalculable advantages, and presented great inducements to men of Enterprise [sic]. I determined to succeed in my undertaking.

 

Woodruff, and his printing press, traveled to the wilderness of Territorial Arkansas by flat boat and piogue [canoe], arriving at the capital in October, 1819.  There, in a log cabin, he printed the first issue of his newspaper, The Arkansas Gazette, on November 20, 1819.  The paper remained at Arkansas Post until the capital moved to Little Rock in 1821.  Woodruff and his paper also made the move.

In 1823, he built a new print shop at the corner of Cherry and Cumberland Streets.  It was a two-story brick building, with two-rooms below and one long room above which housed the press.  Downstairs, Woodruff carried on a lucrative merchandising business in books and stationery, and established a very successful land (real estate) agency.  He remained here until 1827, when he built a larger brick printing office and home two-blocks away on Markham street.

Woodruff sold the Gazette in 1843. But desiring to remain a voice in the public debate, he founded the Arkansas Democrat in 1846.  Four-years later he was able to buy the Gazette back, and immediately merged the two newspapers into the Arkansas Gazette and Democrat.  Subsequent owners would change the name back to the Arkansas Gazette.  Interesting, in 1991, the same scenario played out again when the Arkansas Democrat bought the Gazette and formed the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

Woodruff's small four-page weekly grew to become one of the South's most respected daily papers, as well as one of the nation's oldest continuously printed newspaper west of the Mississippi River.  Mr. Woodruff's vast knowledge of the state's history and people prompted one of his contemporaries to refer to him as, "The Encyclopedia of Arkansas."  He always seemed present to document the people, places, and events in Arkansas.

Source for all of the Above:  Information imprinted on walls inside the Arkansas Territorial Restoration Museum in Little Rock

ABOVE:  Restored Printing Press Originally Used By Woodruff