The Chronicle celebrated its 100th birthday this weekend with the requisite panels and cocktail parties, all of which relished in reminiscence. But one thing none of the alumni in town could remember was the actual birth of Duke’s student newspaper—they were just too young.
It all happened rather quickly back in 1905.
Two literary societies, the Columbians and the Hesperians, dominated the minds of the Trinity College campus those days. Despite a bitter rivalry they had published the school’s literary magazine, The Archive, together since 1887.
The two groups had recognized the need for a regular newspaper and had been trying to finagle a start for 25 years. The College Herald, more of a newsletter than a newspaper, was founded in 1881, but it folded after it became Trinity Magazine. It was the heyday of newspaper tycoons and international newspaper monopolies, and the college had no answer.
So junior roommates Tom Stokes and U.N. Hoffman, an Hesperian and a Columbian respectively, turned to the literary societies and essentially pleaded for a chunk of their treasuries. The groups bought in and formed the eight-person board (four from each group) that would run The Trinity Chronicle under the auspices of the literary societies.
Hesperian Henry Gilbert Foard, Trinity ’06 and known more collegially as “Gibby,” was tabbed The Chronicle’s first editor, a position that would alternate between an Hesperian and a Columbian for the next 20 years. He, along with a very small staff, produced a very small first paper that arrived on campus Dec. 19, 1905. The first front-page story concerned a public debate: “Hesperian vs. Columbian: Sixteenth Annual Inter-Society Debate—Won By the Hesperian.” It was as if Gibby had won out to lead this new inter-society journalistic endeavor.
“What a paper that first issue was!” Hoffman wrote in The Chronicle in 1937, reminiscing on the paper he founded. “What the editors did not know about newspaper publishing!”
The learning curve was bumpy but steady from then on out. The Trinity Chronicle’s next issue—in January—printed the wrong date on its front page. But the weekly four-page edition raged on as a fairly straightforward—but often jokey and self-fulfilling—publication.
Men like B.S. Womble, who covered the law school and alumni affairs, and H.E. Spence, known simply as “It” for his for his luminary status on campus, were a jovial but serious bunch. E.B. Cooper was the first sports editor; he pulled off a rather large feat when the final eight-page edition of the first volume was devoted entirely to sports.
Athletics came to take up a large portion of the editorial content—The Chronicle even made up with the name Blue Devils—and an inter-publication baseball game between The Chronicle and The Archive that was “strictly amateur” even received a front-page write-up in 1910. Four years later, The Chronicle announced changes to its editor elections, and in 1925 Dean W.H. Wannamaker would create a new governing board and cut The Chronicle’s ties with its founding literary societies.
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