SEPTEMBER 2021 • LONGISLANDPRESS.COM 45
BICENTENNIAL CELEBRATION
LONG ISLAND'S OLDEST NEWSPAPER
according to Sleights of Sag Harbor.
“Why Mr. Sleight, when you talked
with us last fall and stated your intention
to start a daily paper here, we
thought you were rather visionary and
doubted your ever carrying it into effect,”
Sibley said, according to the book.
“Had you then bought real estate here
you might have made a fortune by the
great rise there has been in prosperity
since the starting of your paper.”
He wasn’t the only one in the family
to find a calling in journalism. Hon.
B.D. Sleight, who owned a newspaper
in Sag Harbor called The Corrector,
published the first daily newspaper
in Suffolk County in 1865, “but the
field was too small at the time for its
successful continuance,” according to
Sleights of Sag Harbor. The book added:
His son, H.D. Sleight, “followed in
the footsteps of his father in the field of
newspaper work.” In addition, Sleights
of Sag Harbor was written by Harry
Dering Sleight, another journalist in
the family, who died in 1933.
And so, the Press continues that proud
tradition to this day.
The first issue of the Long Island Farmer was printed in 1821.
LI PRESS AT A GLANCE
Jan. 4, 1821: The Long Island
Farmer, a weekly publication based
in Jamaica, Queens, was founded by
Henry C. Sleight, a Sag Harbor native
who served in the War of 1812.
1831: Sleight passed the paper to
Thomas Bradlee, a justice of the
peace and police justice in Jamaica,
who turned the paper over to Isaac
F. Jones a year later.
1840: Jones transferred the publication
to Charles S. Watrous.
March 1849: B.H. Willis takes
over from Watrous.
1860: Charles Welling becomes
publisher.
1891: John C. Kennehan of Great
Neck Hills buys the Farmer and
makes it a daily newspaper.
1919: Kennehan’s nephew, James
F. Sullivan, takes over after the
publisher dies, and soon sells his
interest to James F. O’Rourke.
1920: Benjamin Marvin buys the
paper and changes the name to the
Long Island Daily Press and Farmer.
1926: German newspaper publishers
the Ridder Brothers purchase
the paper, make William F. Hoffman
publisher and shorten the name to
the Long Island Press.
1932: The Ridders sell the Press to
Samuel I. Newhouse, the founder of
Advance Publications, which went
on to absorb various media outlets,
most notably the Condé Nast Publications
magazine group.
March 25, 1977: Newhouse shuts
down the Press amid declining ad
revenue, increasing costs and boosted
competition.
January, 2003: Jed Morey of WLIR
alternative radio fame revives the
title, which Newhouse had abandoned
26 years prior, and turns it
into a free alternative newsweekly.
April 2017: Victoria Schneps-Yunis
and her son, Joshua Schneps,
acquire the Press from Morey and
reinvent it as a monthly news and
lifestyle publication in September
of that year.
19th-century Sag Harbor is where Long Island Farmer founder Henry Sleight learned the newspaper craft. (Getty Images)
“I think it’s just
unbelievably ironic that
I used to deliver that
paper,” says Jimmy Pooley,
a descendant of the paper's
founder.
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