Taking into consideration the benefit that would thereby be conferred upon the patrons of the VINEYARD GAZETTE, we have disposed of the property to Messrs. KENISTON & JERNEGAN, two gentlemen highly qualified for the important trust. The few months we have labored among you have been filled with encouragement, and will be often looked back to as among the brightest in our experience. With heartfelt gratitude, we thank you, friends, one and all, for the helping hand and encouraging word, and hope that the same support will be extended to our successors. And now, as we say the parting word, we would wish that Heaven’s choicest blessings may ever rest upon the readers of the Vineyard Gazette.

-Edgar W. Marchant

Greeting

It is with no small degree of diffidence that we enter upon the editorial direction of this paper, conscious of our own lack of experience in this connection, mindful of the list of successful journalists who have directed its fortunes and gained for it its reputation in the past. And we humbly bespeak for ourselves from our readers all possible indulgence, asking that our shortcomings may be forgiven as far as may be, trusting that if anything shall appear to be meritorious it may receive its due acknowledgement. While we are well aware that a small country paper can never hope to hold that commanding and influential position sustained by a great metropolitan publication, we believe that it has its uses and is not without its influence; and it is our earnest purpose to fill up the largest possible measure of that usefulness, and exert that influence in the right direction.

It will be our endeavor to make the Gazette a live paper, one that shall be welcome in every home, and wherein everyone shall find something to entertain, and possibly to instruct; and while our chief aim will be, in accordance with our understanding of the proper province of such a paper, to faithfully present such local matters of public interest as shall from time to time come to our knowledge, we intend not to be oblivious of the great world without, but to chronicle in their season and in the order of their occurrence such notable events as shall seem likely to interest our readers, and give to those whose means of information from without are limited some idea of what is transpiring in the world about them.

We ask the countenance and material support of our own public, so far as the same can be consistently given; and, realizing that the extent of that support must be measured chiefly by our ability to meet the requirements of our patrons, it will be our aim to make the Gazette equal in every respect to the wants of the communities which properly come within its jurisdiction.

On all public questions our policy will be independence, but not necessarily neutrality; so that while we shall endeavor to steer clear of the entanglements and bitternesses of party strife and local contentions, political or otherwise, we shall ever feel free to respectfully express an opinion, whenever the circumstances of the case shall seem to call therefor. In brief, it will be our constant endeavor to sustain the high standard of excellence attained by our predecessors: with what success, time, and the judgement of our readers, must determine.