This is National Newspaper Week. We print this article about the communities we serve to remind our readers that we have been a part of the local scene for many decades, reporting news items, large and small.
For many years, readers of the Gazette-Journal were greeted with two slogans on the upper corners of the front page:
“Gloucester: Land of the Life Worth Living” and,
“Mathews: Happy Homes and Fertile Farms on Smiling Waters.”
Official or unofficial, these slogans have been associated for decades with the neighboring counties which this newspaper serves. Where did they originate?
The author Thomas Dixon Jr. purchased the North River estate Elmington (which he named Dixondale) in 1897. His writings romanticized the Old South and the Lost Cause, in titles such as “The Leopard’s Spots” and “The Clansman,” the latter of which was adapted by D.W. Griffith in “The Birth of a Nation,” said to be the most controversial movie ever made in the United States.
Dixon also fell in love with rura...