The Kennebec Journal, the oldest Maine newspaper still in publication, turns 200 years old on Wednesday.

It’s the anniversary of the newspaper’s first issue, published Jan. 8, 1825, originally out of a shop on the corner of Bridge and Water streets in downtown Augusta.

The KJ was a weekly newspaper at its outset, with Russell Eaton and Luther Severance as its owners. Maine had been a state for less than five years, and it would be another two before Augusta was named state capital.

“It may, we fear with too much truth, be urged that there are already a sufficient number of political publications in this state; but by an increase the public cannot suffer,” the partners stated in a front-page column in that first issue. “Competition, in this as in all other cases, stimulates to exertion.”

Russell later left the paper to start his own, the Maine Farmer. Severance served terms in the Maine Legislature and U.S. Congress before being appointed U.S. commissioner to the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1850.

Other owners in the KJ’s first century included, briefly, James G. Blaine, the future U.S. speaker of the House and 1884 Republican nominee for president.

In 1870 the Kennebec Journal, known as the Daily Kennebec Journal at the time, was located on Water Street in Augusta. A small newsroom staff occupied one room on the upper floor of the building. Kennebec Journal archives

While Blaine was part of KJ ownership, another Maine luminary also owned a local paper: Melville Weston Fuller, who later became chief justice of the United States, and  in the 1850s owned The Age.

“The Age and the Kennebec Journal were not respectful to each other in their columns,” writes Willard King, Fuller’s biographer, referring to that period when the two men’s careers overlapped. “In fact, neither Fuller nor Blaine gave promise of their future eminence in the pages of those papers.”

The front page of the first Kennebec Journal on Jan. 8, 1825. Newspapers.com archive

The Kennebec Journal became a daily in 1870.

In 1929, the Kennebec Journal was bought by Guy Gannett, a prominent resident of Augusta who was quickly becoming a media magnate, having purchased a series of Portland newspapers as well as the Waterville Morning Sentinel in the previous eight years.

Eventually, Guy Gannett Publishing Co. would own a number of radio and television stations as well.

Gannett owned the KJ for nearly 70 years, until September 1998, when it was sold along with its Maine sister papers to The Seattle Times Co. and the Blethen family.

“(The Gannetts’) roots run deep in Maine, especially Central Maine,” Mike Sexton, president of Central Maine Newspapers, wrote in the KJ on Sept. 2, 1998. “They have always insisted on the highest standards of journalism and community service. They have been everything you could ask for in a newspaper owner and a good corporate citizen.”

The KJ traded one owner with Maine roots for another; Alden Blethen was a Unity native and Kents Hill School graduate who went west and bought a Seattle newspaper in 1896.

The Kennebec Journal of Sept. 2, 1998, announces the sale of the newspaper to The Seattle Times, ending seven decades of ownership by Guy Gannett Publishing Co. Newspapers.com

The Blethens in 2009 sold the newspapers to an investment group led by Richard L. Connor.

After Connor left the company, Donald Sussman, a Maine financier and philanthropist, became the majority share owner in 2012, where he would stay until April 2015, when Reade Brower of Camden bought the Kennebec Journal as part of MaineToday Media.

The Kennebec Journal is now part of the Maine Trust for Local News, a subsidiary of the nonprofit National Trust for Local News, following a sale in 2023.

The Maine Trust for Local News is an L3C, or low-profit liability company, with a mission of supporting educational or charitable purposes similar to a public benefit corporation.

“I couldn’t imagine a better outcome for the future of our newspapers, our employees and the state of journalism in Maine,” Lisa DeSisto, chief executive and publisher, said at the time of the sale.