Monroe Watchman
The Monroe Watchman is a weekly newspaper serving Union, West Virginia, and surrounding Monroe County, in the southeastern part of the state along the Virginia border. Founded in February 1872 as the Border Watchman, it is one of West Virginia's oldest surviving community newspapers. Published weekly from Union, the county seat, it had a circulation of 3,652 in 2016 and is owned by The Monroe Watchman, Inc. Its history runs from a founder remembered for an irascible temper and a pistol fight with a rival editor, through nearly fifty years under a single Johnston-family publisher who took charge at eighteen, to the Mohler family, which has run it since 1965.
Union and Monroe County
Union is a small town — 0.45 square miles in total area — that serves as the county seat of Monroe County. Settled by James Alexander in 1774 and originally chartered in 1799, it was named, tradition holds, because in frontier days the site was a rendezvous for troops during the Indian Wars. The town was incorporated in 1868. A majority of its citizens supported the Confederacy during the Civil War and opposed the creation of West Virginia, into which Monroe County was placed when the state was formed.
Union retains much of its historic architecture, with many structures dating to the antebellum period when the local economy thrived on the resort industry of the nearby springs. The present Monroe County Courthouse, built in 1881 in the Romanesque style then fashionable, dates from the Watchman's first decade. The town's historic churches include the Old Baptist Church (1845) and others of the nineteenth century, and the Union Historic District was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990. East of town stands Rehoboth Church, built in 1784 and described as the oldest existing church building in West Virginia. The town's population has fallen over the newspaper's lifetime in its later decades — 1,341 in 1950, 565 in 2010 and 419 in 2020 — while the county it serves, at roughly thirteen thousand residents, remains a rural, agricultural community for which a single county weekly is the local paper of record. The Watchman is described in directory listings as the sole weekly newspaper serving Monroe County.
Founding in 1872: Elbert Fowler and the Border Watchman
The paper began publishing on February 2, 1872, as the Border Watchman. Its founder, Elbert Fowler, was a native of the area — born at the mouth of Indian Creek in Monroe County, son of Dr. and Mrs. Thomas Fowler. He had joined the Confederate Army at eighteen, was educated partly at Emory and Henry College, and learned the newspaper trade from his brother, Isaac Chapman Fowler, at the Bristol News in Bristol, Tennessee. Moving to Union, he established a four-page Democratic weekly.
Fowler's brief tenure set the paper's early reputation. He was known, in the phrase preserved in accounts of the paper, for an irascibility of temper that amounted to an infirmity. In its initial years the Border Watchman conducted a vicious back-and-forth with the other local paper, the Register, run at that time by Richard Burke. The feud escalated beyond print: after an altercation with Burke, the two editors engaged in a pistol fight in which neither was wounded. Fowler quit the newspaper business in 1874 and turned to law. His later life kept the same pattern — he died of blood poisoning brought on by an 1885 duel arising from a political squabble that had resulted in a charge of slander. The Monroe County Historical Society's school-published history of the paper adds that Fowler sold the paper to A. C. Houston, from whom it passed to the Johnston family.
The Johnston Family: Three Generations
The paper was sold to Charles M. Johnston in 1874, according to encyclopaedia accounts; the locally published history dates Charles McLean Johnston's purchase from A. C. Houston and his arrival as owner-editor to 1876, and notes that Johnston had come to Union in the early 1850s as editor of an earlier paper, The Farmer's Friend and Fireside Companion, before leaving to serve with Brooke's Battery of the Confederate Army. Charles Johnston published the paper until his death in 1880.
On his father's death, Albert Sidney Johnston — born near Warrenton, Virginia, on April 2, 1862, and then only eighteen years old — took entire charge of the newspaper plant as proprietor, printer, publisher and editor. Under him, in 1884, the name changed from Border Watchman to The Monroe County Watchman, and in 1897 to Monroe Watchman, the title it still carries. The local history praises the paper of his era as one of the cleanest, strongest and most ably edited newspapers in the state. Albert Sidney Johnston published the Watchman for almost fifty years before passing it to his son, J. Malcolm Johnston. Three Johnston generations — Charles, Albert Sidney and J. Malcolm — thus carried the paper from the 1870s into the 1960s, a family tenure of roughly ninety years.
The paper's early volumes survive on microfilm: West Virginia University's collections hold the Monroe County Watchman for 1884 to 1897 and the Monroe Watchman from 1897 onward, continuing the Border Watchman's volume numbering — with the bibliographic curiosity that volume 25 appears two years in succession. Duplicate microfilm holdings at the West Virginia and Regional History Center include runs of the Monroe Watchman for 1918-1923 and 1989-1990, making the Watchman a principal primary source for Monroe County history.
The Mohler Era, From 1965
In 1965, long-time editor Harold Mohler purchased J. Malcolm Johnston's stake in the paper, ending the Johnston family's ownership after nine decades. The transition followed the classic small-weekly pattern: the buyer was not an outside chain but the paper's own editor. Harold Mohler ran the Watchman until his death from cancer at 64. His son Craig Mohler then took over the paper and, in current accounts, runs it to this day; directory listings likewise name Craig Mohler — spelled Mohler in most sources — as the editor guiding the paper. Under the Mohlers, the paper has remained independently owned by The Monroe Watchman, Inc., headquartered in Union — listed in recent entries at 430 Main Street, Union, WV 24983 — with its website at themonroewatchman.com, the address given in this directory's batch record as https://www.themonroewatchman.com.
Publication and Circulation
The Watchman is a weekly, as it has been since 1872 — a four-page paper at founding in an era when four pages was a standard weekly format, and a full community weekly in its modern form. Its circulation was listed at 3,652 as of 2016. Set against a county population of roughly thirteen thousand and a county seat of only a few hundred, that circulation represents deep household penetration across Monroe County's farms and small communities — Peterstown, Alderson's Monroe County side, Gap Mills, Sweet Springs and the county's other villages — of the kind a sole county weekly can achieve.
Its content, as described in directory summaries drawn from its own site, extends beyond news to a community almanac: local activities, dining, legal services and lodging information, and guidance to local government services including the county commission, assessor and clerks. For a rural county without a daily paper, that combination of news and practical reference is part of the weekly's function.
Coverage and Community Role
The Watchman's beat is Monroe County entire: county commission and courthouse business in Union, schools including James Monroe High School, agriculture — the county's defining industry, celebrated in Union's annual Farmer's Day — churches, obituaries and the social record of a close-knit Appalachian border county. Its files also serve scholarship: newspaper clippings from the Monroe Watchman about Appalachia are preserved as a named collection at West Virginia University, and the paper is routinely cited in local-history work — for example, a 1975 Watchman article on the Monroe County Infirmary cited in archaeological reporting on the county's frontier forts.
Continuity gives that coverage its weight. The same newspaper — under three titles that are really one lineage — has recorded Monroe County since nine years after West Virginia statehood, through Reconstruction, the resort era, two world wars, the decline of the county seat's population and the modern era, without a change of town, frequency or independence.
Preservation and the Printed Record
Because the Watchman has published from the same county seat since 1872, its back files function as Monroe County's archive of itself. Librarians and genealogists encounter the paper in several forms: the Border Watchman volumes that precede the 1884 retitling, the Monroe County Watchman run of 1884 to 1897, and the Monroe Watchman from 1897 forward, all preserved on microfilm and catalogued by the FamilySearch Library and by West Virginia University. Researchers using those reels are warned that some issues are damaged, some were clipped, some are missing or were never published, and that supplements for specific subjects and holidays were bound in with ordinary issues — the ordinary hazards of a small paper printed, stored and handled in a rural courthouse town for more than a century. That the run survives at all, in sufficient completeness to be filmed in multiple reels and duplicated for other libraries, is itself part of the paper's record: each generation of its owners kept the files that the next generation of historians would need.
Significance
The Monroe Watchman is significant for the completeness of its arc. Founded in 1872 by a Confederate veteran who fought a pistol duel with a rival editor and left within two years, it was steadied by the Johnston family for some ninety years — including almost fifty under Albert Sidney Johnston, who took charge at eighteen — renamed twice without breaking its volume numbering, and passed in 1965 to its editor Harold Mohler, whose son still runs it. A weekly circulation of about 3,650 in a county of about thirteen thousand, published from a Main Street office in a National Register historic district, makes the Watchman a textbook example of the enduring, family-held American county newspaper.
