About Napanee Beaver

Napanee Beaver

Overview

The Napanee Beaver is an independent community weekly newspaper published in Greater Napanee, Ontario, serving the town and the wider Lennox and Addington County area. Founded in 1870, it is one of Ontario's oldest continuously published community newspapers, and it has remained independently and locally owned throughout its existence — a point of pride its publishers have emphasized for generations. The Beaver covers municipal government, courts and police, health care, schools, junior hockey and the everyday civic life of Greater Napanee and neighbouring communities such as Deseronto, Tamworth, Stone Mills and Newburgh. It is a member of the Ontario Community Newspapers Association (OCNA). Since April 1, 2024, the paper has been owned by Adam Prudhomme, a journalist who began his career at the Beaver as a reporter and rose to become its managing editor before purchasing the business from the Morrison family.

History

The Beaver traces its origins to January 1870, when Cephas I. Beeman founded the Addington Beaver in the back room of a store in Newburgh, Ontario. The original paper was a four-page, six-column weekly, with some of the printing handled by the founder's brother, George M. Beeman. The Addington Beaver was short-lived: Cephas Beeman sold it to his brother George and to William Templeton, who moved production to Napanee, first under the name Ontario Beaver and then, as the paper grew to eight pages, under its enduring name, the Napanee Beaver. It was the third newspaper established in the area, after the Napanee Standard and the Napanee Express. In 1890 the Beaver briefly experimented with tri-weekly publication before returning to a weekly schedule.

In 1892 George Beeman sold his stake to William Templeton, who became sole proprietor and editor. Templeton ran the paper until his death in 1908. His widow, Sarah Adeline Templeton, then served as publisher until her own death in 1949, guiding the paper through a succession of editors that included her son William Alan Templeton, editor until 1932, and a grandson who managed the paper before being killed in the Second World War. After 1949, the Templeton daughters continued publishing. In 1953 the family sold the Beaver to Earl and Jean Morrison. The Morrisons expanded their holdings in 1965 by purchasing the Post-Express — itself an earlier merger of the Napanee Express (established 1861) and the Deseronto Post (established 1904) — a combination the paper's masthead recorded as the Beaver combining with those two titles. The move left the Beaver as the last community newspaper in the Napanee area. In 1967 the paper relocated from 133 John Street to a new office at 72 Dundas Street East. A 1974 masthead shows the paper then appearing every Wednesday from that address, with J. Earl Morrison as publisher and managing editor — he also served as president of the Ontario Weekly Newspapers Association — and a claimed press run of 6,700 copies weekly.

Earl Morrison died suddenly in 1978. His widow Jean Morrison then ran the Beaver — together with the Picton Gazette, which the Morrisons had bought in 1977 — for the next four decades. A letter published in Watershed Magazine after her death recalled that she refused to sell her weekly newspapers to conglomerates and chains, and that she regarded the Beaver as Lennox and Addington County's newspaper of record. Marking the paper's 140th anniversary in 2010, she said: "Since 1870, The Beaver has always been independently owned – a fact of which we are extremely proud, in this age of media conglomerations and monopolies." Jean Morrison died in 2019 at the age of 97; the Watershed letter writer observed that she was probably the oldest publisher in Canada at her death. Her children continued to own the paper until April 2024, when they sold it to managing editor Adam Prudhomme. The Beaver launched a digital edition in 2017, and its historic back issues are preserved in the Internet Archive's digital collections.

Programming and Content

The Beaver's editorial mix is that of a classic community weekly. It reports on the councils of Greater Napanee, Deseronto and Stone Mills Township, including development charges, budgets and bylaw disputes; on police and court news, such as an October 2026 report on a major provincial cannabis-enforcement seizure on County Road 12 in Greater Napanee; and on the Lennox and Addington County General Hospital, a recurring beat covering awards, equipment and fundraising — among the hospital stories the paper carried in 2026 was imaging technologist Leah Masterson's provincial Patient Care Award, presented in Toronto on June 5, 2026. Its community coverage extends to events such as the Greater Napanee Connect "Heroes With Rope" fire truck pull, in which six teams raised funds for local charities. Sports coverage is extensive and strongly local: the Napanee Raiders junior C hockey club, the Tamworth Sabres and Deseronto Bulldogs of the Northern Premier Hockey League, and school teams such as the Napanee District Secondary School Hawks, whose senior girls' volleyball team's OFSAA berth the paper covered. Community news — museum programs at the Museum of Lennox & Addington, fire department notices, charity events, legion activities and letters to the editor — fills out each issue. On taking ownership in 2024, Prudhomme said he wanted the paper to draw even more contributions from residents, describing community-submitted stories and memories as a defining part of what the Beaver has always been.

Audience and Reach

The Beaver's market is Greater Napanee and Lennox and Addington County. An OCNA market summary for the Napanee Beaver dated July 21, 2026 put the market's total population at 42,566. The OCNA's member directory lists the Beaver's circulation at 12,133. A July 2024 profile in a Quinte Arts Council publication reported a weekly circulation of 8,300, with home delivery in Greater Napanee and copies available for pickup in a few other rural locations; circulation figures for the paper have varied by source and year. In 1974, the paper's masthead claimed 6,700 copies weekly.

Digital Presence

The Beaver publishes online at napaneebeaver.ca, where stories from the print edition — council news, sports, community events and obituaries — are posted for readers. Its digital edition was launched in 2017. Articles by owner-editor Adam Prudhomme and other Beaver staff from 2025 and 2026, including October 2026 coverage of the municipal election campaign and local hockey, confirm the paper continues to publish on a weekly cycle in both print and digital form.

Ownership and Organisation

The Beaver is independently owned and is not part of any newspaper chain. Owner Adam Prudhomme began at the paper as a reporter roughly sixteen years before buying it, became managing editor in 2019, and continues to serve as editor alongside his ownership duties after taking over on April 1, 2024. The purchase kept the paper in local hands: Prudhomme told the Quinte Arts Council he felt the paper needed to stay local and that he could not pass up the opportunity to buy it. Under the Morrisons, the paper won awards from both the Ontario and Canadian community newspaper associations, and Jean Morrison was an influential figure in both associations.

Contact and Availability

The Napanee Beaver is published weekly in Greater Napanee, Ontario, and distributed by home delivery in the town with pickup copies available in surrounding rural locations, as reported in 2024. The paper was long produced at 72 Dundas Street East in downtown Napanee, the office it moved into in 1967; the Beaver itself has since reported on that building's renovation and reopening as a wellness centre, The Edit HQ. The current edition and online stories are available through the paper's website, napaneebeaver.ca.