The Claremont Eagle Times informed subscribers this week that it’s suspending publication. The announcement came as no surprise after it was learned most of its staff had walked out when their paychecks bounced. This latest chapter is part of a continuum of tough luck for the star-crossed paper that traces way back to 1950 when its publisher, John McLane Clark, drowned while canoeing in a flooded Sugar River.

It’s also a story that’s been replicated hundreds of times all across the United States: local journalism fading to extinction.

Owner after owner of the Eagle Times had tried to make a go of it, but when the backbone of Sullivan County’s economy, Joy Manufacturing — it once employed 1,500 in good-paying union jobs — slowly faded and then disappeared, they tried and tried to keep the paper afloat and in the black. This time, owner Jay Lucas switched to thrice-a-week publication, dropped wire service content and adopted a hyper-local coverage formula.

For the limited resources it had, the paper offered a readable package of obituaries, sports, police blotter reports, accounts of the shenanigans on the Claremont City Council plus community doings. The Valley News provides cursory coverage of the Claremont-Newport area, but readers will now be left without the nuts-and-bolts stuff of community journalism, a far cry from the days when the daily Eagle Times, plus a superb Newport weekly, the Argus- Champion, were alive.

The saga of the Eagle Times had involved the Valley News along the way, and at one point in 1969 owners of the West Lebanon paper came close to buying the Eagle Times. Up till then its name was Claremont Daily Eagle, but it changed when a two-day flash-in-the-pan startup daily in Springfield, Vt., called the Times-Reporter was absorbed and the Eagle became the Eagle Times.

John McLane Clark, part of the Brahmin New Hampshire McLane dynasty, was an editorial writer for the Washington Post when the Manchester newspapers, the morning Union and afternoon Leader, came up for sale. He assembled a bid for the papers, but was beaten out at the 11th hour by William Loeb, who would go on to become a journalistic crank with a huge influence over state politics.

Bitterly disappointed, Clark learned of a small daily for sale up in Claremont and he moved to buy it in 1946. He assembled a talented team and rapidly earned a reputation as a publisher of a first-rate regional newspaper. Among staffers who would go on to great acclaim were Nelson Bryant, longtime outdoor columnist for the New York Times, and Mel Wax, later editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. The Daily Eagle’s coverage territory ranged from Orford and Fairlee down the river valley to Charlestown and Bellows Falls.

But Clark’s untimely death would launch three quarters of a century of hard luck for the Eagle. Two hotshot young Ivy League-credentialed reporters soon saw the Eagle under the hand of Clark’s widow, Rhoda Shaw Clark, was beginning to lose its mojo. With the backing of wealthy wives, Alan Butler and Jim Farley set about to start a new newspaper in the northern half of the Eagle’s territory.

They rented the building of a defunct West Lebanon Kaiser-Fraser auto dealership, acquired a press and bought the subscriber list of a White River Junction weekly, the Landmark.

The Eagle had long called its territory the “Twin State Valley” so the upstart paper named the Valley News dubbed its coverage area the “Upper Valley,” an appellation that still draws derision 100 or more miles north in the Coos-Essex County headwaters of the Connecticut River.

The first issue of the new Valley News hit the street in June 1952, setting off a classic oldtime newspaper war, with two newsrooms constantly trying to beat each other with scoops and better writing and photos.

Competition would occasionally take on ludicrous proportions. A couple of 4-H kids got a front page Valley News picture boarding a train for a trip to Washington; the next day the Eagle summoned a photo from the Associated Press Washington bureau of the pair posed by the Washington Monument

Both papers would lose money year after year. In 1957, two deep-pocketed newspapermen, Walter Paine and James Ewing, bought the Valley News. For four years they ate the losses and were about to pull the plug when suddenly the paper broke into the black.

Mrs. Clark, also raising five children, soldiered on another year in Claremont, before selling the Eagle to Edward Bennett, a cantankerous former Republican state senator and draft horse enthusiast.

Bennett kept the Eagle going, though it was always a struggle. Meanwhile, 20 miles north, the Valley News was gaining traction steadily, thanks to the arrival of interstate highways and the growth of the Hanover-Lebanon-White River Junction educational-medical complex.

Bennett would quit the fight, selling to a German investor and over the following decades the paper would have a succession of owners.

Harvey Hill, owner of a Claremont paper mill with deep roots in the area, gave it a shot for several years before putting the paper in bankruptcy in 2009. He later said it just couldn’t turn the corner in a time when local advertisers were disappearing and the Sullivan County economy was teetering.

There would be yet another owner before the paper went dormant again, and then Lucas, a Newport native and Republican Party figure, took up the challenge in 2023.

Lucas, in telling subscribers of the Eagle Times’s shutdown in a message on Monday, gamely held out hope it might have a rebirth.

“We have decided to suspend operations of the Eagle Times for the time being, pending a full review of our operations and future options.”

If the past is any guide, any future for the Eagle Times will be troubled, at best.

Steve Taylor, a former editor of the Valley News, was a Hanover High School sports stringer for the Daily Eagle from 1954 to ’56 and has been a longtime subscriber. He lives in Meriden.