- The Museum in the Streets -

— Danbury, Connecticut —

The first newspaper printed in Danbury was called The Farmer's Journal and the year was 1790.
By 1837, The Danbury Times was churning out a weekly paper on a small wooden press that printed one side of a page at a time. During the Civil War, James Montgomery Bailey, a Danbury native and Union War soldier, was hired to send back dispatches for publication.
Upon his return to Danbury in 1865, Bailey and fellow soldier Timothy Donovan, a printer by trade, bought The Danbury Times. Five years later, the pair acquired the other weekly in town, The Jeffersonian, and merged the two under a new name . . . The Danbury News.
The pair erected a building at 288 Main Street solely for the printing of the paper where a water-powered press was used to print the news of the day.
Bailey devoted most of his energy to writing humorous stories about life in town that were published throughout New England and eventually the world.
The circulation of The Danbury Times grew from 1,900 in early 1873 to 33,000 by 1874. Bailey began writing books, almanacs and traveling the world for lecture tours. He became known as "The Danbury News Man."
In 1878 Bailey bought out is partner and established a daily newspaper, The Danbury Evening News. James Montgomery Bailey died one year later at the age of 53.
His heirs continued to run the paper until 1927 when competition from the Danbury Times and the Great Depression resulted in another merger that created The Danbury News-Times, the forerunner of today's News Times.

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