Print and publication

The Voree press and its move

James Strang was already a working publisher before he ever saw Beaver Island. His church’s weekly organ, printed at his settlement of Voree, Wisconsin, ran under a masthead that changed at least once: the bound volume held here mastheads it as the Gospel Herald, with an internal section headed “Zion’s Reveille.” Its final pages, from the spring of 1850, already record notices for a “general assembly of the saints at the Tabernacle, St. James, Beaver Island,” months before the paper itself moved. The same Voree press had earlier produced The Diamond (1848), a doctrinal pamphlet issued as the fourth in a numbered “Gospel Tract” series — proof that Strang’s operation was already turning out books and tracts, not only a newspaper, before any of it reached the island.

The Royal Press at Saint James, 1850–1856

The Northern Islander began publication at Saint James on 12 December 1850, printed by Cooper & Chidester. Ninety weekly numbers appeared over the next six years, irregularly and especially liable to suspension over the winter closure of the lake, plus a daily edition of thirty-three numbers that ran from 1 April to 20 June 1856. The surviving building, a two-story, roughly 30-by-20-foot structure of squared logs covered with board and batten, is now the Mormon Print Shop — the fixed physical point connecting the newspaper, the kingdom’s wider publishing program, and the violence that ended both.

The same press did more than print a newspaper. Its last issue advertised books and pamphlets from the same office: a 44-page Prophetic Discussion, Oliver Cowdery’s New Dispensation, a 20-page, five-cent octavo titled, like Strang’s earlier Voree tract, The Diamond (whether it was that same title still in stock or a reissue under the old name is not established here), hymns, and, at two dollars bound in calf, The Book of the Law of the Lord. That last title had grown considerably: the 1856 Saint James edition ran to 320 pages (numbered 17–336, with ten chapters and notes added), against an 80-page 1851 forerunner already unlocatable by 1930; the same newspaper advertisement describes it as “PRINTED BY COMMAND OF THE KING, AT THE ROYAL PRESS, SAINT JAMES” — the 1856 edition itself was reportedly never bound with a title page before Strang’s death, so this imprint line comes from the advertising copy, not a surviving physical title page. The press also reused its own newspaper columns as book copy: Strang’s Ancient and Modern Michilimackinac ran serially in the Northern Islander from January to April 1854, then came out that same year as a stand-alone forty-eight-page pamphlet, set from the same type. Read together, the three titles show a single small shop working across formats: periodical, tract and bound book, all produced from one building over roughly six years.

The expulsion and the end of the press

Publication stopped with the Daily Islander’s issue of 20 June 1856, which reported the shooting of James Strang four days earlier. Within three weeks the press had changed hands rather than gone silent: the party that drove the Mormons from the island used the same equipment to print its own manifesto, an “Extra - Islander Redeemed.” The Buffalo Express, reprinting it, judged the slip “shockingly printed,” adding that “the only means they possess for printing are so rude as scarcely to afford a tangible result” — a hostile verdict from a paper that had never run the machine, but also the last contemporary description of the press actually working. Quaife records that 320 unbound copies of the Book of the Law of the Lord still sat in the printing office when the mob descended, and that of the daily paper’s thirty-three numbers, only one or two copies were known to survive by 1930. By the 1880s, per a Michigan Pioneer sketch, the former newspaper office had become a boardinghouse, then “the best hotel” in Saint James: the first of several reuses before the building became the Historical Society’s own headquarters.

Strang’s own church did not stop printing merely because its Beaver Island shop was gone. A letter Strang wrote from Saint James in September 1854, The Prophetic Controversy, was still being reprinted by the surviving Strangite church in 1878, 1886 and 1893, and a 1920 pamphlet, A Few Historical Facts Concerning the Murderous Assault at Pine River, republished both an 1853 Northern Islander Extra and the 1856 Daily Islander’s shooting report for a Strangite readership sixty-four years after the events. The Saint James press itself was gone in a week; reprinting what it had produced continued, off the island, for another six decades.

A long silence and a slow rebuilding

No press operated on the island again for nearly a century. When one did, its founders framed it, in their own words, as a return rather than a beginning. The first Beaver Beacon was mailed in January 1955: 538 copies, reaching 153 memberships (136 personal, 17 business) by the end of that month, assembled by a small group named in the paper’s own tenth-anniversary retrospective: Jewell Gillespie, Fr. Joseph Herp, Rogers Carlisle, Lloyd McDonough, Loy Malloy, Dr. Harry Vail and Art Johnston, with several more helping prepare the first issue. Its mid-1960s masthead read “Only Island Publication since King Strang’s ‘Northern Islander’ in 1856 — Established January 1955,” the paper’s own claim of descent, made in its own pages, and not an independently verified institutional link between the Civic Association’s newsletter and the vanished Royal Press. Even the Beacon’s own back run has gaps: a 1992 appeal from the island’s District Library sought donated copies to fill holes in its collection, including every issue before March 1968.

The Historical Society becomes a publisher

The Beaver Island Historical Society, founded in 1957 and headquartered in the former print shop itself, became a book publisher in its own right for the American Bicentennial. The Journal of Beaver Island History, Volume One (eleven essays, 218 pages, some eighty photographs) was printed in Lansing, off the island, and mailed back: 160 copies arrived by post before 140 more followed the next day, six months after the project began. The series continued for years; a January 2003 Beacon review describes a 224-page Volume 5, built around a Strang-era article drawn from Warren Post’s journal and tape-recorded oral-history interviews, though only that review is held here, not the volume itself. In the same Bicentennial year the Society also began collecting what the original press had scattered, purchasing an original 3 December 1856 Northern Islander from a Los Angeles antiquarian dealer, and in 1977 it marked the print shop itself as heritage: Michigan Lieutenant Governor James Damman dedicated a new sign at the building on 9 July, with seventeen Strang descendants attending, and the site was registered with the state as Local Site #32.

Books about the island

A second, separate publishing history runs alongside the island’s own presses: books written about Beaver Island, printed elsewhere, in three different modes. Elizabeth Whitney Williams’s 1905 memoir, A Child of the Sea; and Life among the Mormons, was self-published, printed at her own expense by the Seymour & Muir Printing Co., a small Grand Rapids job printer. Milo Quaife’s The Kingdom of Saint James (1930) came from Yale University Press, on the Amasa Stone Mather Memorial Publication Fund: a university imprint, and, as a pre-1931 work, the last major full-length study of the subject that can be held in full text under current copyright law. Doyle Fitzpatrick’s The King Strang Story: A Vindication of James J. Strang (1970) is catalogued here by title only; its subtitle states a position whose production history (publisher, print run, reception) has not yet been traced. These three modes of production, self-funded, university-backed and commercially unread here, are themselves evidence about how the island’s literature reached print. How that literature has treated Strang and his kingdom, and why the surviving record tilts so heavily toward partisan and pre-copyright sources, is the subject of Historiography.

The modern Northern Islander

A newspaper carrying Strang’s old title returned to the island in 2023, by acquisition rather than founding. The Historical Society’s own account, in its January 2024 issue, says simply that it “procured the Northern Islander in April” of that year “and we began our journey onward and upward”; the paper does not state what the title had been before the Society took it over. By January 2024 its masthead named a five-person production team (board president, executive director, executive editor, an editor for advertising, and a circulation manager) and priced the monthly issue at $4.50. That same issue also announced “our first annual Beaver Beacon,” a glossy feature magazine reviving a second name from the island’s print history, distinct from the 1955–2011 Beaver Beacon newsletter covered above: a second name collision layered on top of the Northern Islander one, and a reminder that this island has now recycled its own newspaper titles at least twice. See Communication and connection for the mail, telephone and postal side of the island’s communications record; the Strang-era assassination itself reached the mainland only by telegraph, with no island line of its own, a detail that belongs to that article rather than this one.

The forum also serves as a referral channel for off-island writing. In March 2026, a participant recommended liningtherails.org as a former resident’s blog with varied island-related material and open subscription and commenting. The post identifies neither the author nor the site’s editorial relationship to Beaver Island, and the site was not independently verified here; it is therefore preserved as a lead to investigate, not as an authenticated publication record.¹

This archive as a publisher

This archive is, by its own description, a further publishing act in the same sequence: “a structured, source-traced encyclopedia of Beaver Island and its archipelago” — articles compiled into a public web of linked pages, built in substantial part from OCR of exactly the material surveyed above: the Strang-era imprints, the Beaver Beacon’s decades of issues, and the modern Northern Islander. It does not claim any institutional descent from the Royal Press, the Beacon or the Historical Society’s own book series; it simply compiles and republishes primary material that those earlier presses produced, alongside citations back to the originals.

Summary

Beaver Island has run its own printing press twice, a century apart, with a long silence between. James Strang brought a working church press from Voree, Wisconsin and re-established it at Saint James in December 1850 as the Northern Islander; over the next six years the same shop, printers Cooper & Chidester working from the building that survives today as the Mormon Print Shop, produced ninety weekly newspaper numbers, a short-lived daily edition, and books up to 320 pages, including the Book of the Law of the Lord, “printed by command of the King, at the Royal Press, Saint James.” The press did not survive Strang: within three weeks of his June 1856 shooting, the party that expelled the Strangites had captured it to print their own victory manifesto, judged “shockingly printed” by the mainland paper that reprinted it, and by the 1880s the newspaper’s old office had become a boardinghouse. Reprinting of Strang’s own material continued off-island in the surviving church for decades, but no press operated on Beaver Island again until January 1955, when a small group of islanders began mailing the Beaver Beacon, a paper whose own masthead later claimed descent from Strang’s, in its own words — a claim this article treats as self-description rather than established fact.

The Beaver Island Historical Society, headquartered in the old print shop since 1957, became a publisher itself for the 1976 Bicentennial with The Journal of Beaver Island History, printed in Lansing and mailed back to the island, and in 2023 took over a newspaper called, once again, the Northern Islander, a name now carried by two unrelated papers eighty years apart. Alongside these island-printed works runs a second history of books written about the island elsewhere: Elizabeth Whitney Williams’s self-published 1905 memoir, Milo Quaife’s 1930 Yale University Press study, and Doyle Fitzpatrick’s 1970 vindication, catalogued here but not held. This archive, compiled substantially from the transcribed text of all of the above, is by its own description a further publishing act in the same long sequence, without any claim to inherit the institutions that produced the material it republishes.

Added 4 August 2026. Recent changes