Sunday night, the printing press will roll to a stop at The Fayetteville Observer

The printing press of The Fayetteville Observer will run for the last time Sunday night, marking the end of a long era in Fayetteville history.

From around 7 to 9 p.m., the 700-ton behemoth of machinery on Whitfield Street will print its final copies of the StarNews newspaper of Wilmington and The Fayetteville Observer. Delivery workers will back their vehicles to a loading dock to pick up the papers and take them to customers and retail newsstands from Cumberland County to the coast.

And then the press will stop for good.

“Oh, I dread it,” said Donnie Beal, who worked for The Fayetteville Observer for more than 50 years. Beal maintained the buildings and equipment and is still called on from retirement when something breaks or needs servicing.

“I grew up here just about, and it’s just heartbreaking to see it go,” he said.

The Observer’s news operation is not closing — it still has a team of journalists gathering news in and around Fayetteville and publishing online and in print.

But printing operations are moving to a press at The Gaston Gazette in Gastonia. The print version of the Observer will continue to be delivered to Fayetteville-area homes and in-store newsstands six days per week.

Gannett has been consolidating printing operations to reduce costs as customer demand for printed newspapers continues its long decline and consumption of news continues to rise on cellphones and computers.

The end of printing operations in Fayetteville is ending jobs for 30 full-time and 26 part-time employees.

Newspaper was founded more than 200 years ago

The Fayetteville Observer was established in 1816 by Francis W. Waldo as The Carolina Observer. It was a four-page weekly, says The North Carolina History Project.

Edward Jones Hale bought it in the 1820s, the History Project says, and changed its name to The Fayetteville Observer in 1833.

The Observer wasn’t Fayetteville’s first newspaper — that was The Fayetteville Gazette, established in 1789, local history buff Roy Parker Jr. wrote in 1999. But the Observer is the only one of many newspapers published in Fayetteville to last more than 200 years and continue publication to this day.

Parker, for example, was the editor of The Fayetteville Times from its establishment in 1973 until it was merged with the Observer in 1990 to form The Fayetteville Observer-Times.

The Observer’s first printing presses have vanished to history, Parker wrote. Printing presses in the early times of newspapers “were little more than converted wine or tobacco presses: a big screw that came down on a sheet of paper laid over type lashed to a flat surface,” he wrote in 1997.

In the 1840s, Fayetteville Observer owner and editor Edward Jones Hale had an enslaved man, James Lord, operate the press. The newspaper in 1846 published that Lord had run away.

The Fayetteville Observer lost its printing press toward the end of the Civil War by the order of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman during the Union Army’s Carolinas Campaign. In March 1865, a Union officer reported destroying “the printing establishment of 3 rebel newspapers,” including the Observer. Hale’s office was burned along with other businesses and factories.

The Observer ceased publication until 1883 when the Hale family restarted it.

In the age before the internet and social media, before television and before radio, local newspapers were the “social media” of their day with their mix of news and information, gossip, advertisements for local businesses, and often vociferous expressions of opinion.

Four generations improved and grew the newspaper

The newspaper changed hands several times in the early 1900s, Parker wrote in 1999. Then, in 1923, newspaperman William J. McMurray of New York bought it and incorporated Fayetteville Publishing Co.

A photo from 1925 shows workers using linotype machines. These machines formed molten lead into the letters to create the lead type and lead printing plates that were mounted on the printing press.

McMurray’s relatives — including the Wilsons, the Lillys, the Yarboroughs and the Broadwells — retained ownership for four generations. Then they sold The Fayetteville Observer in summer 2016 to GateHouse Media, a national newspaper company.

GateHouse merged with Gannett in late 2019.

In their time, the local owners invested in Fayetteville Publishing. The family put in new printing presses in the 1940s and 1950s, they launched The Fayetteville Times newspaper in 1973 (which merged with the Observer in 1990), and they moved the office and printing operation from downtown Fayetteville to its current location on Whitfield Street by the Massey Hill area.

A new printing press for the 21st century

In the late 1990s, the family spent $30 million to build a massive expansion to the Fayetteville Publishing building and install a high-tech, computer-controlled Koenig & Bauer AG Colora printing press. The prior press, a Goss brand press, had been in operation since 1956.

Former Publisher Charles Broadwell said the new press helped “power the company.”

“We developed a robust printing business and I think were able to serve our readers with a lot of enhancements to the paper along the way,” he said. “It was definitely a generational change for us when it was installed in 1999.”

“This is like the king of the presses,” Press Operator Louis Mulholland said Tuesday. He has been in the newspaper printing business for 25 years. “I’ve never been on anything like this anywhere else,” he said. It’s his favorite.

The Colora press is 170 feet long, 22 feet wide and 56 feet tall. It prints more pages at once than the 1956 Goss press could, with higher precision and richer, brighter colors. The Colora can produce as many as 70,000 newspapers an hour, while the Goss topped out at 50,000.

With the new press, the newspaper reverted from The Fayetteville Observer-Times back to The Fayetteville Observer.

In 2002, The Fayetteville Observer was named one of the best newspapers in the world for the quality of its printing and colors. Only 50 newspapers in the world — and 10 in North America — were included in the International Newspaper Color Quality Club 2002-04.

Mulholland, 45, grew up in Cumberland County and got into the newspaper printing business at age 19, he said, when he was hired by The Pilot newspaper in Southern Pines.

He later moved to a newspaper in Virginia to work on the press there, and 12 years ago came back to Cumberland County to operate the press here.

The newspaper business has been good to Mulholland and his wife and three children, he said.

“It’s done me well, took care of me the whole time,” he said.

Senior North Carolina reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at 910-261-4710 and pwoolverton@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Fayetteville Observer printing press about to shut down for good