Our origins

The Lobster was founded in 1897 as a small, amateur publication by Hiram Lobster, who painstakingly handwrote each daily issue on tattered rags scavenged from the river. Unsurprisingly, this method of publication did not lend itself well to mass distribution, and only saw limited runs in his hometown of Jonesport, Maine.

In 1902, with the help of his first cousin, Patience Chandler, Hiram assembled a team of horses to drive to the neighboring community of Beals Island in the middle of the night to seize a printing press from a local manufacturer of Holy Bibles. Unfortunately, there being no bridge to Beals at the time, all forty horses rather quickly drowned.

The horses, having been stolen from Patience’s father Barnabas, were insured for a princely sum. Hiram soon took Patience for a wife, and Barnabas would pass away shortly thereafter, leaving his entire fortune to the newlyweds. The couple would go on to acquire the necessary printing equipment to distribute, at peak production, close to 10,000 issues of The Lobster each day to their local community.

Hiram and Patience would have their only child, Robert “Red” Lobster, in 1908. The family subsisted from advertising revenue generated by the newspaper, and were well-regarded in Jonesport as humble and admirable folk.

After nearly fifty years of building his company’s reputation as a reliable source of local news, Hiram would pass away in 1949. With his death came the realization that Hiram had not left his business to Red, but instead to Patience, whose health was quickly failing.

As a last stand against her son, who wanted nothing more than to pry the company from her grasp, Patience would sell the rights to The Lobster and gamble away all proceeds, leaving Red destitute. She finally died after a long struggle with the owner of a Las Vegas casino in 1952. The rights to The Lobster would remain in limbo for more than seventy years until being purchased by Internet wunderkind and entrepreneur Bernard Hoskins in 2022 for less than five dollars.

Thanks to the advent of the World Wide Web, The Lobster now enjoys the readership of millions who log on each day to get the latest news from Down East Maine.