Trivia question: What was the first newspaper on Block Island?
Answer: The Block Island Star, copies of which were discovered by island resident Chris Blane. Blane found the newspapers one day when he was cleaning the attic of the home his mother Edie Blane grew up in.
“In March of 1987, I moved to the family home where I grew up. The house was built sometime in the 1860s, when my great-grandparents married. Bringing stuff from my old house was a problem and made me really pare things down. There was lots of cleaning and rearranging during the spring and summer. When fall arrived, I finally went up to the attic where things had gathered for generations. While cleaning the attic I came across a dusty pile of legal papers, handwritten in Palmer style. They were copies of the first newspaper, The Block Island Star.”
The Block Island Star began in the mid 1870s by Blane’s late family member Adelaide Smith, and her friend Mary Conley, who both hand wrote pieces for their newspaper at a young age. Blane noted it was unclear how many years the two women published
