islandpacket.com - A Brief History of The Island Packet

Before The Island Packet was purchased by the McClatchy newspaper group of Sacramento, Calif., in 1990, it spent 20 years quietly growing and expanding into the island's premier news source.

When the first issue of The Island Packet rolled off the presses on July 9, 1970, the publication became the third weekly newspaper on Hilton Head Island in little more than a century.

The New South and The Palmetto Herald -- two papers published a century before -- preceded The Packet. Those two papers covered the bustling Hilton Head Island town called Port Royal (located where Port Royal Plantation is now), the headquarters for the Union Army's Department of the South until shortly after the end of the War Between the States. The town had 50,000 people in 1865 at the height of the publication of the two weeklies.

More than one hundred years later, The Packet emerged as a Thursday tabloid in a town of 3,000.

The paper was founded by two men who worked at what was then the Hilton Head Company: retired career Foreign Service officer and former newspaperman Ralph Hilton and real estate salesman Tom Wamsley.

Hilton was having lunch at the Port Royal Inn with his wife after church. At the next table were Lucy and Jonathan Daniels. Daniels was then editor emeritus of the Raleigh News and Observer, which the Daniels family owned. Daniels, a son of a former U.S. Secretary of the Navy, had been press secretary to Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II and an administrative assistant to Harry Truman.

The Daniels were about to return to Raleigh from a stay at their island house on Calibogue Cay when Daniels asked Hilton how his plans for a newspaper were shaping up. Hilton said the idea lacked money. Daniels offered his wife's money and suggested he, the author of more than a dozen books, would write a column free of charge.

When the time came to name the fledgling paper, the two men decided on The Island Packet after the packet boats that were the travel, delivery and communications link between barrier islands and the mainland along the Intracoastal Waterway.

Packet Milestones

1970: The Island Packet is born as a weekly tabloid on Thursday, July 9. The weekly's circulation is 362.

1973: The Packet, with a circulation of 4,621, is sold to the News and Observer Publishing Co. of Raleigh, N.C., for about 0,000. Publication expands to twice weekly.

1983: The format changes from tabloid to broadsheet, and the paper expands to three editions a week.

1985: Monday-through-Friday publication begins. Delivery switches from afternoon to morning. The paper begins carrying the Associated Press and other wire services.

1988: The Sunday Island Packet is launched.

1990: The Packet, with a daily circulation of about 12,000, is sold to the McClatchy newspaper group of Sacramento, Calif. The million purchase includes The Packet's sister papers, The Beaufort Gazette and The (Rock Hill) Herald.

1994: The newspaper starts The Bluffton Packet, a weekly 12-page tabloid.

1995: The Packet expands to seven days a week with the addition of a Saturday edition.

1995: The Packet launches it's Web site at www.islandpacket.com. The site was named best in the state by the S.C. Press Association in 2001 and 2003. A redesign was launched in 2001, followed by another one in Sept. 2005.

1996: The newspaper starts The Sun City Packet, a monthly tabloid section for residents of Sun City Hilton Head, a retirement community.

1996: The newspaper starts Visitors Packet, a monthly, four-color visitors' brochure.

1997: The newspaper starts Newcomer's Packet, an annual, four-color booklet geared toward new residents of the Lowcountry.

1999: The Packet moves into its new 30,000-square-foot office on 10 acres on U.S. 278 at Buck Island Road on the mainland. It comes after outgrowing two old buildings and is in response to rapid growth on the mainland and the newspaper's need for a more centralized location.

2004: Island Packet staff members win a record 26 awards, including 14 first-place awards, in the South Carolina Press Association's journalism excellence contest.