The Yale Expositor Archive

The small rural Michigan community of Brockway Center--originally spelled "Centre"--is located 22 miles northwest of Port Huron and around 60 miles north of Detroit. It was located on the Pine River in Michigan's Thumb region. Brockway Center was named for Lewis Brockway, one of the first permanent white settlers in the area.

The Brockway Centre Weekly Expositor, a Republican affiliated paper, was first issued on Thursday, May 18, 1882, with D.T. Sutton as proprietor and James A. Menzies as editor. The Expositor's tagline read: "A Live Paper Makes a Live Town: Independent In All Things, Neutral In Nothing." Sutton was born in October 1858 in rural Saint Clair County. He lived for a time in Richmond and then New Haven, Michigan, before beginning his journalistic career as local and assistant editor of the Port Huron Daily Times and Weekly Times. Sutton also established the Greenback Sentinel, described as a "campaign paper." With the election completed, he relocated to Homer, Calhoun County, to edit and publish the Homer Index, before returning to Saint Clair County to found the Richmond Review.

Menzies was born in Amhertsburg, Ontario--where the mouth of the Detroit River meets Lake Erie--in January 1860. While a child, he and his parents relocated to Michigan's Macomb County. From the ages of 14 through 17, Menzies was educated in Detroit. After completing his education back in Amhertsburg, Menzies returned to Macomb County and worked in the office of the Armada Telegraph for a year. It is thought he also worked for a time for Sutton's Richmond Review, before becoming founding editor of the Weekly Expositor at Brockway Centre. In the early years, a subscription to the Weekly Expositor cost $1 per annum, and the paper described itself as "A Red Hot, Aggressive and Progressive Journal for Live, Enterprising Readers." By November 1883, Menzies was both editor and proprietor. In December 1887, the Expositor expanded from a four-page to an eight-page format. In 1889, a spur of the Flint & Pere Marquette line was extended from Brockway Centre to Port Huron. That same year the town changed its name to "Yale" (at the suggestion of B.R. Noble, the owner of the Brockway Centre Bank), although the surrounding township retained the name Brockway. The newspaper followed suit, styling itself the Yale Expositor beginning in July 1889.

In 1891, Menzies sought to expand his newspaper holdings by establishing the Brown City Bee 11 miles to the northwest in neighboring Sanilac County. However, it soon became clear that the Yale Expositor required all of his attention, so Menzies sold the Bee to Charles H. Fox who renamed it Brown City Banner. In 1903, the Yale Expositor, still under the control of Menzies, was described as "one of the newsy and ably conducted journals of eastern Michigan" with a circulation of around 1,200. The Yale Expositor remains in operation to this day.