Charleston Paper Celebrates Bicentennial

By: Lucia Moses Although The Post and Courier name has existed only a short time, the Charleston, S.C., paper bills itself as the South's oldest daily and can trace its beginnings to Jan. 10, 1803, when the Charleston Courier was first published.

But it is Robert Smith Manigault's name that has been synonymous with Charleston publishing for the past century. When rice farming turned bad for Manigault, he switched to a different type of product -- newspapers, and in 1894 he helped found The Evening Post.

Manigault found greater success in his new field, and in 1926 the Post bought controlling stock in the century-old Courier (which was then the News and Courier). In 1991, the morning and evening papers fully merged to become The Post and Courier.

This week, the paper that survived Civil War shelling and Hurricane Hugo celebrates the bicentennial of day it took root. The Evening Post Publishing Co. now owns four U.S. dailies, several weeklies, and 11 TV stations in the South and West. It also has an English-language daily in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a features syndicate supplying overseas papers, and a timberlands company.

The Manigault name is still at the top of the company roster: Chairman Peter Manigault also is a majority shareholder, along with his sister, Mary M. Gilbreth.

The challenge now for the company is to figure out how to manage its far-flung holdings, which now stretch from the Carolinas to Montana to Arizona. "All of a sudden, we're a small local company, then a small-medium-size company spread out over a big territory," said Pierre Manigault, great-grandson of the founding Manigault and president of the company's Community Newspaper Group, which includes all its U.S. properties but The Post and Courier. "The bigger you get, the harder it is to get the personal touch -- and we want that personal touch."