Draft:The Falmouth Enterprise

The Falmouth Enterprise is an American weekly newspaper based on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. It covers the local news relevant to the town of Falmouth Massachusetts including sports, the Arts and Entertainment and town government among much else.

The Falmouth Enterprise is part of the Falmouth Publishing Company a local company which includes the newspapers the Sandwich Enterprise, Bourne Enterprise and Mashpee Enterprise as well as the lifestyle magazine On Cape Magazine, a digital marketing agency and has been owned and operated on Cape Cod by Hough family since 1929.

The Falmouth Enterprise began its life as the Falmouth local in 1886 published by Falmouth resident Lewis Foster Clark. Clark kept the paper afloat largely through the hard work of editor Annie Bartlett Tubbs and a ready source of funding in the form of his father, the local deacon and clerk at the Falmouth National Bank George Ellery Clark.

In 1890 the Falmouth Local incorporated, and through his willingness to fund the endeavor Charles F. Chamberlyn assumed the publishers chair pushing out the younger Clark. Chamberlyn used the paper to promote the return of the Democrat Grover Cleveland to the White House. For two years he stumped for Cleveland’s second term in the pages of the paper that he soon renamed the Cape Cod Independent.

Chamberlyn left the paper in 1892, its finances on shaky ground and the company standing on the brink on disintegration. In stepped a new publisher, Charles Francis Adams, who in no small part because of his editor Albert E. Powers kept the paper alive. The Adams tenure lasted until 1895 when Charles Sumner Burgess bought the “Cape Cod Independent” and renamed it The Falmouth Enterprise. For the first year of his ownership Burgess kept his distance from the endeavor leasing out the operation two other men to run the paper.

Burgess assumed full control in 1896 and continued on as publisher of the Falmouth Enterprise until 1925 when he sold the paper to Harry B. Albro.

Albro’s, a local businessman and World War One veteran stayed at the paper for four years. At this point the newspaper was more an accessory of the job printing done in the papers shop.

In 1929 George A Hough Jr. purchased the paper and, along with his wife Clara Sharpe Hough. The couple were graduates of the Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia University. The paper grew in the depression years and through World War Two.

In 1951 the George and Clara Hough’s son John Talcott Hough, a World War Two veteran and reporter in York Pennsylvania moved to Falmouth to become the Falmouth Enterprise’s associate editor.

In 1972 the paper made a major physical expansion building out their offices to incorporate a new offset press, which would move to its own building across town in 1989.

George A Hough Jr. died in 1976 and John Talcott Hough assumed the title of publisher. The community was growing and so was the paper. Cape Cod’s population expanded considerably into the 1980s and 1990s. The Enterprise saw the need for expanded coverage in the neighboring towns beginning with the Bourne Enterprise whose first edition published in 1985. Three more editions of the paper, each focused on the communities they served, would appear. In 1994 the Mashpee Enterprise came on the scene followed two years later by the Sandwich Enterprise. For three years from 2009 to 2012 The Barnstable Enterprise also was printed before shuttering.

John Talcott Hough retired from the newspaper in 1993 handing the reins over to his Daughter Margaret Hough Russel, who would leave the paper in 2006 and his son William Henry Hough. In 1996 a fishing magazine began life as a side venture within the office before spinning off into its own company 10 year later.

The Enterprise weathered the fiscal crisis of the late 2000s and endured the general down turn of the industry through the 21^st century looking toward new sources of revenue to support its journalistic mission, including the introduction of a digital marketing service Enterprise Marketing Solutions and in 2021 rebranded its newspaper supplements as a new distinct publication On Cape Magazine delivered primarily to subscribers of the paper.

William Hough retired from the business in 2022, leaving control of the operation to the paper’s fourth generation of the Hough family, John Henry Hough.