Senator Charles Fletcher Johnson; and future mayor L. Eugene Thayer, leavened by newspaper veteran Thomas F. Murphy—the Waterville Morning Sentinel, within a year, grew from a three-desk operation to requiring its own building, on Silver Street.

[2] In 1911, a financially ailing Davis sold the paper to bond holders; ten years later, it was bought by Guy Gannett, who was in the process of building a newspaper, radio and television empire in Maine.

His holdings included the Portland Press Herald and, after 1929, the Sentinel's in-county competitor, the Kennebec Journal.

Frank Blethen, a descendant of Seattle Times founder Albert Blethen, a Maine native, later called the purchase "the largest and riskiest investment in our history" but a necessary move to keep the newspapers from becoming part of a corporate chain.

[4] In December, the newspaper was criticized for firing one of its journalists who had made negative remarks about the gay-rights group Human Rights Campaign.