The newspaper traces its roots to the Wisconsin Territorial Gazette and Burlington Advertiser, which was established July 10, 1837, by James Clarke and Cyrus Jacobs.

In Burlington, Jacobs was killed Oct. 31, 1838, in a duel that culminated a "long-simmering" political dispute with local attorney David Rorer.

At Rorer's urging, Edwards changed the name of his paper to the Burlington Hawk-Eye and Iowa Patriot in tribute to Chief Black Hawk.

Black Hawk was a friend of Edwards and reportedly was present when the first copies of the Fort Madison paper were printed.

Rorer wrote anonymous letters to other Iowa newspapers suggesting the territory adopt "Hawkeye" as the state nickname.

According to the Iowa Journal of History, Edwards wrote, "If a division of the territory is effected, we propose that the Iowans take the cognomen of Hawk-eyes.

Instead, water from the rising Des Moines River flooded the Ottumwa paper's basement where it stored its newsprint, and the Courier had to be printed in Burlington.

After The Hawk-Eye Gazette's move to Main Street, the former building was acquired by an adjacent savings and loan and razed to create extra parking.

In 1994, Harris Enterprises purchased assets of a Salina marketing firm and formed a new company, MarketAide Services, Inc.

[7] In the early 1980s, the Harris Group joined other media organizations, including such giants as Knight-Ridder and Times Mirror, in experimenting with a videotex news service, which was available to personal computers via phone modem.

The service offered a varied menu of on-line information, ranging from agricultural and weather data to sports and recipes.

As was the case with most early videotex experiments, the size of the subscriber base failed to meet expectations, and the effort was shut down in 1985.

In 1979, Awbrey returned to The Hawk Eye as editor-publisher and McCormally became a national correspondent for the Harris News Service.

After beginning his career as a reporter at The Hawk Eye in 1970, Mertens worked at other Harris Group newspapers prior to assuming editor-publisher responsibilities in 1985.

[9] Steve Delaney, a former reporter and business editor for The Hawk Eye, assumed the editor-publisher position in 2004 after Mertens died.

Prior to his return to The Hawk Eye, he was the editor-publisher of another Harris Group newspaper, The Garden City Telegram in Kansas.

A separate Home & Garden, Lifestyles, Business, comics and TV sections is included in the Saturday/Sunday "Weekend Edition" newspaper.

The stories helped raise awareness of formerly secret work at the munitions plant carried out by the Atomic Energy Commission.

[citation needed] Tracing its lineage to the Territorial Gazette, The Hawk Eye is the oldest newspaper in Iowa.

One of its associate editors, Robert Jones Burdette, became widely known in the late 19th century as the "Burlington Hawk Eye Man."

Another of The Hawk Eye's editors, John McCormally,[11] helped the 'Hutchinson News win the Pulitzer Prize for meritorious public service in 1965.

Since its acquisition by GateHouse Media, The Hawk Eye reduced the number of unsigned local editorials to about once a week, generally Sundays.

Under both Gatehouse and Gannett ownership, several rounds of staffing cuts were made, particularly to the newsroom and sports staff, the most recent taking place in August 2022 as part of a company-wide elimination of jobs.

[12] On December 1, 2022, the Hawk Eye was acquired by family-owned Burlington Multimedia, LLC, an affiliate company of Mississippi Valley Publishing and Community Media Group.