start=NEWSPAPER WAS INDUSTRIALIST'S PULPIT
D.A. Tompkins, partner to Joseph P. Caldwell in buying The Charlotte Chronicle in 1892, said he wanted to "preach the doctrines of industrial development."He said he did not buy The Chronicle to make money.
Daniel Augustus Tompkins had become a stockholder of the paper in 1890 at age 38, and when other stockholders asked him to take charge as business manager, he declined. When stockholders persisted, he sought out Caldwell, editor of the Statesville Landmark, as editor and equal partner.
"He had seemed to be a man of strong character and clear judgment and high purpose, a man of broad, liberal views, who was looking hopefully to the future of the South," Tompkins wrote in his memoirs. Shortly after the two took over, they renamed the paper The Observer.
Longtime Observer staff member H.E.C. "Red Buck" Bryant, who began working directly for Caldwell and Tompkins in 1895, said in a 1950 Observer article: "In all my dealings and associations with Mr. Tompkins, I never saw indications of money-first.' "When he went to persuade Mr. Caldwell to join him in the newspaper business, he was met with the suggestion that the class of publication he wanted to put out would cost more than the revenue could possibly be. "Mr. Caldwell told him the paper would not pay. He then asked how long before it would make ends meet if pitched on a high scale for the city, and outside territories. Several years was the reply. He said that was all right and he would see it through, and he did."
Tompkins himself wrote, "Neither of us, I think, ever thought about the money that might be made out of The Observer, and neither pursued any course or policy because of the money involved.
"The paper stood for the welfare of the people," Tompkins wrote. "It was inaugurated at a time when there was a need for reform." For Tompkins, that reform was industrialization.
"There was need for the South to get away from one single crop as its source of income," he wrote. "We had to diversify our pursuits in the South, not only in raising crops, but in all industrial ways, before we could get from under the depression which existed."
Bryant said that Caldwell, and not Tompkins, was the editor, which suited Bryant fine. "News to him (Tompkins) was the establishment of a new enterprise," Bryant wrote in his 1950 Observer article. "Had he been handling items, he would have played up the ones about industry and down the ones about crimes. Human interest to him was the loom and the spindle," Bryant wrote. "But in that, he did not reckon with the average reader of the paper."
Tompkins, from Edgefield, S.C., was primarily an industrialist and engineer who didn't have time, anyway, to be the Observer's editor. In a book on Tompkins called "The Builder of the New South," Dr. George Winston described Tompkins as an engineer, mill builder and manufacturer of mill machinery.
Tompkins was also a historian and author of "History of Mecklenburg County and the City of Charlotte." In some respects, he was ahead of his time.
"He was progressive," wrote Bryant. "He was among the first to supply cotton mill tenant houses with bathrooms and he was disappointed that occupants did not at first appreciate them. Some of the bathtubs were torn out and put in the backyards so the little rooms could be used for cots or beds." Tompkins was a lifelong bachelor, described by Bryant as being "stout, well built, healthy looking, slow moving, but energetic." He had lost an eye by accident.
He was protected from women by his secretary, Miss Anna Twelvetrees. If women wrote to him, said Bryant, "Miss Twelvetrees read their letters first and if not about company business, they were consigned to the wastebasket. That became a rule of the office, never violated."
Tompkins died Oct. 18, 1914, at 62, worried about the paper. He had been looking unsuccessfully for another editor after Caldwell died on Nov. 22, 1911. Said Howard Banks, who knew Tompkins, "The Charlotte Observer was Mr. Tompkins's pet; it was his sweetheart, he its lover."