· The New York Times
The Maine Colony in Palestine
“We are all distressed at the news of the coming of a colony of Americans from Maine to settle at Jaffa. The Consul at Jerusalem has written to Mr. Seward, to dissuade the deluded people from such an insane undertaking; but they will not be dissuaded.”
The earliest New York Times clipping in the archive, and a prequel: four years later the New York Herald would report on what became of this same Maine colony at Jaffa. The paper quotes an American missionary in Beirut calling the settlers deluded. Nobody in the article asks what the people already living at Jaffa made of their arrival.