History of Oregon Newspapers/Marion County
MARION
Aurora.— Someone would have to do it, of course, so Herbert L. Gill, veteran Oregon publisher, christened an Aurora publication the Borealis. Mr. Gill started the Borealis in 1900 as a Saturday weekly. By 1905 he had associated with him H. A. Snyder. In 1906 Sigward Nelson was editing and publishing the paper, and it had faded from the journalistic sky by 1908.
In 1911 Mr. Gill started the Observer in Aurora, his second in the same town, and the Observer has come down to the present. Successive publishers have been Albert E. Adams, 1912; N. C. Westcott, 1912-1922; Paul Robinson, 1922-1927; George E. Knapp, 1927-1930; Paul Hendrix, 1930; Eddy P. Michell, 1931; J. L. Hutchens and Martell Hutchens, 1939.
The Borealis, however, was not Aurora's first publication, for the town had had one-third interest in another paper, known as the Three Sisters, which supplied the news needs of Aurora, Barlow, and Canby, from 1890 to 1894. Maurice E. Bain was the publisher. Advertising came from the three sister-towns and also from Oregon City. One interesting little ad that recalled old times was noted in the issue of Thursday, March 8, 1894; it was a two-column reminder for "Ripans Tabules. 'One gives relief.' Headaches, Dyspepsia, Indigestion." If you recall reading this ad in your favorite newspaper, you can qualify as an old-timer.
But the Three Sisters went the way of the Borealis, and the Observer is alone in the field.
Mount Angel.—This little college town was without a newspaper until 1915, although the town was the seat of a thriving little Catholic college. The first number of the Mount Angel Times came off the press September 24, 1915. The editor was B. C. Jones, political-minded and energetic, who had his printing done by the Benedictine Press, conducted by the Order of St. Benedict, in charge of Mt. Angel college.
Mr. Jones staved off the wolf for several months, and after him the field was unoccupied until J. M. Eisen established the Mount Angel News September 24, 1921. The News was a four-page seven column newspaper. Nearly every merchant in town carried advertising in the first issue. Mr. Eisen was still at the helm in 1930. The present editor-publisher (1939) is E. B. Stolle.
Though without regular secular newspapers Mount Angel had been the seat of several ecclesiastical publications issued by the Benedictine Fathers as far back as 1888. Established in that year was the St. Joseph's Blatt, a Roman Catholic monthly magazine published in German. The Mount Angel community is made up largely of German families. The publication, however, had been started in Portland and was moved to Mount Angel when Rev. Dr. Alois Sommer, its founder, was called to the chair of medicine at Washington University, St. Louis.4 Dr. Sommer and his nephew Ernst edited, set, and published the paper, then known as St. Joseph's Blattchen. With its pages 5×7¼ inches it was probably the smallest paper in America. The paper appeared at first semi-monthly.
When the paper was moved to Mount Angel College, September 1, 1889, Rev. Leo Huebscher, O. S. B., was appointed editor. In its earlier years until the format was changed, the paper was printed on a foot-driven job press. It took, Father Eugene Medved reports,5 four runs to print the four pages and three men to operate the press—one to feed, one to pedal the machine, and one to ink. Largely under the direction of Brother Celestine Mueller, O. S. B., successor of Dr. Huebscher, the publication has developed. It is now a weekly with a circulation of 15,000.
Another publication of the Benedictine Fathers dates back to 1889, when the Banner, a monthly educational publication, was started. Ten years later it became the Students' Banner and in 1900 was known as the Mount Angel Magazine. It is now an English-language monthly known as the St. Joseph Magazine. Other names have been the Pious Union Monthly and Our Patron. The St. Joseph Magazine is a national Catholic family magazine. The circulation now exceeds 50,000 at $3 a year. A coast edition contains 80 pages; the national edition is half that size.
In 18966 the Armen Seelen Freund, a monthly religious magazine published in German, was purchased from Rev. F. B. Luebbermann, Mt. Vernon, Indiana. This is still issued from the Benedictine Press and enjoys 6,000 circulation at $1 a year. Entirely devoted to religious matters, it contains no news.
Silverton.—The weekly Appeal, Silverton's first newspaper, was started in 1880 by Henry G. Guild, Oregon journalistic pioneer, and it has come down to the present, outlasting several competitors. Guild was a young fellow of 25 when he started the Appeal. Born in Illinois August 18, 18557 he got his typographical baptism at Grinnell, Iowa, where he was "devil" on the Herald. Coming north to Oregon, he worked driving team for Col. T. R. Cornelius at the little town of that name. While there he began sending news items to the Hillsboro Independent, then published by H. B. Luce. After a few months Luce sent for Guild, in 1876, and gave him a general utility job. "I set type, kicked the jobber, ran off the papers, set up jobs, wrote locals, and did anything and everything else there is to be done in a country plant," he told Mr. Lockley.8
After a year with Luce, Guild went to Canyon City in 1877 and bought the Canyon City Times from Henry Gale. A year or so of that, and the Bannock Indian war called him from journalism. Returning from the wars, he sold the Times to J. M. Shepherd ("Old Shep"), who with his brother-in-law Delazon Smith had started the Albany Democrat in 1859. Guild then bought the Hillsboro Independent from his former employer Luce, but sold it back to him after a year and a half and went to Silverton, where he started the Appeal.
One of Guild's best friends in Silverton was the young Homer Davenport, who just lazied around, worked as little as possible, observed as much as he could, and drew, drew, drew all the time, finally justifying the confidence of his father, Storekeeper Timothy Davenport, that he would make a famous cartoonist. Homer's career with Hearst, "dollarmark plaid" cartoons of Mark Hanna, his international fame as the successor of the great Nast, his domestic unhappiness, and his death at 45, only a year after his father, are familiar history.
"You couldn't help liking Homer," Guild told Lockley,9 "no matter how much you felt that he ought to settle down and go to work. . . . . One day he came in and drew a most excellent cartoon of me and presented it to me with his compliments. Like most of the other Silverton people I set little or no value on Homer's cartoons, so I did not save it."
Meanwhile Guild was running the Appeal as an independent weekly newspaper, issued on Saturdays. After ten years he sold it to a recently acquired partner, Lou Adams, and Fred Warnock. In 1890 Fred Warnock was listed in Ayer's as the editor. A later editor was H. E. Browne, who ran it from 1904 to 1910, part of the time in partnership with his brother, Gilford D. Browne. In April, 191o, H. E. Hodges, an employee, bought the Appeal, running it until the present publisher of the paper, John T. Hoblitt, purchased it from him in 1915. After publishing small papers in Veneta and St. Paul, Oregon, Hodges moved to California, where he died in 1932.
The Appeal has had intermittent competition in its fine field. First there was the old Tribune, a Republican weekly started in 1889 by Davis & Wiles while Fred Warnock was getting out the Appeal. It ran for four years.
Then Churchill & Cook got into the arena with their Marion County Record (1894-1897).
Wiles & Hodges launched the Silvertonian, a Friday weekly, in 1902, and kept it going for four years.
Another Tribune was back in the field in 1915. Founded in Mount Angel in 1913, it was moved to Silverton by H. E. Browne, who sold it in 1920 to Edward B. Kottek, a former Minnesota printer and publisher. Kottek carried on the paper, with particular emphasis on the commercial printing, until August, 1931, when he sold it to John T. Hoblitt. Mr. Hoblitt consolidated the Tribune with his paper under the title Appeal-Tribune, and Mr. Kottek gave the job printing business his exclusive attention until his retirement five years later.
Stayton.—The Stayton Times, established in 1890, was the first newspaper in the town. It was started by Walter Lyon, who at one time was secretary to Governor Geer. Lyon sold the paper to Horace Mann, after three years. Mann ran the paper, a five-column, four-page Friday weekly, for three more years. Then E. F. Bennett, now of the Auterson-Bennett Printing Co., Portland, came into the field with an offer to buy the Times. The deal seemed sure to go through but finally Mann refused to sell. It was then (February, 1896) that the Mail, which has come down to the present, was started by Bennett. Mann then moved the Times plant out of town.
The Mail's first editor-publisher was assisted in the publication of the four-page five-column paper by his son, H. E. Bennett. Soon he increased the size to six columns, eight pages, half of it ready-print. He sold to H. E. Browne, later founder of the Silverton Tribune, in 1900, who sold the paper to E. D. Alexander in 1901. Alexander later started a new paper, the Standard (in 1914) and consolidated it with the Mail in 1915. He leased the paper to A. F. Fletcher in 1930, took it over again a year later. He is now (1937) retired, and the paper is being published by Lawrence E. Spraker, formerly of Arlington and Condon, succeeding Ralph C. Curtis, formerly city editor of the Statesman at Salem, who recently returned to the Statesman as news editor. Other editors of the paper have been E. M. Olmsted, later with the Grangeville (Idaho) Free Press, and Charles S. Clark, later of the Turner Tribune.
Woodburn.—L. H. McMahan, now and for many years circuit judge in Marion county, was the founder of the Woodburn Independent, the first newspaper published in the town.
The first number of the Independent was issued in 1888. On the mechanical side the publisher was assisted by A. S. Auterson, a young printer from the Middle West, now a partner in the Auterson-Bennett Co., printers, Portland.
Mr. McMahan was succeeded in the ownership in 1892 by J. F. Day, a Presbyterian minister, and Mr. Auterson. In 1898 Mr. Auterson, who had acquired full ownership, sold the paper, first one half and then the other, to Herbert L. Gill, who had published newspapers in Pennsylvania, Colorado, Kansas, and Washington before coming to Oregon and who, among other achievements, had to his credit the founding, in 1890, of the first daily in Olympia, the News.
Mr. Gill sold the Woodburn Independent in 1911 and moved to Portland. In the meantime, however, he had started two papers in another town—the Borealis (1900) and the Observer (1911) in Aurora, just a few miles to the north of Woodburn.
A. E. Adams, to whom Mr. Gill had sold the Independent carried it on for three years. He then appealed to Mr. Gill to returrn to Woodburn. "The people want you back," he wrote the former publisher. For a time he retained a half interest but finally disposed of it to Mr. Gill and left for California. Mr. Gill, who had associated with him his son, Wayne B. Gill, in charge of the mechanical department, retired in 1930 after 52 years in journalism. Since then the paper has been conducted by his son, in partnership with Rodney W. Alden, a former Salem newspaper man, as editor. Herbert L. Gill died in 1936.
The only competition met by the Independent came into the field when Mr. Gill left for Portland and moved out on his return. The Woodburn Tribune, a four-page seven-column publication, was started March 3, 1911, by R. M. and J. B. Barnes, editors and publishers. G. A. Hurley, active Oregon newspaper man, at one time a partner of A. E. Scott in the News-Times at Forest Grove, announced in the issue of July 14, 1911, that he was taking hold as editor and manager. The paper was sold by J. B. Barnes, owner, to L. H. McCarter October 13 of the same year. The last few months of its existence the Tribune was published by Collier & Lyon, who suspended March 6, 1914.
Mr. Gill the elder had associated with him on the news side of the paper his wife, Corinne B. Gill. Speaking of Judge McMahan, the founder, Mr. Gill wrote several years ago, "His paper was bright, fascinating, alive. He depended mostly on editorial work to get large circulation, finally going to a semi-weekly." The semiweekly, however, was in 1891 a little in advance of the town, so close to Salem and Portland, and the paper soon was again made a weekly, which it has remained.
Politics were hot during the McMahan administration of the Independent, and the young publisher, a real westerner, native of Baker county, Oregon, was a fighting editor, with a crusading reform paper. He attacked the alliance between politics and the liquor business and made his paper independent in fact as well as in name. "The first year," he said one day many years after,[1] "25 men were after me to ship me. Finally one of them did catch me. I put a bullet in him. . . . No, didn't kill him, just stopped him." The Grangers were with the editor, and he managed to win his campaign. One of his aims was to put county office-holders on salary instead of on fees-with a view to cutting off unearned returns to many office-holders; this was brought about through legislative action.
Having kept the saloons out of Woodburn for four years, he moved on to Salem, where he started another Independent and continued his crusading.
Mr. Auterson recalls[2] being the first editor to boom Willis C. Hawley, then president of Willamette University, for congress.
Hubbard.—Hubbard journalism goes back to the Beaver State News, established there in 1906 by R. B. Conover. It ran six years.
The News was followed by the Hubbard Enterprise, founded in 1914 by L. C. McShane, who kept it going until 1925, when Alf M. Rhoades, old-time printer, whose nickname of course was "Dusty," spent a year rustling enough copy and ads to keep himself busy in the back shop. Then, in 1926, came Dr. P. O. Riley, erudite ex-college professor and after-dinner speaker, who held the helm until January, 1935, when the paper was suspended.
H. E. Browne of the Canby Herald at once started covering Hubbard with an adapted edition of the Canby Herald known as the Hubbard Herald but soon suspended. For the last eighteen months of its career the Hubbard Enterprise had been printed in Mr. Browne's shop at Canby.
The Hubbard News arrived in 1937, published by Glenn Miller. In the summer of 1938 he disposed of the paper to Ray Ryckman and Terry McIntyre of Salem and is now publishing at Beaverton.
Notes
[edit]4. Paper by Father Eugene Medved, at University of Oregon School of Journalism, 1937.
5. ibid.
6. Father Eugene Medved, loc. cit.
7. Fred Lockley interview, Oregon Journal, June 22, 1923, p. 4.
8. ibid.
9. ibid.
10. Personal conversation, 1937.
11. Personal conversation, 1937.