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Rh for the transfer. The matter was fought through the courts, going as high as the state supreme court, where the transfer to the state was upheld. Mr. Pipes was running the Leader at the time, and he cooperated in the dual capacity of publicist and lawyer, working with Wallis Nash and Tom Cauthorn. The title was upheld, and the legislature's appropriation of $12,000 (regarded then as a lot of money) for building was saved.

The Benton Democrat, incidentally, on June 24, 1881, carried an attack on the management of the college by a resident of Marion county on the ground that it had no right to be called an agricultural college, since it really gave a general wide range of studies. Presi dent Arnold replied through the paper that although the students had an opportunity for general education, the college gave special attention to the various subjects bearing on scientific farming.

In 1897 John D. Daly launched a weekly known as the Oregon Union, which ran for two years. March 24, 1899, the Union and the Gazette were merged as the Union Gazette, which ran semi-weekly, Tuesday and Friday, with Daly and George Paul as editors and publishers. The name Union was soon dropped.

One of the big events of Corvallis history was the driving of the first spike for the Willamette Valley and Coast railway, by William B. Hamilton, president of the railroad company, in September 1879. The Gazette of September 5, 1879, said: "This argues well for the immediate prosecution of the work." The road went through to the coast, but neither Corvallis, nor Yaquina, nor Newport fulfilled the optimistic prophecies of the promoters by becoming a transcontinental railroad terminus.

The first daily in Corvallis goes to the credit of Charles L. Springer and the Gazette. N. R. Moore had gone to Corvallis in 1908 and leased the Times for a year from B. F. Irvine, who had just received from C. S. Jackson the offer to join the Oregon Journal staff as editorial writer. Mr. Moore completed the purchase of the paper the next year and, with business conditions on the up grade in Corvallis, began nursing the idea of starting a daily edition. In 1908 the Gazette was owned by M. S. Woodcock and edited by W. P. Lafferty. W. E. Smith was publishing the Benton Republican, started two years before. Mr. Moore had just purchased the Times. Then Charles L. Springer, of Montesano, Wash., came along and purchased the Gazette. He beat Moore to the punch by issuing the daily edition, May 1, 1909. Merle Hollister, still on the Gazette-Times news staff, was a compositor on the Gazette when the hand-set little four-page five-column daily was launched. The consolidation idea appealed to both Springer and Moore, since neither the Times nor the Gazette had a plant adequate to the publication of a daily paper.

What were they to call the combined paper? Gazette-Times or