Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/339

330 Democrat-Herald. Successive editor-publishers since Mainwaring were Raymond Crowder, now of the Arlington Bulletin; Athey and Kingsley; J. F. Harvey, and J. M. Biggs, from whom the paper was purchased by Pauline M. Stoop and Alfred Quiring in 1930. It is issued Thursdays at $2 a year. Publishers (1939) are Alfred and Leander Quiring.

McMinnville.—Lafayette, Oregon, is not such a wide break in the green of the Oregon landscape in these days of 1939. But Lafayette has a proud history—a lot more of it than can even be hinted at here—and one of its many claims to distinction is, that it was the birthplace of the ancestors of both the present McMinnville newspapers. For Lafayette was the elder brother (sister, if you please) of the present county seat of Yamhill county—and thereby hang a good many tales.

Yamhill county journalism had its inception in January 1866 with the launching of the Lafayette Courier (100). The pioneer publisher was J. H. Upton, one of the most ubiquitous of all the tribe of early Oregon's wandering journalists. The first issue of the Courier appeared on the first day of the year as a five-column four-page paper. Upton, as usual, soon moved on, and the paper, Democratic in politics, went to Jasper W. Johnson, who moved the paper to McMinnville. He sold the plant to W. A. McPherson, one of Oregon's early state printers. He changed the name to the Pacific Blade, whose appearance was noted by the Salem Statesman of October 14, 1869. McPherson changed the paper's politics to Republican.

When the Blade got into financial trouble and suspended, T. B. Handley purchased the plant (in 1870) and used it to publish a paper called the West Side. The next year an interest in the paper was sold to George W. Snyder and Billy Boone, practical printers from Salem. The paper, a six-column folio, claimed a circulation of about 650 at $2.50 a year. In 1872 Boone, later a reporter in Portland, and Handley retired, leaving George Snyder in sole charge of the paper.

It was George Snyder who gave the name Yamhill County Reporter to this publication, which through the years had been, successively, the Courier, the Blade, and the West Side. He was joined the same year (1872) by his brother, A. V. R. Snyder, like himself a practical printer, from Illinois. In reports to Ayer's directories, the Reporter's founding date is given as 1870, indicating that the early publishers were inclined to regard the West Side, and not the Courier or the Blade, as the real ancestor of the Reporter. Snyder Bros. de-