Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/355

346 Lucien P. Arant of Baker, in 1928. Arant disposed of the paper in 1930 to Everett W. Fitch and Paul T. Sagaser. W. L. Flower and Mrs. Ruth P. Flower were the next owners, followed by A. R. McCall September 1, 1931. The present publisher (1939) is Fred Guthrey.

A fire which, September 27, 1930, burned a block of residences, a church, and a lodge building, gave Manly Arant, then publisher, a chance for a metropolitan feat. He rushed the Recorder forms with the story of the fire to La Grande, the county seat, 20 miles away, ran off an extra there, and sold 300 copies to curious La Granders at 10 cents each.

Another Elgin paper, founded in 1908, about the time Mr. Flagg bought the Recorder, was the Elgin Leader, H. A. Snyder and H. H. Palmer publishers and H. H. Palmer editor. It was a Thursday Republican paper. The Recorder was too strong, and the Leader soon suspended.

Summerville, an unfulfilled hope in Union county, had three newspapers in four years, and since then has had no more.

La Grande.—The newspaper history of La Grande revolves to a considerable extent around the Currey family from 1896, when George Hoskins Currey started the Eastern Oregon Observer, forerunner of the Evening Observer of today, to 1931, when his son George Huntington Currey, who had successfully published several Oregon newspapers, sold out his District News and retired from journalism to devote his energies for a time to psychological and sociological research, chiefly in California, (111).

La Grande, county seat of Union county, was founded in 1861 by Oregon Trail immigrants, just two years before the town of Union was started 15 miles to the southeast. The early history of La Grande journalism is to a degree the account of the rivalry of these two ambitious communities—rivalry over the county seat and rivalry over railroad development when the Union Pacific built through the country in 1884.

For seven years after its founding La Grande was without a newspaper. Then, suddenly, two newspapers raced for the field; and in the course of a few hours, as Mr. Currey expresses it, "La Grande became a properly 'fortified' post-Civil war community with both a Democratic and a Republican weekly newspaper. The race for the honor of printing the first newspaper in La Grande still lingers in the memories of the pioneers. The Democrats won. Editor E. S. McComas and Printer John E. Jeffrey rushed out Vol. 1 No. 1 of the Mountain Sentinel a few hours before Publishers Micajah Baker and George Coggan were able to get the first number of their Republican Blue Mountain Times off the press." After about a year, Baker, who was an attorney, and Coggan, a stockman and rancher, killed by Indians near Meacham in 1878, discontinued the Times.