Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/423

414 years of its life the Courier had six owners—Stine (1885), Wimer (1886), A. A. Allworth (1887), Frank T. Sheppard (1888), George Hoskins Currey (1889), who later edited the La Grande Observer, and J. Nunan (1890-1897). Mr. Nunan's ownership lasted until C. S. Price and A. E. Voorhies took charge as partners. Complete ownership by Mr. Voorhies dates from 1899. (160) The paper was started as the Grants Pass Courier, its name to day. The title, however, underwent several changes. Wimer made it the Rogue River Courier, at the suggestion of H. B. Miller, then active in the consular service after having been president of the Oregon State Agricultural College. The paper retained this name until the weekly was discontinued several years ago. The Daily Courier, established September 18, 1910, kept the name Rogue River Courier until after the town of Woodville changed its name to Rogue River, when the confusion brought Mr. Voorhies to change the name back to Grants Pass Courier.

The Courier celebrated its 50th anniversary April 3, 1935, in its own remodeled building 50×100 feet in area, which houses one of the most complete small-newspaper and commercial printing plants in the United States.

The Courier's daily edition established in 1910 was not the first daily paper Mr. Voorhies had given the little city. During the Spanish-American war, in 1898, the Courier, regularly running as a weekly, published a Daily Bulletin of war news. This was a small sheet of four pages and had a regular list of subscribers at 50 cents a month. Abbreviated news dispatches, principally relative to the war, and local items were published. The files of the Daily Bulletin have been lost.

Mr. Voorhies experienced the general scarcity of money at the time of the founding of the Courier. He had come to Oregon in 1891 from his native Illinois, where he had worked without pay learning the printing business in the office of the Greenville Independent. In Portland he helped lay the type for the Irwin-Hodson Co. when that concern started business. The 1894 depression caught the young printer out of a job, and he finally joined the mechanical force of the Portland Sun, a daily morning newspaper started by idle printers, many of whom had just been thrown out of work by the introduction of eight linotypes on the Oregonian. When, after a few months, the Sun went down in financial ruin, in 1895, Voorhies was selected by his fellow-workers to wind up the business.

A few months later he was in Grants Pass as foreman of the weekly Observer, then conducted by F. W. Chausse & Co. The foremanship, among other things, called for soliciting of subscriptions, and Voorhies covered a lot of the county on horseback. The day came when the Observer could no longer afford to pay a foreman, and the depression was on again for the young printer. Friends suggested