The Oregon Digital Newspaper Program has recently been able to add five new historic newspapers to our website, all coming from Stayton, Oregon! Issues from The Stayton Sun, The Stayton Times, Stayton Siftings, Stayton Standard, and the Stayton Mail are now available online. This exciting new addition to our digitized titles provides a comprehensive look at Stayton, covering a time period from December 19, 1889 to May 25, 1916. We are incredibly grateful for the generosity of our donors, who make projects like this possible. This project was funded by grants from the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, the Pacific Power Foundation, Marion Cultural Development Corporation, and the City of Stayton Community Fund.

The Stayton Times was established in 1890 and was the first newspaper in town. It was originally run by Walter Lyon, who had at one point been secretary to Governor Geer. Three years later, the paper was bought by Horace Mann, who when in February of 1896 refused to sell the paper to E. F. Bennet, the Stayton Mail was born.

E. F. Bennett began the Stayton Mail in 1896 after he was unable to take ownership of the Stayton Times. Along with his son, H. E. Bennett, he increased the size of the paper to eight pages and eventually sold it to H. E. Brown in 1900. Around this time a new paper, The Stayton Sun, was started by T. H. McGill. After operating as publisher for only a year, H. E. Brown sold the Stayton Mail to E. D. Alexander in 1901. Later, Alexander would start a new paper, the Stayton Standard, which would eventually consolidate with the Mail. During this period another paper was born, the Stayton Siftings, run by John Alden Seabury with the motto “Truth and Facts.”

These newly added Stayton titles provide an example of the quick turnover time characteristic of Oregon’s historic newspapers. To find out about other aspects of life in Stayton from the turn of the century to WW1, take a look at these newspapers on the Historic Oregon Newspapers website. Each issue of The Stayton Sun, The Stayton Times, Stayton Siftings, Stayton Standard, and the Stayton Mail can be browsed and searched by keyword, thanks to optical character recognition (OCR) technology. In addition, these historic Stayton, Oregon newspapers can be downloaded as a PDF or JPEG file and saved for future reference or research purposes at absolutely no cost to visitors to Historic Oregon Newspapers. So don’t wait, and take a look at Oregon’s historic newspapers today!

This blog post was written in reference to:

George S. Turbull. History of Oregon Newspapers. Binfords & Mort Publishers, Portland, Oregon. 1939.