Salmonid fishes can be found in subarctic waters worldwide. However, for more than a century, “salmon” have been virtually synonymous with the Pacific Northwest. In fact, the Chinook Salmon is the official State Fish of Oregon–drivers may even choose to display this magnificent creature on their bumpers:

An historical essay published in the Daily Morning Astorian on January 29, 1887 suggests that the salmon might have played a small but important role in Oregon’s ever becoming an America territory. Entitled ‘The Boundary Question. How the Oregon Trouble was Settled and the Country was Saved From War,’ this article relates that a man named Gordon, commander of the English man-of-war America, concurred with John McLaughlin’s assessment that the Columbia River country was ‘not worth a war’ with the United States. Remarkably, the article reports that the commander’s dismissive opinion was based upon his observation, “…being fond of angling, the salmon would not rise to the fly. A country where the fish were not lively enough for his sport was, in his estimation, worthless.”

Whatever the quality of sport on offer, at the time of the first Euro-American settlement, the salmon fisheries of the Pacific Northwest seemed literally inexhaustible. Millions of fish averaging thirty pounds and more made the annual spawning run up Oregon’s numerous coastal rivers. They were an important food resource for both indigenous peoples and the pioneer settlers. In fact, the fish were so abundant that people often kept only the choicest cuts of meat and threw the rest away! The first commercial harvest of salmon by Euro-American settlers in Oregon occurred in 1823. Many thousands were caught every year thereafter, but for a while it seemed as if all the people in Oregon would never be able to eat enough salmon to put even a small dent in the overall population of fish.

But then, by the 1860s, new inventions and improvements in food canning technology suddenly made it possible for Oregon businesses to preserve the catch and transport it for sale to markets around the globe. It was at this time that canned ‘Pacific Salmon’ became a popular staple of the American diet, available on grocery shelves almost everywhere.

(Image from Oregon Blue Book’s ‘Historical Oregon Trademarks Web Exhibit’)

The Oregon newspaper titles presently available on Chronicling America provide us with a wealth of information about salmon and commercial salmon fishing. Here we can read about the rapid development of the state’s salmon canning industry and its major contributions to the early economic growth of the state–but also the subsequent emergence of a public conservation ethos as Oregonians began to notice, within a decade or two, some of the grimmer consequences of that industry’s success.

As a point of entry, try the front page of the Daily Morning Astorian from January 27, 1888, where we find an article headlined ‘STATEMENTS AND SUGGESTIONS. Report of the State Fish Commission.’ This story details initial efforts to regulate the Columbia River salmon fishery, and also discusses other factors then known to pressure salmon populations, such as the widespread disposal of sawdust in rivers, and predation by sea lions.

On April 6, 1904, the Sumpter Miner ran a story, ‘Oregon Owns World’s Big Fish Hatchery.’ The largest hatchery in the world had recently begun operating on the Snake River near Ontario, Oregon. The Miner reports that the hatchery will soon be releasing its first batch of fry: more than 25,000,000 young salmon to be stocked into the Columbia watershed in hopes of maintaining the fishery in the long term.

Page 7 of the April 9, 1911 Medford Mail Tribune offers a piece entitled ‘Uncle Sam Studies Traits of Salmon.’ This is an excellent account of the actual scientific methodology used by the federal Bureau of Fisheries to begin tracking the natural life cycle of Pacific salmon species. Here we find the beginnings of ‘fish tagging.’ Prior to this time in the early 20th century, there was much that had remained mysterious about the annual comings and goings of salmon in Oregon’s ocean and rivers.

(Image from Native American Legal Update)

Interested in learning more? There are many resources online! For example, Oregon State University Libraries offers an informative overview of the seven salmon species native to our state. And on their website, Oregon Public Broadcasting provides a detailed timeline of the History of Fishing in Oregon.  —Jason A. Stone

Although I am not supposed to use the term ‘archive’ for the results of our digitization project (microfilm remains the official archival medium of newspaper content) — the internet ‘archiving’ of cultural materials is a buzz-worthy topic in the news of late.

Especially with the recent launch of Google’s Art Project, there is a growing sense that the time for ambitious, full-scale digitization of cultural relics and resources has finally arrived. Technology is evolving to the point that the ‘library experience’ and the ‘museum experience’ can now be replicated with a high degree of sophistication in an online environment.

“Images are no longer just uploaded onto a website, but can be made stimulating and engaging,” observes Nicholas Serrota, director of the Tate Gallery in London.

Digitized newspapers and paintings are just the beginning: see The best online culture archives, Florence Waters’ recent Telegraph (UK) article with links to help you explore 15 of the top websites. You probably will be amazed by what is available–whether your interest is in art, poetry, film, history, textiles, or even spelunking!

Our Advisory Board convened on January 21st in order to review our progress over the past 6+ months and to plot strategy for the next phase of the project. We explored ongoing funding options, brainstormed methods of promoting the digital newspaper resource to the public, and began the process of selecting the next group of titles that will be queued for future digitization.

We are also saying “goodbye” to a couple of Board members who were instrumental in helping us to get this project off the ground in the early stages: George Vogt is retiring from his position as Director of the Oregon Historical Society in Portland, and historian William Robbins is withdrawing from outside obligations in order to devote his full attention to finishing an important book project. Thank you George and Bill, for all you’ve done, from all of us!

We are happy to report that we Geoff Wexler of OHS has agreed to fill one of the open seats on our Board. Geoff brought us a gift: original issues of Abigail Scott Duniway’s New Northwest. We are planning to re-film this title for digitization, and OHS should be commended for loaning us their set of originals.

ODNP management will be seeking candidates to fill the other open seat on the Board; expect an announcement here in the upcoming months.

Throughout Oregon’s history, its citizens have always been inclined to look hopefully toward the future. New Years Day has always been an important holiday in the state, as the historic newspaper record will reveal. A search of Historic Oregon Newspapers or Chronicling America will yield a number of headlines and illustrations commemorating the arrival of a New Year. Below is an example from the December 31, 1922 Astorian that you won’t find on either of the web sites (because it falls outside the scope of dates digitized for this title.)

Note the fuming factory smokestacks in the background of the picture–this is a recurring motif in newspaper illustrations of the day. While we in the 21st Century tend to look at the pall of black smoke and say “Yuck! Pollution!”, in the 19th and early 20th Centuries smokestacks are commonly used to symbolize wealth, industry, modernization, and desirable economic growth. Awareness of the negative impacts of environmental pollution would not begin to enter the broader American consciousness for a few more decades. So this truly would have been the perfect image of a “Happy and Prosperous New Year” for most residents of Astoria in 1922.

Here at the beginning of another New Year we find a convenient opportunity to remind ourselves that the times are always changing.  —Jason A. Stone

We are happy to announce that four new historic Oregon newspapers have just been added to Chronicling America. The Ontario Argus, the Salem Capital Journal, the Burns Times-Herald and the Astoria Astorian are now available, bringing the total number of Oregon newspaper pages on the Library of Congress’ web site to 67,863.

With the onset of the winter holiday season, I’ve been looking through December issues of the historic newspapers, enjoying the nostalgic  illustrations, articles and advertisements from seasons past. You can do the same on Chronicling America, where issues of the Sumpter Miner and Klamath Falls Evening Herald are available for public viewing.

In turn-of-the-century Sumpter and Klamath Falls, people certainly got into the Christmas Spirit: when I performed a simple search on the word ‘Christmas,’ I received 1774 results!

As in the illustration above, use of the abbreviation ‘Xmas’ was rather common–and, it would seem, entirely uncontroversial–in these newspapers of the early 20th Century. (See Wikipedia for a concise explanation of the history of the Xmas abbreviation, which was never really intended to make any sort of political statement or to offend anyone.)

My search on ‘Hanukkah’ (variant spellings included!) failed to turn up a single item in either of the Oregon papers. (This is probably reflective of period demographics in Eastern Oregon–it will be interesting to retry the search once the titles from Portland and Salem are available.) The earliest reference to Hanukkah that appears anywhere in Chronicling America is an item from the Hebrew Observer reprinted in the December 24th, 1885 issue of the Daily Honolulu Press. The earliest full and detailed article about the Jewish Festival of Lights was published December 17, 1887 by the Waco Daily Examiner.

For the time being, at least, we can’t expect to find information on ‘Kwanzaa’ in Chronicling America: the first Kwanzaa celebration was in 1966-67, and the digitized newspapers only run through 1922.

Come back in a couple weeks, when we’ll take at look at historic Oregon ‘Happy New Years’ items. In the meantime… Happy Holidays!  —Jason A. Stone

You never know where historical research might take you…

I was looking around on the Internet this week, hoping to learn the full name of one P. C. Levar of Coos Bay, who had been editor and publisher of the Marshfield Coast Mail newspaper around the turn of the 20th century. While I was unable to discover what the “P. C.” stood for, I did unearth some unexpected information about the man’s writing career. As I discovered, Levar’s legacy rests not so much on anything he wrote while editor of the Coast Mail.  Rather, to the extent that he is still remembered today, it is largely owing to a letter of his that was published in the early film journal, Moving Pictures World.

The letter–in which Levar criticizes the Biograph Film Company for their underhanded replacement of the actress originally known as the ‘Biograph Girl’–is clear evidence that the Hollywood ‘star system’ was already beginning to develop in 1910. Levar’s epistle  is such an early and unambiguous example of what would eventually come to be known as ‘fan mail’ that the letter has been referenced, quoted, and even reproduced whole in a number of books about the formative days of the film industry, including Tom Gunning’s D.W. Griffith & the Origins of American Narrative Film, Eileen Bowser’s The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915, and Florence Lawrence, The Biograph Girl: America’s First Movie Star by Kelly R. Brown.

Here is the complete text of P. C. Levar’s letter:

Although he does not use her name (probably he did not even know it, as film actors were not credited in those days), the ‘true and original’ Biograph Girl whom Levar favors is almost certainly Florence Lawrence.  Lawrence is generally regarded by film scholars as the first true American movie star. Hers was an eventful, very colorful, and ultimately tragic life. Readers who would like to learn more are directed to her biographic entry in the northernstars movie database, as well as Mary L. Grau’s lengthy and detailed Blog article. At Chronicling America, a name search of all papers presently digitized yields 100 pages  with information on Florence Lawrence (see one exemplary page below). As if that weren’t enough, you can also read about her contributions to automotive engineering history. (Yes, the same Florence Lawrence!)

After her relationship with Biograph ended, Lawrence went on to work for other pioneering film production companies, including Lubin Studios, Independent, Universal and Victor. She would appear in more than 270 pictures; at the height of her career earning more than $1 million per year. Prints of her films have become rare, but on YouTube you can view her work in the 1909 Biograph short, ‘Those Awful Hats.’   —Jason A. Stone

Abigail Scott Duniway, acclaimed as “Oregon’s Mother of Suffrage,” was born on October 22, 1834. That makes today a most opportune time to announce that the suffragist newspaper that Duniway published and edited, The New Northwest of Portland, has been confirmed as our final title for digitization in NDNP phase 1!

We had to clear a couple of hurdles with this one:

1.) Confirming that The New Northwest qualified for funding based upon both NDNP project guidelines and the formalities of serials cataloging. Could Duniway’s journal rightly be called a newspaper, or was it more accurately a magazine? This may sound like hair-splitting, but these distinctions truly matter in the world of the library. We were pleased that The New Northwest was judged to be a newspaper, and therefore qualified for inclusion in NDNP.

2.) We discovered that our library’s service copies of The New Northwest microfilm were not matched by master negatives in our archive. In fact, we had none of the negatives on hand at all! Luckily, we managed to track down negatives at the Oregon Historical Society, who have generously agreed to provide us with copies of the negatives. (Libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions generally circulate positive prints, but are often much more reluctant about sharing copies of their master negatives. OHS really was exceptionally co-operative here, so thanks are due to them!)

2012 will mark the 100-year anniversary of woman’s suffrage in Oregon. Cultural institutions throughout the state will be commemorating this milestone, and we are very pleased that the paper that was at the forefront of the struggle, The New Northwest, will be available and accessible to the public via our digital resource.

In the meantime, Abigail Scott Duniway’s life remains, as always, a fascinating and informative subject.  Oregon Public Broadcasting has substantial Duniway web pages that are a great starting place for learning more about “the pioneer suffragist of the great Northwest.” For a wider overview of the history of woman’s rights and citizenship in Oregon, Kimberly Jensen’s article from the Oregon Historical Quarterly is recommended.

While I was working on the post about microfilming the Astorian (see below), we received word from our colleagues in Washington, DC that the latest round of content updates has been released on Chronicling America. In addition to further pages completing our run of the Klamath Falls Evening Herald, you can also now view some content from the Sumpter Miner.

For all participating states, the content totals on Chronicling America now look like this:

2,692,369 pages

348 titles

264 historic essays

That’s a lot of reading material! (With plenty more still to come.)

Those who follow our project may recall Karen Estlund’s trip to Astoria last February. In a previous Blog post, it was reported that she had returned to Eugene with a carload of historic Astorian newspapers on loan from the Astoria Public Library. Has anyone wondered what became of those issues?

While we have used existing microfilm as a source for most of our page scans, the Astorian was identified early on as a title that could use a good upgrade in filming. The existing microfilm had mostly been photographed half a century ago, from bound volumes of issues that were often in an exceedingly poor state of preservation. All of this was less than ideal. So, when it became apparent that we would have the budget to fund refilming of one title, the Astorian was an easy choice.

Now that this work has been completed, let’s take a moment to review the process of microfilming an historical newspaper–the work of our colleagues in the Image Services Department of Knight Library.

The first step in the microfilming process is to guillotine any issues that have been bound between covers. This is because pages that are filmed while still bound tend to produce gutter shadows, areas of uneven contrast and exposure, and other flaws. A far superior filmed image is obtained from a page that can be laid perfectly flat. Next comes a review of collation to make sure that issues and the pages within issues have been placed in the correct, chronological order. As page numbers were not originally printed on the Astorians, the numbers were hand-written in light pencil, in order to facilitate both filming and later page-searching by library patrons. At this stage, any wrinkles in the pages were also flattened using a steam iron, and rips and tears were mended with Filmoplast, a non-reflective adhesive tape specifically designed for archival paper documents.

Once the Astorians were fully prepped, they were then routed to the camera room. Here they were filmed using our planetary microfilm camera. The pages are placed on a flat copyboard and exposed to 35mm film stock. A positive print is struck from each master negative film reel, in order to check the quality of the filming work. When a reel passes quality review, the master negative is then duplicated to produce a negative copy that can be handled by collators with ODNP and, eventually, passed on to our vendor for digital scanning. The original negative is the archival copy.

More or less, this was the process followed for all 11,960 pages of the Astorian that were re-filmed for our project. You can judge the results here:

Heidi Scheidl, the student employee who completed most of this work, reports that she very much enjoyed handling the old Astorians. “I had a chance to read a lot of the articles,” Heidi says. “It gave a really good taste of what the 19th century writing style was like.”

For those who would like to learn more about the processes and history of microfilm and other imaging technologies, here is a website full of information and fun retro photos!  —Jason A. Stone