Brownsville Advertiser

1878 - ??

Bi-weekly

George A. Dyson, newspaper pioneer, started the first paper ever published in Brownsville. This was the Brownsville Advertiser, which appeared in 1878, too late, apparently, to get a notice in Pettengill’s newspaper directory of that year. It had disappeared before the data for Ayer’s newspaper annual for 1881 were made up. Old-timers have little or no information about it.

Brownsville Banner

Brownsville Informant

1880s - ??

Dr. John B. Homer, who later was for many years professor of history at Oregon State College, and George Blakely of Brownsville promoted the next paper, the Brownsville Banner, and J. H. Stine, founder of so many Oregon newspapers, started the Informant. All these were in the eighties, but information on them is vague.

Brownsville Times

1889 -current

Weekly

To Homer Davenport, of Silverton, who was to become a world-famous cartoonist, goes the honor of suggesting to his friend Albert B. Cavender the idea of starting the Times, the newspaper which has come on down to the present. Cavender was working, at the time, on the new Woodburn Independent, just started by L. H. McMahan. Cavender came to Brownsville and, with A. S. McDonald, issued the first number of the Times in June 1889. McDonald was editor, and Cavender attended to the business and mechanical ends. There was a chuckle in the line carried across the first page, right under the title: “Devoted to the Interests of Brownsville and Vicinity, and the Editors’ Pocket-Books.” The pocket-books, incidentally, seem to have been fairly well filled out, since the paper, independent politically, ran up a circulation of 700 at $2 within a year, and a copy of No. 7 in volume 2 carried 13 columns of advertising out of 28 (the paper was a seven-column quarto) -

George A. Dyson, who had started the first paper, carried a 2-1/2 inch single-column ad on the first page for his hardware store, where he also did “repairing at short notice.” The biggest ad in the paper, a three-column full-length display, was carried by O. P. Coshow of the Brownsville Real Estate Agency. The paper was all printed in Brownsville, in contrast with many of its contemporaries, whose papers were half “patent,” printed by the old Palmer & Rey plant (later American Type Founders Company) at Portland.

Another of the ads was for the Oregonian Railway Co., C. N. Scott, receiver, which was running from Portland to Woodburn, Silverton, Brownsville, and Coburg on the “east side,” and Dundee, Sheridan, Dallas, Monmouth, and Airlie on the west side of the river. An item in the news columns indicated that the woolen mills were using 300,000 pounds of wool a year.

Cavender, who attended to the press work, commented that the old Washington hand-press on which the Times was printed at that time, was “a wonderful machine for physical exercise.”

Cavender became the sole owner of the paper in 1892. W. A. Calder, a school-teacher, had purchased McDonald’s interests the previous year.

F. M. Brown bought an interest in the plant in 1894 and in 1906 purchased Cavender’s interest and conducted the newspaper for many years. Other editors have been D. H. Talmadge, C. V. Ayerill, and Milo E. Taylor.  Mr. Talmadge became more widely known as an editorial-page columnist on the Oregonian for several years. He is recognized as one of the leading literary craftsmen in Oregon journalism.