Lincoln County Leader (Toledo, Lincoln County, Or.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
1,420 issues from 1893 to 1922, published in Toledo, Oregon, digitised for Chronicling America.
John F. Stewart first published the Lincoln County Leader in the coastal town of Toledo, Oregon, in 1893. Stewart had moved to Toledo from nearby Woodburn, hoping to start a newspaper that would be free of competition. Although it lacked the population and infrastructure of other cities such as Newport, home to a growing tourist industry, Toledo was an ideal location because it was recently named county seat and was without any competing papers at the time. The newspaper’s original plant was small, containing an old “army” press, which sat on a dry goods box. The press was slow, printing one page at a time and requiring handset type on a “kid” typesetter.
While not deeply political, Stewart’s paper did support the Democratic Party and offered a few passing observations on local politics. A June 1896 article, “The Indian Vote,” covered a county election in which inhabitants of the Siletz reservation first cast votes. The Leader disabused a rumor that tribal members did not have the right to vote. Stewart, who had suggested in an earlier issue that “Indians as a rule voted intelligently,” offered a lengthy excerpt from a court document establishing the legality of their participation, thus reaffirming his support for the new members of the electorate.
Stewart retired from the newspaper business when he accepted a position as county judge in 1898, selling the Leader to Wesley L. Davis. Shortly after Davis’ arrival, a Corvallis paper, the Oregon Union, remarked that the…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Toledo, Oregon, United States
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress