The San Juan Islander (Friday Harbor, Wash.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
857 issues from 1898 to 1914, published in Friday Harbor, Washington, digitised for Chronicling America.
The Islander was first published by James Cooper Wheeler on March 6, 1891, in Friday Harbor, Washington. Friday Harbor is located on San Juan Island in the Puget Sound about halfway between Bellingham, Washington, and Victoria, British Columbia. The paper included news from nearby Orcas and Lopez Islands. The inhabitants of the region were mostly fishermen and farmers, and much of the paper was devoted to news of farmers’ cooperatives, commodity prices, new agricultural production methods, and the movements of shipping vessels. The San Juan Islands also produced lime for concrete, and their striking beauty encouraged tourism.
It was common for rural newspapers in this period to experience delays in production due to the difficulty of moving equipment to remote locations, and the Islander was no exception. In its first issue, the paper noted that “our keg of printing ink was lost overboard and floated around the bay two or three days before being found.” The Islander also declared its opposition to the other weekly paper in Friday Harbor, the San Juan Graphic, published by Frank L. Baum (no relation to the famous author). The Islander promised to be independent in politics and more sympathetic to the patrons of the local saloons.
Alvie J. Paxson served as owner and editor of the Islander from July 1894 to June 1895. He was a member of the Populist Party, and though the paper never took a strong political tone, Paxson was quite critical of the extremism and violence of…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Friday Harbor, Washington, 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