houses in Corvallis were saloons and little Philomath was the only dry town in the county.14
Sam L. Simpson, journalist-poet, moist author of "Beautiful Willamette," was made editor for the political campaign of 1870, with Mr. Carter, later state printer, in charge of the business department. Mr. Simpson thought it proper to make the following frank, albeit wordy, statement of his attitude and that of the paper on the liquor question:
Temperance ceases to be the specialty of this paper, as, in fact, it is not the forte of the present editor. Right here the bright habiliments of neutrality are laid aside forever, and wheeling into line the good champion of prohibition goes down in the smoke and fury of political war.
All of which rhetoric meant that the Gazette was no longer "dry."
Carter later resumed the editorship and continued at the helm until his death in 1880.
William Browne Carter was born in Sangamon county, Illinois, June, 1831. He learned the printing trade in Springfield, Illinois, and crossed the plains to Oregon in 1852. He was the first printer of the Pacific Christian Advocate, continuing on that publication until 1867, when he became editor of the Gazette.15 He became state printer in 1878, succeeding M. V. Brown.
The Gazette was still printed on an old Washington hand-press, operated, Mr. Horner observes, "by the hand that wrote the editorials." Most of the time the paper had a "patent inside," leaving only two pages to be printed on the old hand-press and making only one impression necessary for each paper. The subscription price was $3 a year. Editors following Carter and Simpson were numerous, including W. P. Keady, later speaker of the house in the Oregon legislature; M. S. Woodcock, James Yantis, Will H. Parry, later founder of the Salem Capital Journal, city editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, city comptroller of Seattle, and member of the federal trade commission; Frank Conover, B. W. Johnson (1894), George Paul, Ruthyn Turney, W. P. Lafferty, G. A. Dearing, and Charles L. Springer, under whom the daily edition, first in Corvallis, was started in 1909.
On the death of William B. Carter, April 25, 1880, James A. Yantis and M. S. Woodcock bought the Gazette. The next year (May 6) Woodcock bought Yantis' interest.16 January 1, 1884, the Gazette Publishing House was incorporated by M. S. Wood cock, A. P. Churchill, and Wallace Baldwin.
The building of the Oregon Pacific Railroad, from Corvallis to the "coast in the eighties, which, as the promoters promised, was to be the western end of a transcontinental railroad, not only built up
