the college. The subscription price was $2.50 a year, and the publishers reported a circulation of 250.
Rev. Wayne S. Walker, A.M., of the college faculty, was the next editor (1878). The paper soon faded out.
The next Philomath paper was the weekly Journal, started by T. G. Robinson in February, 1896, as an eight-page Republican paper, 13×20, for which the publisher charged $1.50 a year. This paper was suspended in April of the next year, succumbing to the same malnutrition that had starved out the Crucible.
F. S. Minshall, who was to continue ownership of the paper to 1937. started the Benton County Review in 1904, bringing the first number off the press February 1. A graduate of Otterbein College, Ohio, he taught school in Ohio and Indiana. Coming west, he did his first newspaper work for W. C. Conner on the Roseburg Plaindealer and later was city editor of the Corvallis Gazette, then a weekly.
Opening of tracts of government land in western Benton county gave Mr. Minshall his opportunity, and land notices were important in the early support of the paper. The equipment for printing the paper was that of the old Yaquina Post, which had suspended when the little town burned about thirty years before. The young publisher planked down $100, most of he afterward said, borrowed, and the plant was his—Washington hand-press, 100 pounds of battered long primer, few type cases, and an old imposing-stone.
The old-time "blacksmith" epithet for inept printers was no joke in this case. Mr. Minshall knew nothing of type-setting, and his back-shop employee was young man from the nearby black smith shop, who had done some little composition. "That first issue," Mr. Minshall said many years afterward,27 "was marvel. A rival printer asked me if I was trying to run blacksmith shop and if I had used corncobs to ink my forms. One tramp printer said, 'I have been in a good many printing offices in my day, but this is the damnedest-looking place I have ever been in yet.' And he was not far from right. Our equipment was old and almost worthless."
Tramp printers proved the salvation of this then printerless plant. Before long, however, Miss Hazel Merryman was enlisted as a compositor, and remained with the paper five years, fitting herself for later successful work in a large office in Seattle.
Profit from the land notices provided the money for new plant at the end of three years.
The Review under Minshall was a "family" newspaper in more ways than one. All the five Minshall children, four daughters and one son, have received basic newspaper training the home plant, and four Minshalls skilled as linotype operators have come from this old-time "blacksmith" shop.
