of these, the Chronicle and the Observer, emerged as dailies; the other La Grande papers mentioned up to this time were absorbed or disappeared.
The Chronicle weekly was started by E. S. McComas November 1, 1890, on his return from Union; his partner was John Devine, a printer. Wadsworth W. Parker bought out Devine, and E. L. Eckley and his wife, Hattie J. Eckley, purchased McComas' interests. Parker went east in 1893 and remained there, becoming noted as an expert typographer. The Eckleys became sole owners of the paper and changed the name to the La Grande Chronicle. They started the evening daily Chronicle March 15, 1894. It was a full seven-column, four-page paper with a pony telegraph news service.
The Union County Farmer, a weekly, was started in 1894 by Charles Fitch, who shipped a new plant into La Grande to represent the growing People's (Populist) party. Fitch soon turned the paper over to Bird F. Lewis, who edited it for several years and then went into commercial printing.
La Grande now (1896) had four newspapers—the Democratic daily Chronicle and weekly Journal, the Republican weekly Gazette and the radical Populist weekly Farmer. A fifth paper, the only one of the five to survive, was started October 20, 1896—the Eastern Oregon Observer. This was started by George H. (Hoskins) Currey and developed under his direction into the La Grange Evening Observer of today. George Hoskins Currey was the grandson of Providence M. Currey, the first school-teacher of La Grande, and the son of Col. George B. Currey, noted Indian-fighter, commander of the Department of the Pacific in active charge of Fort Hoskins, Vancouver, Washington, at the end of the Civil war.
George Hoskins Currey had been a schoolmate of Editor Eckley at the Blue Mountain University, had married Edith Huntington, a niece of Editor Micajah Baker of the pioneer Times, and had him self been an early editor of the Courier at Grants Pass.
Currey moved the plant of the former Baker City Blade to La Grande and launched the Observer as a Populist weekly opposed to the radical tendencies of the People's Party movement. The new paper started with 8-column pages, 20×25 inches in size. The next summer Fred B. Currey, brother of George H., returned to La Grande from southern Oregon, and on June 2, 1897, the Observer carried the name of Currey Brothers, editors and publishers.
During the campaign of 1898, from December 1, 1897, to June 1898, the Observer published a morning paper without discontinuing the weekly. This purely campaign move led to a demand for a regular morning daily paper, and the present daily Observer was established November 1, 1901. After the fusion of the Populists and the Democrats in 1898 the Observer proclaimed its political independence, but leaned toward progressive Republicanism.
