pondence from Ellensburg. Other pages, containing editorials, general news, and miscellaneous matter, brought the total to 86 articles, long and short. Advertising patronage was short, slightly more than one column of the 20, though rates were announced as "reasonable." The biggest ad was a two-column "office plugger" for the Port Orford Post, "only two dollars a year," J. H. Upton & Son, proprietors. All the advertising was in the same old label, card style of the 40's, from which the newspapers had not, to any extent, broken away. No advertising appeared on the front page.
In his salutatory Upton sketches briefly his own journalistic experience, praises Curry county and its resources "in gold and silver, coal, iron, copper, chrome, stone quarries, and timbers of the most valuable species;" which, with the prospect of the construction of the breakwater, persuaded the publishers to select Port Orford rather than Ellensburg. The Post announced it would be "in all things fearless and independent, seeking to cripple no cause that is right, and conceding nothing to that which is wrong." The Post was to be politically independent.
As in the case of a good many pioneer publications, the Post's quarters in Port Orford were not imposing, one version being that the early numbers were issued from the woodshed of J. B. Tichenor, real estate dealer.
The Post had accumulated little history when Walter Sutton bought the paper in 1882. The plant consisted of one case of type and a small job press. It wasn't much of a job, then, for Sutton, whose daughter, Mrs. Jesse Turner, is still a resident of Gold Beach, to move the plant by boat to Ellensburg.
Though nearly 20 years older than Sutton, Upton did not come to Oregon until 9 years later, having in the meantime done newspapering in his native Ohio and in Iowa until the Civil war, when he enlisted with the Tenth Iowa, serving until invalided for spinal trouble. Before going to Curry county he had done newspaper work in Salem and Albany and had started the Lafayette Courier in 1866.
The Post, as indicated, did not develop much until after Sutton moved it to Ellensburg. Sutton, born in Cass county, Illinois, in 1849, came to Oregon with his parents when he was 5 years old. His first newspaper work was done in the office of the Oregon Sentinel as Jacksonville in 1862, as apprentice, under Orange Jacobs, editor, only three years after W. G. T'Vault, Oregon's first editor, had severed his connection with the paper. Two years later he went to Portland and worked in the William Davis Carter job office. Back to Jacksonville, he worked a few months in Jackson county's only drug store, then returned to the Sentinel office as foreman. In March 1869 he went back to Portland and worked on the Oregonian as a compositor. His first visit to Curry county was made as a vacation trip in the 70's. He liked the country so well that he let his
