much more than a post office now, but it has its history. For here was launched, back in 1882, the first newspaper in what was to be Lincoln county; and here too was established, five years later, with Yaquina Bay men among the leaders, the Oregon Press Association, which, under a succession of names, has come down to the present as the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association (145).
Coll Van Cleve, well-known old Oregon journalist, was the founder of Lincoln county's first newspaper, the Post, a weekly, issued on Saturdays. Yaquina's population was more in prospect than in actuality, but there was plenty of hope, for not only was Oregon's timber industry beginning to be developed intensively, but the rail road was coming in—and, too, Yaquina was to be a transcontinental terminus, for didn't the promoters say so?
Van Cleve went from the Register at Albany to Yaquina City. There he started the Yaquina Post in 1882. His half-brother, Ed. M. Mack, veteran printer, who now lives in Portland, recalls setting the paper up in 10-point. Van Cleve, partly out of pride for his halfbrother's typesetting speed and partly to attract typographical talent to the office, used to run an ad challenging anyone who thought he could beat Eddie Mack setting type.
Van Cleve, through good times and the great preponderance of bad, kept his little paper going in the same location for 14 years. This, in those days, was something. By 1887 population, business, land office publications, and hope had developed to the extent where he was able to issue a small daily as well as his larger weekly. Other towns in the bay region began to grow, but Yaquina didn't quite get going, and soon the daily stopped, and Van Cleve, in 1889, hooked up the Post with the Scio (Linn County) Press, printing them both at Yaquina.
Yaquina's hopes from the railroad, like those of all the other towns in Benton and Linn counties, proved illusory. The railroad out through Corvallis had been built, and the roundhouse was establish ed at Yaquina. But, with business as light as it was, this didn't mean much. The citizens of Corvallis and Benton county had contributed money, goods, and labor to the extent of $100,000 to the Corvallis & Eastern; and when the promoters had finished, the line, partly constructed, which had become an $18,000,000 project, was sold by receivers for $100,000. The original contributors lost their money (146).
But Van Cleve was not the only hopeful journalist to bet on Yaquina Bay. Samuel Case established the Yaquina Mail, a Saturday weekly, at Newport in 1884, and J. H. Aldrich, experienced newspaper man from Iowa, father of Edwin B. Aldrich, editor of the East Oregonian and member of the State Highway Commission, launched the Newport News in the same town as a Tuesday Democratic paper in 1886. Neither of these papers proved permanent. In
