Introduction to Old Newspaper Articles about South Tillamook County!
The University of Oregon has digitized many of Oregon's old historic newspapers dated from 1846 - 2024. Does that mean EVERY newspaper and EVERY issue has been digitized? No.
Anyone can go onto the Historic Oregon Newspapers web site and search for newspapers by title, location and date. However, know that reading the old newspapers is VERY time-consuming. Much of the old published news was from national sources that don't exactly relate to South Tillamook Coumty, so there is much scrolling up and down newspaper columns on each page of an issue in order to discover old news that pertains to South Tillamook County. And as you scroll, the page often zooms in making the print very small or zooms out making the print size very large.
I am so very curious about South Tillamook County history which means that I often squeeze into my day the systematic search of the oldest issues of South Tillamook County and Tillamook newspapers. I search through the old newspapers, take screenshots of articles and items of interest, and, the most important, label the articles in a way that allows them to stay organized in the files.
Even though many of the articles are very mundane and lack high interest, they still help us to have a picture of much of the life of our early day residents of this area. Even so, I slowly continue to search the old issues. The process of getting them from the Historic Oregon Newspapers website to the South Tillamook County website is very, very time-consuming. First the issue is carefully searched for articles, each article is screenshot and meticulously saved to a file. Then every screenshot is improved in visibility and readability including sharpening using Photoshop Elements. Next a webpage is created that links each article to a main web page. The articles and created web pages are then uploaded to a web server that hosts everything and makes it possible for viewers to read. And then later typos and other mistakes are noticed that require many steps of work in order to make corrections.
The Tillamook Headlight newspapers loaded onto the U of O website are from the years of 1888 - 1924 although not every issue has been copied. The Tillamook Herald issues loaded onto the Historic Newspapers website are from 1913 - 1922. The Cloverdale Courier issues are from 1909 - 1918. Many issues are missing, and there are other years of issues. PLEASE, IF YOU KNOW OF ANY OLD CLOVERDALE COURIER NEWSPAPERS in the possession of someone know that I, Dean Bones, would love to scan those newspapers in order to preserve them and share them with others.
Lastly, when you open an article, advertisement, etc., note that each article has a name to identify in exactly what newspaper the article was found as explained here: 1909, (08) Aug 08 CC 4j explains that it was published in 1909, the 8th month, August; 08 is the day in August the newspaper was published; CC means the article was in the Cloverdale Courier (TH refers to the Tillamook Headlight newpaper) 4j tells that the article was on page 4 and was the 10th (j) article screenshot from the page. If 6f is listed then it was from page 6 and was the 6th (f) article screenshot from that page.