On Thursday, The Oregonian will celebrate its 175 th anniversary.

Our first newspaper was distributed as a weekly edition on Dec. 4, 1850, and hasn’t stopped publishing in one form or another since.

That was nine years before Oregon became a state on Feb. 14, 1859. So, in those early years, the masthead read: “Portland, O.T.” as in Oregon Territory.

And boy was that an interesting first edition. A front-page story on a fur trapper read more like a romance novel than a newspaper of record. Reporter Samantha Swindler tracked that first newspaper down at the Oregon Historical Society and goes into more detail in today’s story.

We are proud to be a historic organization tasked with chronicling our state’s history every day, whether that’s in the print and online newspaper, a story o

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