Pioneer papers online

The Washington State Library is now making available online digital reproductions of the state's oldest newspapers. You can read more about the project in this P-I story.

The archive is starting off with The Columbian (the then-territory's first newspaper, founded in 1852), the Washington Pioneer and the Walla Walla Statesman. The special browser plug-in you need to view the archive, LizardTech's DjVu plug-in, allows you to zoom in up to 1,200 percent -- quite useful since the images, taken from old microfilms, often aren't of very high quality.

The papers that ultimately combined to become the Post-Intelligencer, the Gazette and Weekly Intelligencer, are among those on the library's list to be "added next."