Seattle's oldest newspaper, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, was founded in 1863 as The Weekly Intelligencer (also known as Seattle Gazette), when the city of Seattle was little more than a sawmill, a few dozen buildings, and a couple of hundred people. In 1881, The Intelligencer merged with The Seattle Post and moved into the newly completed Post building, on the northeast corner of Yesler Way and Post Street. The paper survived the Great Fire of 1889, the Panic of 1893, the Depression of the 1930s, and decades of cutthroat competition with its cross-town rival, The Seattle Times, until it became an online-only publication in 2009.
The receipt pictured here was issued by the The Weekly Intelligencer to Mr. J. S. McCallister when he paid $3.00 for a year's subscription to the paper. The subscriber is probably John Smith McCallister (1823-1889), a brickmaker from Illinois who was living with his family in Seattle by 1870.
Caption information source: http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-post-intelligencer-a-brief-history Caption information source: "Seattle Post-Intelligencer (1863-2009)" by Cassandra Tate, HistoryLink.org Essay 8956
Additional Information: Digital copy of this item available thanks to funding from a 2016 Institute for Museum and Library Services grant. Metadata updated as part of a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services administered by the Library Services and Technology Act, through the Washington State Library, a division of the Office of the Secretary of State.
