Yes, I too was not certain how many years there are in a sesquicentennial, but knew it was a 100+. The Napa Valley Register, our local newspaper, turned 150 years old yesterday and they ran several stories about their history including the first edition of the paper, Monday, August 10, 1862.
Here are few excerpts from the special section they included with the regular paper:
Napa had more than a dozen newspapers in the first 60 years after the town’s founding, representing both Democratic and Republican viewpoints. Some never made it past their first few months, while others found themselves on the wrong side of history.
Two newspapers loom over those early years more than the others — the Napa Reporter, the first newspaper published in Napa County, and the Register.
On July 4, 1856, the first edition of the Napa Reporter rolled off an old Washington hand press in a ramshackle office on Main Street, next to the American Hotel.
The town of Napa was just nine years old then, composed of a huddle of low-slung wooden buildings clustered against the Napa River, where the present-day downtown now stands. Pioneer refuse littered the earthen streets — hats, boots, broken bottles and sardine boxes, as the Napa Register reported in 1864, recalling the town of a decade prior.
Image by Michael Waterson from the Napa Valley Register
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