The paper that outlived a fire, a rival and six sales just lost its front door

Every week for 126 years, give or take a fire, a newspaper about Enumclaw has come out. For all of that time you could walk into an office downtown and complain about it. As of this summer you cannot, because the paper no longer has a door.

It still has a Wednesday. That turns out to be the harder thing to keep.

The lamp

D.C. Ashmun and his wife put out the first Enumclaw Courier in July 1900. The paper's own history calls it the King County Courier at the start, which tells you how much of the county Ashmun thought he was speaking for.

In the fall of 1903 a coal oil lamp went over in the office on Railroad Avenue and took the building and the press with it. The Courier was back on the street on December 4. From ash to ink inside a season, in a town with one press and the press gone. Nobody involved seems to have considered stopping.

Ashmun sold in February 1904 to a doctor named Rust, who a month later hired a Seattle newspaperman, Vernon Van Buskirk, to run the place. Van Buskirk bought it outright in 1906 and kept it for thirty years.

The rival

In November 1908 a merchant, C.C. Reber, started a second paper, the Enumclaw Herald, and hired Ashmun, the Courier's own founder, to edit it. The Courier did local news with a little opinion stirred in. The Herald did human interest. A town this size had two weeklies and, one assumes, two versions of every wedding.

The Herald went through nine owners or co-owners in twenty-five years. In 1933 Van Buskirk bought the last of them out, and on October 6 the first Courier-Herald came off the press, with a partner named Clarence Lafromboise on the masthead beside him.

The long middle

Lafromboise bought Van Buskirk out in 1936. Circulation that year was 2,000. Hold that number.

He ran the paper for the next half century. Robert "Bud" Olson became editor in 1954. The National Newspaper Association gave Lafromboise its Award of Merit in 1967. In 1972 the press in the Enumclaw office ran for the last time. In 1973 the paper absorbed the Buckley News-Banner, which had been the competition across the river.

Lafromboise died in 1986 and Olson a year later. Jean Lafromboise took over as president, and in 1987 Westmedia of Longview, owner of the Longview Daily News, signed a management deal with an option to buy that it exercised in 1990. Circulation at the time was 6,800. That is the high-water mark in any figure this piece could find. A challenger called the Enumclaw Eagle started printing in 1988.

When the Longview Daily News was sold to Howard Publications in 1999, the Courier-Herald stayed behind with the Natt family. Bill Marcum became publisher in 2001. A Bonney Lake edition launched in November 2003. The original building at 1627 Cole Street was torn down in 2003 and 2004 and replaced in June 2005 by a new one on the same corner, 6,829 square feet at Cole and Myrtle.

The chain

On June 3, 2008, the paper was sold to Sound Publishing, a subsidiary of Black Press. The Bonney Lake edition closed in 2016. In May 2019 the staff moved out of the big building and into a smaller office around the corner at 1186 Myrtle Avenue. By the summer of 2023 the paper had one paid reporter and photographer, who was also the editor, Ray Miller-Still. Sound Publishing's 2023 media kit put the Wednesday circulation at 1,764.

Fewer than 1936.

In January 2024 Carpenter Media Group of Mississippi announced it was buying Sound Publishing and Black Press, and completed the deal that March. On April 23, 2024, the Cole Street building went up for sale, and Miller-Still was quoted saying the paper was staying put, "no ifs, ands, or buts about it." On June 30, 2025, Carpenter sold the building to American Heritage Insurance and took a one-year lease. By this June the editor was writing as the sole occupant of a small office at 1925 Wilson Avenue, and the lease ran to June 30, 2026. On June 2 he told readers the downtown office was closing.

What is left

The paper. It prints. Miller-Still wrote that he now works from his house in Enumclaw and will find a way to be downtown "even if it's just one day a week."

The archive, which the paper says runs back to 1923, went to the Enumclaw Historical Society at 1837 Marion Street, open Thursdays and Sundays from 1 to 4. The earlier years exist too: the Library of Congress appears to catalog the Courier from 1900 to 1933 and the Herald from 1908 to 1933 on microfilm.

The single point of failure

A town's memory is mostly its newspaper's memory. The hospital story this site ran this week was built almost entirely from Courier-Herald reporting, from the $17,000 in wartime pledges to the five-week demolition. The fair, the dam, the water, the elk, the school counts: nearly every date in nearly every piece on this site exists because somebody at the Courier wrote it down on a deadline and somebody else kept the copy.

The question raised by June 30 is not whether the paper survives. It has survived a fire, a rival, six sales and a pandemic, and it printed the week it lost its door. The question is who writes down 2026, and in how much detail, and whether the copy gets kept. One reporter at a kitchen table is a newspaper. It is also a single point of failure.

Three things worth doing

Subscribe, at courierherald.com. It costs less than the thing it replaces, which is not knowing.

Send the paper your news. The website has forms for story ideas, photos, business news and sports results, and a one-person newsroom runs on what people send it.

Go to the museum on a Thursday or Sunday and ask to see 1923. Then ask what happened to 1900 through 1922, because part of the answer is a microfilm catalog in Washington, D.C., which is a strange place for Enumclaw's first two decades to be listed.