About Silver City nugget. (Silver City, Idaho) 1901-1904
Silver City, Idaho (1901-1904)

Silver City Nugget and The Owyhee Nugget

In 1891, John Lamb and Lemuel A. York established the De Lamar Nugget, a newspaper in the small mining town of De Lamar in Owyhee County, Idaho. Lamb took sole control of the Nugget in 1901. The De Lamar mine quickly dried up and the town's population began to drop. As a result, Lamb moved the paper to Silver City and changed its name to the Silver City Nugget.

The Silver City Nugget was a four-page, five-column paper published on Saturdays. Under Lamb, the Nugget was politically independent and had a circulation of about 400. It covered news in towns near the Owyhee Mountain Range, including Silver City, Dewey, De Lamar, Murphy, Reynolds, Bruneau, Nampa, and Jordan Valley in Oregon. Social events and business dealings were covered under the headings "Local and Personal," "Local, Personal, and Miscellaneous," "Local News of the Last Week," and "Births, Visits, and Sales." Mining news was covered in recurring columns under the headlines "Mining in Owyhee County" and "Mining Notes." The Nugget also printed the proceedings of the board of county commissioners. In 1903, the Nugget's masthead featured the motto "Not the largest but the best." In 1904 and 1905, Lamb ran the paper with the motto "All the local mining news accurately chronicled." In the latter year, the paper's name was changed to the Owyhee Nugget. It promised to "cover a wider scope of usefulness than the latter name implies." In 1909, the motto was changed to "Equal rights to all, special privileges to none"; from 1910 to 1912, it was "Devoted to the mining and agricultural interests of Owyhee County."

In 1912, Lamb sold the Owyhee Nugget to publisher Frank Burroughs who believed that future growth in the area would not be in Silver City, but in the Bruneau Valley. The paper moved to the town of Bruneau in that same year. The Nugget was published as an eight-page, six-column paper on Thursdays. By 1914, Felix A. Eidson took over as editor and publisher. Henry Wilson Gahan purchased the paper in 1915.

In 1916, the Nugget entered a long period of stable ownership under Charles Pascoe. Under his leadership, the Nugget was politically independent. Pascoe ran the paper until 1936, when poor health forced him to lease it to Rodney A. Hawes. Three years later, Hawes and his wife, Leona, purchased the Nugget. In 1940, the paper moved to the town of Marsing, Idaho. Hawes published the Nugget until 1982, when it was sold to Mick and Kyle Hodges. Joe Aman purchased the Nugget in 1984 and combined it with the Owyhee Chronicle to form a new paper, the Owyhee Avalanche, which publishes to this day.

Provided by: Idaho State Historical Society