The Eagle Newspapers company was at one time the largest locally owned newspaper chain in Oregon. Established in the late 1940s by Elmo Everett Smith, the company expanded its newspaper holdings across the state for the next six decades, most significantly under the ownership of Smith’s son, Dennis “Denny” Smith. In 1985, Eagle’s publications accounted for nearly half of the print circulation of all weeklies published in Oregon. At its financial peak in the 1990s, Eagle owned twenty papers and five printing presses across three states. Elmo Smith was inducted into the Oregon Newspaper Hall of Fame in 1979, followed by Denny Smith in 2012. By 2020, Eagle had sold or closed all its newspapers and printing facilities—save one—in response to a declining industry. 

In 1946, Elmo Smith, who served as the 27th governor of Oregon (1956-1957), and his wife Dorothy sold the Eastern Oregon Observer, which the two had founded in Ontario a decade prior. The couple used the proceeds to buy the John Day Blue Mountain Eagle in June 1948. The same day, Smith and his friend Bill Robinson purchased The Madras Pioneer. Oscar W. Lange, Jr., bought in as a third co-owner a few months later. The enterprise became incorporated in 1955 as Blue Mountain Eagle Newspapers, Inc. (BME). The company bought the Hood River News and Polk County Itemizer-Observer, then sold the Blue Mountain Eagle newspaper before Elmo Smith died in 1968. Dorothy, their son Denny, and other trustees inherited the company. 

Denny Smith was a former Air Force pilot flying for Pan American Airways when he inherited the company. He had learned the paper trade from his father and believed small, individually owned weeklies would struggle under inflation, that people priced the papers too low, and that consolidation and increased volume in distribution would counteract the decrease in profit margins. BME had already added several weeklies before Elmo’s death, including in Madras, Hood River, and Polk County; Denny Smith set out to buy or merge with ten more, which BME accomplished within six years. The Central Oregonian in Prineville was the first, followed by papers in Independence, Canby, Woodburn, Aurora, and others. 

Just as the company began its ambitious acquisition plan, it faced a setback. On November 11, 1970, BME’s headquarters in Dallas, Oregon, home to the Polk County Itemizer-Observer and a new press, exploded after a gas leak ignited. The blast shook the rural town and was felt four blocks away. The fire destroyed BME’s office and took four dozen men two hours to get the blaze under control. No one was injured, but the loss to BME was $400,000-$500,000. Protected by insurance, BME set up a new press in West Salem within seventy-one days and moved its headquarters into an old trailer.

For the next decade, BME purchased weeklies in small or rural communities, sometimes merging with businesses and buying out shareholders. In some cases, the company issued common stock to finance acquisitions, which it eventually repurchased. In February 1979, BME merged with publishing companies in Hood River and Hermiston to form Eagle Newspapers, Inc. Denny Smith was promoted from president to board chairman. The other two partners were Hood River publisher Richard “Dick” Nafsinger and G. M. “Jerry” Reed, who owned the Hermiston Herald and Heppner Gazette-Times. The merger brought papers from Heppner, Goldendale, White Salmon (Washington), Hermiston, The Dalles, and Hood River into the company, some of which were merged under new names. Eagle Newspapers, Inc. now owned sixteen papers with a combined circulation of 55,286.

After the merger, Eagle was led by an executive committee of Smith, Nafsinger as president, and Reed as vice president. The new company had 361 employees and had become the largest chain in Oregon (in number of papers). Some papers it bought that were once unprofitable, such as the Lake Oswego Review, were turned around or kept afloat by Eagle. The company also launched new papers, such as the Tualatin Valley Observer in 1979 and the West Linn Tidings in 1981.

Reed divested from Eagle in 1984 and bought back the Hermiston Herald. A year later, Eagle was contracted by the owners of the Eugene Register-Guard to manage its five weeklies in the lower Willamette Valley. In 1987, these papers merged with two of Eagle’s to form a joint venture called Community Newspapers, Inc., which Eagle and Guard Publishing Co. sold in 1996 to Steve Clark.

When Denny Smith inherited Eagle, annual gross sales were $500,000. By the mid-1990s, that number was around $17 million. He relied on the Eagle’s financial success to help fund his political campaigns in the U.S. House of Representatives, which he served in for five terms (1981-1991) as a Republican. He also ran an unsuccessful campaign for governor in 1994, losing to John Kitzhaber.

Eagle bought its last paper in 1996. Nafsinger retired in 2001 and served on the board until he died a decade later. In 2013, the company sold seven papers and its Prineville press to Robert B. Pamplin, Jr., who also had purchased Community Newspapers, Inc. thirteen years earlier, supplanting Eagle as the largest locally owned newspaper group in the state. A national media company from Mississippi acquired Pamplin in 2024. Eagle continued to sell off or close its remaining newspapers, mostly to local managers, up through 2020. In the end, only the Eagle Web Press, a commercial printing company in Salem, remains.