An independent register for Los Angeles & California

A history, 1851–1879

The record

1. Oct. 16, 1850The Los Angeles city council grants Theodore Foster a lot at the corner of the jail for a printing house — “for this once only,” the minutes read, “because he is the first to inaugurate this public benefit.” Foster builds a two-story frame building on what is now Los Angeles Street, then Calle Zanja Madre. The printers live upstairs; the sign over the door reads Imprenta.
2. May 17, 1851The first number of La Estrella de Los Ángeles is issued: four pages, five columns, twelve by eighteen inches, two pages in English and two in Spanish. Ten dollars a year, payable in advance. The publishers are John Allen Lewis and John McElroy; Foster had left the firm before the first issue.
3. July 1851William H. Rand buys an interest and the firm becomes Lewis, McElroy & Rand. Rand would later co-found Rand McNally. The press is an old Washington hand press shipped around the Horn of Africa, six or seven months at sea. Circulation does not exceed 250 copies.
4. 1851–53Lewis edits the English pages and Manuel Clemente Rojo the Spanish columns. The paper is deliberately nonpartisan: “I never could muster up fanaticism enough to print a party paper,” Lewis writes. Its first job of city printing is one hundred white ribbon badges for the new police force, English on one side and Spanish on the other, billed at twenty-five dollars.
5. Aug. 1, 1853Lewis sells to James M. McMeans, having explained in his farewell that the nearest newspaper was more than five hundred miles away in San Francisco, and that the mail between the two towns took anywhere from two to six weeks — once, fifty-two days.
6. 1854–55M. D. Brundige buys the paper, with William A. Wallace editing. Late in 1854 J. S. Waite & Co. takes over, moves the office to Temple’s building on Main Street and cuts the price to six dollars a year. In July 1855 it falls to five, and the publisher agrees to take “most kinds of produce after harvest — corn, wheat, flour, wood, butter, eggs” in payment.
7. 1856Waite, appointed Los Angeles postmaster, puts the paper up for sale. William A. Wallace buys it, then falls ill within two months, and Henry Hamilton — late of the Calaveras Chronicle — takes hold of the Star.
8. Oct. 1862Hamilton, a Scotch-Irish partisan editorialist who sides with the Confederacy during the Civil War, is arrested for his attacks on Lincoln and federal officers. He takes the oath of allegiance and is released, but the paper does not recover.
9. Oct. 1, 1864The Star goes dark. Its last number is a single page. The press and type are sold to Phineas Banning and used to print the Wilmington Journal — the paper’s first press, beginning a second career.
10. May 16, 1868Publication resumes. “Nearly four years have elapsed since our last issue,” Hamilton writes. “The little ‘onpleasantness,’ which at that time existed in the family, has toned down considerably.” The new Star is a seven-column sheet, milder in politics and devoted to the welfare of a county town of about five thousand people.
11. June 1, 1870The first Daily Star appears, published by Hamilton & Barter. Barter leaves that September to found the Anaheim Gazette, buying the old Star press for the purpose; it burns with the Gazette office in 1877.
12. 1873–77Ben C. Truman buys the paper and puts the sparkle back into it, making it as interesting to his friends as to his enemies, and runs it until July 1877.
13. 1877–79The paper passes through several hands in its last years — Paynter & Company, Brown & Company, the Rev. Campbell of the Methodist Church South — and its brilliancy steadily diminishes. Early in 1879 the sheriff attaches it for debt and publication ends. The plant and files, stored in an outbuilding of the creditor J. E. Hollenbeck, are destroyed when the building burns.
14. Mar. 18, 1964The site on the 300 block of North Main Street is designated California Historical Landmark No. 789, in recognition of the first newspaper published in Southern California.
15. 2025Consequence Media acquires the rights to publish the Los Angeles Star. It operates as a limited-distribution e-mailed publication until it soft-launches on Nov. 10, 2026.
16. 2026The masthead returns to press as an independent digital daily — the same name, in the same city, on the same errand.

The proprietors

The Star changed hands often. Its early publishers worked in an isolated town, on small circulation, in a money market where cash commanded five to fifteen percent a month. The list picks the record up again in 2025.

Drawn from J. M. Guinn, A History of California and an Extended History of Los Angeles and Environs (1915); the Los Angeles Star collection at the USC Digital Library; and California Historical Landmark No. 789, designated March 18, 1964.