The Los Gatos Weekly News was the town’s first newspaper and the first edition was printed in July of 1881.
The publisher was William Stuart Walker, previously a farmer from Missouri, who had been successful printing and publishing newspapers in Illinois, Nebraska and California, as well as his home state.
Walker, a veteran of the Civil War branded as a “Radical Republican,” had planned to publish his paper in Saratoga, but when he stepped off the train in Los Gatos he quickly came to the conclusion that this would be the more newsworthy of the two locations.
In the beginning the paper was printed in a house on Alpine Avenue, but Walker later moved it to a wooden building on East Main Street.
Source: Hooked on Los Gatos, the Library and Museum History Project
Clarence Hamsher Collection
