[3] The Guard was launched in Eugene City on Saturday, June 1, 1867, by John B. Alexander,[4] and has been continuously published since October 24 of that year.

[8] Although his own venture as a publisher was short and unprofitable, Alexander unwittingly was the scion of a local newspaper dynasty in Oregon, with two of his sons later themselves publishing The Guard (following the tenure of several intermediate owners), while a grandson, George L. Alexander, would one day edit another Oregon paper, the Lebanon Express.

[8] Alexander and his paper vocally supported the old governing class of the former Confederate States of America and were rabid in their opposition to the policies of the Reconstruction era imposed upon the South by the Northern-based Republican Party.

[9] Such views were out of step with the majority of Oregonians, however, with the Republicans coming to dominate Oregon politics during the last quarter of the 19th century.

[10] The poor economics of the weekly paper were unchanged, however, and Skaggs immediately moved to unload his newly acquired white elephant.

[10] According to Thompson's later recollection, Skaggs sweetened the transfer of ownership by tossing in two bundles of paper and two cords of firewood for the new owners.

Buys bought out his business partner Eltzroth in July 1870 and subsequently remained solely at the publisher's desk for more than seven years.

[13] He continued to battle for the Democratic Party, "first, last, and always" in competition with the Republican Oregon State Journal and the short-lived Eugene City Hawk-Eye, which professed allegiance to the similarly shorter-lived Oregon Independent Party, which ran a full slate of candidates for state and local office in the election of 1874.

[22] Eugene  S. Pulliam of The Indianapolis Star, J. R. Wiggins of The Washington Post, and Herbert Brucker of the Hartford Courant were the other editors to sign the declaration, calling Senator McCarthy's actions "a peril to American freedom.

[30] The building houses the university's printing and mailing facility, archives, and continuing education program, as well as the Oregon Career Information System.

[32][33] The NLRB reconsidered the decision on emails on June 26, 2011, under a remand for reconsideration by the United States Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C.

"[39] In November 2008, the Register-Guard finally changed its policy and printed a birth announcement featuring names of both the child's female parents.

[40] In 2009, two separate layoffs reduced the newspaper's staff by the equivalent of 41 positions; by August 2009, it had 305 full- and part-time employees.

[2] The paper's ownership was officially transferred on March 1 of that year, with Molen replaced as publisher by GateHouse hire Shanna Cannon.

The Register-Guard will collaborate more closely in the Gannett network and with Pacific Northwest newsrooms, including the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon; the Kitsap Sun in Bremerton, Washington, and the Great Falls Tribune in Montana.

[51] In 1998, the paper took first place for science reporting from the Pacific Northwest Society of Professional Journalists competition for Excellence in Journalism.

[53] In 1999, the newspaper was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Spot News Photography, for its coverage of the community's reaction to shootings at Springfield's Thurston High School by student Kip Kinkel.

[55] Since June 17, 2008, by court order, access to the website of The Register-Guard has been blocked in Turkey because its domain name was once linked to a phishing scam.