On Oct. 29, 1885, the first issue of the forerunner to the Medicine Hat News, the Times, was run off a tiny hand press.

Thanks to the entrepreneurial spirit of two Ontarions, teacher Thomas Braden and printer Andrew Armour, Medicine Hat was home to a newspaper, a community booster, a voice for southeastern Alberta and a publication that residents of the area still turn to 125 years later to find out what's happening in their backyard, their province, country and around the world.

Armour and Braden had ventured west from Ontario two years earlier, setting up a newspaper in Calgary, before looking east to Medicine Hat and the fledgling tent city that it was at that time.

In 1981, the News offices and printing plant moved to Dunmore Road, where it continues to operate today.

The front page of the inaugural morning edition, on May 5, 1997, featured a story exposing unprecedented tampering by Bre-X Minerals at its gold mine in Indonesia.