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 and Express, was bought in 1888 and reorganized by Elliott Fitch Shepard (1833–1893). The Express was established in 1836 with the help of Willis Hall (1801–1868), a prominent Whig lawyer and politician, by James Brooks (1810–1873), who had formerly been on the Portland Advertiser and in 1832 had written (for the Advertiser) the first regular Washington correspondence. His brother Erastus (1815–1886) was joint owner of the Express in 1836–1877. James Brooks wrote several books of travel and was involved in the scandal of the Crédit Mobilier.

Ohio.—The Repository (weekly, 1815; daily, 1878), formerly the Ohio Repository, of Canton, is one of the oldest papers in Ohio. The Western Hemisphere of Columbus was purchased in 1836 by Samuel Medary (1801–1864), who changed its name to the Ohio Statesman; Medary—the “old wheel horse of Democracy,” who is said to have originated the cry of “Fifty-four, forty, or fight!”—was a friend of Stephen A. Douglas and governor of Minnesota in 1857–1858 and of Kansas in 1858–1860; S. S. Cox was editor of the Statesman in 1853–1854.

The Weekly Gazette of Cincinnati (founded in 1793 as the Centinel; in 1804–1815 called the Liberty Hall; in 1815–1883 the Cincinnati Gazette), and the Commercial Tribune (morning; formed in 1896 by the consolidation of the Commercial Gazette and Tribune), are published by the same firm. In 1825–1840 Charles Hammond (1779–1841), an anti-slavery leader, was editor of the Gazette. The Commercial was made by Murat Halstead (1829–1908), prominent Republican politician, and writer of several “campaign lives” of Republican presidential candidates, who was the first editor in the Middle West to get news freely by telegraph. The Cincinnati Enquirer (morning, 1842) became a great power in Ohio politics under the ownership (after 1852) of Washington McLean and his son John R. McLean. The Post (1880), the Times-Star (Times 1836), the Volksblatt (1836), the Volksfreund (daily 1850; weekly 1852), and the Freie Presse (1874) are the other large dailies of Cincinnati. In Cincinnati James G. Birney established in 1835 the Philanthropist, an anti-slavery paper, which Gamaliel Bailey edited in 1837–1847.

The Cleveland Leader (Republican, 1847) was bought in 1853 by Edwin Cowles (1825–1890) and Joseph Medill (after 1855 of the Chicago Tribune). Cowles became sole owner in 1854; he was an anti-slavery Whig and one of the founders of the Republican party in the state. The Leader of 1853 was a consolidation of the Cleveland Forest City, a Whig paper founded in 1849 by Joseph Medill and united in 1852 with the Free Democrat. Like the Chicago Tribune it was in 1909 controlled by Medill’s grandson, Medill McCormick (b. 1877), a son-in-law of M. A. Hanna. The Press of Cleveland (evening, independent) was established in 1878 by James Edmund Scripps (1835–1906); with Milton A. McRae (b. 1858) he formed the Scripps-McRae Press Association of Cleveland and the Scripps-McRae League, which included the Cincinnati Post, the St Louis Star-Chronicle, the Cleveland Press, the Kentucky Post of Covington, the Columbus Citizen, and the Times, the News-Bee and Times-Bee of Toledo. Scripps and McRae organized the Publishers’ Press Association of New York, a rival of the Associated Press. Scripps in his later years was a benefactor of the city of Detroit, where he had established (1873) the Evening News. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer (morning, 1841) is a well-known paper; in its columns appeared the first “Artemus Ward” sketches, contributed by Charles Farrar Browne (1834–1867), who in 1861 went to New York to edit the short-lived humorous Vanity Fair. The Waechter und Anzeiger (Waechter 1852; Anzeiger 1872) is published in Cleveland.