Page:History of Warren County.djvu/288

 1839, published, in continuation the 28th No., 30th Vol. of the Glens Falls Spectator. This continued to be the organ of the administration, and for the first time in the history of the county, two papers were published contemporaneously, and assumed that active partisan character which has ever since distinguished the press of this part of the State. About this time, too, sprang up a corps of newspaper correspondents that kept the papers constantly supplied with contributions and original matter. After about eighteen months of journalistic warfare, the interest of Mr. Ellis in the Spectator was purchased by Winfield Scott Sherman, who formed copartnership relations with Warren Fox, and consolidated the two presses into one concern. The new paper was entitled the Glefis Falls Clarion, and was ostensibly neutral in politics and religion. In December, 1841, Hon. A. N. Cheney purchased Fox's interest, and the joint editorship thereafter was W. S. Sherwood and George W. Cheney. In May, 1842, the irrepressible Zabina Ellis bought out Mr. Sherwood and the firm name was Cheny & Ellis. After the lapse of a year Ellis retired from the firm, and left Cheney to conduct the paper alone until January 1, 1851.

Meanwhile newspaper enterprise seemed to be increasing. In September, 1843, two brothers, Marcellus and Thomas J. Strong, practical printers, bought out the press and type of the Literary Pearl, a sheet which had been started by Newton M. Curtis, and which had died after the fitful fever of a short life, and issued a paper under the name of the Glens Falls Republican. This sheet, besides containing the usual literary and miscellaneous matter of a country paper, ardently espoused the principles of the Democratic party, which, being then in the ascendent in Warren county, gave it at once an extended and liberal patronage. The circulation soon reached five hundred greater than had previously been attained by any paper. During the year following, September 23d, 1846, Dr. A. W. Holden, the author, subsequently, of a valuable history of the town of Queensbury, and a coadjuter in the preparation of this history, was associated with T. J. Strong in the publication of the Republican. During the political canvass of 1 844 the Clarion, which had claimed to be a neutral paper, came out vigorously for the Whigs. A campaign sheet called The Whig Reveille was published at the Clarion office, and another called The Hickory Leaf at the office of the Republican.

But political newspapers are not the only kind which constitute the history of the county. During the temperance agitation which began about 1845, the object of which was to procure the enactment of a law restricting the sale of intoxicating drinks to specific and manifestly necessary cases, a small semimonthly publication was started at Glens Falls, devoted to the principles of the agitators, and laboring under the euphonious title of The Rechabite and Temperance Bugle. The date of the first issue was July 29th, 1847, and the names of its editors, for it had two, were Marcellus and Thomas J. Strong. The intensity of the interest in the movement may be inferred from the circulation (1,500)