West Virginia. Otis K. Rice
periodicals in the country. Between 1850 and 1861, seven other religious journals, most of them by Methodists and Baptists, were published at Morgantown, Charleston, Parkersburg, Fairmont, and Harrisville. The Mountain Cove Journal and Spiritual Harbinger, begun in Fayette County in 1852, was the voice of a millenialist group that had migrated from New England and the Burned-Over District of western New York a few years earlier.
Agricultural periodicals naturally appealed to rural West Virginians. The Charles Town Farmers' Repository; established in 1808, was the first agricultural newspaper west of the Virginia Blue Ridge. It was followed by the Martinsburg Farmers' Museum and Berkeley and Jefferson Advertiser in 1827; the Morgantown Monongalia Farmer in 1833; the Brandonville Silk Culturist and Farmers' Manual in 1839; and the Union Farmers' Friend, and Fireside Companion in 1853. Later publications coincided with a growing interest in scientific agriculture.
Exactly how many early newspapers were partisan political journals is difficult to determine, but probably very few remained neutral on the burning questions of their times. Between 1840 and 1850 Wheeling, Charleston, Clarksburg, Brandonville, and Moorefield each had one or more prominent Whig journals. The Wheeling Intelligencer remained for years the leading organ of the Republican Party in the state. Staunch Democratic newspapers included the Buffalo Star of the Kanawha Valley, founded in 1855 and known after its move to Charleston in 1857 as the Kanawha Valley Star; and the Morgantown Shield, begun about 1843. The Morgantown American Union, established in 1855, expressed the views of the American Party.
Athough the press of antebellum West Virginia was generally Unionist and antislavery, most sections also had pro-Southern newspapers. The Kanawha Valley Star upheld Southern views, as did the Point Pleasant Independent Republican, the Philippi Barbour Jeffersonian, and the Pruntytown Family Visitor, all established between 1854 and 1858. The most vehement antislavery newspaper in southern West Virginia was the Ceredo Crescent, founded in 1857 in connection with Eli Thayer's attempt to make Ceredo a pilot antislavery community in a slave state.
The western terminus of the National Road, a thriving river port, and an industrial town, Wheeling had the most cosmopolitan population and the most diversified press in antebellum West Virginia. It was the only town to support a daily newspaper before the Civil War. Its first daily, the Gazette, appeared in 1835, but seven others, some short-lived, were launched by 1860. In 1829 William Cooper Howells, the father of William Dean Howells, founded the Eclectic Observer and Working People's Advocate, a journal devoted to the rights of labor and free schools, and The Gleaner, or Monthly Miscellany, with Ann Cooper Howells as its editor. Ann Cooper Howells took up her editorial labors two years before Anne Newport Royall, regarded by many as the first woman newspaper editor in the country, established Paul Pry in Washington, D.C. The Arbeiter Freund, a German-language newspaper, appeared at Wheeling in 1848 to meet the needs of German residents and transients, some of whom may have been refugees from the German revolutions of that year. In 1860, as the Virginische Staats-Zeitung, it became the first German-language daily in West Virginia.
Books and Pamphlets. In addition to newspapers and journals, 168 other items, mostly books and pamphlets, issued from West Virginia presses prior to 1830. Nearly one thousand more appeared between 1831 and 1863. Many of these early imprints were of a religious nature. The first book printed in the state, Christian Panoply; Containing an Apology for the Bible in a Series of Letters Addressed to Thomas Paine, published at Shepherdstown in 1797, attacked Deism and defended the Bible. Between 1823 and 1861 Alexander Campbell published more than sixty-five titles at Bethany, most of them religious tracts and sermons.
In the early nineteenth century, Wheeling became a center of some importance for the publication of school textbooks. The firm of Davis and McCarty produced the Murray English Readers, widely used in West Virginia schools. Albert and Edwin Picket published readers, spellers, and grammars, of which their father, a prominent educator, was the principal author.
West Virginia Writers. Works of more than ordinary literary, historical, and scientific value emanated from the pens of early West Virginia writers. A Short Treatise on the Application of Steam by James Rumsey was published somewhere in Virginia in 1787 and reprinted in Philadelphia the following year. Both it and A Plan Wherein the Power of Steam is Fully Shown, published by Rumsey in 1788, were attacked by John Fitch, who was also interested in steam navigation, and led to “a war of pamphlets” between Fitch and Rumsey.
Nineteenth century West Virginians took immense pride in their ancestors who had conquered a wilderness and sustained a new nation. The Journal of the Lewis and Clark Expedition by Patrick Gass, a resident of Wellsburg and the last survivor of the expedition, naturally excited interest. The journal was first published at Pittsburgh in 1807 and later in Philadelphia and London. Aware of interest in Gass himself, John G. Jacob, editor of the Wellsburg Herald, published Life and Times of Patrick Gass at Wellsburg in 1859.
No early West Virginia writer has received more acclaim than Joseph Doddridge. Nearly every historian of the American frontier has acknowledged a debt to his Notes, on the Settlement and Indian Wars, of the Western Parts of Virginia & Pennsylvania, published at Wellsburg in 1824. Theodore Roosevelt, known for his Winning of the West, pronounced Doddridge's Notes “the most valuable book we have on old-time frontier ways and customs.”7 Born at Friend's Cove, Bedford County, Pennsylvania, in 1769, Doddridge grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania and later moved to Wellsburg. His own frontier experiences, vivid memory, and integrity enabled him to depict faithfully the life and folkways of the trans-Allegheny region. An Episcopal minister and physician, Doddridge also wrote a noted Treatise on the Culture of Bees (Wellsburg, 1813) and Logan, the Last of the Race of Shikellemus (Buffaloe Creek [Bethany], 1823), the latter a drama in which he sought to immortalize a much-wronged Mingo Indian chief.
Another work of importance to trans-Allegheny frontier history has been Chronicles of Border Warfare by Alexander Scott Withers. Based upon tradition and upon writings and notes of generally reliable antiquarians, including Hugh Paul Taylor, Judge Edwin S. Duncan, Noah Zane, and John Hacker, the Chronicles, published at Clarksburg in 1831, inspired Lyman C. Draper to undertake the immense task of gathering source materials for trans-Appalachian history at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Withers lived in Clarksburg from 1827 to 1861 and died at the home of a daughter in Parkersburg in 1865.
Colonel John Stuart of Lewisburg was the most important chronicler of pioneer history in southern West Virginia. One of the first permanent settlers of the Greenbrier region, Stuart was an organizer of Greenbrier County and a major figure in its political, social, and religious life. In 1799 he wrote Memoir of Indian Wars, and Other Occurrences, with details of Greenbrier history and the battle of Point Pleasant. His Memoir was first published in 1833.
Anne Newport Royall left perceptive but sometimes biting descriptions of life in the Greenbrier and Kanawha valleys in Sketches of History, Life and Manners in the United States (New Haven, Connecticut, 1826). A survivor of the famous Hannastown, Pennsylvania, massacre, Anne married Major William Royall and lived for several years at Sweet Springs, Monroe County, and later in Charleston. Left in straitened circumstances after her husband's death, she turned to writing and published several works, including Paul Pry, a gossipy Washington newspaper.
Two other prose works merit note. Philip Pendleton Kennedy provided a vivid picture of life in the West Virginia mountains in the Blackwater Chronicle (New York, 1853). His cousin David Hunter Strother, like Kennedy a resident of Martinsburg, illustrated his work. Strother, with the nom de plume of “Porte Crayon,” was also well known as an essayist and illustrator for Harper's magazine. Of unknown authorship, Young Kate (New York, 1845) has been attributed to John Lewis. Reissued ten years later as New Hope, or the Rescue: A Tale of the Great Kanawha, its sketches of pioneer characters, leading families, dealings in land, and modes of life reveal intimate knowledge of the early Kanawha Valley.
A few West Virginians wrote poetry of merit. Joseph Doddridge was the author of “A Dirge,” inspired by the death of George Washington, and “An Elegy on the Family Vault” (Wellsburg,