Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/198

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166
HISTORY OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM

municipal notices, consumption of flour by bakers, bills of mortality and the list of baptisms and marriages, etc." The last issue of the paper, Number 1641, was on July 2, 1814. Two days later Fontaine died. The Louisiana Gazette on July 7 of that year said of him: "He was an enemy to the revolutionary principles that so long deluged his native country in blood, and often (to his intimate friends) expressed the hope that he should live to hear of a Bourbon being on the throne of France. His hope was realized and he departed in peace, we trust to play his part in another and a better world."

Le Courrier du Vendredi was started at New Orleans on May 26, 1785, without the name of its editor in the imprint. It was the precursor of The Louisiana Courier, a tri-weekly published in French and English. Le Telegraphe, established December 10, 1803, was another weekly newspaper originally published all in French, but later a tri-weekly printed part in French and part in English. In its second issue it printed the terms of treaty by which Louisiana became a part of the United States. Formal possession of the Territory was taken December 20, 1803.

The Louisiana Gazette, the first paper in New Orleans to be printed in English, was established on July 27, 1804. Published twice a week, its editor was John Mowry. He started with only nineteen subscribers who paid an annual subscription of ten dollars. Several attempts were made to turn The Gazette into a daily newspaper: the first was on April 3, 1810. Possibly the reason that these attempts were not very successful was due partly to the fact that editors did not pay enough attention to local news and also to the large number of residents who could not read English.


THE CALL FROM VERMONT

In the rooms of the Vermont Historical Society at Montpelier is still preserved the press on which was printed the first newspaper in that State. The claim has been made that this press was the first to be used in the English-speaking colonies of North America and that it did the best work in a mechanical way, when set up in the house of Henry Dunster, the first president of Harvard College. But at any rate, it printed