EARLY HISTORY OF THE CONCORD PRESS.
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��character, without any elaboration, to prove the slender resources and the equally moderate requirements of the people of that generation upon the craft.
The "Concord Gazette" was com- menced with the .advice and under promise of material aid from gentle- men of the Federal party in Concord and vicinity. Its various publishers were Hoit & Tuttle, Tuttle alone, and Joseph and William Spear. Excepting a brief period when the paper was in charge of the late Hon. John Kelley of Exeter, it really had no reliable hand at the helm. But through the force of external circumstances the Gazette had a good circulation during several years ; .but when the war was over, and the political excitement it caused had subsided, the Gazette languished, and languishing expired, in 181 8 — in the twelfth year of its age. I remember the paper well as it appeared through those years of its life that succeeded 1812. It had, for a vignette, awretched imitation of the eagle, a "counterfeit presentment " of the emblem bird, so badly engraven that its groundwork was black as ink. This caused the Patriot to adopt the practice of speaking of the Gazette as the " crow paper." But the party whose views it espoused had no other journal in central and north- ern New Hampshire, and they were subjected to " Hobson's choice" — the Gazette or nothing. William Hoit and Jesse C. Tuttle were the only pub- lishers of the Gazette whom I knew, and only them because they ended their days in Concord, within the re- collection of some men now in our midst ; each living many years after the Gazette ceased to be. Mr. Hoit was a native of Concord, but when a lad went hence with his father's family to Wentworth. He served five years as an apprentice to the printing business in Peacham, Vt., which town he left on becoming of age, and entered into the service of Mr. Hough, in Concord. His was almost wholly a printing-office education, but he became a good scholar in the English language, and was the most correct compositor whose
��proofs I ever read. He rarely omitted or duplicated a word : but his surprise one day amounted to consternation — a day, too, in the evening of which the Statesman went to press — when the discovery was made that he had left an "out" of somewhat colossal propor- tions : being all the toasts or sentiments at a celebration of American Inde- pendence in Plymouth, written in the close chirography of the late N. P. Rogers, Esq. His general information was far above that of his associate, Mr. Tuttle, and the anecdote is not fictitious that a dispute arose between Hoit and
��Tuttle in regard to
��tain word found in the
then being put in type.
was as follows : "The armv of Bona-
��capitalizing a cer- foreign news The sentence
��Mr. Tuttle was a place
��parte is in jeopardy." maintained that jeopardy in Europe, and therefore should com- mence with a capital letter, while his associate took the negative of the question. Hon. Thomas W. Thomp- son being in the office, or passing in the street, was chosen arbiter, and of course decided for Mr. Hoit. Mr. Tuttle was a native of Goffstown, and became an apprentice to Mr. Hough. He was a worthy man, but without apt- itude for the successful pursuit of his chosen calling. He did not remain long in the printing business after the discontinuance of the Gazette, in 18 18, but became otherwise employed ; finally becoming the lessee of a grist mill, now known as Brown's, in Bow.
During the interval between the dis- appearance of the " Concord Gazette" • and the commencement of the "New Hampshire Statesman" — 1818 to 1823 — a sectarian paper, known as the " New Hampshire Observer," made its appearance. Its establishment was encouraged by Congregational clergy- men and laymen. George Hough was printer and publisher ; but, as seems often to have been the case in news- paper undertakings of that and a pre- ceding period, no arrangement of re- liable nature was made for regular liter-
for an was as much the plan as there was one at the
��ary assistance. The scheme "Association of Gentlemen "
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