- Media - Janesville Sesquicentennial
-
- [Photograph of Levi ALDEN]
-
- Eastern Teacher founded Gazette
- On the morning of July 4, 1845, a stagecoach carrying Levi
ALDEN reached the top of Mount
- Zion a few miles east of Janesville.
- ALDEN, a schoolteacher from New Hampshire, stopped
the stage to behold the panorama
- before him: miles of prairie bordered by woods and a single
dirt road leading into the village of 800 residents.
- Unlike many that wandered aimlessly into Janesville in the
mid-1800s, ALDEN had a purpose. He
- had come to publish a newspaper. His brother, James, a brick-maker
by trade, had settled in Janesville the year before and urged
Levi to follow him west.
- Before leaving the East Coast with his wife Sarah Ann and
baby daughter, ALDEN had put his
- hand-operated printing press aboard a boat that was to wind
its way through the Great Lakes before stopping at the port of
Milwaukee. There, it was put aboard an ox cart for transport
to Janesville, arriving 30 days after ALDEN.
- When the equipment joined him in Janesville, ALDEN
and partner E. A. STODDARD founded
- The Janesville Gazette, publishing the first edition on Aug.
14, 1845.
- ALDEN - principal of Cayuga Institute at Cayuga Bridge,
N.Y., in the winter of 1843-44 when he
- first was told of Janesville - was a man of education. He
attended the Unity Scientific and Military Academy in Unity,
N.H., and graduated from Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. ALDEN
also was a man of heritage. He was seventh in direct descent
from John ALDEN, founder of the Plymouth Pilgrim colony
who Longfellow immortalized in his poem, "The Courtship
of Miles Standish."
- ALDEN, who had studied for the ministry before deciding
on teaching and then publishing, helped
- support his family and his young newspaper by teaching Latin
and Greek at the community's first school, the Janesville Academy.
- Besides being the city's first newspaper publisher of record,
ALDEN was Janesville's first telegraph
- operator. After selling the Gazette in 1855, ALDEN
became president of the Janesville Academy and operated the city's
telegraph office.
- From 1858 to 1866, he was clerk of the circuit court in Janesville,
and in 1867 he was appointed
- auditor of public printing, a job he held for six years.
- In 1873, ALDEN returned to the newspaper business,
becoming associate editor of the Wisconsin
- State Journal in Madison. He died in 1893 at the age of 78.
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