out a livelihood by serving as postmaster of the port.
An ardent Federalist, he did the job he had set out to do. Even later he stood by the government so steadfastly during the Whiskey Insurrection that the local faction placed him under arrest. "It is difficult to estimate the services these men performed for the Community," says the historian of Pittsburgh, speaking of Scull and his son and successor.[1]
We get an inkling of the difficulties that beset the young printer—in addition to the disorganization that preceded the adoption of the Constitution—from a letter addressed by him to the commandant of the fort, asking for the loan of some paper with which to print his journal, none having arrived from the East. The commandant obligingly lent him "twenty-seven quires of cartridge paper."
While the Gazette was a Federal organ, it was liberally conducted, for Scull permitted H. H. Brackenridge to put forth the Jeffersonian ideas at some length. But the anti-Federalists felt that they were not properly supported in this section and in 1798 a paper called the Herald of Liberty was brought out at Washington, Pennsylvania, under the management of John D. Israel. This was followed two years later by one at Pittsburgh called the Tree of Liberty.
So pressing was the necessity for a paper-mill that one was established in 1793, at the Kentucky hamlet of Royal Spring. The second paper-mill west of the Alleghanies was established in 1796, but it was not until 1820 that a type foundry was established in the trans-Alleghany region. Although the pioneer journalists were apt to be adventurers and "frequently unsuccessful as business managers "they were, in the main, men who had to be
- ↑ Killikelly, History of Pittsburgh, 485.
