The first newspapers of Butler County were very different from what people today would think of as a newspaper.

According to “The Press and America” by Edwin Emery, early newspapers were small weekly four-page publications printed on crude hand-operated wooden presses. They featured dense text in three or four columns using small, often ill-formed, type on inferior paper.

Most of these early frontier papers had a small circulation and were staffed by a very small number of workers who combined newsgathering, editing and printing tasks. The owner of the paper would usually serve as reporter and editor.

According to Emery, there was little local news in these frontier papers, content was lifted from or from stories gleaned from visitors to the local newspaper office.

Emery writes, “Advertising was rarely adequate to support the news business, but fortunately there needed to be some means of publishing legal information in this new area, and that was often sufficient inducement to start up a newspaper.”

According to “The 20th Century History of Butler and Butler County and Rep. Citizens” edited by James A. McKee and published in 1909, the first newspaper west of the Allegheny Mountains was the Pittsburgh Gazette, which published its first edition on July 29, 1786. At the time there were few settlers in what would become Butler County. The Western Press began publishing in 1811 in Mercer, and McKee writes copies of the Press were circulated in the northern part of Butler County.

The first Butler County newspaper, according to McKee, was the Palladium and Republican Star. It was first issued on Nov. 10, 1818, in Butler, which by then, according to McKee, had reached a population of 10,000. McKee wrote “Journalism in the early days was a precarious way of earning a living and a thorny path to public favor.” The early journalists had a strong adherence to the principles of the political party they belonged to and impressed their individuality on the journals they published.

The Palladium and Republican Star was owned by John Galbraith and was a four-page folio, formed by folding sheets of paper in half creating four pages, with four columns to a page and published weekly. Local news was confined to advertising columns and the bulk of the paper consisted of foreign news that was a month to six weeks old. It cost $2 for a year’s subscription if paid in advance and $2.50 if paid within a year. Advertising cost $1 a square for four insertions in the paper.

John Galbraith was the son of John Galbraith Sr. The elder Galbraith was a native of Ireland who served as a soldier in the Pennsylvania line under Gen. Anthony Wayne during the Revolutionary War. He moved to Butler County in 1796 with his sons, John, Alexander and James, who were well-known pioneers.

John Galbraith Jr. read law and was admitted to practice in 1818, but he devoted his attention to his newspaper until he moved to Venango County in 1819. He was elected to Congress in 1832 and again in 1834, after spending four years in the state legislature beginning in 1828. Galbraith moved to Erie in 1837 and was again elected to Congress. In 1851 he was elected president judge of the Erie district serving until his death on June 15, 1860.

The successor to the Palladium was the Butler Centinel which was owned by Moses and John Sullivan and began publishing in October 1820. McKee noted the Centinel “espoused the cause of the Federalist Party and was intensely anti-Jacksonian.” Despite paying little attention to local matters the Centinel published for four years.

According to the Norwich University Resource Library, the Federalist Party, founded by Alexander Hamilton, advocated a strong centralized federal government and favored the promotion of industry and manufacturing over agriculture.

It was opposed by the Democratic-Republican Party which was founded by Thomas Jefferson and favored a decentralized government that protected states’ rights, favored agriculture and opposed national debt and a national bank. President Andrew Jackson was a firm believer in the party’s principles.

In 1824, William Stewart and Joseph Buffington bought the paper and changed its name to the Sentinel. They enlarged the paper and extended its line of news. Buffington retired from the paper in 1826.

In his salutatory, or welcome to the readers of the Sentinel, Stewart wrote the paper would follow the precepts “taught from the cradle to revere those principles for which the Founding Fathers of the Revolution pledged their lives and sacred honors; educated where Republicanism in its purity is to be found, in the cabin. It need not nor will it be thought strange that my predilections are strongly in favor of the Democratic Party. ”

In 1830, McKee wrote, Parker Purviance and George Smith bought the Sentinel “cleared the office of all Democratic tendency and, being the Whigs, gave battle without quarter to the Democrats.”

The Whig Party was opposed to the policies of Jackson and in its time elected two presidents, William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor.

The Democrats led by Andrew Jackson, championed the common man, states’ rights and a rapid westward expansion of the nation. The Whigs, led by Henry Clay, pushed for a stronger federal government, modernization and economic development.

This competition between the Whigs and the Democrats became a heated rivalry and stoked high voter turnout for elections.

McKee wrote Purviance and Smith exhausted themselves in the 1840 presidential election which saw Whig candidate William Henry Harrison defeat incumbent President Martin Van Buren of the Democratic Party. “Soon after, the Sentinel, having finished its mission, went the way of all things human,” McKee wrote.

The Sentinel’s demise didn’t’ leave the county without a newspaper, however. Maurice and John Bredin had begun publishing The Repository on March 14, 1823. Its salutatory set forth the belief of its publishers that another newspaper in Butler would be useful and desired by the citizens of the county.

As Democratic-Republicans, which championed agrarianism, individual liberties and a limited federal government, the publishers claimed the right to express their opinions on public matters but declared the columns of The Repository would be open to the opinions of all.

It published every Friday and devoted two pages to European and Asian news and a half page to state politics. In 1824, in response to the rival Sentinel increasing the size of its pages, The Repository also increased the sizes of its pages.

John Bredin retired from the newspaper in 1830. In 1831. He was commissioned judge of the new 17th Judicial District. In 1830, the paper was sold to John McGlaughlin and John McClelland. In 1842, The Repository was sold to David Shannon and John Little, who carried on the paper until The Repository “sank its identity” according to McKee’s history, into the new Democratic Herald.

The Democratic Herald was founded in May 1842 by James McGlaughlin and James Ziegler. The paper had a revolving door of owners. In 1845, Samuel Purvis replaced McGlaughlin. In 1848, Ziegler departed and was replaced by Joseph McMurty. In 1849, the owners were listed as James McGlaughlin (again) and Cornelius Coll.

Then in 1850, Andrew Marshall replaced McGlaughlin. A year later Ziegler was back and replaced Coll. At this time the paper stated its mission: ‘We are Democratic in thought, word and deed and shall endeavor to be as honorable to political opponents as their conduct deserves.”

The Democratic-Herald moved its offices to a house on Main Street in Butler. McKee wrote the paper warned its readers that the Know- Nothing journals were edited by foreigners and pointed out “Know- Nothing was not a conviction but a pretense used conveniently by demagogues.” It also blasted the Whig Party. “Said party rarely, if ever, obtained victory except by some kind of — ism or an unnatural and healthy excitement based on some — ism.”

The Know-Nothing, or American Party, gained prominence in Butler County in the 1850s. It championed nativism and was anti-Catholic as well as anti-immigrant.

Following several further changes of ownership, on Dec. 4, 1861, the paper announced the Democratic Herald would be mailed to subscribers of the Butler Union newspaper. Shortly after on Dec. 11, the two newspapers would be combined as the Union Herald.

In 1867, Jacob and Alfred Ziegler bought the paper and between 1872 and 1878 the paper was known as Ziegler’s Democratic Herald before reverting to its original name.

James McKee wrote in his history of Butler County that from 1867 “up until the death of Jacob Ziegler the Herald was prosperous.’ Jacob Ziegler had a long association with Butler newspapering coming to the city from Gettysburg in 1831 and working at the Repoitory as a printer’s devil, a term for an apprentice at a newspaper who mixed ink, fetched type and cleaned the office.

After Jacob Ziegler’s death, the administrators of his estate ran the paper until Oct, 26, 1888, when the Democratic Herald was sold to James McKee and W.J. Ziegler, a nephew of Jacob Ziegler.

The younger Ziegler didn’t have the lengthy journalism career of his uncle because the next year he and McKee sold the paper to P.A. Rattigan & Sons, who owned the Millerstown Herald. The new owners combined the two newspapers, moved to Butler and changed its name to the Butler Herald. By 1901, the paper was owned and operated by P.A.’s sons, Harry T. and W.J. Rattigan. “McKee wrote “The paper continues to be an organ of the Democratic Party and enjoys a fair share of patronage.”

McKee wrote that the old Sentinel newspaper was “revived in a new building and address” as the Butler County Whig on June 24, 1846, under the ownership of William Haslett. Haslett in his salutatory stated the paper was opposed “secret and oath-bound societies because we believe such societies unnecessary, Anti-Republican and fraught with immediate and ultimate danger to the liberties of the country.”

Started in the 1820s, the anti-Masonic Party, which was pretty much what its name stated, had gained by this time had gained adherents in Butler County.

Haslett sold the Butler County Whig to William Lemmon in 1855. Lemmon that same year bought “The Star-Spangled Banner,” described by McKee as the organ of the Know Nothings. Lemmon consolidated both papers as the Butler American and Star of Liberty, which “espoused Know-Nothing in any shape.”

McKee noted The Star-Spangled Banner was small paper published between 1853 and 1855 by a man known only by his last name of Johnson. McKee wrote the Banner was known for “the viciousness of its editorials” and the “misstatements of its news columns.” It was the same kind of newspaper under the ownership of Lemmon.

By 1859, Haslett again got control of the Butler American and Star of Liberty. In 1865, the paper was sold to Thomas Robinson who moved the American to the offices of the American Citizen, which Robinson started in 1863 with Major Cyrus Anderson.

McKee wrote Haslett had a long and prominent connection with journalism in Butler. Two years after selling the American, he established the Butler County Press and ran it until 1869 when he sold the newspaper to John Negley and retired permanently from the newspaper business.

Negley renamed the newspaper the Butler Citizen. McKee wrote the Butler Citizen ‘was the lineal descendant of the 1820 Centinel and all the Federal, Whig, American and Republican newspapers published here before 1870.”

Other newspapers in Butler County were the Butler Union started in 1860 by Samuel Irvine who soon merged it with the Democratic Herald in 1861 to become The Union Herald published by J.C. Coll & Co.

The Oil Man’s Journal started publishing in 1869 in Parker during the area’s oil boom and was owned by Clark Wilson. He moved the paper to Butler in 1877 but, McKee wrote, “finding that the newspaper field in Butler was already well occupied, the publication of the Journal was finally suspended after the existence of a few years which were full of troubles.”

Prospect saw several short-lived newspapers — The Prospect Record, The Mirror and News, The Trump, The Camp Meeting Register, The Prospect Leader — but none lasted more than a year.

Zelienople had the Zelienople Recorder, the first newspaper published outside of Butler that started in 1847 but ended after a year of a “short, perilous existence.”

Slippery Rock’s Centerville Casket started publishing in 1879 but also died within a year. After the State Normal School opened in Slippery Rock, R.D. Young started The Signal in 1897 but it was “suspended for want of patronage.”

The Sand Pump in Millerstown was also launched during the county’s oil boom in August 1873 and lasted only a month. However, the Millerstown Review published from 1875 to 1879 when it ceased operations because its publisher, the Rev. A.S. Thorne, moved to Kansas.

McKee notes in his 1909 history that a new Millerstown Herald owned by William Brown was an eight-age paper that “enjoys liberal patronage from the community.”

The Saxonburg Herald was started in 1888 by Paul Voigt because of the discovery of the Saxonburg oil field and an influx of people. It was described as an eight-page weekly journal but it soon ceased publication.

McKee notes the oil boom excitement in the Petrolia and Karns City area led to the creation of eight very short-lived newspapers between 1872 and 1882.

The Petrolia Record started in 1877 and was owned by Charles Herr. In 1888, Herr moved the paper to Butler and changed its name to The Butler County Record. Its offices in the former Park Theatre building was destroyed in a fire on Nov. 23, 1903.

Charles M. and W.J. Heineman launched the Daily Times in 1884. McKee noted The Times had a circulation of 3,000 in 1908 and featured “the cream of the daily news and the details of the oil field.”

The Connoquenessing Valley News began publishing in October 1878. Its owners, Col. Samuel and J.R. Young, wrote that “nothing of sectarian or political character would occupy its columns.” McKee wrote it was “prosperous weekly paper influential throughout the Connoquenessing Valley.”

Another newspaper success, The Butler Eagle, was started as a weekly in 1870 by Thomas Robinson, with as Robinson wrote the “object of providing the county with a newspaper which would expound on the ideas of the soldier of the military element of the Republican Party and inculcate lessons of patriotism from their point of view.”

Robinson and George Shiever started the Daily Eagle, an evening paper in 1902. In 1903 they merged it with the Butler County Observer of Evans City.

On Jan. 29, 1903, a stock company with capitalization of $25,000 was organized with Eli Robinson, the son of Thomas Robinson, as president; Levi Wise as treasurer; Raymond Locke as secretary and A.L. Weine and Bertha Wise on its board of directors. The company took over the plant of the Daily and Weekly Eagle and the plant and subscription list of the Observer, which was then discontinued.

This gave the Weekly Eagle the largest subscription list of any county weekly in Western Pennsylvania.

In October 1903, Robinson sold out to Levi Wise who became principal owner of the Eagle Printing Co. In April 1904, the newspaper operation moved into its building on West Diamond Street where the papers were also printed. At the time the Daily Eagle had a circulation of 4,000.