History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century/4/John King
JOHN KING, founder and editor of the first newspaper published within the limits of Iowa, was born at Shepardstown, Virginia, January 10, 1803. He was educated in the public schools of his native State and at Chillicothe, Ohio, to which place he removed in 1829. In 1833 he went to the frontier town of Dubuque, then in Michigan Territory, to engage in lead mining. Stephen T. Mason, then acting Governor of Michigan Territory, appointed Mr. King Chief Justice of the Court of Dubuque County during the first year of his residence there. In the fall of 1835 Judge King decided to establish a newspaper in the new town and made a trip to Cincinnati by river where he purchased a Washington hand press and a small printing outfit, returning as soon as navigation was resumed in the spring of 1836. He issued the first number of the Dubuque Visitor on the 11th of May of that year. It was the first and only newspaper in the vast region north of St. Louis and west of the Mississippi River. Judge King was an able writer and judge, an enterprising pioneer and a citizen of the highest character. His foreman was Andrew Keesecker, an accomplished printer, who set the first type in Iowa. He was also a native of Shepardstown, born there in 1810 and who came to Galena, Illinois, when a young man and worked on the first paper established there. He died in Dubuque April 15, 1870. Judge King died in that city February 13, 1871.