dated September 20, 1815, in which an announcement was made that owing to the -death of both proprietors, Hall and Pierie, The Pennsylvania Gazette would discontinue on October 11, 1815. The notice asserted that if enough subscribers could be obtained by a certain date the paper would be revived. New papers which had appeared in Philadelphia seemed to have the popular favor, for the required number of subscribers was not secured and The Pennsylvania Gazette, which had held a foremost place in two different eras of American journalism, was no more. The plant of the paper was sold and the equipment became scattered among the various printing-offices of the city.
FIRST PAPER IN NEW YORK
Because William Bradford was the founder of the first paper in New York, and because he trained in his shop many of the printer-editors of colonial New York, he should receive special attention. After learning his trade in the office of his father-inlaw, Andrew Sowle, he accompanied William Penn to America in 1682. Upon his return to England in 1685 he procured a press and type and again set sail for Philadelphia where he opened a bookshop and did a general printing business a work which needs only passing mention, as he did not at that time think of starting a newspaper.
Invited to come to New York by Governor Benjamin Fletcher, Bradford was appointed "Royal Printer" in 1693. In 1696 Bradford evidently reprinted an English newspaper,—probably The London Gazette,—for a letter dated May 30, 1696, from Governor Fletcher to the Lords of Trade says: "A Ship belonging to this Place from Madera happily mett at Sea that Vessell which had your Lord's Packet for Virginia & brought me a Gazett which gave me an Account of that horrid Conspiracy against His Majesty's Sacred Person. I caused it to be reprinted here." Possibly Bradford was mindful of the fate of the venture attempted by Benjamin Harris in Boston and did not care to start a paper when the censorship was so severe.
Thomas, in his "History of Printing," reproduced a heading of a second number of The New-York Gazette in which it showed the date of from Monday, October 16, to October 23, 1725:
