Alexander Kelly McClure was born at Centre Church, Sherman's Valley, Perry County, Pa., on the 9th of January, 1828. His parents came from sturdy Scotch-Irish stock on both sides, reared to the calling of the farmer in the mountain regions of Perry. He was flogged through the very common and semi-occasional schools of that time in the usual way. Free schools were then unknown, and a three months' course of subscription schooling in the winter was then regarded as a very liberal contribution toward the education of the youths of the community. Teaching in the schools was confined entirely to the simple rudiments of education, and grammar was regarded as necessary only for those who were to be prepared for the professions. His education was confined to these primitive schools, with three months added during his apprenticeship. When fifteen years of age he was apprenticed to his uncle, William M. McClure, of New Bloomfield, Pa., to learn the trade of tanner and currier. When his apprenticeship had been half fulfilled his uncle removed to the West, and he finished his apprenticeship with James Marshall in the same place. In the spring of 1846, when but little over eighteen years of age, he finished his apprenticeship and made his first visit to Philadelphia, bearing with him a single letter of introduction from his old master to the late Joseph B. Myers, then engaged in the hide and leather house of Joseph Howell & Co. There was universal depression in business during that year, and Mr. McClure's efforts to obtain employment at his trade were unsuccessful. He went to New York, worked his way up the North River on a barge, and traveled through the then great tanning region of the Catskill Mountains on foot for a week in search of employment without success. He returned to Catskill, worked his way to Buffalo on a line boat, and thence around the Lakes to Chicago and lowa, that was then a territory. After spending the summer working on the prairie farms he returned home in the fall of the same year. The pursuit he had chosen seemed so discouraging that he gave up the idea of following it, and a sudden and unexpected change in the purposes of his life was effected by an application that had been made by some prominent Whigs of Juniata County to Judge Baker, editor of the Perry Freeman of New Bloomfield, for some one to establish a Whig paper in that county. Judge Baker had but lately founded his paper, and he encouraged Mr. McClure, during his apprenticeship, to write brief articles occasionally, and gave him a pretty free run of the exchange papers; and at his request Mr. McClure was finally induced to make the venture, although he had no knowledge of the printing business and was entirely without experience as a writer or the education necessary to qualify him as such. He thus established the Juniata Sentinel of Mifflintown, and issued the first paper on the 9th of December, 1846, when he was not yet nineteen years of age. He speedily mastered the mechanical duties of his office, and before the close of the year was his own chief compositor and pressman as well as editor. His paper was thus made quite successful among the small county journals of the State, and he gradually became somewhat of a political power in his immediate section. In 1848, when not yet of age, he was a delegate in the Whig Congressional Conference of that district, and earnestly but unsuccessfully urged the nomination of Andrew G. Curtin. That was the beginning of a friendship that has steadily grown and ripened for nearly half a century. In 1850 he was appointed Deputy Marshal for Juniata County, and took the census of that year. In 1852 he sought a wider field by purchasing one-half interest in the Chambersburg Repository, then one of the oldest and most respected journals of the State, and he moved to that place in March of that |