George Kline

Background

George Kline was born about 1757 in Germany.

Career

At an early age Kline emigrated to America and worked at his trade of printer in Philadelphia, where in 1781 he published the Allied Mercury. Evidence of the thoroughness of his separation from the old country appears in his voluntary rearrangement of the letters of his name from Klein to Kline, in order to avoid the implication of alien birth

In 1785 Kline removed to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, then scarcely more than a frontier settlement but already a place of considerable culture and the seat of Dickinson College. In the same year that he arrived he started a Federalist weekly, The Carlisle Gazette, and the Western Repository of Knowledge. It was a small four-page sheet on very blue paper, well printed and executed, and sold for six cents a copy or fifteen shillings for one year's subscription. With several changes of title, it was issued without interruption until 1817, when it was absorbed by the Carlisle Spirit of the Times.

Kline had an individual style and was a capable editor. In his paper events and movements characterizing the first decades of the history of the United States under the Constitution were viewed from the frontier rather than from the center of political and social activities. The Gazette's columns carried real news from the little but ambitious and growing towns of Cincinnati, Detroit, and St. Louis. Accounts of Indian attacks on the Ohio kept its readers conscious of the perils of the not-distant wilderness and forest. The embarrassment caused by delinquent subscribers was tacitly acknowledged in the editor's announcement of his willingness to receive "flour, wheat, corn, wood, pork, or spirits" in lieu of cash. Thoroughly public spirited, George Kline was sympathetic with every project which promised to promote civic improvement, particularly the quality of public reading. His press issued, in 1797, Rules of the Carlisle Library Company; with a Catalogue of Books Belonging thereto, and he reprinted among other works Isaac Watts's Scripture History (1797), John Brown's Westminster Assembly of Divines (1797), Charlotte Smith's Montalbert, a Novel (c. 1800), vol. I, Twenty Sermons (1803) of Jonathan Edwards, and James Hervey's Meditations and Contemplations (2 vols. , 1806).

Achievements

• Kline became a well-known frontier newspaper editor. He was recognized for the founding of "The Carlisle gazette, and the western repository of knowledge". It was the first newspaper in Pennsylvania west of the Susquehanna River.

Connections

Kline was married to Rebecca, daughter of Judge Lewis Weiss, who became the mother of his eleven children. His wife survived him nearly fourteen years, dying July 13, 1834, at the home of a son in Harrisburg.

Spouse:

Rebecca Weiss

References

• History of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania with Illustrations 1731