Wilmer Atkinson: an autobiography, founder of the Farm journal
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
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Willmer Atkinson was an American journalist. He founded the Farm Journal in 1877.
Background
William Atkinson was born on June 13, 1840 on a farm in Warwick township, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He was the third child of Thomas and Hannah (Quinby) Atkinson. His parents were Quakers, opposed to slavery and to drinking, and sympathetic with the women's rights movement.
Education
Atkinson attended a rural school and Foulke's Quaker Boarding School, Gwynedd, Pennsylvania, and then spent a year in Freeland Seminary, Collegeville, Pennsylvania.
Career
After leaving Freeland Seminary, Atkinson taught in a country school near his home and also helped his father on the farm.
In 1862 he and Howard M. Jenkins, who later married Atkinson's sister, purchased the Norristown Republican, a weekly newspaper. They were barely started in the publishing business when Pennsylvania was threatened with invasion by Lee's Confederate army. The two youths enlisted to resist the expected attack. When the danger was past, they were discharged and returned to their paper.
Atkinson's work was interrupted twice more by army service, and before his final discharge he became a second-lieutenant.
In 1864 he sold his interest in the Republican.
Two years later he and Jenkins went to Wilmington and founded the Wilmington Daily Commercial, the first daily newspaper in the state.
While living in Wilmington, he served on the Board of Education.
In 1876 he sold his interests and moved to Philadelphia. Here he began the enterprise that was to absorb the rest of his life - the publication of a monthly agricultural paper, the Farm Journal. The first number appeared in March 1877. He filled the publication with crisp, compact articles, and concise, often epigrammatic paragraphs. "Ginger" and "gumption" were favorite words of his, and he put into his work the qualities for which they stand.
In 1880 it inaugurated the first guaranty ever instituted by any publication against fraudulent practises by its advertisers.
In 1910 Atkinson started a farm almanac under the title of Poor Richard's Almanac Revived. He edited it personally for five years, then turned over the direction of it to a member of his staff.
In 1917 he retired from the editorship of the Farm Journal after forty years' service. He devoted the last part of his life to writing his autobiography, which was almost completed when he died.