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CHAPTER SEVEN
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Matthias Bartgis, Pioneer Printer at Frederick, Publisher of
German and English Newspapers and Almanacs. John
Winter and the Maryland Gazette
RIOR to 1777 there was no printing press in Maryland
beyond the tidewater line. The history of the filling
up of the back-country of Maryland with the Scotch-
Irish and German immigrants who came down from
Pennsylvania by way of Lancaster, Hanover and York,
is one of the most interesting chapters in the develop-
ment of the State. The establishment of the Bartgis
Press at Frederick-Town in 1777 gives evidence of the state of literary
culture there and in the surrounding district at that time. A careful
study of the content and source of the material printed in Bartgis's
newspaper would probably show that at this early date the connection
between Western Maryland, Western Pennsylvania and the Shenan-
doah Valley of Virginia was much closer than that between Western
Maryland and the tidewater region. The exception to this would be the
contact of the merchants of Baltimore with the wheat-raising country
to the West. Clarence P. Gould in his essay on The Rise of Baltimore,
makes an interesting study of the contact of the tidewater with the
back-country by examining the advertising notices in the Maryland
Gazette and 'The Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser in 1773
and comes to the conclusion that the circulation of the Baltimore paper
was chiefly in the western country while the Annapolis newspaper
circulated only along the tidewater.
Matthias Bartgis was born in 1750, the son of Michael Bartgis of
Lancaster and his wife, Catherine Echternach, and was named after
his grandfather, Matthias Echternach.2 He learned the art of printing
from William Bradford, the Philadelphia printer, whom he served as
1 In Essays in colonial history presented to Charles McLean Andrews by his students, New Haven, 1931.
2 I am greatly indebted to Mr. W. Bartgis Storm of Frederick, great, great grandson of Matthias Bartgis, for bio-
graphical information about him.
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