192

during Ms stay in Reading that he married Catherine
Alles (1777-1859), daughter of Captain Henry Alles of

Revolutionary fame.⁶

On November 11, 1794, Charles Cist, with whom
Gruber had served his apprenticeship, wrote to Gruber,
urging him to accept a proposal for the establishment
of a newspaper in Savannah, Georgia. At the aame time,
General Daniel Heister, a Representative in Congress
from Washington County, Maryland, proposed that he
establish a German paper in Hagerstown. He accepted
the latter proposition, retired from the Reading news-
paper at the end of the year, and moved to Hagerstown.⁷
There he set up his press, made and purchased in Phila-
delphia,⁸ and in June of 1795 (judging from the date
of the first issue located) started the publication of
Die Westliche Correspondenz.

It is probable that Gruber was from the first
equipped to print in both English and German, for the
Imprint of his first extant paper calls his establish-
ment the "deutsch- und englischen buchdruckery,"⁹ but
no English issue of his press prior to 1801, when he
published A Catalogue of Jacob D. Dietrick's Circu-

6 Eshleman. op. cit.

7 Hagers-Town town and country almanack. 1859.
P. [9]

8 Ibid. 1859. p. [8].

9 Westliche corresponded. September 28, 1796.