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January 16, 1940 - Freeport Journal
Dr. H.H. Newhall Issues First Publication In Northern Illinois
BY JEANNE LEBRON
In preceding installments you read of life at the mines as Dr. H.H. Newhall described it in his letters to his brother, of the smelter he had started and the store he was operating.
But Dr. Newhall was not primarily a business man, and although he had been at first attracted by the prospect of money to be made in smelting and mining, he found the difficulties greater than he had foreseen. The fifty per cent advance in the prices at his store appeared at first to be the inexperienced man to be clear profit. Dr. Newhall had over-looked the fact that he would have to grub-stake miners and await their success for his pay. Many did pay, after they had struck a good lead, but there were many more who did not strike the rich mines they anticipated, and could never pay. Others died from the fevers and pestilances which raged through the community, and others simply skipped the country.
Then too, there was the difficulty of running a business with men who were continually sick orhalf-sick from the diseases resulting from the unsanitary and crowded living conditions at the mines. Dr. Newhall saw that his services as a physician and surgeon would be more valuable to himself and to the community, and after a year of smelting, he retired to his practice of medicine.
His interest in the first newspaper in northern Illinois probably began with a discussion over the name, which, you will rememer, the proprietor altered at his suggestion from the Northern Herald to the Miners' Journal. When the first number was issued on July 8, 1828, Dr. Newhall was the editor,
and James Jones, the printer who had conceived the idea of starting a paper, as the publisher. The Miners' Journal was a small five-columned paper, neutral in politics, furnished to subscribers for $3.50 a year, payable in smelters' notes for mineral accepted, in cash, or in lead.
The paper was issued with fair regularity. Sometimes a shortage of paper postponed an issue of the newspaper until a boat arrived from the south with a new supply.
A year later Dr. Newhall severed his connection with Jones, who continued to publish the Miners' Journal by himself until his death of the cholera in 1833. Dr. Newhall, meanwhile, on July 20, 1829, joined
with Dr. Addison Philleo, another physician and Hooper Warren, a printer, in the firm of Newhall, Philleo and company, to apublish the Galena Advertiser. The paper existed about a year. Dr. Newhall and Warren, Whigs, and Dr. Philleo, a Democrat, were unable to harmonize their political views. Dr. Newhall and Warren dropped out of the combination, leaving Dr. Philleo to publish a re-christened paper. The Galenian, a strictly Democratic newspaper, later to be called the Galena Democrat.
This was the end of Dr. Newhall's newspaper career. His own bound volume, containing issues of these papers, is preserved today in the library of the Chicago Historical society, to which it was given by one of his descendants.
On June 29, 1829 Dr. Newhall was appointed the second treasurer of JoDaviess county, to succeed
William Rissely, who had resigned. As one of the first officers, he exerted considerable influence on the newly organized government.
He was married on Jan. 2, 1830 to Elizabeth Penelope Pope Bates by the Rev. Aratus Kent, Presbyterian missionary, who founded Rockford college, and many Presbyterian churches throughoutthe west. Miss Bates brought to Dr. Newhall another firm tie with the fortunes and history of the mining community.
Her brother, Captain David G. Bates, was Galena's first steamboat captain and one of the earliest traders of the settle at Galena. He had come in 1819.
A second brother, Nehemiah Bates, had also came to Galena about 1820 and had set up a smelter here
with A.P. VanMatre. Miss Bates herself was one of the pioneer women of the community, arriving at about the same time as Dr. Newhall.
The Black Hawk war in 1832 called Dr. Newhall into army service. As surgeon for the 27th regiment, Illinois militia, he had charge of the army hospital at Galena during the war.
The close of the war gave Dr. Newhall no rest, for upon its heels came a severe epidemic of cholera, striking nearly every family in the mining region. Some settlements were wiped outentirely, and others left with only one or two emaciated survivors as the epidemic swept up the roads and rivers of the country. Dr. Hewhall worked night and day with th eother physicians and surgeons of the settlement, and in these rude log cabins he developed a treatment for the Asiatic cholera so effective that his name became famour from St. Paul to the mouth of the Mississippi.
The epidemic finally over, Dr. Newhall settled back to the routine life of a country doctor, retiring from the official participation in public life. But as the family doctor of many citizens, and as one of the best educated men of the community, he retained an active influence. There were many decisions and many plans which undoubtedly originated in his office, and were carried outside to be presented before the public as another man's idea. Keeping in the background, Dr. Newhall continued as the advisor of the community he had helped to found and to nourish.
When he died on Sept. 19, 1870 after a brief illness, he was the oldest practicing physician in northern Illinois, mourned by the whole countryside as a friend and advisor.
He left eight children and a widow, his second wife, the former Jane Bouton, who he had married Nov. 11, 1856,
after the death of his first wife in 1845. The Members of his family are now scattered throughout the county; only one, a grandaughter,
Miss Virginia Barrett, remains in Galena.
Contributed by Christine Walters transcribed from the Freeport Journal 16 January 1940
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