The Horace Greeley Foundation

In 1826 at age 15, Horace became an apprentice at the Northern Spectator newspaper in Poultney (now East Poultney), Vermont. “Poultney was a capital place to serve an apprenticeship,” he recalled. “Essentially a rural community, her people are at once intelligent and moral; and there are few villages wherein the incitements to dissipation and vice are fewer or less obtrusive.”

He was hard working and steady at his job. Although he did not continue formal schooling, he borrowed books from the library. “I do not think I ever before or since read to so much profit,” he wrote.

Greeley participated in the formal debates held in the village and, according to a 19th-century Poultney historian, he “astonished everyone who heard him, and seemed better informed than any of the speakers on the subject matter of the discussion.”

Horace was sometimes homesick for his family, who moved west to Erie County, Pennsylvania. He was exhausted by working the wooden printing press, which was “a task beyond my boyish strength.” Occasionally other apprentices bullied him. And his life outside of work was restricted: “I never fished, nor hunted, nor attended a dance, nor any sort of party or fandango, in Poultney. I doubt that I even played a game of ball.”

But despite hardships, he mastered the skills of printer and editor and was remembered in Poultney with respect and affection. In 1830 when the Northern Spectator closed, he walked across New York to rejoin his family.