Author: Moorhead, James
Biography:
MOORHEAD, James (1780-1857: ancestry.com)
The surname is spelled variously Moorhead or Morehead, with the former on his title-pages and gravestone. Some autobiographical remarks in Flowers of Song indicate that he was self-educated. All records place him in Pennsylvania, where he had a successful career as a publisher and newspaperman, founder of a family business. He was born in Franklin County PA, the son of Alexander and Prudence (Morrow) Morehead. He married Nancy Thompson about 1805 and they had at least three children. He was clearly a pious man with literary tastes. In Pittsburgh in 1812 he published an anthology entitled Blossoms of Poetry featuring British writers of the first half of the eighteenth century; his final endeavour of that kind was Extracts from Isaac Watts (1843). By the early 1820s he was settled in Indiana County PA, already a seasoned newspaperman. In 1826 one of his sons took over a paper called The American (where his Flowers of Song had been printed) and gave him the task of running it. He retired in 1828 but then came out of retirement in 1840 to begin an important new phase of his life as the owner and editor of two anti-slavery papers, The Clarion of Freedom and The Indiana Independent. He was also a travelling lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society and a Conductor on the Underground Railroad. He died at the family homestead on 9 Jan. 1857 and was buried in Oakland cemetery. (J. T. Stewart, The History of Indiana County, Pennsylvania [1913] 1:428-9; ancestry.com 14 Apr. 2020, 22 Sept. 2025) HJ