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Heinrich Miller Prints Lancaster City's First Book and First Significant Newspaper

Names

Heinrich Miller was one of the most important Pennsylvania German printers of his time.  He is also one of the most eccentric, footloose, and well-documented German-American / Moravian printers of his era.

Heinrich has many claims to printing fame, including:

  1. Heinrich printed the first item printed in Lancaster City in book form: an  11-page German-language pamphlet titled Circular-Schreiben der Vereinigten Reformirten Prediger in Pennsylvanien... (Circular Letter of the United Reformed Preachers in Pennsylvania...)  He printed this in 1752 with his business partners Ben Franklin and Samuel Holland.
  2. Heinrich printed Lancaster's first significant newspaper, Die Lancasterische Zeitung (The Lancater Gazette.)  ...also printed in 1752 with his business partners Ben Franklin and Samuel Holland.
  3. Later, Heinrich's Philadelphia newspaper (Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote) was the first newspaper to announce the Declaration of Independence ...on July 5, 1776.  Four days later, Heinrich published a German-language edition of the Declaration of Independece in his Staatsbote newspaper.

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Heinrich's Severe Case of Wanderlust:

Journeyman

Johann Heinrich Moeller (or Heinrich Miller as he usually wrote his name) was born in 1702 in the Waldeck region of Germany.

Heinrich wandered back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean as a journeyman printer during his Wanderjahre (Journeyman Years):

  • From Rhoden, Germany to Basel, Switzerland
  • To Zurich, Switzerland
  • To Leipzig and Altona, Germany
  • To London, to Amsterdam, through France, and back to Germany and Holland
  • To London
  • To New York
  • To Philadelphia
  • To the Delaware Indians as a Moravian missionary with Count Zinzendorf
  • To Marienborn, Germany
  • To England
  • To Holland
  • To Germany
  • To New York
  • To Philadelphia
  • To Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1752.  Here he printed Lancaster City's first book and first significant newspaper, with his business partners Ben Franklin and Samuel Holland. (See information above, and on Ben Franklin's page, Here.)
  • To Philadelphia
  • To England
  • To Philadelphia

Finally, in the early 1760s, his journeyman years were over, and he became one of Philadelphia's greatest printers.

An excellent 1916 biography of Heinrich Miller is in the "German American Annals" Here.

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