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Frank Leslie

Frank Leslie’s Weekly, later often known as Leslie’s Weekly, actually began life as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Founded in 1855 and continued until 1922, it was an American illustrated literary and news publication, and one of several started by publisher and illustrator Frank Leslie. John Y. Foster was the first editor of the Weekly, which came out on Tuesdays. While only 30 copies of the first edition were printed, by 1897 its circulation had grown to an estimated 65,000 copies.

These weekly papers were large quarto in size, about 12″ by 16″, and each consisted of sixteen pages to the issue. They followed a tested and proven formula of carefully combining elements of war, politics, art, science, travel and exploration, literature and the fine arts in each issue, enhanced with between 16 and 32 illustrations.

Throughout its decades of existence, Frank Leslie’s Weekly provided illustrations and reports — first with woodcuts and Daguerreotypes, later with more advanced forms of photography — of wars from John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry and the Civil War until the Spanish-American War and the First World War. It also gave extensive coverage to less martial events such as the Klondike gold rush of 1897, the laying of the 1858 Atlantic Cable and the San Francisco earthquake.

News Brevities (March 1870)

• CANADA has fifty-seven snow-shoe clubs.
• PINEAPPLE fritters are a Florida delicacy.
• BRAZILIAN troops draw rations of dog meat.
• CHRISTMAS has been made a legal holiday in Ohio.
• SPIRITUALISM is called “Spiritism” in Australia.
• MACON, GA., has an ox that weighs 4,545 pounds.
• OLLIVIER favors the abolition of capital punishment.
• PHILADELPHIA has executed but twenty-five criminals since 1789.
• CINCINNATI proposes to make itself a city of forty-two square miles.
• LONDON has its first street railway. The carriages are drawn by horses.
• MAINE has spent $21,000,000 for its six hundred and seventy-two miles of railroad.
• MR. BURLINGAME, the Boston “Post” says, leaves a memory to be crowned only with myrtle.
• MILWAUKEE is to have an Irish daily and weekly paper. The company has been chartered.
• THE Chinese in San Francisco held a jubilee on January 30, the first day of the Chinese new year.
• TWO HUNDRED of the gentlemen at a late Tuileries court ball are said to have worn hired court suits.
• A GOTTINGEN professor has discovered some very minute diamonds in a specimen of Oregon platinum.
• A LADY physician of Lafayette, Ind., is honest enough to return her professional income at $2,500.
• BOSTON shipowners are signing a petition asking Congress to abolish the laws allowing extra pay to seamen.
• THE number of skilled workmen out of employment in England is said to be between seventy and eighty thousand.
• A LOYAL undertaker of Calcutta hoisted a huge “Welcome” over his shop-door in honor of Prince Alfred’s coming.
• THE English soldier in India is to be allowed to wear a beard, but it must be cut periodically —that is, trimmed to a full point.
• THE Rev. Mrs. Phœbe A. Hannaford has received and accepted a call to the pastorship of a Universalist church in New Haven.
• THE Paris papers tell how an English lady was shown out of the Prefect’s ball because she brought her pet terrier in her handkerchief.
• THE Board of Immigration of Honolulu have sent an agent to China to promote the immigration of the Chinese to the Sandwich Islands.
• THE cost of telegraphic dispatches in Australia has been reduced to one shilling for twelve words, and one penny for every additional word.
• THE Rhode Island Democratlc State Convention is to be held in Providence, on Thursday, March 17, to nominate candidates for State officers.
• EASTERN Florida congratulates itself upon its vigor, life and spirit, indicated by its rapid growth, by its large immigration , and by the rapid increase in the value of real estate.
• THERE were several severe shocks of earthquake recently on the Island of Hawaii. The summit of the volcano Mauna Loa is shrouded in smoke, indicating that the fires in the crater are again active.
• THE bill endorsing the first mortgage bonds of the Mobile and Montgomery Railroad, to the amount of $2,500,000, has passed both houses of the Alabama Legislature by the constitutional majority.
• JOHN NEAL says that out of 544 cases brought before the Superior Court of Maine, in six terms, only ninety-nine went to a jury. That is, the people preferred the decision of a judge in 405 cases.
• THE Board of Supervisors for the County of Milwaukee, Wis., have tendered the new Court-House, to cost nearly $1,000,000, to the State for a Capitol, provided the Capital is moved to Milwaukee.
• ON the 22d of February, outrages were committed on Chinamen in San Francisco, which threatened to produce a riot; but a heavy rain and a strong force of police combined, dispersed the gathering crowds.
• THE Yale Navy have voted not to accept the proposition of Harvard to open the annual races to the whole university; therefore, only the academical department can be represented in the crews next summer.
• NAVAL honors were paid by the vessels of our squadron at Hong Kong, and by the foreign vessels present at the time, to the memory of the late Mr. Stanton, Franklin Pierce, and Rear-Admiral Stewart.
• EDWARD AND DANIEL AGNEW have been arrested in Reading, Penn., for bigamy. They have families in Philadelphia, but represented themselves in Reading as single men, and were recently married in that city.
• AT a meeting of the presidents of three of the freight lines leading from Louisville, the tariff was reduced from sixty to fifty cents on all fourth-class fast freight. They also adopted a resolution to adhere to these rates.
• THE Auburn “Advertiser” learns that the Auburn Theological Seminary is soon to have a library building, suited, in all respects, to its needs. The corner-stone of the Seminary was laid just fifty years ago next May.
• REAR-ADMIRAL ROWAN, in command of the Asiatic Squadron, informs the Navy Department that all is quiet on that station, with the exception of occasional piracies and the “murder of a missionary now and then” by the Chinese .
• THE Sacramento “Union” states that a set of railway speculators are proposing to the California Legislature to pass a law to enable them to fasten a bonded debt of $1,000,000 on the County of San Bernardino, when the whole taxable property of San Bernardino is $500,000.
• THE workingwomen of Boston, by a unanimous vote, have passed the subjoined resolution: “That we will not become parties to any attempted encroachments on the legitimate sphere of man’s duties, and therefore we respectfully, but firmly, remonstrate against legislation in favor of suffrage for women.”
• COL. BERNARD, with detachments of the First and Eighth U. S. Cavalry, had a series of running fights with the Indians in the Dragoon Mountain, in Arizona, on the 28th of January. Thirteen Indians were killed, and two were taken prisoners. The Indian camp and a large amount of material were destroyed.

This editorial tackling the subsidized immigration from Ireland to the United States appeared in Frank Leslies Weekly on July 7, 1883.

Our Government has not taken action a day too soon in putting a stop to the pauper immigration from Ireland. If a rigorous examination has proved that the “assisted” immigrants of the steamer Furnessia were principally paupers, is it not reasonable to conclude that rigorous examination, had it been applied, would have proved the same fact in regard to the emigrant freight of the steamer Belgravia, and of the steamers which have been arriving at Philadelphia, and of those which bore the crowds of destitute Irish against whose shipment to Boston Governor Butler of Massachusetts protested—of every steamer, in short, which has reached America from Ireland since the day Earl Spencer helped the women and children aboard the tenders and waved them a courtly adieu from the quay of Belmullet? What guarantee have we that of the Irish who have reached our shores within the past month there are not thousands in the plight of these “eighteen forced emigrants now in New Haven in destitute circumstances, only five of whom are able to work,” which Mr. Reynolds, of the Irish deputation, described to President Arthur the other day, or of the “seventy-three” who, according to Mr. Smith, of Ohio, are “a burden upon the community of Tiffin”?

We are anxious to respect England whenever and in whatever England is respectable; but we are under no obligation to palliate or apologize for England’s offenses against humanity, or to call them anything but their proper names; and when these offenses take the form of injuries to the interests of the United States, we think it is an occasion for something else than an interchange of diplomatic platitudes.

(Frank Leslies Weekly/June 21, 1919 – by Elizabeth M. Heath) Nine million boys and girls found citizenship through the war and made their claim good by national service. Early in the game they demanded an active part in the business that was absorbing their elders. As the war comes to an end, their organization covers every State. Their service flag, the Junior Red Cross banner, hangs in 60,000 schoolhouses —in the one-room rural school in the lonely Ozarks as in the swarming high schools of New York City. Sixty thousand Junior auxiliaries, organized in 4,000 chapters of the Red Cross, stand ready to deliver the goods on a national order, whether it be to turn out thousands of garments and pieces of furniture from their school workshops, to collect tons of secondhand clothing, to earn a million or two dollars by the ingenious methods known only to childhood, to clean up a town and make substantial profit on the accumulated waste, or to run a country-wide competition in deep breathing and scrubbing behind their ears.

Junior Red Cross Poster

Since time was, children have wanted a share in the events that absorbed their elders’ interest. In the year 1212 of the topsy-turvy Middle Ages, when the Great Adventure centered around the rescue of Jerusalem, 50,000 children started on a crusade of their own. That gallant wave of singing, white-clad youth was pitifully broken against human treachery and natural obstacles, but the spirit that prompted it is the heritage of all children. In the chaotic months that succeeded April. 1917, boys and girls felt that once more great doings were afoot in which they had no place. Father, mother, big brother and sister, even cook— everybody was busy winning the war. Well, they would win the war too. “What can we do?” they asked insistently. No one answered. Quite plainly it was the children’s business to go to school, to study history and geography and other useful things that would make them good citizens when they grew up. Then came the Junior Red Cross to prove that national service was also education, and that the children’s enthusiasm for it would put new vigor into every study in the regular curriculum. Convinced that it meant neither overwork nor neglect of studies, and that it would supply an outlet for the children’s enthusiasm, parents and school authorities gave the scheme their support, and the simple machinery of the Junior Red Cross was soon in running order.

Retold by Alice Hamilton Rich

(Frank Leslie’s Weekly, May 15, 1902) ONCE THERE was a King who had no sons and but one daughter. It was a great disappointment not to have a son, but those who cast the horoscope of the daughter told him that his daughter would be a great blessing to the kingdom while she lived, and at her death would bequeath untold riches. As this story was widely known, the princess had many admirers who sought betrothal with her. And the King was greatly distressed as to choice of the right one. When she was grown she was very beautiful—so beautiful that myriads of pilgrims came to the temple to beg for the gift of beauty, and to burn incense. This brought prosperity, and thus the prophecy at her birth was fulfilled. But the King could no longer delay the betrothal of his daughter, as so many princes desired her that the kingdom was continually in trouble with other kingdoms. One day the princess’s father was out hunting, when a powerful King surprised him and carried him captive to a far-away kingdom. The prime minister and privy councilors met and issued an edict saying the hand of the princess would be given to the man who rescued the King.

(Frank Leslies Weekly, March 27, 1902) Perhaps you don’t know that the egg, which is such an important part of the interest in Easter Day, the egg which is stained blue or scarlet or yellow or which is decorated with the face of a Chinaman or something of that sort, has gone through a long and tedious course of inspection before it reaches you. So that the dealer who sells the egg, if he is informed in his calling, can tell whether it is old, whether its shell is slightly cracked, whether it has been touched with the frost, or whether there is water inside. For the egg business, having become one of the most important industries of the country, has been the subject of great thought and study by men who have made huge fortunes from the product of the hen.

I visited, the other day, one of the largest egg houses in New York when the rush of their Easter business was on. The Easter time is the very busiest time in all the year for the produce men. In the spring, of course, the traffic in eggs is the heaviest, because it is then that the hens, delighting in the warmth of the first, spring sunshine, lay the largest quantity. And the biggest, day among the egg merchants of New York is always the Friday before Easter, when the grocers are buying their eggs for Easter Sunday. In the commission house where I called there was great hurry among the men, who were unloading cases of eggs from some of the wagons and loading other cases on to other wagons. Many of the eggs had come in by express and were delivered by the express companies. After they had been received at the office the new arrivals were sent at once to the inspection department.