ABSTRACT
David Ross Locke was born in Vestal, Broome County, New York, near Binghamton, in 1833. His father, Nathaniel Reed Locke, was a laborer, tanner and shoemaker. His mother, Hester Ross Locke, died when he was six, and he was subsequently raised by a stepmother, Phila Amelia Taft Locke. David was deeply influenced by his father's belief in the value of hard work and faith in the rightness of temperance and abolition as preached in the hell-fire and damnation theology of the Methodist Episcopal Church to which Nathaniel Locke belonged. For a brief period, between the ages of seven and twelve, David attended a one-room school in Marathon, New York. In 1845 David Locke went to work as an apprentice in the editorial offices of the Courtland Democrat, where over the next seven years he learned the nuts and bolts of the newspaper trade.
