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Luther Tucker was born in Brandon, Vt., May 7, 1802. At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to Timothy C. Strong, a printer of Middlebury. Mr. Strong removed to Palmyra, N. Y.. in 1817 and took the young man with him, but they did not remain long together, the separation coming two years later, before Mr. Tucker had quite finished his apprenticeship. Mr. Tucker then started out for himself and in the prosecution of his work, visited, during five succeeding years, various points in the North and East, and the cities of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington and New York. In the spring of 1825 he entered into partnership at Jamaica, Long Island, with Henry C. Sleight, whose business was chiefly the publication of standard works for New York houses. Some of the volumes then published are now in the possession of his sons, bearing the imprint of Sleight & Tucker. In 1821 Mr. Tucker had passed through Rochester, N. Y., and although the place was then very small, he was much impressed with the location. He witnessed there the first crossing on the aqueduct, over the Genesee, of the Erie Canal. When looking for a wider field than that at Jamaica, he went to Rochester and at the early age of twenty-four he began the publication of the Rochester Advertiser, the first daily newspaper established on this Continent west of the city of Albany. Its first number appeared October 27, 1820, and it at once attracted attention. January 1, 1831, he established the Genesee Farmer, while still continuing the Daily Advertiser. The circulation of the Genesee Farmer rapidly increased, notwithstanding the establishment of the Cultivator at Albany, by Judge Buel, under the auspices of the State Agricultural Society in 1834. Mr. Tucker's paper had the larger circulation of the two. In 1839, after purchasing a farm near Rochester, he sold the daily paper, which still exists as one of the leading journals of Western New York, under the name of the Rochester Union and Advertiser. Mr. Tucker then intended that farming and the publication of the Farmer should occupy all his tmie, but before a single season, Judge Buel's death at Albany left the Cultivator without a head and Mr. Tucker was induced to combine the two papers. The number of the paper for January, 1840, was published from Albany and bore the title of "The Cultivator; a consolidation of Buel's Cultivator and the Genesee Farmer." The publication is still continued by one of his sons and a grand-son, under the old firm name, Luther Tucker & Son, the paper (now called "The Cultivator and Country Gentleman"), being very much the oldest agricultural periodical of any class in this country. Mr. Tucker died of pneumonia. Sunday. January 26, 1873.
