Alfred Peter Swineford. (Photo courtesy of the Marquette Regional History Center)

MARQUETTE — Alfred Peter Swineford, a native of Ashland, Ohio, was apprenticed to a printer at the age of 15. At the end of his apprenticeship in 1853, he began Albert Lea, Minnesota’s first newspaper, the Southern Star.

In the 1860s the Copperheads (also known as the Peace Democrats) were a faction of the Democratic Party in the Union who opposed the American Civil War and wanted an immediate peace settlement with the Confederates. Prior to and during the Civil War Swineford worked as a Copperhead journalist across the Midwest in Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Following the end of the war, in 1867 Swineford briefly settled in Negaunee where he published the Lake Superior Mining and Manufacturing News. A year later, in June 1868,

Marquette’s great fire destroyed the presses of the Lake Superior Mining Journal. Swineford purchased the subscription list for the paper and relocated to Marquette where he revived the paper as The Mining Journal.

Swineford, 34 years old at the time, ran the Mining Journal as a successful and respected weekly until June 1884 when it began publishing daily. It was described as “a seven-column folio, independent in politics, concise and elegant in style, and comprehensive in design.”

After the Civil War, when the Copperheads no longer had any reason for being, Swineford switched his skills as a writer and orator to the Democratic Party.

His political activity resulted in his being elected as a member of the Michigan legislature in 1871. During his term, he used his influence to gain approval for Marquette’s city charter. He later served as mayor of the city in 1874 and 1875.

Continuing to combine his journalistic and political careers, in 1883, Swineford was selected as State Commissioner of Mineral Statistics for Michigan. He also made an unsuccessful run for lieutenant governor of Michigan that year. The following year in 1884, Swineford was named the United States Commissioner for the State of Michigan to the World’s Industrial and Cotton Exposition in New Orleans.

His strong support of Grover Cleveland’s presidential campaign led to his appointment as governor of what was then the District of Alaska in 1885. Swineford was the second person to be named governor, but he was the first to travel to Alaska to carry out his duties. He served until 1889 when he resigned because Cleveland was leaving office.

Swineford had married his first wife, Psyche Cytheria Flower, in Wisconsin in 1857. They had one daughter, Nelly, before Psyche’s death in 1881. In 1886, he married a second time, Minnie Marks Smith, who at one time had worked for the Mining Journal. Although they never actually resided in Marquette again following their departure for Alaska in 1885, he and his second wife frequently visited Nelly, who had married E.O. Stafford of Stafford’s Drug Store in Marquette and her daughter, Ruth, who was Swineford’s only grandchild.

For several years following his resignation as Alaska’s governor, Swineford was on the move a lot, perhaps biding his time until he was given another political appointment. When Cleveland was elected again in 1892, Swineford hoped that he would be sent back to Alaska as governor again.

Instead, he was made a special agent of the U.S. Land Department and charged the responsibility of opening Oklahoma’s Cherokee Strip for settlement in 1893.

Four years later, the Swinefords returned to Alaska as private citizens to assist in the development of some mining properties and to reenter the newspaper field with the publication of the Ketchikan Mining Journal. Until his death in 1909 at the age of 75, Swineford made Ketchikan his home and applied his energies to the task of persuading the U.S. government to give Alaska territorial status.

One of the many obituaries published at the time of his death pays tribute to Alfred Peter Swineford in these words: “His life was full of usefulness, of achievement, and of the respect of his fellow men won by his sturdy manhood, his high courage, his kindness of heart, and his largeness of soul.”