Pittsburgh had a population of less than 1,600 when the community got its second newspaper.

In August 1800, John Israel's "Tree of Liberty" began publication. It was a pro-Jefferson newspaper supported by Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and it served as a Democratic-Republican counterweight to John Scull's "The Pittsburgh Gazette," which backed the Federalists.

As Pittsburgh prepares for its 250th birthday next November, the Post-Gazette will publish stories every other Sunday drawn from contemporary accounts in the region's newspapers and periodicals. The stories will offer snapshots at critical -- and sometimes comical -- junctures over the past two-and-a-half centuries.

Additional coverage of Pittsburgh birthday.

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Like Scull, Israel was a busy printer, publishing, among other works, annual editions of "The Pittsburgh Almanack" for bookseller Zadok Cramer.

Cramer's version was in the style of Benjamin Franklin's very popular "Poor Richard's Almanack," produced between 1732 and 1758 in Philadelphia and widely copied. In addition to providing weather forecasts, planting tips and information on lunar and solar cycles, the 1804 edition of the Almanack contained poetry, health advice, travel information and a plea to women to save old clothes for paper-making:

"To enable us to publish an Almanack yearly, our good housewives, and their pretty little daughters, will not forget to save all the RAGS they can possibly spare -- remembering the old maxim -- 'Gather up the fragments that nothing be lost.' Save them from the ash heap, the wood pile, or the nursery -- wash them clean and pack them in an old barrel or a rag-bag made for the purpose -- lose nothing that is made of hemp, flax or cotton ..."

Copies of several Pittsburgh almanacs from the early years of the 19th century, including the 1804 edition, are in the archives of the Heinz History Center.

Pittsburgh produced goods worth "near 350,000 dollars" the previous year, the Almanack reported. That number could be expected to rise dramatically in the coming decades, in part because of President Thomas Jefferson's purchase in 1803 from France of New Orleans and the Louisiana territory. Goods and passengers starting from Pittsburgh, located at the head of the Ohio, could travel all the way to the Gulf of Mexico without leaving U.S. territory.

"We think the object obtained is great and important. In a commercial point of view it has given to us a second Alexandria; in an agricultural, a vast tract of country, where rich and fertile soil abounds with all the luxuries and elegancies of life ..."

Those luxuries could be dangerous, the Almanack warned, quoting an anonymous verse:

"Is health your care, or luxury your aim?

"Be temperate still, and when nature bids, obey ..."

Readers were warned of the dangers of whiskey, spices and sauces. "Fermented liquors, which are too strong, hurt digestion; and the body is so far from being strengthened by them, that is wrecked and relaxed ...

"All high seasonings, pickles, etc. are only incentives to luxury and never fail to hurt the stomach. It were well for mankind if cookery, as an art, were entirely prohibited."

Garlic, however, had virtues for the stout of frame. "Fat people should not eat freely of [an] oily ... diet; they ought freely to use horse-radish, garlic and such things as promote perspiration and urine. Their drink should be water, coffee, tea, or the like, and they ought to take much exercise and little sleep."

Despite growth in the number of "manufactories," southwestern Pennsylvania's economy was based on agriculture and the Almanack included advice from "Alexander Burns of Buffaloe, in Washington County" on avoiding fly infestation in wheat. His fields have "been entirely free from the destructive insect for these four years past, while his neighbors joining lines with him have generally had but thin and small crops." What was his secret? "Never to sow new wheat, but to sow that which has remained a year at least in the granary."

Miscellaneous information included a statistic for the average daily wage of a laborer in 1802: 75 cents. Based on estimated changes in the consumer price index over more than two centuries, that number is equivalent to about $15 in modern currency.

A final Almanack chart provided distances for travel from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia (308 miles, via a route through Greensburg and Lancaster), and Pittsburgh to the Federal City, as Washington, D.C. was called (233 miles, via Bedford and Hagerstown).