Abell was born in
East Providence, Rhode Island, on August 10, 1806, to
quartermaster Caleb Abell and Elona Shepherdson, who came from generations of English ancestry; his father's family were originally from
Stapenhill,
Derbyshire (now part of
Staffordshire). After leaving school at the age of 14, he worked as a clerk in a retail business specializing in
West Indian wares, before he became an apprentice at the
Providence Patriot newspaper in 1822. He served as a journeyman printer in
Boston and New York City. In New York, he met two other young newspapermen,
Azariah H. Simmons and
William Moseley Swain, and they became friends. Together, they decided to go into business and found a "
penny paper". For example, Abell's newspaper in Baltimore was strongly associated with the
Democratic Party; Abell was offered a political appointment as a result of his work on it. While it was an independent newspaper,
The Sun editorially leaned toward the ideals of Jacksonian democracy as championed by sixth President
Andrew Jackson. Soon each issue used the phrase "Light for All" as its motto, with a distinctive "vignette" (illustrated logo) on its masthead, which is still in use. Despite its origins as a penny paper, by the late 19th century the
Sun had won a position as the newspaper of choice of Baltimore's upper class. By 1864, Abell was sole proprietor of
The Sun and had sold his share in the
Public Ledger to partner Swain. Abell was a pioneer in making use of technology and a variety of transportation systems to transmit and deliver news. To get news from his reporters as quickly as possible, he used
pony express, stagecoaches, trains, ships, and even
carrier pigeons. He established a new pony express route from
New Orleans, in conjunction with the publishers of the
New Orleans Daily Picayune, during the
Mexican–American War. With this system, he learned of the U.S. victory at
Veracruz,
Mexico before officials in the nation's capital,
Washington, D.C.; he sent word to the president. He was the first newspaperman to use
telegraphy when he transmitted President
John Tyler's message of May 11, 1846, and he was the first to buy a Hoe
cylinder press. The carrier pigeons were part of a network that Abell established with another newspaper publisher in New York; they carried messages between that city, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., and from incoming ships. They were superseded by the spread of telegraphy. Abell's newsroom received foreign news by a convoluted route. News from Europe was delivered to
Halifax,
Nova Scotia by ship; from there it was transported overland by pony express to
Annapolis Royal, N.S., by steamship to
Portland, Maine, and then by rail to Baltimore. Through a journey of nearly one thousand miles, the news was delivered in little more than two days from Halifax to Baltimore. In later years, Abell supported telegraph pioneer
Samuel F.B. Morse and helped finance the construction of telegraph lines into Baltimore. By the start of the
American Civil War, Abell had increased circulation of
The Sun to 30,000 subscribers. He remained owner of
The Sun until his death in Baltimore on April 19, 1888. Abell is entombed in Baltimore's
Green Mount Cemetery off Greenmount Avenue (
Maryland Route 45) and East North Avenue. His three sons and their grandsons retained control of the newspaper until 1910. As a result of a financial restructuring of the former Abell–Swain–Simmons partnership into a reorganized A.S. Abell Company, the newspaper was sold from family control. Also sold was the participating Safe Deposit bank and trust company which they had owned for those three decades. File:Arunah Shepherdson Abell Gravestone Detail.jpg|Abell's gravestone File:Arunah Shepherdson Abell Gravesite.jpg|Abell's gravesite in Green Mount Cemetery ==Legacy and honors==