[1] From the age of 16, he was employed as a printer, with a short break during the War of 1812,[2] when he was stationed at Sackett's Harbor on Lake Ontario.
[8] Fairchild would typically set up a print shop in a community, run the paper for a year or so, sell the newspaper, and then move on to repeat the process somewhere else.
His oldest son, Corydon Fairchild, ran The Ovid Bee for over thirty years after his father left.
[10] He and his son returned briefly to New York in 1851 to collect his family and brought them to the West Coast.
[2] David Fairchild was elected a member of the California State Assembly for the 18th District, for the Eleventh Session[11] in 1860–61.