The Freiheits-Freund ("Freedom's Friend") was founded as a weekly newspaper in 1834 by Henry Ruby, with Victor Scriba as editor, in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.
[3] Carl Friedrich Bauer, a Forty-Eighter who fled the German states after the failed revolutions of 1848, founded the Pittsburger Volksblatt ("People's Paper") in 1859 after leaving the editorial office of the Freiheits-Freund.
Some time later, the Volksblatt was acquired by the brothers Isaac E. and Louis Hirsch, under whose leadership the paper gained an increasing share of the market formerly dominated by the Freiheits-Freund.
[1] The Freiheits-Freund and Volksblatt served the German-speaking population of Pittsburgh until, in February 1901, the consolidation of the two papers and the founding of the Neeb-Hirsch Publishing Company took place.
[5] Before the U.S. entered World War II, the paper took a denunciatory stance toward the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization in the United States.