Elijah Parish Lovejoy, born in Albion, Maine, on November 9, 1802, was a newspaper editor, social reformer, and Presbyterian minister whose death at the hands of an angry mob at Alton, Illinois, made him an enduring symbol of the fight for human liberty and freedom of the press. He graduated from Waterville, now Colby, College in 1826, moved the following year to St. Louis, taught school, and began his career as a journalist in 1832. Deciding to become a minister, he returned East to study at Princeton Theological Seminary, then in November 1833 began editing the religious newspaper the St. Louis Observer. His antislavery views so enraged proslavery Missourians that he fled with his newspaper to Illinois. Three presses were thrown into the Mississippi River, yet he persisted in publishing the Alton Observer. He was shot dead while defending the warehouse where a fourth press had been stored. Buried on his thirty-fifth birthday in an unmarked grave at Alton Cemetery, his body was later exhumed and reinterred at its present location on a hillside north of the Lovejoy Monument. Two others were wounded. His allies were William Harned, Edward Breath, George H. Whitney, Enoch Long, H. D. Davis, Thaddeus B. Hurlbut, Amos B. Roll, James Morse Jr., George H. Walworth, Reuben Gerry, George T. Brown, D.F. Randall, W.G. Atwood, Royal Weller, John S. Noble, D. Burt Loomis, and Henry Tanner. Traditions add Owen Lovejoy, Elijah's brother, Rueben D. Earley, L. Norman Brown, John P. Anderson, a free black man and a Baptist minister.