Culture is the leading element in the formation and progress of society, and is the result of mental activity. The most potent agency in the production of culture is education. While Pittsburgh was a frontier village, suffering from the turbulence of the French and Indian War, the uncertainty of the Revolution, and the chaos of the Whisky Insurrection, education remained at a standstill. The men who had blazed trails through the trackless forests, and buried themselves in the woods or along the uncharted rivers, could usually read and write, but there were no means of transmitting these boons to their children. The laws of the province made no provision for schools on its frontiers. In December, 1761, the inhabitants of Pittsburgh subscribed sixty pounds and engaged a schoolmaster for the term of a year to instruct their children. Similar attempts followed, but, like the first effort, ended in failure. There was not a newspaper in all the Western country; the only books were the Bible and the almanac. The almanac was the one form of secular literature with which frontier families were ordinarily familiar. In 1764, while Pittsburgh was a trading post, the military authorities caused a plan of the village to be made by Colonel John Campbell. It consisted of four blocks, and was bounded by Water Street, Second Street, now Second Avenue, Market and Ferry Streets, and was intersected by Chancery Lane. The lots faced in the direction of Water Street. In this plan most of the houses were built. At the outbreak of the Revolution, the proprietors of the province were the cousins, John Penn, Jr., and John Penn, both grandsons of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania. Being royalists, they had been divested of the title to all their lands in Pennsylvania, except to a few tracts which had been surveyed, called manors, one of them being “Pittsburgh,” in which was included the village of that name. In 1784 the Penns conceived the design of selling land in the village of Pittsburgh. The first sale was made in January, when an agreement to sell was entered into with Major Isaac Craig and Colonel Stephen Bayard, for about three acres, located “between Fort Pitt and the Allegheny River.” The Penns determined to lay out a town according to a plan of their own, and on April 22, 1784, Tench Francis, their agent, employed George Woods, an engineer living at Bedford, to do the work. The plan was completed in a few months, and included within its boundaries all the land in the triangle between the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, extending to Grant Street and Washington, now Eleventh, Street. Campbell’s plan was adopted unchanged; Tench Francis approved the new plan and began to sell lots. Major Craig and Colonel Bayard accepted, in lieu of the acreage purchased by them, a deed for thirty-two lots in this plan.