Jim McClure View Comments Leading businessman George S. Schmidt liked the way York was heading in the Gay Nineties, five years after it had become a city. But he felt some folks had held too firmly to the past for decades and, in fact, were still doing so. "'Let well enough alone' was a motto which we devotedly followed for a hundred years and which might well have been engraven on our borough seal," he wrote in the daily York Gazette in February 1892. He didn't stop there. "We lived a life as placid and contented as it was narrow and bigoted," he wrote, "and blindly sacrificed on the altar of a mistaken conservatism every tendency toward municipal advancement." He wrote these words in connection with businessman A.B. Farquhar’s aggressive improvements to the newspaper he had just acquired, the York Gazette.