WILLIAMSBURG:
Printed by William Parks. M,DCC,XXX.
Before 1730, however, a more tolerant attitude had developed. With the permission of Governor William Gooch, the English-born William Parks moved that year from Annapolis to Williamsburg, which had succeeded Jamestown as the capital of Virginia in 1699. He was designated public printer of Virginia, at an annual salary of £120 a year, eventually increased to £280. Parks continued to print the acts of the Virginia Assembly, which he had begun several years before in Maryland, and soon advertised for subscriptions for a proposed Virginia Miscellany “at his House, near the Capitol, in Williamsburg.” Before the year was out he had printed several works, at least five of which are known by title. One of these is an ode to printing, Typographia, by one “J. Markland,” which salutes Gooch for his encouragement of printing. In the high-flown style of its day, the ode concludes:
“A Ruler’s gentle Influence
Shall o’er his Land be shewn;
Saturnian Reigns shall be renew’d
Truth, Justice, Vertue, be pursu’d
Arts flourish, Peace shall crown the Plains,
Where GOOCH administers, AUGUSTUS reigns.”
Parks was Williamsburg’s most distinguished eighteenth-century printer and probably its most successful. In the annals of his craft in America he is ranked with Benjamin Franklin and William Bradford, the foremost printers in Pennsylvania and New York. Parks, like all of his brethren, depended for his bread and butter on printing blank forms (deeds, mortgages, bills, and the like), government work (such as proclamations, forms, and laws), almanacs, and other job work, but he helped establish in the American colonies that dependence upon free and fair discussion of issues in the newspapers which strengthened the concept of a free press. He gave impetus to literature in a colony that had lacked the local means for its encouragement. By his example, he was partly responsible for the rash of journalistic enterprise in pre-Revolutionary Williamsburg.