Parks’s most influential act was his founding of the Virginia Gazette, the first newspaper to be published in Virginia and the second south of Maryland. Begun in 1736, this weekly was the leader of a colorful succession of similarly named sheets in Williamsburg and later in Richmond, to which the Virginia government removed in 1780. And in these Gazettes—in the 1770s published by as many as three competing printers at a time—can be found a rich chronicle of the events in the colonies leading to the American Revolution. Important foreign and domestic occurrences were described in dispatches—perhaps taken in some cases from private correspondence—and in excerpts from other newspapers. The editor rarely reported local happenings beyond a brief mention of ship arrivals, marriages, deaths, fires, and the like. He often printed legal notices and entire acts of the Virginia Assembly, without comment. Fulsomely phrased letters to the editor posed weighty questions of government, science, or theology.

The modern reader will find the Virginia Gazette of 1736 to 1750 undramatic in its lack of headlines, pictures, and display type. But the ingredients of human interest are there, subtly in the note of controversy which gradually built up to the Revolution, and emphatically in the advertisements, which largely financed the Gazette. Many are the notices of runaway slaves, strayed farm animals, husbands deserted by wives, or blooded horses available for racing or breeding. From the advertisements, also, the contemporary Virginia reader could learn of the arrival of goods from London—articles of fashion that were highly prized by Virginians as evidence of their Englishness. In an early issue of the Gazette, Parks states:

“Advertisement, concerning Advertisements

“All Persons who have Occasion to buy or sell Houses, Lands, Goods, or Cattle; or have Servants or Slaves Runaway; or have lost Horses, Cattle, &c. or want to give any Publick Notice; may have it advertis’d in all these Gazettes printed in one Week, for Three Shillings, and for Two Shillings per Week for as many Weeks afterwards as they shall order, by giving or sending their Directions to the Printer hereof.

“And, as these Papers will circulate (as speedily as possible) not only all over This, but also the Neighbouring Colonies, and will probably be read by some Thousands of People, it is very likely they may have the desir’d Effect; and it is certainly the cheapest and most effectual Method that can be taken, for Publishing any Thing of this Nature.”

PRINTING IN AN AGRICULTURAL ECONOMY

William Parks’s significant achievements seem even greater if one understands the difficulties of operating a business in the Williamsburg of 1730-1750. Because Virginia’s colonial prosperity was based on a one-crop economy—tobacco—little “ready money” was in circulation within the colony. The weed itself became a sort of currency. The usual practice was for the plantation owner or the small farmer to subsist on his produce and his credit until the crop was harvested and shipped to English merchants, who from the proceeds of its sale bought for the planter such articles as he had directed. Because all American tobacco was transported to Britain in British vessels, shipping space was plentiful on the westward passage, and shipowners and British merchants offered Virginia buyers cheap freight rates on finished goods. Thus such English manufactures as cloth, furniture, pewter, silver, and ceramics were sold to Virginia planters and merchants.

The two-way trade between Virginia planters and British merchants slowed down the development of a large Virginia artisan group. Accordingly, local industry was limited in eighteenth-century Virginia, even in an urban center such as Williamsburg. Virginia craftsmen complained bitterly of unpaid accounts, the necessity of accepting such “country pay” as tobacco, corn, and beef, and the paucity of buyers who offered ready money.

It is easy to understand why William Parks found relatively few craftsmen in the Williamsburg of his day. Except for a few trades such as cabinetmaking, blacksmithing, coopering, wigmaking, tailoring, and shoemaking, the Virginia capital was largely a community of taverns, townhouses, and governmental institutions, and the colony itself was overwhelmingly rural. There is no doubt that Virginia’s reliance on agriculture, a reliance approved by British mercantile theory, resulted in an overdependence on the industry of the mother country. We can thank the peculiarities of Parks’s situation—the inability of English printers to satisfy Virginians’ desire for regional news, and the subsidy Parks received as public printer—that his craft became firmly established in the 1730s in Virginia. Indeed, it seems clear that the prospect of becoming Virginia’s public printer was what lured Parks from Annapolis to Williamsburg in the first place.

PARKS’S SUCCESSORS IN WILLIAMSBURG

Altogether, Williamsburg had at least twelve master printers and three separate printing locations or offices during the colonial period. After Parks died on a voyage to England, William Hunter, the man whom he had left in charge, bought the business. Publication of the Virginia Gazette continued, and Hunter became public printer and postmaster. In the latter capacity he worked in close association with an astute Philadelphia printer, Benjamin Franklin, with whom he served jointly as deputy postmaster-general for all the colonies. Hunter printed in 1754 the first published writing of George Washington, entitled The Journal of Major George Washington, sent by the Hon. Robert Dinwiddie, Esq; His Majesty’s Lieutenant-Governor, and Commander in Chief of Virginia, to the Commandant of the French Forces on Ohio....