About Virginia Gazette

Virginia Gazette

The Virginia Gazette was the first newspaper published in Virginia and, for much of the colonial period, the principal printed record of public life in Williamsburg, the colony's capital. Its first four-page edition appeared on August 6, 1736, under printer William Parks, carrying a motto promising the freshest advices, foreign and domestic. The title did not belong to a single unbroken paper. Between 1736 and 1780 three separate Williamsburg newspapers used the Virginia Gazette name, sometimes competing with one another in the same town at the same time.

Together those three papers documented Virginia from a settled tobacco colony through the Stamp Act crisis, the imperial disputes of the 1760s and 1770s, and the opening years of the American Revolutionary War. Their printers held government contracts, sold books and stationery, ran bookbinderies and post offices, and printed laws and proclamations. When the capital moved from Williamsburg to Richmond in 1780, the Gazette era in Williamsburg ended with it.

William Parks and the First Gazette

William Parks was an English-born printer who had already founded the Maryland Gazette in Annapolis in 1727 before establishing himself in Williamsburg. He became Virginia's public printer, a lucrative official position that involved printing the colony's laws, journals and proclamations. That government work, rather than newspaper subscriptions alone, made a Williamsburg printing business viable in a colony where an earlier attempt at printing in the seventeenth century had been suppressed and where no newspaper had previously survived.

Parks printed the Virginia Gazette from 1736 until his death in 1750. He died suddenly aboard a ship leaving Britain, and his Williamsburg shop was seized to satisfy his debts. Before his death he had taken an important step for colonial printing in 1743 by building a paper mill in Williamsburg. He obtained rags and other raw material for newsprint through Benjamin Franklin, whom he had consulted in Philadelphia in the fall of 1742 about hiring a contractor and craftsmen who knew how to build such a mill.

William Hunter and Joseph Royle

After a break in publication, William Hunter, who had been foreman in Parks's shop, purchased the business at auction and restarted the Gazette in 1751. Hunter also served as deputy postmaster general for the colonies and, with Franklin, worked to improve the postal system in the southern colonies. Franklin visited Hunter in Williamsburg in 1756 and afterward recommended Williamsburg as a place for a school for Black children supported by the Associates of Dr. Bray; Hunter served as one of the school's first administrators.

Hunter died in 1761. His will directed that his foreman, Joseph Royle, operate the printing business and share profits with Hunter's son. Royle published the paper until his own death, recorded in the publishing succession as covering 1761 to 1765. The frequent deaths of printers were not unusual misfortunes in this period; they repeatedly transferred the Gazette as property, along with its presses, type, contracts and debts, to widows, foremen and partners.

Purdie, Dixon and the Later Successions

After Royle, Alexander Purdie took a share in the business and partnered with John Dixon, a local businessman who had married Royle's widow, Rosanna, who was also William Hunter's half-sister. The partnership of Purdie and Dixon published the original Gazette from 1766 to 1775. Dixon and William Hunter Jr. followed from 1775 to 1778, and Dixon and Thomas Nicolson from 1779 to 1780.

The last issue of that first line of the paper appeared on April 8, 1780. Its printers announced that they proposed removing their office to Richmond immediately, following the seat of government. The move reflected a basic fact of colonial newspaper economics: the official printing contract followed the capital, and a printer who lost proximity to the assembly, courts and governor lost a central source of income and news.

The Second Gazette: William and Clementina Rind

In 1766 William Rind founded a competing newspaper also called the Virginia Gazette. Rind had worked in Maryland, where the Rind family had been connected with the Maryland Gazette, and his Williamsburg venture ended the original paper's monopoly in the town. His Gazette was a distinct publication with its own numbering, politics and readers, even though it bore the identical title — a source of lasting confusion for readers and historians trying to distinguish which Virginia Gazette printed a given item.

William Rind died unexpectedly in August 1773. His widow, Clementina Rind, continued the paper from 1773 to 1774, becoming one of the colonial women printers who kept a family press operating after a husband's death. The Rinds' press published patriotic material, including a petition from the Virginia House of Burgesses protesting taxes imposed by Parliament, and William had signed a nonimportation resolution in 1770. Clementina was succeeded by John Pinkney, who published the Rind paper from 1774 until its last issue on February 3, 1776.

The Third Gazette: Purdie, Clarkson and Davis

On February 3, 1775, Alexander Purdie began a third Williamsburg paper under the same name, after parting from his earlier partnership. For a period, therefore, Williamsburg readers could choose between rival Virginia Gazettes that reported the deepening crisis with Britain from a small capital town. Purdie published his paper until his death in 1779, after which John Clarkson and Augustine Davis continued it until December 9, 1780, the last issue located for that version.

The existence of three simultaneous or successive titles showed both the demand for news in revolutionary Virginia and the weakness of any exclusive claim to a generic name such as Gazette. Printers treated the title as a description of the paper's function — an official-looking register of public intelligence — rather than as a protected brand.

What the Gazettes Printed

A typical colonial Gazette mixed foreign intelligence copied from London papers and arriving by ship, reports from other colonies, proceedings and proclamations of Virginia's government, shipping news, and long columns of advertisements. Advertisements announced imported goods, land and enslaved people for sale, runaway servants and enslaved people, strayed horses, book sales and the services of craftsmen. Both the Maryland and Virginia Gazettes carried advertisements placed by enslavers seeking the capture of people who had run away.

The papers also carried essays, poems and letters, including poetical correspondence and acrostics that the Rind press in particular cultivated, and almanac material aimed at both men and women readers. Because copies survived unevenly, the Gazettes became an essential, if incomplete, archive for historians of colonial Virginia government, commerce, slavery, dress, medicine and everyday life.

The Stamp Act and the Road to Revolution

The Stamp Act of 1765, which taxed printed paper including newspapers, struck directly at printers' costs and at colonial claims that only elected assemblies could tax the colonists. In May 1765 the Virginia House of Burgesses passed Patrick Henry's Virginia Resolves, arguing that Virginians were subject to taxation only by an assembly to which they elected representatives. The Gazettes operated in the town where that debate took place and in a trade that the tax itself threatened.

During the following decade Williamsburg's competing papers reported nonimportation agreements, protests against successive British revenue measures, and the formation of revolutionary institutions. Their printers were not neutral observers: official printers depended on government favour, while the Rind press aligned itself openly with patriotic protest. As war began, news of fighting, military movements and the new state government filled columns once dominated by London intelligence.

Women, Family and the Printing Trade

The Gazette's history illustrated how colonial printing was a family trade. Presses passed through marriages, widowhood and apprenticeship as much as through formal sale. Clementina Rind's continuation of her husband's paper, Rosanna Royle's marriage to John Dixon connecting two Gazette partnerships, and the repeated inheritance of shops by foremen and sons all showed women and kinship networks holding the business together at moments when it might otherwise have closed.

That history also included enslaved labour. Evidence concerning the Rind household indicated that an enslaved man named Dick, listed in William Rind's estate inventory, worked actively in the press. His presence was a reminder that the celebrated colonial press rested in part on the work of enslaved people who rarely appeared in its pages except in advertisements for sale or recapture.

The Move to Richmond and the End in Williamsburg

In 1780 Virginia moved its capital from Williamsburg to Richmond, a more central and defensible location during the war. Dixon and Nicolson's Gazette issued its final Williamsburg number on April 8, 1780, announcing removal to Richmond. Purdie's successor paper, by Clarkson and Davis, ended on December 9, 1780. With those closures, the Williamsburg Virginia Gazettes that had run, in their three forms, since 1736 ceased publication.

Other Virginia papers later used the Virginia Gazette banner at various times and places, but they were not continuations of the colonial Williamsburg offices. In 1893 W. C. Johnston revived the name in Williamsburg in newspaper form, unrelated to its colonial predecessors, and a modern Williamsburg paper founded in 1930 also took the historic name.

Legacy and Survival of the Record

Colonial Williamsburg and other repositories preserved and indexed surviving issues, distinguishing the three papers by printer and years — the first running through Parks, Hunter, Royle, Purdie and Dixon to Nicolson; the second through William Rind, Clementina Rind and Pinkney; and the third through Purdie to Clarkson and Davis. Issue counts recorded for those runs ran into the hundreds for the longest partnerships.

For researchers, the Gazettes remained one of the richest printed sources for eighteenth-century Virginia precisely because they combined official acts with commercial ephemera. A single issue could contain a governor's proclamation, a London news summary, a poem, a merchant's import list and an advertisement seeking an enslaved runaway — the governing, trading and coercive systems of the colony side by side on the same sheets.