A History of Printing in Colonial Maryland

work of William Parks in Maryland, and very soon after the passage of the
act of admonition, having in the meantime, however, rectified his negli-
gence by printing the acts of April 1736,¹ he removed his entire establish-
ment to Virginia, leaving the Province of Maryland without a printer. In
November 1737, at the close of a letter to a correspondent in Philadelphia,
Governor Ogle wrote "as we have not a Press here at present, I have given
Directions to the Bearer of this to get a good Number of Proclamations
printed in Philadelphia."²

PARKS ESTABLISHES PRINTING ON A FIRM BASIS IN VIRGINIA

Closely identified as Parks is with the Province of Maryland, his name
is even more intimately associated with the literary history of Virginia than
with that of the sister colony. Virginia had been without a printer since the
failure of Nuthead's venture at Jamestown in the year 1683,³ and when in
February 1727, Parks presented to the Virginia House of Burgesses his pro-
posals for printing a collection of its laws, and its session laws of succeeding
years, his tentatives met with immediate and intelligent approval by that
body. A committee composed of some of the leading men of the colony was
appointed to arrange the details of the publication with the printer, and
when the work finally appeared in the year 1733, Parks had been for three
years an important personage in the Virginia capital, between which and
Annapolis he was then dividing his time and energies. In the year 1732 he
was allowed by the Virginia burgesses an annual salary of one hundred and
twenty pounds, a rate of payment at which he continued to serve the col-
ony until the year 1738, when, as the result of a petition which he presented
to the Assembly, his emolument was increased to two hundred pounds. In
1742 he was allowed two hundred and thirty pounds, and again in 1744 his
increasing importance in the colony was recognized by the addition of fifty
pounds annually to this sum, so that in his last six years of life, his salary
for public work was two hundred and eighty pounds a year. In his petition
for a larger salary, addressed to the Virginia Assembly on December 5,
1738, he asserted that he had relieved the colony of the "Drawback of the
Duty upon Paper." It is possible that he referred in this statement to the
paper mill which he is known to have established at Williamsburg, the first
paper mill, it should be said, to be built in English America south of Penn-

¹ See the bibliographical appendix under the year 1736, where this set of session laws is recorded with date of
March 19, 1735.

² Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania. Harrisburg, 1851,4: 253.

³ Evans, No. 1057, records a pamphlet printed by Pr. Maggot of Williamsburg in 1702, but aa nothing can be
discovered concerning such a person or press, he concludes the name to be an ironym.

[72]