What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?

“Good sober Workmen are wanted.”

Charles Read cast his net widely in search of “Good sober Workmen” to employ at the “New Forge or Bloomery” located midway between Philadelphia and Burlington, New Jersey. In an advertisement in the Providence Gazette, he sought various sorts of laborers, including Good Master Colliers,” “Wood-Cutters,” and a manager “who will have a more general Oversight,” in addition to “Good sober Workmen.” Prospective workers could apply at the “Tanton and Atsion Forges, which are near to each other.”

These forges were part of an expanding domestic industry that included the furnace operated by William Hawxhurst in Sterling, New York, and advertised the same week that Read placed his notice. In his History of Manufactures in the United States, Victor Selden Clark notes that a “line of furnace and forges extended from New Hampshire to South Carolina.” Indeed, Clark states, “At the outbreak of hostilities [in the 1770s] the colonies already produced enough iron for civil and military engagements.” In fact, the proprietors of the forges collectively contributed to an export industry. Many of the forges had been established to meet the needs of British markets that demanded iron “pigs and bars” as raw materials. Clark describes a decline in production during the years of the military conflict, caused by disruptions to commerce, ironmasters with British sympathies departing the colonies, and, perhaps most significantly, lack of laborers since so many workmen were “drawn off to the army.”[1]

Forge operators like Read and Hawxhurst did not face those particular challenges in the 1760s, but that did not mean that it required little effort to keep their forges fully staffed. In his attempts to recruit qualified workmen, Read inserted advertisements in the Providence Gazette, more than two-hundred miles from the Tanton forge he was preparing to open in New Jersey. Compared to the contents of the rest of the newspaper (“the freshest Advices, both Foreign and Domestic,” according to the Providence Gazette’s masthead), most advertisements tended to concern relatively local matters in the 1760s. Occasionally, however, local readers encountered advertisements placed from a distance, sometimes encouraging them to purchase certain goods (such as William Goddard’s proposal for printing the Pennsylvania Chronicle), other times presenting them new opportunities.

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[1] Victor S. Clark, History of Manufactures in the United States, 1607-1860 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1916), 221.