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

“ALL Person who are anywise indebted to the Estate of JOHN DUTARQUE, deceased, are desired to make payment.”

The “missing” Georgia Gazette from June 15, 1768, presents an opportunity to discuss methodology. Each day the Adverts 250 Project republishes an advertisement originally published in an American newspaper exactly 250 years ago that day, along with a short essay that provides historical context and analysis of the contents of the advertisement. These advertisements are drawn from databases of eighteenth-century newspapers that have been digitized: the Virginia Gazette from Colonial Williamsburg’s Digital Library, newspapers published in Charleston from Accessible Archives’s South Carolina Newspapers, and an extensive array of newspapers from throughout the colonies from Readex’s America’s Historical Newspapers.

If no newspaper was published on a particular day (or if no newspaper published on a particular day has been digitized as part of one of those databases), the Adverts 250 Project instead features an advertisement printed sometime during the previous week. Although colonial printers clustered newspaper publications on Mondays and Thursdays in the late 1760s, at least one newspaper was published somewhere in the colonies on every day of the week except Sundays. This means that usually there is only one day of the week that the Adverts 250 Project needs to feature an advertisement not published exactly 250 years to the day.

The clustering of publications on Mondays and Thursdays means that some days offer many more choices for both newspapers and advertisements. During most weeks, the South-Carolina Gazette and Country Journal was the only [extant and digitized] newspaper printed on Tuesdays, the Georgia Gazette was the only newspaper printed on Wednesdays, and the Providence Gazette was the only newspaper printed on Saturdays. As a result, the Adverts 250 Project features an advertisement from each of these publications once a week. During the rest of the week the project draws from among more than a dozen other newspapers, attempting an informal rotation to feature as many as possible.

This methodology causes some newspapers to be featured much more often than others. Even though it carried relatively little advertising compared to some of its counterparts published in the largest port cities, the Georgia Gazette contributes an advertisement to the Adverts 250 Project once a week because it was only newspaper published in the colonies on Wednesdays in the late 1760s. (Dates that fell on Wednesdays in 1768 fall on Fridays in 2018.)

Today’s advertisement should have come from the Georgia Gazette, but the issue for June 15, 1768, is “missing.” Note the availability of other issues summarized in the calendar provided via Readex’s America’s Historical Newspapers. On closer investigation of some of those other issues it turns out that the June 15 edition is not missing after all. The June 8 edition is numbered 246. June 22 is numbered 247. June 29 is numbered 248, indicating that the June 22 edition is indeed numbered correctly and not the result of the printer or compositor neglecting to advance the number if there had been a June 15 edition (that would have been 247). For whatever reason, printer James Johnston did not issue the Georgia Gazette on June 15, 1768. Despite the noticeable gap in the calendar depicting publication in 1768, complete runs of the Georgia Gazette for that year have been preserved in archives and reproduced via America’s Historical Newspapers.

Rather than examine an advertisement published sometime during the previous week, the not-missing-after-all issue of the Georgia Gazette presents an opportunity to discuss the Advert 250 Project’s methodology in greater detail as well as describe the schedule of publication throughout the colonies in the late 1760s. This should give readers a better sense of why advertisements from some newspapers appear so frequently and advertisements from other newspapers are featured much less often.