What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago this week?
“City Tavern, Philadelphia.”
When the City Tavern opened in Philadelphia, Daniel Smith inserted advertisements in the Pennsylvania Gazette and the Pennsylvania Packet in February 1774. The opening had been much anticipated in that city, following the efforts of some of the most prominent residents to erect the building via subscription. In 1772, Samuel Powel entrusted the land to seven wealthy colonizers. In turn, those “Gentlemen Proprietors” oversaw a “voluntary subscription of the principal gentlemen of the city” to raise funds to build the tavern and then selected Smith to lease and operate the City Tavern.
About three months after his advertisement ran in Philadelphia’s newspaper, it appeared in the Supplement to the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly News-Letter on May 5. It featured identical copy and, except for the headline, identical format in terms of capitalization and italics. Smith may have written it out exactly, but just as likely he clipped the advertisement from his local newspaper and sent it to Richard Draper’s printing office in Boston. Alternately, he could have sent instructions to reprint the notice from a newspaper that Draper received via his exchange networks with other printers, but Smith would not have been certain that Draper received the issues that originally carried his advertisement. Given that the tavernkeeper proclaimed that he “fitted up a genteel Coffee Room, … properly supplied with English and American papers and magazines,” he likely corresponded directly with Draper, ordering a newspaper subscription and arranging to run his advertisement in the public prints in Boston.
That advertisement provided a brief history of the City Tavern that would have been familiar to many residents of Philadelphia yet new to readers in Boston. Smith hoped to impress prospective visitors to his city with the “largest and most elegant house occupied in that way [as a tavern, coffeehouse, and inn], in America.” He emphasized his own “very great expence” in furnishing it with “every article of the first quality, in the stile of a London tavern.” Indeed, when John Adams traveled to Philadelphia to attend the First Continental Congress several months later, he described it as “the most genteel [tavern] in America.”[1] That was the reputation Smith hoped to cultivate, not only in his city but throughout the colonies. He positioned the City Tavern as a destination itself, not just a place to eat, drink, and lodge while visiting Philadelphia.
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[1] See entry for August 29, 1774, in John Adams diary 21, 15 August – 3 September 1774 [electronic edition]. Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive. Massachusetts Historical Society. http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/