GUEST CURATOR:  Ashley Schofield

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

“The great Misfortune of losing his House and Store by Fire, with almost every Thing in and about them.”

Peter Frye was a justice of the peace in Salem, Massachusetts, when the town had a fire on October 6, 1774. According to Donna Seger, Frye was a Tory. Tories were also known as Loyalists, colonists who remained loyal to the king and Parliament. In an advertisement that he placed four months after the fire, Frye points out his misfortune of losing his house, store, and belongings due to the fire. “He is now obliged to beg all of those who were then indebted to him by Bond, Note, or on Account” to pay him what they justly owed.

Frye called for sympathy amongst the people of Salem by stating his misfortune of losing his house, store, and belongings. He thought that some readers would hesitate to engage because he was a Tory, either overlooking or disregarding his plea. He knew he was asking a lot of the people to help him recover, so began by noting that he lost everything.

Advertisements calling on readers to settle accounts and debts were common, but most advertisements were due to regular business transactions, not due to fires. Additionally, he not only lost his house and store, but allegedly all that was in them. In this matter, Frye no longer had his ledgers and account books due to the fire, which meant he had no records to confirm who owed him and what amount.

Frye relied on the sympathy and the good consciences of the people of Salem to help him out in this time of tragedy to gain back what he had lost. As Donna Seger explains, “Frye had tried to find his way back to ‘friendship’ with his Salem neighbors, but they had never been able to forget his commercial and judicial dealings contrary to Patriot proclamations.” Due to his position as a Tory on the eve of the American Revolution, townspeople held a grudge against him. Seger notes that Frye left Salem, moving to Ipswich and then Britain.

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ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY: Carl Robert Keyes

I enjoyed working with Ashley on this entry for many reasons, including the confluence of primary and secondary sources that went into crafting it.  We began with negotiating whether I would approve Frye’s advertisement as Ashley’s selection for this project.  I encouraged students to choose advertisements about consumer goods and services to build on our readings and discussions about the consumer revolution, but I also told them that I would consider other kinds of advertisements if they made convincing cases for what they hoped to learn from them and why they should be included in the Adverts 250 Project.  Ashley convincingly argued that she did not previously know about the fire in Salem in 1774.   Frye’s advertisement offered an opportunity to learn about that piece of local history and its aftermath.

To fill in the details, she consulted Streets of Salem, a blog produced by Donna Seger, Professor of History at Salem State University.  Seger composes “[s]omewhat random but still timely posts about culture, history, and the material environment, from the perspectives of academia, Salem and beyond.”  In the nine years that I have been producing the Adverts 250 Project, I have consulted and linked to Streets of Salem on many occasions, so I was pleased that Ashley discovered that wonderful and engaging resource when researching Frye’s advertisement.  In the entry that gave so much information about Frye, Seger weaves together various primary sources, informed by Mary Beth Norton’s 1774: The Long Year of Revolution.  Ashley was already familiar with Norton from our discussions about the historiography of the American Revolution.  Seger’s post about “Tea, Fire and a new Congress” vividly illustrated how historians incorporate secondary sources into their research on primary sources, not only for background information but also in presenting an interpretation of what happened, why it mattered then, and why we consider it important now.

During the research, writing, and revision process, Ashley also had an opportunity to learn more about early American print culture and various kinds of advertisements, especially notices that called on colonizers to settle accounts.  As a result, she was able to make a distinction between the familiar and standard notices that so often appeared in the pages of early American newspapers and the appeal that Frye made as he attempted to recover from a fire that had devasted his household and business.  I sometimes select advertisements that deliver local news (including some that ran in the Essex Gazette right after the Salem fire) to feature on the Adverts 250 Project.  Ashley contributed to the project’s examination of those sorts of newspaper advertisements.