The Printer of Colonial Williamsburg

In 18th-century Williamsburg, Virginia, a large community of specialized tradespeople supported everyday life. While coopers crafted barrels and buckets and founders shaped molten metal, printers produced newspapers, pamphlets, and more, spreading news throughout the colony’s capital and beyond.

In colonial America, the printed word was the primary means of mass communication. Several printers produced weekly newspapers, all called the Virginia Gazette, as well as official colonial laws, legal forms, and pamphlets.

They also handled everyday commercial and entertainment printing, turning out lottery tickets, advertisements for theater productions (such as the ad shown here for a 1770 performance), and even poetry and song lyrics submitted by local authors.

Operating a printing office in 18th-century Williamsburg involved meticulous, physically demanding daily tasks. The workload was typically shared by a master printer, paid journeymen (skilled tradespeople), unpaid apprentices starting around ages 12 to 14, and enslaved workers.

The majority of printers were white men, though women also ran presses. Following her husband’s death in 1773, Williamsburg resident Clementina Rind took over his business without missing an issue. She even served as the official government printer of Virginia for over a year.

Printing required massive amounts of paper, often imported from England, Scotland, and the Netherlands. Williamsburg’s first printer, William Parks, bought old linen rags to manufacture his own paper at a mill just outside the city.

Artisans also crafted their sticky, dark letterpress ink from scratch by boiling linseed oil with pine rosin. Once the mixture cooled, they added lampblack (a fine soot) to give the ink its readable dark color.

To begin, printers painstakingly set the text by placing individual tiny metal letters, which were imported from England, one by one into a composing stick. This letter-by-letter method allowed printers to easily accommodate unique spellings and different languages.

Next, the artisans coated the set type with their handmade ink using tools called ink balls.

Finally, they manually operated the heavy printing press to stamp the inked type onto the paper.

This final step was labor-intensive. Enslaved workers were an integral part of the printing office, routinely performing the physically demanding work of operating the printing press.

Subscribers to the Virginia Gazettes were overwhelmingly white men. The papers reached an audience across Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. A wide range of colonists sought out newspapers to discover the latest events unfolding across the colonies and around the globe.

As the American Revolution approached, the press became a battleground. Actions like Britain's Stamp Act—a direct tax on paper goods in the American colonies—threatened the livelihoods of colonial printers and pushed many to criticize the imperial government.

The printing trade laid the groundwork for independence. By distributing pamphlets and political notices, printers spread the revolutionary ideas that united the colonies. Their actions helped establish America’s tradition of a free press.

Visitors can watch artisans manually set type, operate reproduction printing presses, and produce printed material. These modern printers preserve the art of the 18th-century printing trade, bringing it to life for audiences today.