The widow's might
1739-1747: Elizabeth Timothy held the future of the family in her hands
The South-Carolina Gazette of January 4, 1739, carried the usual mix of world and local news, the shipping report, and two pages of announcements and advertisements. Then, on the back page, at the bottom of the right hand column, was the news that the printer, Lewis Timothy had died, “by an unhappy Accident,” and that his widow was continuing to publish. She hoped that “all those Persons, who by Subscription or otherwise assisted my late husband” would continue to do so for “his poor afflicted Widow and six small Children and another hourly expected.” She signed her name, Eliza. Timothy, and added an all-business postscript:
P.S. All Persons are desired to send their Advertisements by Wednesday Night otherwise they cannot be inserted that Week.
For the next thirty-two weeks the South-Carolina Gazette appeared as scheduled, even as the printer’s death notice changed on February 8 to read “and SEVEN small children.” The paper’s regularity faltered only during a small-pox/yellow fever epidemic when Elizabeth was sick and two of the children died.
Elizabeth was born Elizabeth Villain in Amsterdam in 1702. In 1724 she married Louis Timothee, a Huguenot printer. Amsterdam was wealthy, polyglot, and brisk, where women were active in the marketplace and the counting house—and the print shop. Girls studied alongside boys, and accounting was standard in the curriculum. Elizabeth was well-prepared to be a full partner in a business enterprise.
Had the Timothees stayed in Amsterdam, they would have been at the hub of the information age, when the Dutch Republic sent books, newspapers, pamphlets, letters, and edicts around the globe. But in 1731, they left for Philadelphia, an emerging city on the edge of a wilderness. They sailed from Rotterdam, by way of Cowes, on a ship called Britannia, with Peter, who was six; Mary, who was five, Paul Lewis, two, and Charles, one.
The Timothees were well situated soon after they landed on September 21, indicating that they were likely valued members of the trans-Atlantic network of printers. On October 14, a notice appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette that Louis, who intended to open a French Language School, offered private lessons at his home on Front Street, “next door to Dr. Kearsley,” a prominent Philadelphian. Louis was soon swept up in the schemes of the printer of the Pennsylvania Gazette, Benjamin Franklin. In June Franklin announced the launch of a High Dutch (German) newspaper, translated by Timothee. Then Franklin made Louis first librarian of the Library Company of Philadelphia, housed in the mansion that belonged to one of the members of the Junto. The whole family moved in and filled it with galloping little feet and voices.
In November 1733, Franklin tapped Lewis, who had Anglicized his name, to replace the printer in his Charleston shop who had died of yellow fever in an epidemic that was killing twenty people a day. Lewis sailed to Charleston. Elizabeth and the children followed.
Two years after they arrived, the Timothys buried Paul Lewis, who had just turned six. Then, in the small-pox summer of 1738, they lost the child Lewis, who had not yet turned two. Before the next year ended, there were three more deaths, the adult Lewis, Charles, who was nine, and Joseph, probably the infant Elizabeth was carrying. Yellow fever—or small pox—had struck again.
In a notice printed November 11, 1739, Elizabeth asked those indebted to Lewis’s estate to settle up before March 1:
… being under an Necessity of settling all her said Husband's Accounts at that Time, in which she hath been much retarded by Sickness, as well of herself, as her Family; and as many of the outstanding Debts are but small, she hopes no Person will lay her under a Necessity of putting them to any Charge in the Recovery thereof.
The war with Spain had caused a severe downturn in the colonies, so the Timothys were not the only ones calling in debts. The newspaper and the print shop touched the lives of nearly everyone in Charleston, which had a free population of a few thousand. The print shop attracted people who wanted to influence events or demonstrate their competence to do so, people with products and services to sell, people in crisis of lost horses, wives, workers, and wardrobes; debtors and creditors, ship captains with letters and newspapers, runners of errands, outraged complainers, all came to the print shop. The news provided common currency in coffee shops and taverns among people who would not ordinarily mix.
As printers, the Timothys straddled the social, economic, and cultural divides in the little city. People of wealth depended on the printer’s good offices, but would have made demands for credit that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to resist.
On March 22, 1739, Elizabeth offered “for ready money” 300 acres of land near Purrysburg and a lot in the town, a settlement of Swiss Protestants about 80 miles south of Charleston. She directed enquiries to herself or Jane Lebray, a widow, who was granted 300 acres in Purrysburg the previous June.
Then, in 1740, while the print shop was trying to keep up with demand sparked by the evangelist George Whitefield, Pierro, “a Negro Fellow who carried the South-Carolina Gazette about this Town,” ran away. Elizabeth offered five pounds sterling for his return. The loss of Pierro was a major blow for the printing house, though it may have meant freedom for Pierro.
The ability of enslaved workers to move about freely was a business asset, especially to a newspaper publisher, but also to lawyers, craftsmen, merchants, shipowners, factors, and commanders of militia—everyone who needed to move information and goods. After the Stono rebellion in 1739, South Carolina passed laws aimed at better controlling the movement of enslaved workers, but the will to enforce them was weak. Regulations slowed the movement of money. To the Timothys, the loss of Pierro was the cost of doing business, which did not make it any easier to live with.
Franklin wrote in his Autobiography that in 1739 “the partnership at Carolina having succeeded, I was encourag’d to engage in others, and to promote several of my workmen, who had behaved well, by establishing them with printing-houses in different colonies, on the same terms with that in Carolina.”
On the ground in Charleston it may have been difficult for Elizabeth to see that success. Over the next several years, however, she managed the print shop and the newspaper well enough to buy it out from Benjamin Franklin and give it to Peter in 1747 after he turned twenty-one.
Hey Cindy! Can you edit this after publishing? I noticed a date of 1939, not 1739. Quite the story of this family's lives.