From Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Darling and Nathan Whiting, 25 November 1754
To Thomas Darling and Nathan Whiting
ALS: Yale University Library
Boston, Nov. 25. 1754
Gentlemen
I hoped to have had the Pleasure of seeing you at New Haven long before this time, but the Sickness of my Fellow Traveller Mr. Hunter, and various Accidents have hitherto prevented:9 I hope however to be there in three or four Weeks at farthest.
I suppose you long since received the Press, Types and Stationary I ordered into your Care.1 My Nephews that are Printers having one after the other changed their Minds, and chusing to continue where they are, the one at Antigua, and the other at Newport;2 I must provide another Hand for your Place. In the meantime, Mr. Parker of New York will come I believe and make trial this Winter.3 If he likes the Place, perhaps he may continue. So please to deliver him the whole when he arrives with you.
Please to present the enclos’d Sermon4 with my Respects to Mr. Clap. And I would farther request your Delivery of the enclos’d Letter to Mr. Holt,5 a Gentleman I suppose to be now in your Town.
With great Respect, I am, Gentlemen, Your obliged humble Servant
B Franklin
Messrs. Darling and Whiting
Endorsed: Benja Franklin Letter
9. See above, p. 438.
1. See above, pp. 82, 109, 422, 439.
2. Benjamin Mecom (see above, IV, 355 n) and James Franklin, Jr. (see above, II, 261–3).
3. James Parker (see above, II, 341 n), New York printer, was appointed postmaster at New Haven and opened a printing office there as well in the winter of 1754–55. He began to publish the Connecticut Gazette in April 1755. Winnifred R. Reid, “Beginnings of Printing in New Haven,” Papers in Honor of Andrew Keogh (New Haven, 1938), pp. 67–88.
4. The sermon has not been identified.
5. John Holt (1721–1784), an unsuccessful merchant in Virginia, came in the summer of 1754 to New York and Woodbridge, N.J., where Parker taught him printing. Later in the year he came to New Haven in charge of the printing equipment, and became Parker’s associate, conducting both the printing office and the post office there, 1755–60. Returning to New York, he printed the New-York Gazette; or the Weekly Post-Boy, from 1762 until 1766, when he opened his own printing office and began to publish the New-York Journal. Thomas, Printing, I, 188–9, 303–4. He was a brother-in-law of William Hunter, BF’s associate as deputy postmaster general.