The Timothées move to Charles Towne
By Elizabeth F. Gay, H. Cheves Leland and Renée Marshall
When Louis Timothée departed Philadelphia in late November 1733, his wife Elisabet was weeks away from delivering their sixth child, Michael. She already had Pierre, Marie Elisabet, Louis Paul, Charles and John to look after. The family had been in Pennsylvania since September 1731, and two short years later, Louis was dispatched to Charles Towne by Benjamin Franklin to assume responsibility for The South-Carolina Gazette. Franklin’s prior agent, Thomas Whitmarsh, had died of yellow fever in the latter part of 1733 and needed to be replaced with speed.
“L. Timothée” printed his issue No. 1 of The South-Carolina Gazette on February 2, 1733-4, “in Church Street.” In the issue’s colophon, his name is in the French form. At some point in the next two months, he anglicized his name, not an uncommon practice, to Lewis Timothy. Elisabet became Elizabeth.
Elizabeth must have been a strong, even formidable, woman to settle her husband’s final affairs in Philadelphia, close their home, and then travel to Charles Towne with an infant and five children under the age of ten. Upon their arrival, she worked to set up a new home for the family while her husband opened a print shop and kept the editions printing on time.
Thus far, records do not confirm any additional people working with Timothy in the print shop, but research suggests that there were enslaved, indentured or others who worked with him. In early 1735, Timothy moved his print shop to Union Street (now State Street).
By late summer 1735, Lewis and Elizabeth had at least two more children, Joseph and Catherine, and they had buried their son Louis Paul. On September 18, 1735, a plat certified that Lewis Timothy received a royal grant to 200 acres in Orangeburg Township on the PonPon
River. Another plat, certified the next day, named him as a boundary on 250 acres, but there is no record of the family ever living in or near Orangeburg. Two years later, Lewis, the ninth Timothy child, was born in Charles Towne on December 6, 1737.
The eldest son, Peter, was apprenticed to his father as was usual in most printers’ families. The site of the printing office moved several times from Union Street in Jan 1734/5 to King Street in 1736, to “on the Bay, the corner opposite to New Market,” to “Broad Street, at the corner next to upper market,” to the corner of King and Tradd, and later “removed to Broad Street.”
In addition to publishing the Gazette, Lewis Timothy also served as the official printer for South Carolina. This entailed printing government broadsides, pamphlets, and sometimes currency notes, as well as publicizing the South Carolina Assembly’s meetings. Timothy printed An Essay on Currency in 1734, The Laws of the Province of South Carolina by Trott in 1736, and Collection of Psalms and Hymns by John Wesley in 1737, and the first Anglican hymnal printed in America. In addition, as a printer, he was responsible for publishing news from abroad as well as from other colonies, shipping news, religious tracts, and brochures. It was a time-consuming venture and required many hands, so the whole family would have been involved in some manner.
In October 1738, their son Lewis died at the age of six, possibly from yellow fever. At the time, Lewis Timothy wrote, “by reason of Sicknes (sic), myself and Son having been visited with this Fever, that reigns at present, so that neither of us hath been capable for some time of working much at the press.” The South-Carolina Gazette continued to be published, no doubt due to work by Elizabeth, Peter, and the rest of the family.
Lewis Timothy died at the end of December and was buried in Charles Towne on December 30, 1738. How Lewis Timothy died is unknown, but on January 4, 1739, The South-Carolina Gazette published the following notice:
“Whereas the late Printer of this Gazette hath been deprived of his Life by
an unhappy Accident, I take this Opportunity of informing the Publick, that I shall continue the said Paper as usual; and hope, by the Assistance of my Friends, to make it as entertaining and correct as may be reasonably expected. Wherefore I flatter myself, that all those Persons, who, by Subscription or otherwise, assisted my late Husband, in the Presecution (sic) of the said Undertaking, will be kindly pleased to continue their Favours and good Offices to his poor afflicted Widow and six small children and another hourly expected. Eliza Timothy”
Elizabeth Timothy lost her husband and their namesake son, Lewis, just two months apart, and she was expecting another child within a few weeks. No records for the birth or baptism of the child she was carrying were found, but it was probably their tenth child, a daughter Louise, who was later named in her mother’s will. We know Louise was born between January 4 and February 8, 1739, because the last line of the notice quoted above was changed in the paper published on February 8, 1739, to “his poor afflicted Widow with SEVEN small children.”
Once again, Elizabeth rose to the occasion. She had arrived in Philadelphia in 1731 after an ocean voyage with four young children, all under the age of seven. While there, she had two sons, the second arriving a month after her husband had left for Charles Towne in 1733. Four years later, she was a widow with six young children: Peter, Mary Elizabeth, Charles, John, Joseph and Catherine. The “unhappy accident” that deprived the Timothy family of their husband and father once again left Elizabeth to manage her home and children alone and placed their eldest child, Peter, in his role as inheritor of the business years before he would reach maturity. The print shop had debts to collect, and advertisements she had to sell for income.
As to Elizabeth’s success, in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Franklin wrote:
In 1733 I sent one of my journeymen to Charleston, South Carolina, where a printer was wanting. I furnished him with a press and letters, on an agreement of partnership ... He was a man of learning, but ignorant in matters of account; and though he sometimes made me remittances, I could get no account from him, nor any satisfactory state of our partnership while he lived. On his decease the business was continued by his widow, who being born and bred in Holland, where (as I have been informed) the knowledge of accounts makes a part of female education, she not only sent me as clear a statement as she could find of the transactions past, but continued to account with the greatest regularity and exactness every quarter afterward; and managed the business with such success, that she not only reputably brought up a family of children, but, at the expiration of the term, was able to purchase of me the printing-house and establish her son in it. I mention this affair chiefly for the sake of recommending that branch of education for our young women, as likely to be of more use to them and their children in case of widowhood than either music or dancing; by preserving them from losses by imposition of crafty men, and enabling them to continue, perhaps a profitable mercantile house, with established correspondence, till as son is grown up fit to undertake and go on with it, to the lasting advantage and enriching of the family.
Elizabeth Timothy’s name never appeared in the colophon of the Gazette. The editions were published under the name of her son, Peter Timothy. The partnership between Benjamin Franklin and Lewis Timothy terminated at the latter’s death, but no copy of an agreement between Elizabeth Timothy and Benjamin Franklin has been found, nor have any documents pertaining to her purchase of the Printing House, other than Franklin’s own account in his autobiography. She and Peter continued publishing The South-Carolina Gazette, with the colophon “Charles-Town - Printed by Peter Timothy, in King’s-Street.”
Peter Timothy printed a notice on Tuesday, June 16, 1739, addressed to his Goose Creek subscribers who had complained that their Gazettes were not being received regularly. He noted that it was “not through my Neglect, for I send them constantly every Week to Mr. Childermas Croft who informs me that he meets with Opportunities enough, but the Persons who go up to those Places refuse to carry them.” He requested “proper Directions where they may be sent … that they may have less cause of Complaint.”
In September of that year, the burials of two of the younger Timothy children, Joseph, aged seven, and Charles, aged eleven, were recorded in St. Philip’s Parish, Charles Towne. The cause of their deaths is not known, but there was another yellow fever epidemic in Charles Towne in 1739.
By the end of 1739, Elizabeth Timothy had bought out Franklin’s interest in the partnership, becoming the first woman in the American colonies to own and publish a newspaper. That year, Franklin wrote in his autobiography, “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 of Carolina.”
The great fire of November 18, 1740, was reported in the Gazette, which described the conflagration as having “consumed the Houses from Broad-Street and Church-Street down to Granville’s Bastion” and “likewise consumed all the Houses on the West side of Church-Street, from Broad-Street to Tradd-Street, opposite to Coll. Brewton’s.”
It wasn’t long before history revealed the spark within Peter Timothy as he matured and became a force in the fight for liberty. Peter’s first foray into public discord was the 1740 war of words between Anglican Commissary Alexander Garden (under a pen name) and the Rev. George Whitefield that was published in the Gazette. For those who may have seen the recently released film The Great Awakening or who are aware of its subject, you will be familiar with Whitfield’s preaching in the colonies.
Peter was accused, along with Hugh Bryan and the Rev. Whitefield, of publishing a letter written by Bryan to the General Assembly stating that “the clergy of South Carolina broke their canons daily” and that God was going to punish Charles Towne for the iniquities of the slave owners and the Anglican Church. As one can imagine, the matter caused a good bit of discord, but after Bryan apologized to the Assembly, no one was charged. Peter Timothy’s involvement in this turmoil placed him at the center of a controversial topic of great interest throughout the colonies. Since he was 16 at the time, we assume his mother oversaw and approved the content printed in the paper.
In 1742, Elizabeth Timothy outlined the difficulties she faced while publishing Trott’s The Laws of the Province of South Carolina, and her request for an increase to £6 per sheet was approved by the South Carolina Assembly. Although her son’s name continued to appear in the colophon as printer, it was she who submitted and paid bills until 1746. For seven years, she managed the business and reared her children, providing Peter, in his 21st year, with the printing business she and Lewis had planned for him in the original contract with Benjamin Franklin.
On December 8, 1745, Peter married Ann Donavan in Charleston. A year later, to the day, on December 8, 1746, Elizabeth advertised in the Gazette that “Elizabeth Timothy, next to the printing office, in King Street … would be departing the Province in a few months.”
Elizabeth Gay, Cheves Leland and Renée Marshall are all proudly associated with The Huguenot Society of South Carolina.
