![]() Other printers made significant contributions to the early history of North Carolina. He remained active as a printer until his death in 1785. Davis published later editions of the acts of the Assembly and also started North Carolina's first newspaper, the North-Carolina Gazette, in New Bern in 1751. He also issued the first collection of public laws printed in North Carolina as authorized by the Assembly of 1747, titled A Collection of All the Public Acts of Assembly, of the Province of North Carolina: now in Force and Use, etc. Davis's first New Bern publication was the Journal of the House of Burgesses of the Province of North Carolina, printed in 1749. Prior to his establishment as the public printer, multiple copies of such documents were made by hand for key officials. Assembly brought Davis to New Bern to help with the distribution of their proceedings and laws. The province's closest neighbors, Virginia and South Carolina, only established presses a decade before North Carolina. North Carolina, a primarily agricultural province, did not have the population density of large cities to help support a printer. As late as 1671, Lord Proprietor Sir William Berkeley expressed his relief that North Carolina had "no free schools and no printing, and I hope we shall have none these hundred years." Also, many of the American colonies' earliest presses had started in large urban centers such as Boston (1639), Philadelphia (1685), and New York (1693). ![]() The lack of a press had helped the provincial government control the distribution of information. A number of factors contributed to North Carolina's relatively late entrance into the world of type. ![]() While North Carolina was the ninth of the 13 colonies to establish a printing operation, it did so 110 years after the colonies' first press appeared in Massachusetts. Prior to Davis's arrival, printing jobs had been sent to Williamsburg, Va., or Charleston, S.C. In 1749 North Carolina's provincial government brought James Davis from Virginia to become the colony's public printer and establish the first printing press in the then-capital city of New Bern. Pyatt and Chester Paul Middlesworth, 2006
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