Late in 1790 Nathaniel Willis, grandfather of the writer Nathaniel
Parker Willis, established at Shepherdstown the first press within the
present boundaries of West Virginia. For some years he had published
_The Independent Chronicle_ at Boston, and earlier in 1790 he had
been printing at Winchester, Va. At Shepherdstown Willis published
_The Potowmac Guardian, and Berkeley Advertiser_ from November 1790
at least through December 1791.[42] By April 1792 he had moved to
Martinsburg, where he continued publishing his newspaper under the
same title.
The earliest example of West Virginia printing in the Library of
Congress is a broadside printed at Martinsburg in 1792. Entitled
_Charter of the Town of Woodstock_ [Pa.], it consists of the printed
text of a legal document in the name of one John Hopwood and dated
November 8, 1791. The preamble of the document reveals its nature:
Whereas I John Hopwood, of Fayette-County, and Commonwealth
of _Pennsylvania_, have surveyed and laid out into
convenient lots or parcels, for the purpose of erecting
a Town thereon, the quantity of two hundred acres of
land, being part of the tract of land on which I now
live, situate in Union Township, and County aforesaid,
on the great road leading from the Town of Union to Fort
Cumberland, on the River Potowmack; and for the purpose
of encouraging the settlement, growth, and prosperity of
the said Town, as laid out agreeable to a plan and survey
thereof, hereunto annexed and recorded, together with this
instrument of writing, have determined to grant and confirm
to all persons, who shall purchase or become proprietors
of any lot or lots in the said Town, and to their heirs
and assigns, certain privileges, benefits, and advantages
herein after expressed and specified....
Access of the proposed town to the Potomac River is the clue to
why this broadside relating to an otherwise remote location in
Pennsylvania should have been printed in this part of West Virginia.
The _Charter_ is the third recorded West Virginia imprint apart from
newspaper issues, and the Library of Congress has the only known copy.
Written on the verso is: Col. Morr[----] And other early hands have
written there, "Hopwoods deeds" and "no body will have his Lotts."
At the Anderson Galleries sale of Americana held at New York on
November 9, 1927, the presumed same copy of the _Charter_ was sold
from the library of Arthur DeLisle, M.D. (1851-1925), librarian of
the Advocates' Library in Montreal.[43] It fetched $11. The Library
of Congress obtained it in October 1935 from the Aldine Book Shop in
Brooklyn for $35.
[Illustration: (Charter of the Town of Woodstock.)]
[Footnote 42: The latest extant Shepherdstown issue of _The Potowmac
Guardian_, for December 27, 1791, is reported in Clarence S. Brigham,
_Additions and Corrections to History and Bibliography of American
Newspapers 1690-1820_ (Worcester, Mass., 1961), p. 50.]
[Footnote 43: According to his obituary in the Montreal newspaper
_La Presse_, December 22, 1925, Arthur DeLisle obtained a degree
in medicine but never practiced that profession. "M. DeLisle
s'intéressait vivement à toutes les choses de l'histoire et, par des
recherches patientes et continues il fit de la bibliothèque du Barreau
ce qu'elle est aujourd'hui, l'enrichissant sans cesse de livres et
de documents précieux relatifs à l'histoire du droit, ainsi qu'à la
biographie des juges et des avocats de Montréal depuis 1828."]