Even if your ancestors never worked on Madison Avenue, some of them may have written an advertisement or two, and put a touch of their personality into their writing.
In 1774 a pair of men took out ads in the Pennsylvania Packet. They didn’t know each other. It was just coincidence that their ads were printed one after the other on page one.
Ad Number 1
The longer ad was the one I was interested in. It was long—unnecessarily long, though it started well. Three thousand acres near Winchester, Virginia, were for sale. There was a description about the different types of land on those acres and what good uses for them might be. There was a sawmill, fed by an “unfailing stream.” There was a site suitable for a gristmill. There was a ten-year rental deal for half the land and the mill that earned the owner £50 of Virginia money every year. It was a long ad but at least there was a point to those opening lines. The description even answered some questions for me in the research for a book. That, though, was only half the ad. The rest consisted of a tirade, the gist of which was, that prospective buyers should not listen to the lies of good-for-nothing neighbors, who thought nothing of casting false disparagement upon his land. He related how he had once been a victim of such neighbors before. He discussed how mean spirited people hide behind pretended neighborliness and false religiosity, only to lie for the sport of it, and how he did not intend to be a victim of such behavior again. Finally, he advised prospective buyers to come see him directly at his home in Winchester “at the sign of William Pitt.”
The second half of that advertisement was certainly an odd way to attract buyers, and an odd use for all that advertising space. It does, however, give some insights into the man’s personality. Even the sign was interesting. William Pitt was immensely popular in the American colonies in the 1760s. Popular enough to get Pittsburgh, and many other places in America, named for him. He was Earl of Chatham, and, as Prime Minister, was responsible for the strategy that drove France from North America at the end of the French and Indian War.
Ad Number 2
In contrast, the other ad was rather short and much more to the point. Certain unspecified lands along the Ohio River were to be divided into lots and sold to interested parties. There was little information. Not even the total amount of land was specified. If you were to judge by the size of the ad, it would seem to be the least important of the two. The name of the man who wrote the ad caught my eye, though. It was George Washington. Not George Washington Smith, George Washington Davis, or some such name, which was my initial reaction. It was the George Washington, but it was a few years before Americans would be named for him by the hundreds, a few years before his image would start to replace William Pitt on signs across America. In 1774 he was not yet President George Washington, or General George Washington. He was still a few months away from being George Washington, Delegate to the First Continental Congress. As far as I’ve been able to tell, his small, nondescript advertisement announced the availability for purchase of land totaling about 60,000 acres. My two “Mad Men” were clearly very different.