The Weekly Advertiser began in Fredericksburg, Virginia as the joint venture of Jesse White and George W. Johnson in January, 1853. Mr. Johnson disassociated with the paper after six months and Jesse White, born in Stafford in 1790 and a long time resident and printer, continued its publication until interrupted by the Civil War.
The Wallace Library of Fredericksburg possesses original papers [in 1971] of Volumes 1, 2, 5,6 7, and 8 of the nine volumes printed. These are now available on microfilm from the Bell and Howell Micro Photo Division, Old Mansfield Road, Wooster, Ohio, 44691.
The index was prepared by Robert Hodge. The four-page, Saturday newspaper, is mostly advertisements, but its local news in capsule form provides an excellent reference for the events of the time. The issues were scanned for items of Fredericksburg area persons and events. Each entry consists of essentially three parts: Name, Reason for being, and Publication date. This is an early effort by Bob Hodge and did not include page and column numbers. The electronic version was created by the Center for Historic Preservation at Mary Washington College by scanning a copy of the text and then modifying the format to fit a table. If you prefer, or if you have difficulty accessing this database you can right-click the download button and bring the data to your machine as a tab-delimited text file and open the file in your spread sheet program. Be certain to set your fields to text before you open this file in Microsoft Excel or it will assume all dates are twentieth century. download