Delaware Paper Manufactory

Joshua Gilpin, the son of Thomas Gilpin, a wealthy Quaker merchant in Philadelphia, established the first paper mill in Delaware in 1787. A converted snuff mill, it was located on the Brandywine Creek a few miles north of Wilmington. The first public notice of the mill was an appeal for rags by Joshua Gilpin & Company which appeared in the Delaware Courant on May 12, 1787. The first paper was manufactured in June 1787. It is uncertain whether the broadside described above was printed before or after the advertisement in the Delaware Courant, but it certainly appeared before June 1787.

The broadside is unrecorded in all bibliographies of eighteenth-century American printing, and this appears to be the only known copy.