The National Library of Canada is negotiating to have the country’s first newspaper, a 250-year-old edition of the Halifax (N.S.) Gazette, returned permanently to Canada. Currently on loan from the Massachusetts Historical Society, the original copy of the paper was unveiled at a special ceremony March 20 at NLC in Ottawa. Published Monday, March 23, 1752, by John Bushell of Boston, the two-page paper was given to the MHS in a stack of Gazettes by an unknown donor in the mid-1800s.
NLC Librarian Roch Carrier said in the March 21 Halifax Herald that he’s trying to keep this part of Canada’s history in the country permanently, and is encouraged by the MHS’s initial response, adding, “I think we’ll be able to achieve what we want to do, bringing this first newspaper back to Canada where it belongs.”
The library celebrated the anniversary of the first Gazette with events in Halifax, including a reprinting of the issue at the Public Archives of Nova Scotia. Carrier said that reading the newspaper is like stepping into a time machine: “You read and it takes you back through time to another society where people in North America were worried about catching smallpox. You know what people were talking about around the dining table, you know what they were talking about in the taverns.”
The newspaper can be read on the NLC’s Web site at www.nlc-bnc.ca.
Posted March 25, 2002.