William Yates Murray

• formal_name:
• first_date: 1796
• last_date: 1796
• function: Publisher
• locales: Petersburg
• precis: Publisher of the Petersburg Intelligencer (1796) as a partner to William Prentis (340).
• notes: Publisher
  Petersburg
  Publisher of the Petersburg Intelligencer (1796) as a partner to William Prentis (340).
  Murray was evidently a journeyman printer with deep roots in the Petersburg area. He was the son of Susan Yates (1746-95) and John Bolling Murray (1744-82), grandson of the Robert Bolling who settled Blandford plantation (today part of the City of Petersburg) in the late 1600s. When his father died in 1782, at the early age of thirty-three, he left a family of eight minor children, suggesting William was bound out as an apprentice about the time William Prentis and Miles Hunter (229) started the Petersburg Intelligencer (July 1786) when he was fourteen. That Murray was a trained printer was noted prominently in his obituaries.
  Murray also died young, just twenty-four in 1796, and his memorialists all noted that he was then a partner to Prentis; however, Murray is not recorded as such in the standard bibliographic references, and the surviving copies of the Intelligencer from that year do not reveal the date that he would have been one. Still, Murray's familial connections likely made him an attractive financial partner for Prentis in the heat of a hotly-contested presidential campaign in which the Federalist publisher opposed the state's favorite son, Thomas Jefferson. Indeed, the suggestion that Murray was a political-financial partner, as well as a print-trade one, is buttressed by the fact that his death was reported in Federalist newspapers alone, all of which recorded his profession as a printer.
  
  
  Personal Data
  
  Born:
  In
  1772
  Mecklenburg County, Virginia.
  
  Died:
  Oct. 1
  1796
  Petersburg, Virginia.
  
  
  Neither married nor fathered any children.
  
  Sources: Death notices in Petersburg Intelligencer, Oct. 4, 1796, Virginia Herald [Fredericksburg], Oct. 11, 1796; genealogical data from Murray, Yates, and Bolling family charts posted on Ancestry.com (August 2012).
  
• Related Bios:
  • William Prentis

This version of the Index of Virginia Printing was a gift from the estate of the site's creator, David Rawson. The content contained herein will not be updated, as it is part of the Library of Virginia's personal papers collection. For more information, please see David Rawson Index of Virginia Printing website. Accession 53067. Personal papers collection, The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.