The first newspaper, the Bermuda Gazette, was published in 1784.
In 1806 he received in lieu of a pension the nominal office of the writership of the Edinburgh Gazette, with a salary of £300.
As for the " Declaration," the original records of the transactions of Mecklenburg county were destroyed by fire in 1800, but it is claimed that a copy of the " Declaration " was made from memory in the same year, and when, in 1819, a controversy had arisen as to where the movement for independence originated, this copy was published, first in the Raleigh Register and North Carolina Gazette and then in many other newspapers.
In September 1729 he bought at a merely nominal price The Pennsylvania Gazette, a weekly newspaper which Keimer had started nine months before to defeat a similar project of Franklin's, and which Franklin conducted until 1765.
Franklin wrote a paper on the causes of earthquakes for his Gazette of the 15th of December 1737; and he eagerly collected material to uphold his theory that waterspouts and whirlwinds resulted from the same causes.
