Abstract

"Networks for Sale: Advertising and Infrastructure in the US, 1830-1860"

Jennifer Black, Misericordia University (jblack2@misericordia.edu)

This paper examines the business structure of the first advertising agent in the United States, Volney Palmer, pointing to the self-expressed and longitudinal ways he served the public interest through the cultivation and integration of commercial networks in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. First, Palmer framed his business as serving the public interest—facilitating commerce between urban merchants and wholesalers, on the one hand, and rural newspaper editors, merchants, and ultimately consumers, on the other. Promising fair rates, economies of scale, and minimized risk, Palmer argued that small business owners could reap substantial profits from advertising. In many ways, it was Palmer’s client network that he was offering to sell—his business connections with rural newspaper editors became a valuable “product” that he could mobilize to drum up additional advertising revenues.
But in other ways, Palmer’s business model served the public interest because it laid the groundwork for commercial distribution and advertising later in the century. This paper applies a geographic lens to Palmer’s business model and client list, showing how canals provided the critical distribution networks for both Palmer’s business communication and the goods he promised to push toward the hinterlands in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and elsewhere. Palmer’s work to connect urban distributors with rural merchants and consumers helped to map and, subsequently, integrate a regional commercial network in the US before the Civil War. His efforts to share information about this network were later copied by admen such as George Rowell in the post-bellum years. Thus, while the expansion of the railroads after 1870 has been identified as a primary factor in the growth of America’s national market, Palmer’s reliance on canal infrastructure to build his media networks in the antebellum years shows that the structure for national distribution and media networks was laid much earlier in the nineteenth century.