Jonas Green

Not the same as Jonas Green, who was born and died in Connecticut (d.1789)

Jonas Green died in 1767, leaving Anne Catharine Green with debt, a print shop, and six children to take care of. Green decided to take over Jonas' print shop and continued uninterrupted publication of the only newspaper in Annapolis at the time. Green fulfilled her husband's contract with the government, publishing the Acts, Votes, and Proceedings of the Maryland Assembly on time. Her reliability earned her the same contract the next year, but in her own name.

Jonas Green, a printer employed by Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Bradford

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Green

Green was born into a family of printers. The family tradition had been begun in Massachusetts by his great-grandfather, Samuel Green,[1] who was himself the successor to the earliest printers in the North American colonies, the Dayes of Cambridge. Samuel Green started his printing business in 1649 and producing a number of notable works, including Elliot's New Testament, translated into the Native American language.[1]

Career

Jonas Green moved to Maryland in 1738, and became the Province's official printer.[1] Green was a protégé of Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia.

He became the publisher of the Maryland Gazette. Its early masthead read as follows:

"Annapolis, Printed by Jonas Green at his Printing Office on Charles Street; where all persons may be supplied with this Gazette at twelve shillings, six pence a year, and Advertisements of moderate length are inserted for 5 shillings the First Week and 1 shilling each time thereafter; and long ones in proportion."

Money was sometimes hard to come by, so Green sometimes traded an ad or a subscription for supplies. His wife, Anne Catharine Green, also helped to make ends meet by selling homemade chocolates at the post office.

The Maryland Gazette and the American Revolution

Green, a born troublemaker, hated the Stamp Act, which among other things directly taxed his newspaper. Refusing to pay, he published the Gazette with what was then a blaring headline: "The Maryland Gazette Expiring: In Uncertain Hopes of a Resurrection to Life Again." Green wrote that because of the Stamp Act, the newspaper "will not any longer be published." In the bottom right-hand corner of the page, where the tax stamp should have been placed, there appeared instead a skull and crossbones. Calmer heads persuaded Green to return to publishing as part of the struggle against tyranny, and he later resumed publication under this banner headline: "An Apparition of the late Maryland Gazette, which is not dead, but only sleepeth." Defenders of this newspaper's claim as "the oldest in the nation" say this brief interruption of publication was not a business decision as much as a deliberate political statement by a determined and courageous publisher.

When Green died in 1767, his jobs as editor and publisher were taken over by his wife, Anne Catherine Hoof Green, making her the first woman to hold either of the top jobs at an American newspaper.[citation needed] A strong supporter of Colonial rights, she continued her husband's policy of operating an independent newspaper under the nose of the royal governor in Annapolis. Ultimately, she published the newspaper for eight years while raising 14 children. The newspaper stayed in the Green family for 94 years.

Family

2. "Anne Catherine Hoof Green". Princeton University. Retrieved 2009-03-18. Married to Jonas Green of Boston in 1738, Ann Catharine Hoof Green seems to have been entirely occupied for the first thirty years of their marriage with bearing their fourteen children, and rearing the six who survived infancy. Upon Jonas's death in 1767, however, she assumed control of his printing operations and successfully petitioned the Maryland legislature to appoint her public printer to the province, a post her husband had also held. With the help of her son William, she completed the printing of the Acts and Votes of the 1767 session. The province at first paid her fee in tobacco, the local currency, until in 1770 she was commissioned to print $318,000 in paper money. Ann also continued to publish The Maryland Gazette, the newspaper established by Jonas in 1745.

• Pennsylvania, Compiled Marriage Records, 1700-1821
• Name: Jonas Green
• Marriage Date: 25 Apr 1738
• Marriage Place: Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Spouse's name: Anne Catherine Hoof

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• U.S., Newspaper Extractions from the Northeast, 1704-1930
• Name: Jonas Green
• Event: Death
• Death Date: Abt 1767
• Death Place: Annapolis, Maryland
• Newspaper: Boston: Various Newspapers
• Publication Date: 10 Apr 1767
• Publication Place: Massachusetts, USA
• Call Number: 109363

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• Massachusetts, Town and Vital Records, 1620-1988
• Name: Jonas Green
• Event Type: Birth
• Birth Date: 24 Dec 1712
• Birth Place: Boston, Massachusetts
• Father Name: Timothy Green
• Mother Name: Mary Green

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References

• Reference: Ancestry Genealogy - SmartCopy: Jul 25 2019, 4:59:15 UTC
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Catherine_Hoof_Green
• “Jonas Green House”
• “ "The Green Family of Printers". A History of Printing in Maryland: Selections From The Marylandia Collection.
• “Dictionary of Literary Biography“ on Jonas Green “Jonas Green, "P.P.P.P.P." (purveyor, punster, punchmaker General, printer, and poet of Dr. Alexander Hamilton's Tuesday Club of Annapolis), was known throughout the colonies as public printer of Maryland from 1738 until his death in 1767. During that time he printed the Maryland Gazette and published the poetry, essays, and sermons of Maryland's most distinguished men of letters, including the Reverend Thomas Bacon, Henry Callister, the Reverend Thomas Chase, the Reverend Thomas Cradock, the Reverend John Gordon, Dr. Alexander Hamilton, and the Reverend James Sterling. In his own right, Green was one of Maryland's foremost essayists, poets, and humorists. Like his father before him, Jonas's father, Timothy Green, took up the printing trade in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Shortly after Jonas Green's birth in 1712, Timothy Green moved his family to New London, where he became public printer of Connecticut in 1713. Jonas learned the printing trade from his father ...”