Maryland Archeology Month

-April 2008-

Sponsored by:

Stories of Liberty
Archeology in Annapolis

Explore!

Archeology Gallery

Lead Printer's Type

Lead Printer's Type

The "Death of Liberty"; Lead Printer's Type From the Green Family Print Shop, In Use Ca. 1765.

Full Text from the Booklet regarding the Green Family Print Shop:

Over the course of four field seasons spanning 1983-1986, Archeology in Annapolis conducted excavations at the 18th-century Green Family print shop. The buried ruins of the print shop are located in the back yard of the Jonas and Anne Catharine Green House on Charles Street. Under the direction of Connie Crosby, Don Creveling, and Barbara Little, the entire print shop was uncovered. Barbara Little produced an important analysis of the printers' type; moreover, what was found archeologically would lead to the interpretation of one woman's challenge to 18th century society.

Jonas and Anne Catharine Green moved to their Annapolis home on Charles Street from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1738. Jonas Green's family had been printers for three generations. By 1745, Jonas and Anne Catharine had begun to print Annapolis' colonial newspaper, the Maryland Gazette. Their print shop, located in a detached building behind their house, would soon play a significant local role in the events that culminated with the American Revolution. Jonas Green was part of a burgeoning industrial class that professed a strict separation of home life from work. This was not an altogether easy task to accomplish with the Green household consisting of Jonas, Anne Catharine, five surviving children of the 14 they had together, as well as several indentured servants, apprentices, and slaves.

The quantity of printers' type recovered from the site provoked much excitement, because of how important the Maryland Gazette was in carrying news of the American Revolution. This is the largest collection of printers' type ever recovered archeologically in North America. Amid the 11,000 pieces of lead printer's type recovered during excavations at the Green Print Shop, one find is worth specific discussion given its association with the broader implications of the Stamp Act. Created by Jonas Green as a means of protesting the British-imposed Stamp Act of 1765, the Death's Head type pictured here is very much like an actual font that appeared in copies of the Maryland Gazette that survives in microfilm and originals at various archives. In addition to incorporating the Death's Head imagery in the paper's printed protests against the various "Intolerable Acts" being levied against colonists, Jonas Green authored several pieces attacking other components of Britain's colonial policy in North America.

One of the ways the people of Annapolis were unified after the Revolution was through the creation of popular opinion. The archeologically recovered printer's type demonstrates how authorless opinion appeared visually.

The different fonts of type demonstrate that after the American Revolution the face of the Maryland Gazette became uniform and looked just like modern newspapers. This uniformity was achieved by eliminating florid capital letters, multiple quotation marks, printer's flowers, and other unique expressions of the printer's art. These signatures of Green family prowess disappeared, even though the Greens still owned and operated the newspaper through the 1830s.

Uniformity was achieved through the use of a large number of very small typefaces, all in Roman font. Popular opinion, which is the idea that people agree with each other on a wide range of issues, when in fact they may disagree profoundly, is actually created as individuals read newspapers and see themselves and their opinions in the text. This fantasy can only be achieved by the elimination of all visible signals of an author's hand.

After Jonas' death in 1767, his widow Anne Catharine Green assumed the day-to-day operations of the Maryland Gazette and became the paper's official editor. Aside from taking control of the print shop, Anne Catharine made a number of other changes that appear no less "revolutionary" than Jonas' public protest of the Stamp Act.

In a review of Anne Catharine Green's 1775 probate inventory, archeologist Barbara Little noticed that a number of items that had formerly been in the print shop were now listed as being in her house. It appears that Anne Catharine Green rearranged a series of print shop work supplies, and brought an eight-day clock, paper, varying tools and a book binding press into the house itself. Seemingly an innocuous discovery, this find affords us the ability to gain insight into Anne Catharine Green's worldview, seen through her relation to work discipline. The change in work routines that resulted from Anne Catharine Green's mixing of work and home life, created an environment of domestic craft production, contradictory to the type of home and work life that Jonas had created.

Eighteenth-century America did not recognize the economic and professional independence of women, but Anne Catharine Green became a well-known printer, head of household, and community leader despite this. She is probably the best-known 18th century Annapolitan woman today.