CHAPTER NINE

The Beginning of Printing in Baltimore Town—Nicholas Hasselbach—

Enoch Story the Tounger— Hodge & Shober—John Dunlap

of Philadelphia and Baltimore—James Hayes, Jr.

ALTHOUGH it had been erected and laid out in the year
1729, the town of Baltimore began to assume prominence
only in the decade preceding the Revolution. In 1764,
the year before the establishment of its first press, Sharpe
wrote to Secretary Calvert concerning the town on the
Patapsco in these words: "but as you seem to have been
misinformed with respect to the Growth of Baltimore
Town I must observe to you that altho there is more Business transacted
there than at any other of our Maryland Towns, It is in point of both its
Trade & Buildings almost as much inferiour to Philada as Dover is to Lon-
don, nor do I suppose that it contains at this time more than two hundred
Families, it is however increasing & will probably very soon get the Start
of this City¹ tho the number of Houses in this place also hath increased con-
siderably with these few years."²

The decade following the close of the Indian wars, indeed, proved to be
a period of great increase of population in northern and western Maryland,
an increase which brought Bal timore Town prominently forward as the nat-
ural port of the districts only then made safe for agricultural settlement.
The decline of the Eastern Shore tobacco trade and the coincidental growth
of the grain trade of the northern and western sections contributed further
to increase the importance of the port of entry on the Patapsco, so that when
the Revolutionary War began, Baltimore had become a town of about five
thousand inhabitants and the most important port of Maryland. At the com-
ing of its first printer, however, it was, as Governor Sharpe described it in
the passage quoted above, still in its swaddling clothes, and it must have
been with an eye for potentialities that its typographical pioneer set up his
press within its bounds early in the year 1765.

¹ Annapolis.

² Sharpe Correspondence, August 22, 1764, Archives of Maryland, 14:173.

[in]