A History of Printing in Colonial Maryland

A NEW CHRONOLOGY OF AMERICAN PRINTING

If one might assume that the payment to Nuthead of five thousand five
hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco in October 1686 had been made for
services rendered by him throughout the previous twelve months, it would
be possible to set the year 1685 as marking the inaugural of printing in
Maryland, in which case the typographic beginnings of that province
would be coeval with those of Pennsylvania. Indeed it is likely that, find-
ing his press under the gubernatorial interdiction in Virginia in the year
1683, Nuthead had come immediately to Maryland, so that although the
first occurrence of his name in the records of Lord Baltimore's colony was
in the Act of 1686, yet it is possible that in the future there may be found
documents to show that his art had an even earlier origin there than the
year in which its initiator was first mentioned.

If the facts relating to the operations of the Nuthead press in Virginia
and Maryland be accepted at the value which has been attached to them
here, it appears at once that the received chronology of American printing
has suffered alteration. In that case the order in which presses were estab-
lished in the several English colonies would read, as to the first five of them,
as follows: Massachusetts, 1638;¹ Virginia, 1682;² Pennsylvania, 1685;³
Maryland, 1686;⁴ New York, 1693.⁵

The order of priority as suggested in this chronology gives to Virginia
the position which Isaiah Thomas conceded to it in the appendix to his first
edition, and it claims for Maryland the place to which it seems to be entitled
by the testimony of its records.

DINAH NUTHEAD AND THE FIRST ANNAPOLIS PRESS

Dinah Nuthead, the widow of William, was a woman of admirable cour-
age. A few months after the death of her husband, she removed from St.
Mary's to Anne Arundel County, whither, some months before, the gov-
ernment had preceded her. It is nowhere expressly stated that she carried
with her the printing press which had come to her at William Nuthead's
death, but it seems unreasonable to believe otherwise in the light of certain
events which are now about to be related. Entirely without education, not

Dinah Nuthead, or to some other printers working in the Province before that year. There is not, however, the
slightest trace remaining of any other Maryland printers of this period except the Nutheads.
¹ Roden, R. F., The Cambridge Printers, 1638-1692. N. Y., 1905, p. 11.

²Ante. Thomas, 1st ed., 2: 544; also Thomas ad ed., 1:331 and 332.

³Hildeburn, C S. R., A Century of Printing The Issues of the Press in Pennsylvania, 1685-1784. 2 v. Phila.
1885.

⁴Ante. Even if the year 1689 with its printed "Address" be taken as Maryland's inaugural year, the relative
order of this list is not disturbed.

⁵Hildeburn, C. S. R., Sketches of Printers and Printing in Colonial New York. N. Y., 1895.

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