CHAPTER SEVEN

Jonas Green, Printer to the Province—Qreen and Rind—Thomas

Sparrow, the First Maryland Engraver--Anne

Catharine Green and her Sons

WHEN Governor Ogle sent to Philadelphia in November
1737 to have printed certain Maryland proclamations¹,
there was employed in that city, either in the shop of
Franklin or in that of Bradford, a young journeyman
printer who had lately come to Pennsylvania from New
England, where for generations the men of his family had
been engaged in operating the presses of the Puritan col-
onies. It is possible that through having been employed on the printing of
these proclamations or of other Maryland papers, young Jonas Green had
learned for the first time of the vacancy in the office of public printer of
Maryland, caused by the recent removal of the Parks establishment from
Annapolis to Williamsburg. Conjecture on this point, however, is unprofit-
able; what concerns us is not the manner in which Green heard of the va-
cancy, but the fact that within a few months after hearing of it, he had
removed to Annapolis and set up an establishment in which for nearly thirty
years thereafter he served the Province of Maryland with a fidelity and
distinction that merit remembrance.

GREEN'S ANCESTRY AND EARLY LIFE

Jonas Green was the great grandson of Samuel Green, who, emigrating to
Massachusetts with Governor Winthrop in the year 1630, settled in Cam-
bridge and became in 1649 successor to the Dayes, father and son, the first
printers in English America.² For forty-three years Samuel Green contin-
ued as printer to the colony and government of Massachusetts, surrender-
ing his press finally to one of his sons in the year 1692. During these years
he carried out some amazingly ambitious works, among them the publica-
tion in 1661 of Eliot's translation of the New Testament in the Indian dia-

¹ See preceding chapter. These proclamations had to do with the Maryland-Pennsylvania boundary dispute.
² Roden, R. F., The Cambridge Printers, 1638-1692. N. Y. 1905.

[75]