Sketch of pitcher

Maryland Historical Society

William Faris was born on August 16, 1728 in London, England, and came to Philadelphia as an infant with his mother in 1729 after his Quaker father died in prison for failing to renounce his religious opinions and refusing to pay tithes to the Anglican Church. Faris was raised by his mother Abigail and two stepfathers and apprenticed to an unknown watchmaker or clockmaker in Philadelphia. He came to Annapolis in 1757 and by 1759 was living in the house on West Street, at the "sign of the Crown and the Dial," which he would occupy for the rest of his life. In 1761 Faris married Priscilla Woodward (1739-1817) and fathered nine children-three of their four sons apprenticed in their father's shop.

Faris advertised first as a watchmaker and clockmaker in 1757 and added silversmithing to his busy establishment in 1760. By 1763 he had "procured from Philadelphia a very compleat silversmith." In 1764 he opened a tavern-a typical form of diversification in the period. Craftsmen could not survive in the period on their craftwork alone as the gentry in the eighteenth century ordered most of their luxury goods from England in the latest fashion. Craftsmen were employed mostly for repair work so they often resorted to opening taverns or ordinaries in order to survive. Faris is known in the world of colonial craftsmanship for the handful of case clocks and the few surviving pieces of silver that were manufactured in his shop, but most importantly for his twenty-one silver shop drawings, the only such drawings known to have survived from a colonial American silver shop.

Mantel clock by Faris

Maryland Historical Society

Although silver is what has given him lasting fame, it is the thirteen-year diary he kept from 1792 to 1804-the last entry written a week before his death-that best documents late-eighteenth-century life in Annapolis. Faris recorded births and marriages, deaths and burials as well as locally elected officials and his beloved garden. The diary also served as a journal for weather entries, some days having only the entry "a fine day."

Faris's diary is the only existing Annapolis diary and one of the best documents of post-colonial life in Maryland. The muslin-covered journal of approximately seven hundred pages contains a wealth of information on life in the early Republic. The reader is able to travel back to the eighteenth century, meet the inhabitants of Annapolis in the 1790s, gain knowledge of the medical treatments of the period as well as learn of Faris's experiments with electricity, hydrogen, smallpox inoculation, grafting and hybridizing of flowers in his garden, and myriad other details of life in the period. The diary lets readers reconstruct the vibrant life of a small American town as seen through the eyes of a renaissance man in the period succeeding the American Revolution.

Letzer, Mark B. and Jean B. Russo, eds. The Diary of William Faris: The Daily Life of an Annapolis Silversmith. Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2003.