Jonas Green

Maryland Historical Society

Jonas Green, printer and newspaper editor, was born on December 28, 1712, in Boston, Massachusetts, the fifth of the seven children of Timothy Green and his wife Mary Flint. Green, one of a line of Massachusetts printers extending back to his great-grandfather, learned the craft from his father and then as an employee of a Boston firm. In 1735 Green printed and offered for sale at his house in Cambridge the first Hebrew grammar published in America.

Within a year, Green moved to Philadelphia, where he worked for both Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Bradford. On April 25, 1738, Green married Anne Catharine Hoof (?-1775), a native of Holland who emigrated to America as a young child. Very shortly after their marriage, the couple moved to Annapolis, Maryland, where on May 9 the General Assembly approved legislation appointing Green the colony's public printer. The couple's first child, John, was born in Annapolis on October 18, 1738.

Green served as public printer for the remainder of his life and as publisher of the revived Maryland Gazette from April 1745. His major imprints included Daniel Dulany's Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies (1765) and Thomas Bacon's Laws of Maryland (1765).

Green served as a vestryman and registrar for St. Anne's Episcopal Church, city alderman, postmaster, and secretary of the local Masonic lodge, and belonged to the Tuesday Club of Annapolis throughout its existence, from 1745 to 1756. In addition to his titles of "Poet Laureate" and "Master of Ceremonies," club records refer to Green as "Jonas Green, P.P.P.P.P," the five P's standing for "Poet, Printer, Punster, Purveyor and Punchmaker general."

Jonas Green registered the births of thirteen additional children in the pages of the St. Anne's register, but only four of the fourteen survived to adulthood. Green himself died on April 7, 1767, mourned, said the Gazette, "in the various Stations of Husband, Parent, Master and Companion."

Wroth, Lawrence C. . A History of Printing in Colonial Maryland: 1686-1776. Baltimore: Typothetae of Baltimore, 1922, available as vol. 435 of the Archives of Maryland Online.