The Revolutionary Type

More than a decade before the first musket shots heralded a new nation's rise, Jonas and Anne Catharine Green were arming for rebellion in colonial Annapolis, with printer's ink as their weapon. As the publisher of the pro-patriot Maryland Gazette, Jonas flouted British rule by marking his newspaper’s pages with a skull-and-crossbones insignia to protest the hated stamp tax. When he died in 1767, Anne Catharine took over, becoming one of the colonies’ first female news publishers and editors.

The newspaper closed in 1839—its revival decades later led to today's Capital Gazette—and much of what remains is now in the stewardship of a UMD master’s student. 

As an intern for the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Lab (MACL), Emma Collett has helped preserve 1,100 pieces of lead printer’s type excavated from the Greens’ original shop, destroyed by a 1780 fire. It’s the largest collection of its kind in the United States, a selection of which is on display through September at the Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum Visitor Center in Calvert County as part of an exhibit on the Greens and the freedom of the press.

“The Gazette started before the nation formed, existed for 100 years while everything was changing, and offers a firsthand account of running a printshop through the perspectives of different family members,” said Collett. 

As a child in North Dakota, Collett tagged along with her mother to local archives to research birth, death and church records of her own ancestors, Swedish, Danish and English members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who pulled handcarts and rode wagon trains to Utah and formed settlements. She tore into Dig magazine when it arrived by mail, fascinated by archaeological relics revealing similar family histories.

Collett came to UMD’s anthropology department wanting to make archaeological collections more accessible. At the MACL, a repository for all state-owned artifacts, she learned that the Greens’ types were unearthed in the 1980s by the UMD-led field school Archaeology in Annapolis at the former print shop behind their Charles Street home. The surprisingly heavy objects each have a raised letter, symbol or artistic design, carved backward. Three playing card suits are accounted for (no diamonds emerged), as is Jonas’ “Death’s Head” motif, etched under the words, “The fatal STAMP!”

The type sat in storage until earlier this year, when the MACL earned a grant from the MD Two Fifty commission to curate and exhibit them. 

In addition to the printshop collection, Collett has organized more than 200,000 other archaeological relics excavated from the Greens’ property, recently transferred to the MACL from the preservation nonprofit Historic Annapolis. They include glassware, ceramics and newsprint bits charred by fire. The rehousing project offers “extraordinary research potential,” said Rebecca Morehouse, the MACL’s curator of state collections, crediting Collett’s management. “Her attention to detail, eagerness to learn and sense of humor have made her to a pleasure to have on our team.”

Collett is drawn toward Anne Catharine’s pioneering experience two-and-a-half centuries ago, after emigrating to the country from the Netherlands. When Jonas died, Catharine Anne moved the press inside the house so she could put out the paper while caring for her six children. A son assumed leadership of the Gazette following her 1775 death, leading coverage about the War of Independence before another new generation of Greens stepped in. 

“All of archaeology is family history,” Collett said.