Though the first printing press was imported from Europe into the Americas around 1554, to Mexico City, and Harvard got the first printing press in the English colonies in 1639, “The town fathers won’t allow a press into Boston until 1674,” Gary Gregory says. “Because they’re dangerous. You can print ideas on them. Printing presses do all kinds of things. They caused a revolution.”
Gregory is the owner and print master of the Printing Office of Edes & Gill, situated in the 1715 Clough House, one of Boston’s oldest surviving brick residences, on the campus of the 1723 Old North Church & Historic Site at 193 Salem St. in Boston’s North End.
You know, the church with the famous steeple from which two lanterns were flashed on the evening of April 18, 1775, alerting Paul Revere and other Revolutionary riders to spread warning that British soldiers were coming “by sea,” crossing the Charles River and marching toward Lexington and Concord to destroy the colonists’ stockpile of military supplies. Gun battles ensued there at dawn, igniting the American Revolutionary War.
The British commander was General Thomas Gage, himself a member of Old North Church, who is said to have used its steeple as an observation post to direct artillery fire during the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775.
It’s the church with the steeple immortalized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1860 poem “Paul Revere’s Ride,” which Wadsworth dramatically retold to fuel Northern readers’ patriotism on the eve of the Civil War and to rally readers behind the abolitionist cause.
Though, of course, the current steeple atop the church isn’t that steeple—the steeple from 1775 was blown off and destroyed in an 1804 gale, a replacement with a different design was destroyed by a 1954 hurricane, so the current steeple was built as a replica of the first.
Behind the church, a few steps down into the Clough House, Gregory offers free demonstrations of his replica of an 18th century wooden English common press, dubbed the newspaper press of the Revolution. The power of the press was so instrumental to the revolutionaries that their First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution insists, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom … of the press.”
Gregory prints and sells replicas of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and other founding documents of the United States. He’s also got one of only two existing reproductions of an 18th century copperplate rolling press in the United States, the kind of press deployed by Paul Revere to print his infamous Boston Massacre broadside.
Gregory affects a Ben Franklin-y appearance, dressed in 18th century-style workman’s cap, white linen shirt, neck stock, waste coat, breeches, stockings, leather shoes and ink-stained apron. Holding the wooden handles of leather inkballs, he presses them into a tray of ink, then daubs the ink onto raised bits of the 10,000 or so pieces of type in the Declaration.
“I was a corporate sales manager guy for a Fortune 500 company,” Gregory recalls. He grew up in Ohio, and lived in Los Angeles, until a corporate relocation to Boston in 1997. “I loved history as a kid and I forgot about it until I moved to Boston.” He took a visiting niece to Minute Man National Historical Park in Concord—accidentally on Patriots Day, when the fields and lanes are filled with Revolutionary War reenactors. “There were all these people dressed up. I said I don’t know what this is, but I’ve got to do it.”
Gregory went on to found Lessons On Liberty in 2003, a company leading historical walking tours of Boston’s Freedom Trail, until they had to close during the covid pandemic. The Printing Office of Edes and Gill is Gregory’s own independent nonprofit, started in 2007 and named for Benjamin Edes and John Gill, who printed the Boston-Gazette newspaper.
“I was researching history and everything came back to Edes and Gill and the Boston-Gazette,” Gregory says. “Because that was the mouthpiece of the Sons of Liberty,” the group, including Paul Revere, organizing opposition to certain taxes and restrictions imposed by Britain, which eventually led to the Revolution. Edes himself helped instigate the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Their press was located on Queen Street (now Court Street) near where the old courthouse stands a block from the Old State House.
The first edition of the Declaration was printed for the Continental Congress in July 1776 in Philadelphia. Gregory prints a version of the Declaration based on one printed in January 1777 in Baltimore, because British forces had seized Philadelphia that September.
“What Congress had never done before is put their names on it,” Gregory says. “There’s a pretty good reason for that: treason.”
During the 18th century, presses were constructed in England and imported to the North American colonies. Gregory’s replica, which he bought in 2005, was constructed in 1949.
Gregory lowers the paper onto the frame of lead, tin and antimony type. He wheels the printing bed into the press. He pulls back on a metal and wood arm to squeeze the paten against the plate and paper. Wood braces reach from the top of the press to the ceiling to keep the press wedged in place, to keep it from tipping over from the force. Then Gregory wheels the printing bed in some more and repeats because the wood block of his paten is only big enough to print half a sheet at once.
The finished print is filled with inflamatory, revolutionary ideas, like: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” (Not that the many slavers who signed the document took these words exactly literally.)
The original printer of this version of the Declaration, usually identified as M.K. Goddard, decided to spell out her whole name across the bottom: Mary Katharine Goddard.
Goddard was the first postmaster of Baltimore, official printer to the Continental Congress, and printer of the Maryland Journal and the Baltimore Advertiser, the city’s first newspaper, which her brother William launched in 1773. Goddard became the only woman named on the Declaration, risking her business and her life by committing treason against Britain.
Gregory says, “They sent them out before the ink was dry.”
If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon. And sign up for our free, occasional newsletter so that you don’t miss any of our reporting. (All content ©Greg Cook 2023 or the respective creators.)
