Isaiah Thomas and the Press That Wouldn't Quit

Picture this: it is April sixteen, seventeen seventy-five, three days before the Battles of Lexington and Concord. A printer named Isaiah Thomas is quietly disassembling his press in Boston in the dead of night, loading pieces onto a wagon, and spiriting them out of the city before the British authorities can find and destroy them.

Thomas was not just any printer. He ran the Massachusetts Spy, a fiercely patriot newspaper that the colonial government viewed as seditious. Born in Boston in seventeen forty-nine, Thomas had built the Spy into what some described as the most politically charged newspaper in New England. British officials had made clear they intended to shut him down.

So he moved. Fifty miles west to Worcester, the press arrived, was reassembled, and on May third, seventeen seventy-five, the Massachusetts Spy resumed printing, now reporting from the front lines of a revolution. Worcester would remain Thomas's base for the rest of his life.

Fourteen months later, in July of seventeen seventy-six, the Declaration of Independence arrived by post and was read publicly from the steps of the meetinghouse on the Worcester town common. A plaque on what is now the site of the old South Church marks the spot, calling it the first public reading of the Declaration in New England.

Thomas went on to become perhaps the most important publisher in early American history. He amassed a personal library of some eight thousand books, and in eighteen twelve, he used that collection to found the American Antiquarian Society, the nation's oldest historical society with a national scope, right here in Worcester. He had spent his life chasing history, and then he built the institution that would preserve it.