The Printer Who Saved the Record

Isaiah Thomas dismantled his press in the dark. It was April 1775, and Boston was a trap — British soldiers controlled the streets, patriot leaders had fled or been arrested, and a printer who published sedition was a man with a target on his back.

Thomas had been publishing the Massachusetts Spy since 1770. The paper was partisan, unapologetic, and widely read. Its masthead carried a snake and the motto "Join or Die." British authorities wanted it shut down and its publisher silenced.

So Thomas took his press apart, loaded the type and frames onto a cart, and smuggled them out of Boston, across the Charles River, and eventually to Worcester. Within weeks, he was publishing again — the same fierce, opinionated newspaper, now from a location the British could not reach.

From Worcester, the Spy covered the war. Thomas printed the first accounts of Lexington and Concord based on eyewitness reports. He published congressional proceedings, military orders, and the political arguments that sustained the revolutionary cause. His press was an information system — one of the few that operated continuously throughout the war.

Thomas was also a businessman. He understood that news was a product and that people would pay for it. His subscription lists extended across Massachusetts, carried by riders on the same roads that moved military dispatches. The Spy's circulation was itself a network, connecting scattered communities to a shared narrative.

After the war, Thomas became wealthy in the printing business and turned to preservation. In 1812, he founded the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, donating his own vast collection of newspapers, pamphlets, and books from the Revolutionary period. He understood that what he had printed was history, and that history required a keeper.

The AAS on Salisbury Street in Worcester today holds more Revolutionary-era printed material than any other institution in America. Isaiah Thomas saved the record twice — first by printing it, then by preserving it.