About Maryland Gazette

Maryland Gazette

The Maryland Gazette was founded in Annapolis in September 1727 by the English-born printer William Parks. It was the first newspaper published in Maryland, the first newspaper in the southern colonies, and the sixth newspaper in colonial America. Parks published it, with interruptions, through 1734. More than a decade later the title was revived in Annapolis by Jonas Green, a former Benjamin Franklin protégé, and under Green and his family it became one of the most durable newspapers of colonial and early national America.

The Gazette's long history ran from the proprietary colony of the Lords Baltimore through the Stamp Act crisis and the American Revolution. It was printed by a succession that included one of America's earliest women publishers, Anne Catherine Hoof Green, and the Green family remained associated with it until the early twentieth century, when it was bought by Annapolis's Capital newspaper.

William Parks Founds the Gazette in 1727

William Parks immigrated to America in 1726 and opened a print shop in Annapolis, where he began printing Maryland government documents and the colony's Acts of Assembly. In October 1727 he became the colony's first public printer, commissioned to print government documents for an annual payment. That same year he began the Maryland Gazette, modelling its format at first on British weekly papers such as the Spectator and the Tatler. It began as a half-folio sheet with double columns printed on both sides and later expanded to a full folio of four pages carrying essays, news and advertisements.

In the Gazette Parks published work by colonial writers including the poetry of Ebenezer Cooke and Richard Lewis, the ecclesiastical views of the Reverend Jacob Henderson, and the legal views of the colonial lawyer Daniel Dulany. He also published the first political pamphlet in the region, an anonymous argument in favour of a controversial tobacco regulation, which historians have noted as an early use of print to move political debate beyond a small governing elite and into public discussion.

Irregular Years, Suspension and Departure for Virginia

Publication of Parks's Gazette became irregular after 1730. For a period the paper was suspended while Parks was in England, and after his return in December 1732 he revived it with partner Edmund Hall under the title The Maryland Gazette Reviv'd. The earliest surviving issue has been used to infer a starting date of September 16, 1727, because an issue dated December 10, 1728 was numbered 65. The last located issue of Parks's series was dated November 29, 1734.

Parks moved permanently to Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1736, where he became public printer and postmaster and founded Virginia's first newspaper, the Virginia Gazette. His Annapolis venture thus served as the training ground for southern colonial journalism: the format, the reliance on a government printing contract, and the combination of official work with a weekly paper were all carried from Maryland to Virginia with him.

The Apprentice Who Became John Peter Zenger

One figure connected with Parks's early Annapolis shop acquired lasting fame elsewhere. John Peter Zenger learned the newspaper trade as an indentured servant and apprentice printer associated with the Gazette before becoming a New York editor. His 1735 trial in New York, in which he was acquitted of seditious libel for printing criticism of the royal governor, established in colonial American practice the principle that printing the truth was not libel — a key forerunner of press freedom and of the First Amendment.

The connection illustrated how small the colonial printing world was. A handful of shops in Philadelphia, Annapolis, Williamsburg, Charleston and New York trained, employed or competed with one another, and printers, journeymen and apprentices carried techniques and political ideas between colonies along with their type and presses.

Jonas Green Revives the Title

The second Maryland Gazette was established by Jonas Green on January 17, 1745, and proved far more successful and long-lived than the first. Green had previously been employed as a printer in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin and became printer to the province soon after arriving in Annapolis with his wife, Anne Catherine, around 1738. For years his Gazette was the only newspaper in Maryland, giving it an unmatched position as the colony's news outlet.

Green's masthead directed readers to his printing office on Charles Street in Annapolis, where subscriptions were sold for twelve shillings and sixpence a year and advertisements were inserted for five shillings the first week and a shilling for each repetition. Because money was sometimes hard to collect, Green at times accepted supplies in trade for an advertisement or subscription. His wife helped the household finances by selling homemade chocolates at the post office — a small detail that captured how a colonial newspaper was sustained by an entire family's labour.

The Stamp Act and the 'Expiring' Gazette

As publisher during the Stamp Act crisis, Green used the Gazette — Maryland's only news outlet — to stir opposition to Parliament's new taxes. The Stamp Act, passed in March 1765 and effective that November, taxed printed paper directly, so printers had both a political and a commercial reason to resist it.

On October 10, 1765, anticipating enforcement, the Gazette appeared reformatted with thick black mourning borders under a changed title announcing that it was expiring, in uncertain hopes of a resurrection to life again. A skull-and-crossbones woodcut marked the place where the stamp proving payment of the paper tax would soon have to appear. Other colonial newspapers copied such dramatic protests. Publication was suspended for a time during the crisis before the paper resumed; Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in March 1766.

Anne Catherine Green Takes Over

Jonas Green died in 1767. His widow, Anne Catherine Hoof Green, took over the Gazette and continued publication without a break, with the help of a son. She produced the Acts and Votes and Proceedings of the 1767 Maryland Assembly on schedule, and, after performing the work well, the Assembly appointed her to her husband's post as printer to the province — though it did not pay her until a year after her husband's death. She is described as the first woman in America to serve as a newspaper publisher in that official capacity, and more precisely as one of the first women publishers in the colonies.

Anne Catherine Green had married Jonas in Philadelphia in 1738 and had fourteen children, six of whom survived infancy. Historians have reasoned that she must already have known the family business thoroughly to sustain it, and under her editorship the Gazette printed communications from the northern colonies showing growing protest against British taxation, including accounts of events such as the Boston Tea Party, while also allowing debate in its columns covering both sides of questions.

Through the Revolution and Beyond

Under the Green family the Gazette supported colonial freedom and opposition to the Stamp Act, and it was notable in the nineteenth century for continuing publication through the Civil War, when many other Maryland newspapers were shut down. The paper appeared in Annapolis under successive generations and successors, with the Green family continuing as its publishers until 1909.

In 1919 the Maryland Gazette was bought by The Capital of Annapolis — originally The Evening Capital, launched by William Abbott in 1884, who had purchased the Gazette shortly before the First World War. At that time the Gazette was a weekly covering Anne Arundel County, while the Capital was Annapolis's daily. In 1955 the Gazette shifted its focus to northern Anne Arundel County, and in 1969 it became a twice-weekly paper.

Format, Content and Public Role

From its Parks beginnings, the Gazette's four pages combined essays, foreign and domestic news, official proceedings, poetry and advertisements. As the province's printer, its publisher printed the laws themselves, so the paper stood close to the government it also reported on — a dual role typical of colonial official printers, who were expected to be useful to authority while also selling a product readers wanted.

That closeness changed meaning during the imperial crisis. Communications, resolves and protest reports printed in Annapolis allowed Maryland readers to follow events in Massachusetts and other colonies and to locate their own disputes within a continental movement. The Gazette's role in informing citizens of the political events leading to the Revolution is a central part of its historical reputation in Maryland.

Later Years and the Modern Descendant

The Gazette and its sister publications were composed and printed at numerous locations in the Annapolis area over more than 270 years, with the company moving headquarters seven times, including moves in 1948, 1987 and September 2014. Its modern descendant, The Capital, was acquired by the Baltimore Sun Media Group in 2014. The Gazette title continued in print on Wednesdays and Sundays with daily posting to its website as of 2021.

In 2024 the Maryland Gazette and The Capital officially merged under the Capital Gazette name. That merger closed the separate existence of a title first printed in 1727, while preserving its claim — often made for the Annapolis paper — to be among the oldest continuously published newspapers in the United States, a claim that rests on the Green revival and the paper's successors rather than on an unbroken run from Parks's original series, which had ended in 1734.

Legacy

The Maryland Gazette mattered at three levels. It created the southern colonial newspaper, proving with Parks that an official printer in a small colonial capital could sustain a weekly paper. It demonstrated, under Jonas and Anne Catherine Green, the family succession — including a widow's appointment as public printer — by which much of early American journalism survived. And through the Stamp Act 'expiring' issue, it produced one of the most reproduced images of colonial press protest.

Its surviving issues, preserved in Maryland archives and newspaper collections, remain a primary source for the political, commercial and social history of colonial Maryland — the record of a province arguing, in print, its way toward revolution.