[333] been able to find sufficient corroboration. Stephen Daye was apparently an employee of the president. He was not a successful printer. He did not know how to spell or punctuate, or to do a great many things that printers are expected to do. He was soon after dismissed from the office. He then became a real-estate agent. Among other transactions he sold twenty-seven acres of land for a cow, a calf, and a three-year-old heifer. He also owned land in the outlying districts, mainly in Lancaster, Mass. In my judgment Mr. Daye was not in any sense the first printer. The first printer was Dunster. Although he did not set up type (it is not quite certain that Stephen Daye himself did), he was the controlling power of the press, and so far as a man who marries a printing press, and has control of it, can be called a printer, Dunster was that printer. After Mr. Daye left the press, which was very soon after new relations had been established, a man by the name of Greene, who came over with Winthrop, and was one of the boys of the town, became the manager of the press. He proved to be a very energetic man. He had charge of the press for forty years. He was elected captain of the militia of the town, and held that position for thirty years. After Greene died, for nearly seventy-five years, there was no printing press in Cambridge. After the failure of the first press, a wonderful change took place in the colonies. While it existed, the press of Cambridge seemed to have a paralyzing influence on all enterprises of the kind. There were no newspapers and no other enterprises in the way of printing until after this press failed. It failed because it was a great monopoly. Immediately afterwards newspapers sprang up in Boston, Worcester, and other places, and soon after a press was established in Philadelphia and finally in New York. Franklin quarreled with his brother at Boston, and was driven to Philadelphia, and Bradford, on account of a quarrel with his brother Quakers, was driven to New York. So anxious were these people to find evidence against Bradford on account of his printing heretical matter in his newspaper, that they held up the form of type in order to see what was printed; but in doing this pied the type and destroyed the evidence against him. All these apparently little causes led to great results. The establishment of the newspaper led to the discussion of political questions, and those led eventually to the Revolutionary War.
This is from an informal address not intended for publication, but it is the only possible contribution from one whose chief interests were towards furthering the welfare of the city and the artistic improvement of the printing art.Mr. John Wilson contributes the following interesting facts in regard to his father's important share in the improvement of American bookmaking:—
