Connecticut Almanack, The.
Scarce
Printed by Connecticut’s First Woman Printer
[Printing]. (Watson, Hannah). [Strong, Nehemiah]. The Connecticut Almanac for the Year of Our Lord 1778; And from the Creation of the World 5717. Being the second after Bissextile or Leap Year. Wherein are contained all things necessary for such composition. Adapted to the horizon and meridian of Hartford latitude 41 degrees 56 minutes north; longitude 72 degrees 52 minutes westward of the meridian of Greenwich (according to the latest observations) but may serve indifferently for all the towns in Connecticut. Hartford: Printed and Sold by Hannah Watson, near the Great-Bridge, 1778.
12mo.; pages foxed and browned; lightly chipped and soiled at edges; contemporary marbled wrappers. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of the first almanac printed by a woman in Connecticut, who was also that state’s first woman printer. OCLC lists only two copies, at Central Connecticut State University and the Library of Congress. Evans 15608; Drake 314; Hudak 13-7 and pages 424, 439, and 713.
Composed of eight leaves, this almanac was rebound in marbled paper wrappers; the title page mentions that Watson lived in Hartford and had her printing office in that town, “near the Great-Bridge.” The verso of the title page begins, “To the Reader,” and includes information about tides, superior and county courts, and farmers meetings. Each page that follows is devoted to an entire month – January (page 3), February (page 4) and March (page 5), and so on – the last two pages are devoted to information about lunar eclipses, quarters of the astronomical year, and a mathematical question.
Watson came into publishing involuntarily – and unexpectedly – when her husband Ebenezer, the publisher of the Hartford Courant, died of smallpox in 1777; at the time, the Courant boasted the largest circulation of any newspaper in America (it was started in 1764). Watson was twenty-seven years old and the mother of five children all under the age of seven when she took over the additional responsibilities of publishing the paper and running the paper mill that supplied it. Remarkably, Watson never missed an issue, even after the paper mill burnt down in early 1778. With the help of Sarah Ledyard – who was the widow of Austin Ledyard, Ebenezer Watson’s partner in the paper mill – Watson successfully appealed to the Connecticut Assembly to have the mill rebuilt. In 1779, Watson married her neighbor, Barzillai Hudson, who succeeded her in publishing the paper.
Watson published the Courant from 1777 to 1779; she was the first of only two women to hold that post in the newspaper’s history; the next woman to do so was Marty Petty, nearly two hundred years later, in the 1990s. In addition to the almanacs, Watson also printed a handful of pamphlets and broadsides, including Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis…Addressed to General William Howe (n.d.), Bernard Roman’s Annals of the Troubles of William Howe (1782), and Ezra Stile’s inaugural address at Yale College (1778).
Watson (1749-1807), was born in Lebanon, Connecticut; she married Ebenezer Watson on August 1, 1771. The lead article in the first issue of the Courant that Watson published, on September 22, 1777, was addressed, “To the Ladies” and asked women to save rags, which the newspaper would purchase to use for fuel. Watson would also take out advertisements for herself, asking, for instance, for all people indebted to her late husband to repay their debts to her at the printing office.
The contents of this almanac were compiled by Nehemiah Strong (1729-1807), a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Yale University who is attributed with the authorship of several such almanacs of New England in the eighteenth century, including a second one for Watson in 1779.
Connecticut Journalism Hall of Fame: www.ctspj.org/watson.html
Early American Women Printers and Publishers 1639-1820, by Leona M. Hudak,
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