The Sedition Foundry


	Between 1771 and 1775, when Isaiah Thomas operated his press from his home and office on Union Street, many radical revolutionaries met secretly within the walls of his printing office to draft their plans for liberty. Portrayed from left to right are Paul Revere, James Otis, John Hancock and various apprentices and assistants as they proofread the daring November 14, 1771 issue.

22-year-old Isaiah Thomas at his Old No. 1 Press

Isaiah Thomas (above center) was born youngest of three into a poor Boston family on January 19, 1749. From the ages of six through sixteen, Isaiah was indentured as an apprentice to a Boston printer, Zachariah Fowle, where he learned his trade.

In 1767, Thomas lived in Halifax. He worked on the Halifax Gazette against the Stamp Act, a British Parliamentary tax law of 1765 and took such a strong stand against this measure, that he was fired. In 1767 at 18, Thomas settled for two years in Charleston, South Carolina, and worked as a journeyman printer.

On Christmas day of 1769, he married Mary Dill, and moved to Boston in the spring of 1770 where he began a partnership with his former master, Fowle. The first samples of The Massachusetts Spy were issued on July 17, 1770. By October 23, 1770 , Fowle sold his interest to Thomas.

At the end of October 1771, Isaiah Thomas moved his print shop to a wooden house on the "south corner of Marshall Lane, leading from Mill bridge into Union Street," the exact location where the left half of Ye Olde Union Oyster House stands today.