The Mysteries of Ezekiel Russell’s Wife

I’ve been writing about printer Ezekiel Russell’s wife, who, according to Isaiah Thomas’s History of Printing, was a great help to him in his business. Indeed, as I quoted yesterday, the first edition of that book said she learned the printing business and wrote memorial verses for broadsides.

Since 2009 I’ve been calling that woman Penelope Russell because that’s what later printing historian Josiah Snow called her in 1847. But over the past few days I’ve realized that her name was Sarah Russell.

That’s clear from a series of documents:

• The record of the marriage of Ezekiel Russell and Sarah Hood in Hampton, New Hampshire, on 7 Oct 1773.
  
• Biographies of their oldest (surviving) child, Nathaniel Pope Russell, born in Danvers in 1779.
• The births of two younger children in Boston in 1785 and 1787.
  
• The baptisms of four younger children at Ezekiel Russell’s house by the minister of the Hollis Street Meetinghouse, all on one day in May 1787.
  
• Real estate records from Boston in the 1780s and 1790s.
  
• Ezekiel’s death notice in the 12 Sept 1796 Federal Orrery, and Sarah’s notice for administering his estate in the 7 Oct 1796 Massachusetts Mercury.
  
• Sarah’s unusual listing as a printer in the 1798 Directory of Boston.
  
• Sarah’s death notices in the 16 Oct 1806 Boston Gazette and 24 Oct 1806 Farmer’s Museum.
  

And then there’s this letter that a descendant has shared online, sent by Sarah’s mother from besieged Boston in January 1776 when the Russells were living in Salem.

So where did the name Penelope Russell come from? Was she just an error by Snow, repeated by later authors through to me? Or, since Waters linked her to the Censor, published in 1771-72, perhaps she was Russell’s first wife (though I haven’t found any other trace of her). If the latter, that could mean both of Russell’s wives were active in the printing house.

Another question: Bostonians didn’t go up to Hampton, New Hampshire, to be married by a Presbyterian minister unless they were eloping. What was the story behind the Russells’ marriage in 1773? Did they have any children in the mid-1770s? Why did they have four children baptized by a Congregationalist minister at their home in 1787, but not the oldest, Nathaniel Pope Russell? (If there was illness in the family, the baby survived, but I don’t know about the middle children.)

Penelope Russell and The Censor

Penelope Russell of Boston is listed in many books and websites as one of the first female printers in the U.S. of A. All these citations seem to funnel back to the first volume of The History of Woman Suffrage (1881), which included this statement:

Penelope Russell printed The Censor in Boston, Mass., in 1771. She set her own type, and was such a ready compositor as to set up her editorials without written copy, while working at her case. The most tragical and interesting events were thus recorded by her.

Matilda Joslyn Gage (shown here, courtesy of the National Park Service) wrote that volume’s chapter on female printers, though she later complained that her coauthors, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, rewrote all her material and pushed her out of the creation of the following volumes.

Gage went on to publish her more radical feminist ideas in Woman, Church, and State (1893), but her biggest contribution to American letters was encouraging her son-in-law L. Frank Baum to write down those fairy stories he was telling the children.

Gage’s remark about Penelope Russell has no citation, but with Google’s help I traced it back through early feminist pamphlets and general-interest magazines to what may be the ur-source: an article by Josiah Snow of Rochester titled “Early Printers, Male and Female”, dated 11 Jan 1847 and published in a History of the Press of Western New-York:

Penelope Russell succeeded her husband in printing the “Censor,” at Boston, in 1771. She was a very industrious and active woman. She not only set type, but while at her case, invoked her muse and put up type on tragical events, in an interesting manner, without any written copy.

Obviously Snow was passing on professional lore; he wouldn’t have seen Russell at work seventy-five years earlier. And some details got mangled along the way.

[ADDENDUM: Perhaps the most important detail is that the wife of Ezekiel Russell, who helped him in his print shop and kept it running after his death, was actually named Sarah Russell.]

The Censor was indeed printed in Boston from 23 Nov 1771 to 2 May 1772. However, at the time Penelope Sarah Russell’s husband Ezekiel was very much alive, and listed on the magazine’s masthead as its publisher. He was, indeed, still in his late twenties. Only after Ezekiel died in September 1796 did Penelope Sarah Russell succeed him as head of the print shop.

TOMORROW: Isaiah Thomas on Ezekiel and Sarah Russell—and he actually knew them.