Peter Edes

Edes was born in Boston, Massachusetts; died in Bangor, Maine. He received his basic education at the Boston Latin School.[2] Peter Edes' great-grandfather, John Edes, emigrated from Lawford, England and met and married Mary (Tufts) Edes on October 15, 1674. They had a son, also named John, who married Grace Lawrence, and became the parents of Peter Edes, the elder, and resided in Charleston, Massachusetts, who died in 1787. Their second son, Benjamin Edes, was the father of Peter Edes.[3]

All persons of the name Edeas or Eades living in America in the 18th century were descendants of John and Mary Edes. Their son Peter was a subscriber to Thomas Prince's 1736 work, the New England Annals. As an english family they were entitle to wear the family coat of Arms, but the American family resented the tyranny of England and broke of all association with the Englis and the mother country.[3]

Peter Edes was a printer's apprentice to his father, Benjamin Edes who, with John Gill, printed the radical newspaper The Boston Gazette, which was fundamental in instigating the Boston Tea Party and rallying the cause for independence.[4]

When the American Revolutionary War was approaching he was an outspoken advocate of American independence.[2] In Sept., 1775, at age 19, Edes he was arrested by General Thomas Gage two days after the Battle of Bunker Hill and was taken prisoner to Boston, on June 19, 1775, after he drew attention to himself from British Regulars by watching the Battle of Bunker Hill with ‘anxious and tearful’ eyes for his countrymen. He received a sentence of seventy-five days,[lower-alpha 2] for having fire-arms concealed in his house. Edes had already attracted their attention in April when he stood on Beacon Hill and watched the British retreat from the Battle of Lexington while making no effort to conceal his joy. He was one of the participants at the Boston Tea Party.[5][2]

In 1779, Benjamin Edes formed a partnership with his two sons Peter and Benjamin and established the printing firm of Benjamin Edes & Sons who continued publication of The Boston Gazette, from 1779-1784. About three years later Peter began business for himself in Boston, but was not very successful.[6]

Thereafter Edes established a printing shop in Boston. He then removed to Newport, Rhode Island on March 1, 1787, and published the Newport Herald. In 1796 he removed to Augusta, Maine, the first printer to establish there,[7] and where in 1797 he published the Kennebeck Intelligencer. He afterward lived in Hallowell and finally settled in Bangor where he died.[8][2]

• List of early American publishers and printers
• Colonial history of the United States

• Edes, Peter (1901). Samuel Lane Boardman (ed.). Peter Edes, Pioneer Printer in Maine : a Biography : His Diary While a Prisoner by the British at Boston in 1775. De Burians.

• Wilson, James Grant; Fiske, John, eds. (1892). Appletons' cyclopedia of American biography. II. New York, D. Appleton and Company.

• Thomas, Isaiah (1874). The history of printing in America, with a biography of printers. I. New York, B. Franklin.

• Wroth, Lawrence C. (1938). The Colonial Printer. Portland, Me., The Southworth-Anthoensen press.

• "Peter Edes, Apprentice Printer, Imprisoned by the British". New England Historical Society. Retrieved December 8, 2021.