Jonas Green

Jonas Green (died 1767) was a colonial American printer and newspaper publisher together with his wife Anne Catherine Hoof Green in Maryland. He was a strong opponent of The Stamp Act.

Maryland Gazette 5 Sept 1765. A skull and crossbones was displayed where the stamp should have been affixed.

Early life Green was born in Boston into a family of printers. He was the son of Timothy Green, who removed from Boston and settled at New London in 1714, and great-grandson of Samuel Green, another printer at Cambridge.

The family tradition was started in Massachusetts by his great-grandfather, Samuel Green, a successor to the earliest printers in the North American colonies, the Dayes of Cambridge. Samuel Green started his printing business in 1649 and produced a number of notable works, including Elliot's New Testament, translated into the Native American language.

The Maryland Gazette and the American Revolution Green, a born troublemaker, hated the Stamp Act, which among other things directly taxed his newspaper. Refusing to pay, he published the Gazette with what was then a blaring headline: "The Maryland Gazette Expiring: In Uncertain Hopes of a Resurrection to Life Again." Green wrote that because of the Stamp Act, the newspaper "will not any longer be published." In the bottom right-hand corner of the page, where the tax stamp should have been placed, there appeared instead a skull and crossbones. Calmer heads persuaded Green to return to publishing as part of the struggle against tyranny, and he later resumed publication under this banner headline: "An Apparition of the late Maryland Gazette, which is not dead, but only sleepeth." Defenders of this newspaper's claim as "the oldest in the nation" say this brief interruption of publication was not a business decision as much as a deliberate political statement by a determined and courageous publisher.

Jonas Green Park is a former Maryland state park now owned and operated by Anne Arundel County. Located on the Severn River in Annapolis at 2001 Baltimore Annapolis Blvd., at the end of the Baltimore & Annapolis Trail, it was established on June 6, 2009, and offers a visitors center, a cartop boat launch site, environmental plantings, and a fishing pier. In November 2018 the park was renamed the Jonas and Anne Catharine Green Park.