THOMAS, ISAIAH (1749-1831), American printer, was born in Boston, Mass., on Jan. 19, 1749. He was apprenticed in 1756 to Zechariah Fowle, a Boston printer, with whom, after working as a printer in Halifax, N.S., Portsmouth, N.H., and Charleston, S.C., he formed a partnership in 1770. He issued in Boston the Massachusetts Spy three times each week, then (under his sole ownership) as a semi-weekly, and beginning in 1771, as a weekly which soon espoused the Whig cause and which the gov ernment tried to suppress. On April 16, 1775 (three days before the battle of Concord, in which he took part) he took his presses and types from Boston and set them up at Worcester, where he was postmaster for a time ; here he published and sold books and built a paper-mill and bindery, and continued the paper until about 2802 except in 1776-78 and in 1786-88. The Spy supported Washington and the Federalist party. In Boston Thomas pub lished, in the Royal American Magazine, which was con tinued for a short time by Joseph Greenleaf, and which contained many engravings by Paul Revere; and in 1775-1803 the New England Almanac, continued until 1819 by his son. He set up
printing houses and book stores in various parts of the country, and in Boston, with Ebenezer T. Andrews, published the Massa chusetts Magazine, a monthly, from 1789 to 1793. At Walpole, N.H., he published the Farmer's Museum. About 1802 he gave over to his son, Isaiah Thomas, Jr., his business at Worcester including the control of the Spy. Thomas founded in 1812 the American Antiquarian Society. He died in Worcester on April 4, 1831.