Background
Abel Buell was the son of John Buell of Killingworth, Connecticut, served his apprenticeship with the silversmith Ebenezer Chittenden and about the year 1762 set up on his own account in his native town of Killingworth.
engraver silversmith typefounder
Abel Buell was the son of John Buell of Killingworth, Connecticut, served his apprenticeship with the silversmith Ebenezer Chittenden and about the year 1762 set up on his own account in his native town of Killingworth.
Almost his first action was to employ his craftsman's skill in raising a series of five-shilling Connecticut notes to the more comfortable denomination of five pounds. For this error in judgment and conduct he was tried at Norwich in March 1764 and sentenced to branding, imprisonment, and confiscation of property.
Released from prison by the Assembly some months later, "from a compassionate regard and pity on his youthful follies, " Buell succeeded in gaining a restoration of civic rights by the construction of a lapidary machine of his own invention for the cutting and polishing of crystals and precious stones.
He next applied his ingenious mind to learning the art of typefounding. In May 1769, Edes & Gill of Boston printed the proof of an advertisement set in types of Buell's design and casting. A copy of this "first Proof struck by American Types" as Gale described it remains to-day in the Yale University Library, the first crude specimen sheet of an English-American typefounder.
In October 1769, as the answer to a printed petition set in another font of his own making, Buell was granted a subsidy of £100 by the Connecticut Assembly to aid him in the establishment of a type foundry in New Haven, but he took no further steps toward the immediate realization of this enterprise.
About the year 1770, he began to exercise his clever fingers in the art of copperplate engraving. In 1773 or 1774 he engraved the Chart of Saybrook Bar drawn from surveys made by Abner Parker to render the entrance to the Connecticut River easier of navigation.
It was probably while employed as an engraver on the Bernard Romans charts of the Florida coast that Buell fell in debt to James Rivington, the New York printer of the Romans maps, and it was probably, too, this work that gave rise to the tradition that Buell surveyed for Romans the Pensacola section of the Florida coast. It is not certain that Buell was ever in Florida or that he came in contact with Romans until the surveys for the charts were completed and the eccentric engineer had come to New York to arrange for their publication.
The debt to Rivington and the unreturned £100 he had received from the Connecticut Assembly forced Buell to abscond from New Haven and to remain outside the Connecticut jurisdiction from 1775 until 1778.
He was enabled to return through the loyalty and industry of his wife Aletta, who kept his silversmith establishment, "At the Sign of the Coffee Pot, " in operation during the period of his absence and ultimately discharged his indebtedness to the government.
The claim of the "inhuman varlet" Rivington, as Aletta called him, lapsed because the printer had joined the British and could no longer prosecute in the Connecticut courts. At last in 1781 Buell began to supply type in quantity to the Greens of New Haven and New London. Meanwhile typefounding had become an established industry in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and thus, though Buell was the initiator of the art in English America, he had forfeited the distinction of being the first to put it on a practical commercial basis.
Until the end of the century he remained in New Haven busily employed as a man of affairs.
In 1789 he went to England to learn cotton manufacturing and in 1793 is found for a short time at "the cotton manufactory near New York. " Two years later he built at New Haven a cotton mill which drew a prophecy of success from President Stiles, but like most of his projects this seems to have failed soon after its beginning operations.
In 1799 he removed to Hartford and began his life anew as silversmith, armorer, and engraver of printers' ornaments. About 1805 he is found as a silversmith in Stockbridge, Massachussets, where under the influence of the religious revival of 1813 he abjured the doctrines of Thomas Paine, which he had previously held, and threw himself into the practise of Christianity with the fervor that characterized all his actions.
He died in the Alms House in New Haven at the age of eighty-one years, described in the newspaper notice of his death as "an ingenious mechanic. "
Abel Buell achieved his chief work as engraver in the publication of a large wall map of the territories of the United States according to the Peace of 1783. Crude in some respects and soon outmoded, this map of 41 x 46 inches yet has distinction in that it was the first map of the new political division to be compiled and engraved by one of its citizens. Another Buell's achievement is his invention of a machine for coining money and formed a company that made copper coins under the supervision of the state for the ensuing two or three years.
He operated a line of packet boats, helped develop a marble quarry, conducted a regular vendue, owned or had an owner's interest in two privateersmen, fashioned silver and jewelry, cast type, practised the art of engraving, made plans, drawings and models for all sorts of engineering work, invented a machine for planting corn, exhibited a negro in the process of turning white, and in many directions turned his hand to things interesting and useful to his community but rarely profitable to himself.
He was married first in 1762 to Mary (Parker); second, probably in 1771, to Aletta Devoe; third in 1779, to Mrs. Rebecca (Parkman) Townsend; fourth, to Sarah Buell, who died in 1803.
