Stephen Day

Background

Stephen Day was born in England about 1594.

Career

Day was a locksmith in Cambridge, England, in 1618. Later he and his family emigrated to New England in the ship John of London, under contract to work two years for the Rev.  Josse Glover of Sutton, Surrey.  Glover brought with him a printing press which cost  ‎£20, a font of type, and  ‎£60 worth of paper, but died on the voyage to Boston.  Mrs. Glover settled in Cambridge, and purchased a house for the Days, on the present Holyoke St. There the press was probably set up.  

The first imprint, a single sheet reproducing the Freeman's Oath of the colony, was issued within six months.  There are known to have been twenty-two imprints made by the Cambridge press before 1649, when Samuel Green became the printer: the Freeman's Oath; ten annual almanacs; five Harvard commencement broadsides; the Capital Laws, 1642; The Book of General the Lawes and Libertyes, 1648; the Bay Psalm Book, 1640; a spelling book, 1643; Winthrop's Declaration of . .. the Narrowgansets, 1645; and Norris's Catechism, 1648.  Copies of only nine of the twenty-two are known to be extant.  

Stephen Day's relationship to the Cambridge press during this period is a matter of conjecture.  The General Court made him a land grant on December 10, 1641, as "the first that set upon printing", but his name does not appear on any existing imprint.  There is no evidence that he knew anything about printing before coming to America; and his letters are those of an uneducated, almost illiterate, man.  

As a locksmith he undoubtedly set up the press, and managed it for Mrs. Glover.  She married, on June 21, 1641, Henry Dunster, to whose house, on the site of Massachusetts Hall, the press was soon removed.  When Mrs. Dunster died in 1643, Stephen Day, who disliked President Dunster, may then have left the management of the press to his son Matthew, who had probably been apprenticed to the printing trade in England, and whose name appears on the title page of the Almanac for 1647.  Mr. Wilberforce Eames, however, believes that the press remained under the nominal if not actual management of Stephen until 1649, and that he should be credited with all previous imprints.  Stephen Day had acquired considerable land by 1642, when he became active as a mining prospector in the wilderness for the Winthrops and as a promoter of ironworks at the plantation of Nashaway (Lancaster), of which he was an "undertaker. " Committed by a local court "for his defrauding several men" in 1643, he was released two days later by the General Court.

About 1655 Day forfeited his rights in Nashaway for nonresidence, settled down to his old trade in Cambridge, joined the church,  and died, leaving a small property, including gunsmith's and locksmith's tools.  His name is spelled Day in most contemporary documents, and in the greater part of his surviving signatures; in the others it is spelled Daye.  

Achievements

• Stephen Day is remembered as the first printer in British America. The first imprint, a single sheet reproducing the Freeman's Oath of the colony, was issued in America by Day.

Connections

In 1618 Day married Rebecca, the widow of Andrew Bordman, a baker of that town.  In the summer of 1638, with his wife, two boys, and stepson, he emigrated to New England in the ship John of London.

He married a second time in 1664.

Spouse:

Rebecca Day