Author: Prentiss, Charles
Biography:
PRENTISS, Charles (1774-1820: WBIS)
His parents were Pamela (Mellen) and Caleb Prentiss; his father was pastor of a church in Reading MA where Charles was born. He graduated from Harvard in 1795 and promptly settled in Leominster MA, where he married Sophia Gardner (d 1857) and established a publishing business in conjunction with a bookstore and a bindery. The couple had three children. Prentiss's press published various titles up to 1799, including his own Collection of Fugitive Essays and a weekly paper, the Rural Repository, which lasted only 18 months. His brother John joined him in a few of these projects and then left to set up a more successful business in Keene NY. Prentiss thereafter moved about the country as publisher and editor, never staying with one periodical or in one place for very long: he worked in Georgetown, Baltimore, Boston, Washington DC, Brookfield, and Richmond. For two years while he was living in Washington he reported the proceedings of Congress. He also wrote a biography of Robert Treat Paine, Jr. (q.v.), to accompany his collected works (1812) and a biography of Gen. William Eaton (1813); his History of the United States was completed by someone else and published posthumously. He died in Brimfield MA and is buried in Leominster. (Appleton; WorldCat; ancestry.com 6 Jul. 2020; D. C. McMurtrie, A History of Printing in the United States [1936] 2:427 n42) HJ