Charles F.S. Kendall

• formal_name: Charles F.S. Kendall
• first_date: 1818
• last_date: 1818
• function: Printer
• locales: Richmond
• precis: Journeyman printer working in Richmond in 1818.
• notes: Printer
  Richmond
  Journeyman printer working in Richmond in 1818.
  Kendall was a peripatetic figure in the American printing trade, working for others for all but the early days of that career, and then in partnership with the man who trained him. Born in 1787 in Woodstock, Vermont, he was trained in nearby Windsor – then the largest town in the state and its former capital – in the Federal Gazette office of Nahum Mower there. That association meant that Kendall travelled with him when Mower moved his business to Montreal in early 1807 to start the Canadian Courant and Montreal Advertiser. In mid-1810, Kendall moved to Kingston in Upper Canada (now Ontario) to begin publishing the Kingston Gazette in league with another former Mower apprentice, Stephen Miles; Mower evidently financed the venture but did not journey up the St. Lawrence with his two protégés. Kendall became the journal's sole proprietor in March 1811, when Miles left for Plattsburgh, New York, seeking a more profitable setting. Kendal did likewise in September when he sold the Kingston Gazette to a group of local businessmen (who induced Miles to again take up the weekly later that fall) and returned to Vermont in search of journeyman work there. The abandoned Gazette proved to be the only journal Kendall ever owned.
  Still, Kendall apparently did own an independent press office on his Vermont homecoming. Although laboring initially in the Windsor office of Alden Spooner in 1813, Kendall worked in Walpole, New Hampshire, in 1814 and in Woodstock in 1815-17, when neither town issued a newspaper. Kendall is next seen in the historical record in Virginia in 1818; he was then at work in Richmond – probably in the press complex producing the daily Richmond Compiler and the thrice-weekly Enquirer – when he married Margaret Ramsey, formerly of Baltimore; their marriage notice in the Compiler is the only time his middle initials appeared in print. How long Kendall remained in Richmond is uncertain, but it is evident that by 1826 he had moved on to the press offices of New York City when his wife died there of "consumption."
  The rest of Kendall's working life is speculative, absent a distinct record of his employment. But it seems that he relocated to Saratoga, New York, after the death of his first wife and a remarriage to the widowed aunt of the Presbyterian elder Ezra H. Gillett, where it appears he became a gentleman farmer. He is last seen living in the home of Rev. Gillett in New York City in 1870, suggesting he had returned to the trade there after 1830, though he was then likely retired at the age of eighty-two. Kendall's subsequent fate has yet to be discovered.
  
  
  Personal Data
  
  Born:
  Feb. 26
  1787
  Woodstock, Vermont.
  
  Married [1]:
  Nov. 10
  1818
  Margaret Ramsey @ Richmond, Virginia (d. 1826).
  
  Married [2]:
  ca.
  1828
  Thankful Williams Ripley @ New York, New York.
  
  Died:
  After
  1870
  probably in New York City.
  Children:
  One daughter by Thankful: Mary Jane (1830-81).
  
  Sources: Imprints; Printer File, AAS; Dictionary of Canadian Biography; Canniff, Settlement of Upper Canada; Federal Decennial Census, 1830 & 1870; genealogical data from Kendall and Gillett family charts posted on Ancestry.com (November 2012).
  
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This version of the Index of Virginia Printing was a gift from the estate of the site's creator, David Rawson. The content contained herein will not be updated, as it is part of the Library of Virginia's personal papers collection. For more information, please see David Rawson Index of Virginia Printing website. Accession 53067. Personal papers collection, The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.