Munsell, Joel, 1808-1880

Founder of a printing and publishing house in Albany, New York.

Printer, publisher, editor, and author of works on historical subjects and printing history. Born in Northfield Massachusetts and relocated to Albany, New York, in 1827.

Joel Munsell (1808-1880), printer and antiquarian, was born in Northfield, Mass., the son of Joel (1783-1865) and Cynthia Payne Munsell ( -1864). In 1825, at the age of seventeen, he was apprenticed to the Franklin Post and Christian Freeman in Greenfield, Mass. Later, he worked in a print shop in Albany, N.Y., where in 1827 he went into the newspaper business for himself. Munsell printed many newspapers (e.g., Albany Morning Express) and periodicals (e.g., New York State Mechanic) and edited several. He also published reference books in history and prepared a few compilations, including Outline of the History of Printing (1839) and Typographical Miscellany (1850), a limited edition. Munsell gathered a large personal collection of works on printing and a large collection of newspapers. He was a founder of the Albany Institute and a member of the American Antiquarian Society.

Joel Munsell was born in Northfield, Massachusetts, on April 14, 1808, the son of wagon-maker Joel Munsell, and his wife, Cynthia Paine. In 1825, he began an apprenticeship in a printing shop in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and two years later, became associate editor of the Albany Microscope, a newspaper that he later purchased. In 1834, Munsell married Jane Bigelow, with whom he had three children before her 1854 death. He remarried, to Mary Ann Reid, in 1856, and had six additional children with her.

By the 1840s, Munsell had acquired another printing plant. His publications increasingly emphasized American history, genealogy, and the history of printing. He became interested in the circumstances surrounding the 1777 murder of Jane McCrea, which had attained mythic proportions during the Revolutionary War and its aftermath. Around 1847, he began investigating the truth of the many conflicting accounts of McCrea’s death, most of which blamed a Mohawk named Le Loup. He solicited further information from several historians who had written about the murder, including Charles Neilson and Epaphras Hoyt, and publicized his research through the New York Historical Society, in which he was active. During the period of 1861-1864, he published the New England Historical and Genealogical Register . Munsell’s voluminous output and contributions to American history and the study of typography earned him a reputation as one of the most important printers of his time. He died January 15, 1880.