Before settling in Hudson, Stoddard served an apprenticeship at one of New England’s leading journals, the Connecticut Courant in Hartford.⁶  It was here that he learned the printing and newspaper trades.

In the fall or winter of 1784, Stoddard and his wife Patience took up residence in the fledgling city of Hudson, which had been founded just one year earlier by thirty Quaker merchant-seamen from Massachusetts and Rhode Island.  Stoddard set up a printing office and bookstore at the southeast corner of Third and Warren Streets the following spring.⁷

On April 7, 1785, he began publication of Hudson’s first newspaper, the Hudson Weekly Gazette, in partnership with Charles R. Webster, a fellow apprentice at the Connecticut Courant.  Webster had arrived in Albany several years earlier and set up a printing shop before reviving publication of the Albany Gazette.  He withdrew from the Hudson newspaper in 1786.  Stoddard continued to publish the Hudson Weekly Gazette until 1803-1804, by which time he had become discouraged by the acrimony of party politics. He also published the short-lived literary journals Columbian Magazine from 1814 to 1815 and Messenger of Peace, Devoted to Doctrine, Religion, and Morality from 1824 to 1825.

Stoddard’s printing office produced more than 400 titles in addition to printing Stoddard’s Diary or Columbia Almanack from 1785 into the 1830s⁸.  Some of these titles fell into the category of “chapbooks,” or cheap printed material usually containing engraved illustrations.  In addition to books, Stoddard also printed pamphlets and broadsides.  In the late 1790s, the Hudson city government contracted Stoddard to print paper currency, which substituted for small silver and copper coins that had become scarce.¹⁰ 

The books printed by Stoddard from 1785 into the early decades of the nineteenth century were frequently religious in nature, including sermons delivered at churches in Albany, Schenectady and Hudson, histories of the bible and of biblical figures and compilations of hymns and spiritual songs.  In the closing years of the eighteenth century Stoddard also printed titles relating to the formation and development of the United States government as well as documents associated with the nation’s founding fathers, including Washington’s Farewell Address, printed in 1797.  In his portrait of Stoddard, Ammi Phillips depicted the “pioneer printer of Hudson” holding a copy of the address.  Three years later, Stoddard printed George Washington’s will and a schedule of his property to be sold.

View of Hudson from Athens, c.1820.  Engraving by Hill after a watercolor by William Guy Wall, Hudson River Portfolio (1820-1826).  Collection of the Columbia County Historical Society, Kinderhook, New York