THE DIAL SIGNED BY STEPHEN GREENLEAF, BOSTON, CIRCA 1745

In 1745, Stephen Greenleaf, "Mathematical Instrument-Maker" on Boston's Queen Street, advertised an array of devices: "Theodolites, Spirit Levels, Semi circles, Circumferences, and Protractors, Horizontal and Equinoctial Sun Dials, Azimuth and Amplitude Compasses, Eliptical and Triangular Compasses, and all sorts of common Compasses, drawing Pens and Portagraions, Pensil [sic] Cases, and parallel Rulers, Squares and Bevils, Free Masons Jewels, with sundry other articles too tedious to mention" (Boston Gazette, 18 June 1745, cited in George Francis Dow, Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Boston, 1935), p. 136). This maker is frequently identified as Stephen Greenleaf (1704-1795), Boston's Loyalist sheriff at the outbreak of the Revolution. However, the man who became sheriff graduated from Harvard in 1723 and later established his own underwriting business; there is no indication that he made instruments. There were numerous men of that name living in the vicinity of Boston at the time, but as evidenced in the settlement of the estate of John Banfill (Banfield), the instrument maker had ties to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In 1745, Banfill, a shipwright in Portsmouth, named his cousin, Stephen Greenleaf of Boston, as the executor of his estate and in Greenleaf's petition the following year, Greenleaf identifies himself as a mathematical instrument maker (Henry Harrison Metcalf, ed., Probate Records of the Province of New Hampshire 1741-1749, vol. 3 (Concord, 1915), pp. 271-272). No genealogical links between Banfill and Greenleaf have been found, but the maker may have been Stephen Greenleaf (b. 1724) who was born in Portsmouth to Capt. Stephen Greenleaf and Mary (Cotton). A similar compass engraved "S Greenleaf BOSTON fecit" is in the collections of the New Hampshire Historical Society (1873.004.001).