Joseph Jenckes ★

Born Abt in St. Anne, Blackfriars, London, England. He married November 5, 1627, in Horton, Buckinghamshire, England and worked as cutler/knife forger. He died March 16, 1683, in Lynn, Massachusetts.

A Cutler's London Trade

Joseph Jenckes was born around 1599 near St. Anne, Blackfriars, in London and, following his father, became a member of the Company of White Bakers as a young man while working as a cutler — a maker of knives and blades — in London and later Hounslow, Middlesex, likely drawn there by a community of German cutlers whom King Charles I had brought to England to make swords. Joseph marked his own blades with a thistle, trained at least three apprentices, and once complained that a rival cutler's pomegranate mark looked too much like his own and was costing him business; a sword he made was still held by the Powysland Museum in Wales as late as the 1950s.

America's First Patent

Joseph emigrated to Massachusetts and settled by 1645 in Lynn, where he worked with John Winthrop Jr. to run the Hammersmith Ironworks at Saugus — the first successful ironworks in America. There he invented a water-mill design and a new scythe pattern that anticipated the standard scythes still used two centuries later, and in doing so received a patent from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the first patent ever granted in the American colonies. He went on to cut dies for the colony's coinage in 1652 and, in 1654, was approved by Boston's selectmen to build fire engines for the town. Joseph died in Lynn on March 16, 1683; his descendants include Nicholas Brown, the merchant for whom Brown University is named.