Biographical Statement

Charles Adams (1805-1883) was a son of Litchfield residents Joseph Adams (1764-1856) and Deborah Marsh Adams (1773-1857). In the early 1820s, Charles Adams moved to New Haven and apprenticed with the printer Thomas Collier, formerly of Litchfield, and worked in the office of Sherman Converse. Adams established a printing business in 1825 and published The New Haven Chronicle in 1827 and then founded the New Haven Palladium in 1829. In the early 1830s, he moved to Bath, N.Y., where he published The Constitutionalist beginning in 1834. He also published the Corning and Blossburg Advocate. When his brother Henry died unexpectedly in 1842, Adams moved back to Litchfield and continued publication of The Litchfield Enquirer until 1845, when it was sold to Payne Kilbourne. Twice Adams assumed the editorship of the paper until it was sold to James Humphrey in 1859. After 1845, Adams was elected judge of probate court, a position he held for fourteen of the next twenty years. He was a deacon of the Congregational Church; a director of the Litchfield Savings Bank, the Litchfield Female Academy, and the Litchfield County Historical and Antiquarian Society, and a member of the Board of Visitors of the Elm Park Collegiate Institute. He married Jane Hinman of New Haven in 1827. She died in 1828. He married Julia Hinman of New Haven in 1830 and they had ten children.

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