Read, Jonathan

Flourished: New York

Jonathan Read was a Baptist, military officer, public servant, and inventor. He lived and worked in Pittstown in Rensselaer County, New York, throughout the nineteenth century, alongside his wife, Charlotte, and their children. He served in New York's Sixth Artillery Regiment at the rank of colonel, and later attained the rank of general. In 1822, he became a deacon for the Baptist Church of Pittstown, and in 1830 he won election as the town's justice of the peace. In March 1842, he obtained a patent for a reaper (a kind of mechanical harvester).

U.S. Census Office, First Census of the United States (1800), Pitt's Town, Rensselaer County, NY, 39; Hugh Hastings, ed., Military Minutes of the Council of Appointment of the State of New York, 1783-1821 (Albany: James B. Lyon, 1901), 3:2038; U.S. Census Office, Fourth Census of the United States (1820), Pittstown, Rensselaer County, NY, 121; Nathaniel Bartlett Sylvester, History of Rensselaer Co., New York (Philadelphia: Everts and Peck, 1880), 479; George B. Anderson, Landmarks of Rensselaer County, New York (Syracuse, NY: D. Mason, 1897), 481; Rollin Hillyer Cooke, ed., Historic Homes and Institutions and Genealogical and Personal Memoirs of Berkshire County, Massachusetts (New York: Lewis, 1906), 1:219; U.S. Census Office, Fifth Census of the United States (1830), Pittstown, Rensselaer County, NY, 143; U.S. Census Office, Sixth Census of the United States (1840), Pittstown, Rensselaer County, NY, 323; Jonathan Read, Read's Horse-Power Reaper, United States, Patent US 2,488, 12 March 1842; New York, New York, U.S., Index to Death Certificates, 1862-1948, (Lehi, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2020).