Zamorano, Agustín Juan Vicente (1798–1842)

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Zamorano, Agustín Juan Vicente (1798–1842)

Agustín Juan Vicente Zamorano (b. 1798; d. 1842), Spanish military officer in California and printer. A native of Saint Augustine, Florida, Zamorano served as a royalist cadet in the Mexican Wars of Independence. As a lieutenant of engineers, he went to California with Governor José María Escheandía in February 1825. While commandant of the presidio at Monterey (1831–1836), Zamorano ordered (from Boston) the first printing press in California in 1834; the first work printed on it, in the same year, was a set of regulations. Zamorano surveyed the Santa Rosa settlement for Governor José Figueroa in 1834, and the following year he printed Figueroa's Manifesto a la República mejicana, which concerned colonization. He served as commandant of Loreto in 1839–1840 and was named inspector of Alta California in 1842. He died shortly after his arrival in San Diego.

See alsoFigueroa Alcorta, José .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

George L. Harding, Don Agustín V. Zamorano: Statesman, Soldier, Craftsman, and California's First Printer (1934).

Cecil Alan Hutchinson, Frontier Settlement in Mexican California (1969).

                                 W. Michael Mathes

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