Part 14 (1/2)

After John Page's third term as governor ended, he and Margaret Lowther Page and their children left Richmond in the first week of January 1806. They traveled to Rosewell by way of Westover and Williamsburg, where they stayed with St. George Tucker and his family. Mary Willing Byrd and Lelia Tucker enjoyed Margaret Page's company, but behind her back they pitied her. Mary Willing Byrd said: ”I wish her more happiness, than I fear awaits her at Rosewell.” Noticing that Margaret Page was pregnant again, Lelia Tucker thought: ”Poor Lady! she is in the way to increase her family, already too large for their means of support.”

John Page let go of more land in Gloucester County during his last year as governor. His estate shrank to 800 acres, most of it uncultivated. With fifteen slaves over the age of twelve, Rosewell could do little more than produce food to support its inhabitants and some surplus commodities. These seldom commanded cash; the plantation cleared, at most, $500 in a year. In his first summer back at Rosewell, Page mused about Virginians and wealth. He told himself that he could have left his family rich if he had refused to pay his debts, perhaps borrowed still more, and died in debtors' prison after conveying his property to his wife and children. His default would not have harmed them, as he had learned from sixty-three years of living in Virginia: ”they would always be respected in proportion to their riches, and...both I and they would have been despised had I left them poor.” He refrained from following this course, he believed, only because he had a strong Christian faith, expressed through the Church of England, later the American Episcopal Church. If he had taken no thought for his soul, he could have told his family ”that they ought to enjoy their hearts desire in all things and say 'let us eat & drink for tomorrow we die.'” If he were not a Christian, Page concluded, he would not be a republican. He would prefer ”a despotic Prince to preserve a greater degree of Order, & security of life & Property.” Appeals to morality would be merely ”a good Countenance to restrain others from injuring me, and mine, & from interfering too much with me when in pursuit of favorite Gratifications.” Only Christian faith had rescued him from such egotistical materialism.

Page recently had heard of a terrible example of the consequences of irreligion. Chancellor George Wythe, still active in court at the age of eighty, was murdered by his sister's grandson, who lived in Wythe's home in Richmond. Wis.h.i.+ng to hasten the day of coming into his inheritance, George Wythe Sweeney put a.r.s.enic in the old man's coffee. Wythe long had been a deist, Page said; this meant that he had raised young Sweeney without Christian morality. The young man wanted money. Nothing restrained him. He forged checks. He killed his guardian. An irreligious Virginia, Page suggested, risked becoming either a despotism or a commonwealth of Sweeneys.

John Page spent the last two years of his life holding a federal patronage appointment under the Treasury Department as commissioner of loans in Richmond. His duties were light, consisting chiefly of signing his name. He borrowed more money to support his family. He wrote to Thomas Jefferson, who gave him the position: ”Rosewell is all I have left, of Land, & by Sales & Deaths of Negroes, I have not enough to Work it!” it!” He and his wife worried about the future education of their children, requiring money they did not have. Margaret Lowther Page confided to St. George Tucker: ”I am very unhappy.” John Page knew. He wrote to Jefferson of ”my dear unhappy Wife.” He and his wife worried about the future education of their children, requiring money they did not have. Margaret Lowther Page confided to St. George Tucker: ”I am very unhappy.” John Page knew. He wrote to Jefferson of ”my dear unhappy Wife.”

In the last summer of John Page's life, Skelton Jones of Richmond, collecting material on the history of Virginia, submitted biographical questions to him. Writing answers took him back to happier times. He recalled the learning and the virtue of his ancestors. His ”dear, pure minded and American patriotic” grandfather, Mann Page, creator of the mansion at Rosewell, had ”checked the British Merchants from claiming even freight on their goods from England.” His father, Mann Page, had received encouragement to pay court to Sir Gregory Page, a baronet in England, in expectation of becoming his heir. ”But he despised t.i.tles sixty years ago, as much as you and I do now; and would have nothing to say to the rich silly Knight, who died, leaving his estate and t.i.tle to a sillier man than himself, his sister's son, a Mr. Turner, on condition that he would take the name and t.i.tle of Sir Gregory Page.” Family tradition had garbled the story: Sir Gregory Turner was already a baronet in his own right when he inherited Sir Gregory Page's landed estates in 1775, becoming Sir Gregory Page-Turner. But John Page had learned from his father's independent spirit that the Virginia Pages did not sacrifice self-respect for t.i.tles and riches.

John Page fondly described his grandmother, Judith Carter Page, who introduced him to the world of books. He remembered ”our highly enlightened Governor Fauquier.” From the age of fifteen through the completion of his studies at the college, Page had lived in Williamsburg while Fauquier made the governor's palace a center of learning, science, and music. Page proudly recalled standing by his ”Whiggish principles” in openly challenging the Tory governor, Lord Dunmore, while serving on the college's board of visitors and on the king's Council. Page listed public offices he had filled. He said that, if he lived, he would write his memoirs. On Tuesday, October 11, 1808, John Page died. Two months later, Margaret Lowther Page and her children again visited the Tuckers in Williamsburg on their journey from Richmond back to Rosewell.

Within days of her return to the neglected mansion she wrote to St. George Tucker: ”To clear the Estate from Debt is my first Object.” She lived for another thirty years, apparently spending most of her time in Williamsburg and Richmond. Following the example of Mary Willing Byrd, she brought order to her late husband's tangled affairs. After eight and a half years of effort she wrote to Tucker: ”I know it will give you pleasure to learn that I am entirely free from Debt, and have no Extravagance to regret in the Past-nor dread antic.i.p.ation of the privations of the Future.” By that time the big brick mansion at Rosewell was ”in bad repair.” Margaret Lowther Page, a New Yorker, and her children were the last Pages to walk as owners across the black-and-white marble floor of the great hall and climb the mahogany staircase to move among more than a dozen rooms paneled in different woods. At her death, the Page heirs sold the Rosewell estate and the decaying mansion-with its leaking roof, broken windows, and rats-for $12,000.

Henry Lee received a letter from Robert Morris late in the summer of 1801, a reply to ”two distressing letters” he had written. Lee was still trying to get repayment of at least part of his $40,000 loan. Morris informed him that his letters had arrived while commissioners of bankruptcy and creditors were going through Morris's papers to make sure they had seized all his a.s.sets before releasing him from the Prune Street prison. His ”good wishes,” Morris told Lee, ”is all that is left in my power. those you have & ever will have.” From that day, if not before, Lee's own insolvency or imprisonment became certain.

Lawsuits, foreclosures, insistent creditors attacked him on all sides. Though Lee had been too young to contract debts with British merchants before the Revolutionary War, John Wickham took him to court on behalf of the House of Hanbury, seeking payment of the debts of Matilda Lee's father, Philip Ludwell Lee. In his customary manner Wickham wrote: ”You will naturally suppose that no further Indulgence can be granted.” But by 1804, Wickham had to report on Lee to his client: ”he & all his sureties had become insolvent.” Lee sold more and more land in Westmoreland County. The Stratford estate was not his to sell, since he had only a widower's life interest in it. Elsewhere in the county his holdings fell from 2,049 acres to 236. Lee's western purchases, like Morris's, had been indiscriminate. Too much property fit the description of his tracts in the mountains above the Shenandoah Valley: ”the situation is very unfavorable, in most places too steep for cultivation; whenever you meet with a level spot, there the soil is very fine, but very few of these spots have I met with that are called General Lee's land.”

Lee had acquired a reputation for deeding the same property to two different people, for conveying to others land he did not own, for promising to convey t.i.tle yet not sending deeds. An agent for one of his creditors warned in April 1805: ”as all t.i.tles of land held under Genl. Lee may be supposed as precarious, these that he cannot shew any evidence of t.i.tle for, must be doubly so.” Sometimes Lee took offense at complaints. After receiving seven letters from William Hodgson pressing him to pay, he replied that he did not like to be addressed as if he were a professed cheat. To which Hodgson rejoined that his letters only stated facts without imputing motives; an unpaid creditor remained unpaid whether or not his debtor intended to cheat him. In July 1805, Nathaniel Pendleton wrote: ”I would give $250 to have General Lee arrested in Fairfax.”

Lee evaded sheriffs for several more years, but by early 1809 he could no longer raise enough cash to fend off his creditors. Yet he did not wish to imitate Robert Morris and give up all his property by declaring himself insolvent. He wrote on March 4: ”I am miserable [in]deed, as I must prepare for jail.” Just before he surrendered to the sheriff of Westmoreland County, he wrote to Bushrod Was.h.i.+ngton. He said that he was willing to return George Was.h.i.+ngton's four quarter-shares in the Dismal Swamp Company to Was.h.i.+ngton's estate without demanding a refund of payments he had made. He had many reasons for regret, but he had it in his power to clear himself of his most embarra.s.sing failure to pay.

Henry Lee entered the Westmoreland County jail on April 24, 1809. During his brief stay there, he and his wife signed a deed conveying all their ”right, t.i.tle and interest” in the Dismal Swamp Company to the estate of George Was.h.i.+ngton. Lee was transferred to the Spotsylvania County jail on May 13. Jailer Thomas Hicks signed a receipt for ”the Body of Henry Lee,” confined at the suit of Nathaniel Pendleton and others. Virginia law did not require that Lee stay locked in a cell. He moved within Spotsylvania County's equivalent of ”prison bounds.” After one year, however, he must pay his debt or give up his property and take an oath of insolvency or go into close confinement. Lee waited eleven months before making his choice.

He devoted his time not to sorting out his confused transactions but to writing his memoirs. He filled long sheets of paper with his sprawling, sometimes barely legible handwriting. He was telling his story of the last years of the Revolutionary War in the Carolinas. His main character was twenty-five years old: Light-Horse Harry Lee, commander of Lee's Legion-a special unit of 100 cavalrymen and 180 infantrymen-repeatedly outwitting the forces of Lord Cornwallis. For good measure he added an account of the last invasions of Virginia, with their climax in the surrender of Cornwallis's army to George Was.h.i.+ngton at York Town. George Was.h.i.+ngton Parke Custis, Martha Was.h.i.+ngton's grandson, later said of Lee's behavior in the days of his financial ruin: ”The fame and memory of his chief was the fondly-cherished pa.s.sion to which he clung amid the wreck of his fortunes-the hope, which gave warmth to his heart when all around him seemed cold and desolate.”

As the first anniversary of Lee's confinement neared, he reluctantly surrendered his property, drawing up a list of his holdings and specifying to which debts they should be applied. His life interest in Stratford Hall he conveyed to his oldest son, Matilda Lee's heir, the last Lee to own the mansion. Henry Lee took the oath of insolvency; Sheriff Edward Henderson and Jailer Hicks released him on Wednesday, March 20, 1810.

Shareholders in the Dismal Swamp Ca.n.a.l Company received from the management repeated calls for money. Each year its sometime president, Thomas Newton, Jr., said that the northern and southern trenches were about to meet at a proper width. But hiring and feeding slave laborers was expensive. Work often stopped as the company ran out of money. The ca.n.a.l made little headway in the summer of 1802. Yet Newton wrote to Governor James Monroe: ”I think the boats may pa.s.s through by next summer.” Two years later Newton wrote to Governor Page: ”I think the boats may pa.s.s through by next summer.”

The Dismal Swamp Company also relied on the labor of hired slaves for its lumber business. White men and black men came to an understanding: the blacks turned out enough s.h.i.+ngles; the whites left them to do it in their own way. Workers spent most of each week in the swamp, felling white cedar trees and cutting s.h.i.+ngles. The men were spread out, a few in each camp, sleeping on cedar chips in low, flimsy shanties built on mounds of leftover wood. If they produced their s.h.i.+ngles in five days, they took two days for themselves outside the swamp. Some weeks they took three. Their owners and other whites in and near Suffolk complained that the s.h.i.+ngle-getters had ”too much leisure time,” which they spent ”improperly.” The black men's labor in the swamp furnished the company with hundreds of thousands of s.h.i.+ngles each year through a system which lasted for decades.

At a meeting in May 1804 the managers of the Dismal Swamp Company resolved: ”The Negroes & etc to be sold.” This decision ended all vestiges of the original scheme devised by the elder William Byrd and afterward persuasively presented to the accommodating Governor Francis Fauquier. The partners at last admitted that for years they had not envisioned a self-supporting, growing population of company slaves who would turn the Dismal Swamp into farmland to make shareholders rich. Their true source of profit always had stood fully grown in the swamp. In 1807 the company's hired slaves made 928,700 three-foot cedar s.h.i.+ngles; in 1808 they made 1,285,900. Antic.i.p.ating larger dividends, the partners bought for the company as many quarter-shares as they could. The two-thirds of Anthony Bacon's share which had come to James Bacon were sold to the company. The namesake cousin of William Nelson, Jr.-William Nelson of Caroline and King William counties-had inherited one-third of the share owned by his father, Secretary Thomas Nelson. Writing his will on Christmas Day, 1806, he said that ”it is now likely” this share ”will be very valuable.” He bequeathed it to his four sons. Of these four-twelfths of a share, the company managed to buy one. A subsequent owner of another twelfth replied to an inquiry: ”should I be disposed to sell hereafter I shall most certainly give the Company the refusal.”

William Nelson, Jr., almost missed the company's meeting in Suffolk on May 10, 1810. He had fallen ill in March, and St. George Tucker had feared that Nelson would die. ”The loss of such a friend is to me irreparable. He was my other self.” But Nelson's health slowly returned during a stay in York Town in April. He walked along the riverbank, picking up sh.e.l.ls. Back at Westover, he did not yet look well. This was not a good way to turn fifty.

The new managers were eager to make money. Writing to Samuel Gist in 1811, the Reverend John Bracken found Gist ready to help him. The Reverend James Henderson pushed his colleagues to make the company more efficient. It ought to stop allowing partners to serve as managers for life, as William Nelson, Jr., had done. Instead, the company ought to choose a president, who would, with managers' advice, ”direct all the Operations of the Company.” Henderson felt frustrated by partners'”stinginess & indecision.” He urged onward the new Jericho Ca.n.a.l through the swamp, establis.h.i.+ng a narrow water course for cargoes of s.h.i.+ngles, connecting Lake Drummond with the Nansemond River. He looked forward to charging tolls for floating other people's s.h.i.+ngles on the company's ca.n.a.l.

Beginning in 1810, the Dismal Swamp Company paid steady dividends to shareholders. That year a quarter-share drew $333. In 1811 a quarter-share drew $500-in 1812, $400; in 1813, $300; in 1814, $600. The estate of George Was.h.i.+ngton, with four quarter-shares, received a dividend of $2,000 in 1811. Before the partners' meeting, Justice Bushrod Was.h.i.+ngton wrote to James Henderson: ”The handsome dividend which you antic.i.p.ate in May furnishes a strong evidence of the prosperous state of the Company's affairs & of the good management of those to whom they have been & are committed.” He approved of Henderson's proposal to seek a charter of incorporation from the General a.s.sembly. Henderson wished that the partners were less delighted with their dividends. They did not heed his advice to reinvest some of their profits. ”Among the Proprietors,” he complained, ”there are some who would not expend one Dollar to receive 20 per Cent Interest.” Their notion of a good report was news of fifty black men working in the swamp, bringing out 20,000 of the 80,000 s.h.i.+ngles coming from the swamp each week to meet a high demand at a price of $16 per 1,000. Years later, warned about ”a waste of Timber,” their minds had not changed. A new shareholder wrote to Bushrod Was.h.i.+ngton: ”Our partners seem to prefer present profit to any advantage in the future.... Our Attention is now exclusively applied to the s.h.i.+ngle-getting.”

William Nelson, Jr., again fell ill in the autumn of 1812. He did not recover. Weakened by intestinal disease, he stayed at Westover, asking St. George Tucker to lecture to the law students. Nelson seemed in good spirits, joking as usual. He did not let his daughters, their aunt Anne, or Mary Willing Byrd know that he was near death. As his condition worsened early in the new year, he moved to Williamsburg, staying in the house he had shared with his friend William Short almost forty years earlier. In the first week of March he could not get out of bed. He died on the morning of Monday, March 8. His body was placed, as Lord Botetourt's had been, in the chapel of the college. An obituary in the Richmond Enquirer Enquirer said of Nelson: ”He pa.s.sed through life, it is believed, without an enemy; but, at every turn met with those who loved, respected, and esteemed him.” said of Nelson: ”He pa.s.sed through life, it is believed, without an enemy; but, at every turn met with those who loved, respected, and esteemed him.”

Eight months later, Mary Willing Byrd suffered another loss. Her daughter, Anne, died at the age of fifty. Anne Byrd lived at Westover all her life. Judge Nelson's five daughters called her ”Mother,” later remembering her as ”a truly pious well educated dear creature.” After her death, the family went into ”the deepest dejection.” Within a few weeks Mary Willing Byrd was very sick. She wrote her will in December 1813, dividing the contents of her mansion among her children, stepchildren, and grandchildren. William Wirt, gathering material on Patrick Henry, wrote of ”poor Mrs. Byrd”: ”when she dies, adieu to the glories of Westover.... Look at the apparently inexhaustible mines of opulence to which Colo. Byrd was born-and see his family already in decay and ruin: a magnificent prince himself-his children & grand children beggars!” To his surprise, Wirt received from Mary Willing Byrd and the other executors of William Byrd's estate an offer of employment. He had represented them in their litigation with the administrators of Speaker Robinson's estate. Byrd's executors now said that if Wirt could establish in court the estate's claim to two hundred or three hundred city lots in Richmond and to 630,000 acres along the Roanoke River, they would pay him 10 percent of all he recovered. He calculated: ”if 100 lots are recovered, I get, at an average, property worth, at least, $50,000. You see this is a pretty splendid bubble.” Mary Willing Byrd died in March 1814. She had been a widow for thirty-seven years.

The spring of 1814 was a time of celebration for shareholders in the Dismal Swamp Ca.n.a.l Company. A 20-ton boat made a voyage from Scotland Neck, North Carolina, down the Roanoke River into Albemarle Sound, up the Pasquotank River, through the length of the ca.n.a.l, then down the Elizabeth River to Norfolk. She was the first vessel other than s.h.i.+ngle flats and the like to use the ca.n.a.l. Even after the ca.n.a.l's two ditches had met, much work remained to be done. With the labor of twenty or thirty slaves in summer and half as many in winter, the last segments did not reach a width of 20 feet until 1809. The ca.n.a.l still needed locks. The first were temporary, made of wood. The company borrowed money to continue work, mortgaging future revenue from tolls.

As the ca.n.a.l company began a three-and-one-quarter-mile feeder ditch to Lake Drummond in 1812, the Dismal Swamp Company extended and brought into use its Jericho Ca.n.a.l. Twelve feet wide, four feet deep, and ten miles long, it began near Suffolk, ran southeastward across the company's tract, then turned almost due south to Lake Drummond. James Henderson insisted upon faster progress than the hapless ca.n.a.l company had achieved. Suffering, disease, and deaths among slaves working on the Jericho Ca.n.a.l appeared in stories told by people in Nansemond County for generations-stories of ”chain-gangs of slaves”: ”They say the poor creatures died here in heaps from swamp fever. But that didn't make any difference to their owners. They was made to dig right into the heart of the swamp to get at the juniper trees.” Early in the twentieth century, a tourist entering the Dismal Swamp by the Jericho Ca.n.a.l asked her guide, a young white Virginian, why a swamp so filled with color, suns.h.i.+ne, and bird calls was named ”dismal.” ”'There's more to it than shows just at first, ma'am,' he answered. 'There are more sad stories about this swamp than all the suns.h.i.+ne can make bright.'” Among many accounts of the origin of Lake Drummond, one was a tradition begun in Nansemond County: ”The black folks around here say that the lake belongs to the devil.”

s.h.i.+ngle-getters for the Dismal Swamp Company cut their way into the interior of the swamp. In addition to felling stands of white cedar, they found many large trunks of trees lying on top of one another, covered by water and layers of peat. The great fire of 1806 and other fires left many blackened trees but also ”brought to view and into use, more good timber than they injured, by burning the soil down to where numerous trees had lain perhaps for a century concealed, and their existence unsuspected.” After twenty-five years of cutting millions of s.h.i.+ngles, the company's workers were felling cedar trees with a diameter of 12 inches. Dismal Plantation lay unused, its fences broken. In October 1813 the managers leased it at a rent of $60 per year to Thomas Bains and Benjamin La.s.siter, who signed with their marks.

The old Dismal Swamp Company came to an end two days before Christmas 1814. The General a.s.sembly pa.s.sed an act of incorporation for the Dismal Swamp Land Company. James Henderson became its president. In the years 1817 to 1825 a quarter-share drew an average annual dividend of $285.

The Dismal Swamp Ca.n.a.l, newly enlarged, reopened on the last day of 1828. Stage coaches used the parallel road. Early in 1830, Isaiah Rogerson announced the opening of his Lake Drummond Hotel adjacent to the ca.n.a.l. A building 128 feet long, it had eight chambers, four in Virginia and four in North Carolina. The bar was ”furnished with the choicest wines and liquors of every description.” North Carolina law made getting married easier than did Virginia law. For this and other reasons, the Lake Drummond Hotel boasted about the convenience of guests' being able to cross the state line without leaving the building. It was an establishment in the heart of the Dismal Swamp ”fully applicable for all the purposes of life, as eating, drinking, sleeping, marrying, duelling, etc., etc., in all its varieties.”

Nearing his ninetieth birthday, Samuel Gist bought more farms in Oxfords.h.i.+re, Gloucesters.h.i.+re, and Warwicks.h.i.+re in 1810 and 1811. In subsequent years his annual income from leaseholds was almost 6,000. His stock, consolidated annuities, and other personal property yielded at least another 6,000 each year, apart from investments set aside for his daughters and their husbands. His daughter, Mary, was now the wife of Martin Pearkes, a tobacconist in London. Between July 1810 and February 1812, John Wickham sent Gist more than 2,000 sterling in debtors' remittances from Virginia. The dividend in 1810 on Gist's three quarter-shares in the Dismal Swamp Company was $1,000. He collected it by authorizing the Reverend John Bracken to receive it in return for Gist's securing a bill of exchange Bracken had sent to London for another purpose.

Gist began to prepare for his death. He wrote his will. He ordered a vault to be readied for his remains in Wormington's small church. He bought a white marble coffin, which he kept in a case in the stables behind his house in Gower Street. In his eighties Gist thought much about carrying on his family name. Beginning life in a charity school, a kinsman of weavers, he had made the name of Gist feared and respected in the City. He owned more than 4,000 acres in England. He had aspired not just to ama.s.s wealth but also to found a line of Gists, a great family, yet he had no son, no grandchildren, no brother or sister, no nephews or nieces. He did not keep his concern secret. He ”sought with great anxiety for any family of his own singular name, in the hope of fixing upon a male inheritor the bulk of his vast property.”

The closest male relative of whom he knew was his cousin, James Gist. In 1764, as Samuel prepared to move from Virginia to London, James, at the age of thirty-six, gave up his trade as a weaver and enlisted as a private in the army of the East India Company. He was s.h.i.+pped to Bengal. Perhaps he had married ”an European woman” and fathered sons. If so, Samuel Gist wished to make the oldest son heir to the Gist fortune.

But James had died a bachelor in the fall of 1774. His remains were buried in Calcutta. The year after James's death, as Samuel rushed to get the last peacetime s.h.i.+pments of tobacco from Virginia, his uncle, Thomas Gist, James's father, was living in another part of London with Henry Rogers, a kinsman. Thomas Gist, long a weaver, was eighty-seven years old, dependent upon the Rogers family. While working in the City, Rogers learned of James's death in India. At home that evening, he asked Thomas Gist whether he wished to hear what had become of his son. The old man replied: ”Oh Harry I shall never hear of him any more.” Rogers worked the conversation around to breaking the news of James's death. Long afterward Rogers's children remembered that ”Thomas Gist wept much upon receiving the intelligence.” Of these events Samuel Gist knew nothing in 1775, or forty years later.

Samuel Gist thought that if James had died leaving no sons, his closest male relative was a second cousin living in Bristol. Josiah Sellick was an accountant, forty-five years old in 1810. He was married; he had a daughter and, more important for Gist's purposes, a son. In the absence of male descendants of James Gist, Samuel Gist bequeathed all his land in England and the bulk of his stock, annuities, and cash to Sellick in trust, and after Sellick's death to his oldest son, and so on in each generation. To this inheritance he attached a condition. Anyone receiving it must adopt ”the Surname of 'Gist' and in and by the Surname of Gist only and no other thenceforth for ever continue.” Any person eligible to receive the inheritance who refused or neglected to abide by this requirement, Gist wrote, ”shall thereupon be considered as dead.”

In The Times The Times and the and the Morning Chronicle Morning Chronicle on January 20, 1815, lists of deaths included: ”On Monday last, at his home in Gower-street, Bedford-square. Samuel Gist, Esq. in the 91st year of his age.” A list of January deaths in the on January 20, 1815, lists of deaths included: ”On Monday last, at his home in Gower-street, Bedford-square. Samuel Gist, Esq. in the 91st year of his age.” A list of January deaths in the Monthly Magazine Monthly Magazine read: ”In Gower-street, Bedford square, 90, read: ”In Gower-street, Bedford square, 90, Samuel Gist, esq Samuel Gist, esq. leaving immense wealth.” The Gentleman's Magazine The Gentleman's Magazine gave a fuller obituary, adding that Gist ”is said to have ama.s.sed more than half a million of money.” He had ”entered Lloyd's Coffee-house, and was one of its most fortunate adventurers.” Josiah Sellick of Bristol looked ”likely eventually to possess the bulk of his fortune, which is most unexpected, he having only occasionally had any communication with the deceased.” gave a fuller obituary, adding that Gist ”is said to have ama.s.sed more than half a million of money.” He had ”entered Lloyd's Coffee-house, and was one of its most fortunate adventurers.” Josiah Sellick of Bristol looked ”likely eventually to possess the bulk of his fortune, which is most unexpected, he having only occasionally had any communication with the deceased.”

The bequest to Josiah Sellick was not the only surprise in Gist's will. He named as executors his sons-in-law, Martin Pearkes and William Fowke; his attorney, Francis Gregg; and his banker, George Clarke, of Walpole, Clarke & Bourne in Lombard Street. He bequeathed annuities, 50 or 100, to several relatives, and he established a fund for any relatives of his mother or father who might come forward. He ordered payments to the estates of three former a.s.sociates in business-John Hisc.o.x, John Wilkinson, and John Tabb-each of whom had accused him of unjust dealings. To his servants, Gist gave 20 or 30 each, depending upon length of service. To eight charities-the Bristol Infirmary, Christ's Hospital in London, London Hospital, the London Lying-in Hospital, the Welsh Charity School, the Hospital for the Reception of the Blind, the Vaccine Inst.i.tution, and the Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children-he bequeathed 100 each. His largest charitable bequest was 10,000 in 3 percent consolidated annuities, the proceeds of which were to be used by the Corporation of the City of Bristol to support six poor men, six poor women, six poor girls, and six or more poor boys attending charity school at Queen Elizabeth's Hospital, as he had done.