Oswell Eve (115)

Election date: 1768 (Elected to the revived American Philosophical Society. Elected to the American Society in 1768.)

Oswell Eve (c. 1723–1793) was a mariner, chandler, and manufacturer, and a member of the American Philosophical Society and American Society, elected to both in 1768. Little is known about Eve’s early life, but he worked for two decades as a ship captain, sailing between Philadelphia, Lisbon, and the Caribbean. He was active in local institutions, serving as a Philadelphia Port Warden and as the lieutenant of a group of Associators. Eve was also a founder of the Society for the Relief of Poor and Distressed Masters of Ships, their Widows and Children and a signer of the 1765 Non-Importation Agreement. In 1768, financial straits forced him to flee, with only part of his family, to the Bay of Honduras. Having remade his fortune, he returned to Philadelphia in 1773 and opened a chandler’s shop. Around this time his daughter Sarah became engaged to APS member Benjamin Rush but died before the wedding took place. With the outbreak of the War of Independence Eve transitioned into gunpowder manufacturing; his innovative Frankford Powder Mill produced an estimated 25,000 lbs. of gunpowder for the Committee of Safety and Continental Congress. Eve also aided the war effort by surveying the Delaware River. But by the summer of 1777 he had become a Loyalist. He served the British as both a powder-maker and a surveyor during the occupation of Philadelphia, before evacuating to New York. In 1778 he was accused of treason in absentia; his sons were jailed and his property confiscated. He then founded a Loyalist settlement in the Bahamas. Though supported by APS members Andrew Allen and Joseph Galloway, Eve’s petition to the Loyalist Claims Commission was unsuccessful. His son Joseph Eve is said to have invented a cotton gin that was narrowly preempted by Eli Whitney’s design. (PI)

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