Thomas Gilpin (276)

Thomas Gilpin (18 March 1728–2 March 1778) was a merchant, and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1768. Born near Elkton, Maryland, Gilpin grew up in a wealthy family with a modest education. Both his father and uncle gave the youthful Gilpin large tracts of land that became the basis for all his future wealth and endeavors. Inspired by a trip to England and Ireland in 1752, Gilpin bought still more acreage in Kent County, DE and built a house, mill, tannery, and tavern and lived there happily for years. Business pursuits increasingly pulled him towards Philadelphia and with his marriage to Lydia Fisher 1764, Gilpin was truly settled in the city. His publications with learned societies, namely the APS and the Society of Arts in London, demonstrated that he was also endlessly intrigued by the natural world, such as when he advocated a number of measure to help alleviate a fly infestation that was attacking crops on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1762, or when he collected data on so-called “seventeen year locusts” in 1766, but also the alleged trans-Atlantic migration of herrings. Gilpin’s main interests, however,  lay in designing agricultural and internal improvements that benefited his commercial interests. His most ambitious project proposal was the construction of a Chesapeake and Delaware canal, a man-made waterway that would be a boon for farmers and merchants attempting to move their products between the Chesapeake region and Philadelphia. While this project failed to secure enough support in Gilpin’s lifetime, his son Joshua revived it in the early nineteenth century. The American Revolution, however, ushered in only hard feelings for Gilpin. As a merchant, his commercial interests benefited neither from Parliamentary taxation nor the non-importation of British goods. His vocal opposition to oaths of allegiance and reluctance to take up arms engendered little local goodwill. Eventually, he found himself one of twenty others, mostly Quakers, who the Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council arrested and exiled down to Winchester, Virginia  in late 1777. While many of these Friends returned, Gilpin was not among them. After making a bequest to Pennsylvania Hospital he died on the grounds of the Hopewell Friends Meeting House. (PI)