VOL. !: A MOST HEALTHFUL AND PLEASANT SITUATION: THE SIMPSON FAMILY IN MARYLAND, 1688-1760

A MOST HEALTHFUL AND PLEASANT SITUATION:

THE SIMPSON FAMILY IN MARYLAND, 1688-1760

Kirke Wilson

San Francisco, California

1991

“this country of Mary-Land abounds in a flourishing variety of delightful Woods, pleasant Groves, lovely Springs, together with spacious Navigable Rivers and Creeks, it being a most healthful and pleasant situation.”

George Alsop, 1666

 

INTRODUCTION

The story of the Simpson family in North America is also the history of the settlement and development of what is now the United States. Over two centuries and six generations, the Simpsons moved from the Chesapeake Bay shoreline of colonial Maryland to the frontier in North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, and Oregon. In the first two generations, Richard Simpson and his son Thomas established farms and families in the tobacco-growing area near what is today Aberdeen and Havre de Grace, Maryland. In the third generation, another Richard Simpson moved his family to the North Carolina frontier north of what is now Greensboro. In the fourth generation, another Thomas Simpson moved his family to Warren County in middle Tennessee for fifteen years and then to Howard County and Johnson County in Central Missouri. William Simpson, in the fifth generation, and his son Benjamin in the sixth, moved their families to the Platte Purchase in Western Missouri and, with infants of the seventh Simpson generation, across the overland trail to Oregon in 1846.

The geographical progress across the continent was not, for the Simpson family, accompanied by noticeable economic progress. The Simpsons and the families they married were often among the earliest settlers in their areas. They suffered relatively few of the common frontier disasters of war or early death but failed to achieve the level of economic security that would enable them to remain, beyond one or two generations, in Maryland, North Carolina, Tennessee or Missouri. The Cooper family, with which the Simpson family married in the nineteenth century in Missouri, displayed a similar pattern in Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri before moving to Oregon and California in 1846.

 In Part I of For We Cannot Tarry Here, I described the life and movements of the Simpson and Cooper families in Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee from 1750 to 1820. During that period, their lives were marked by military and political events, including the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War. On the frontier, the wars were largely fought against Indian surrogates or allies of the French or British. The lives of the frontier settlers seem to have been shaped in fundamental ways by the interaction with the Indians and the interaction with the natural environment.

Looking back more than two centuries, it is difficult to define with any certainty the mix of experiences and expectations that would motivate a family or clan to move over the mountains to the frontier. In Maryland of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, motivation seems more accessible. Richard Simpson appears to have come to North America during the 1680s, most likely as an indentured servant. Like many of his neighbors, he worked off his indenture and probably worked for wages for several years while accumulating the capital to establish his own farm and family. For the next eighty years, Richard Simpson and two generations of descendants continued as small farmers near Chesapeake Bay. Although they were among the early settlers, they do not appear to have expanded their holdings or achieved much economic security. They appear to have lived and farmed quietly for three generations before moving to North Carolina sometime after 1750.

In contrast to the frontier experiences of the Cooper family in Kentucky and Missouri, the Simpson family in Maryland had little or no experience of Indians or military campaigns. Their lives were peaceful but characterized by sustained hard work as small farmers and little to show for it beyond large families. By the 1750s, prospects  for economic improvement were declining for the Simpson family in Maryland and Western North Carolina offered an opportunity to begin anew. The restlessness that emerged repeatedly in the nineteenth century, began for the Simpson family in the eighteenth century when the third and fourth generations of the Simpson family moved from Maryland to North Carolina.

In a subsequent chapter, I will describe the Simpson family experience in North Carolina from the 1750s to 1810 and the move to Tennessee. I will also attempt to resolve questions about whether or not the Thomas Simpson who signed the Watanga Petition in 1776 was the same person who moved with his family from Rockingham County, North Carolina to Warren County, Tennessee in 1804.

As I had hoped, the distribution of the 1750-1800 part of my narrative in 1990 led me to genealogists in the Simpson family who had been investigating the Simpsons in North Carolina and Maryland. I am deeply indebted to my remote cousins Wenonah S. Williams and Donald Ray Simpson, as well as others for the painstaking genealogical research that provides the framework for my investigations in frontier social history. I am in their debt.

The effort to place the Simpson family in the context of time and place is entirely my own and is exceedingly dependent on the libraries that have preserved primary and other records and scholars who have devoted their careers to the colonial period in the Chesapeake region. The Library of Congress, the Library of the Mechanics Institute in San Francisco, the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore and the library of the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore have been particularly helpful.

172 Hancock Street

San Francisco, California

November 1991

 

COLONIAL MARYLAND, 1688-1760

“take these westerne discoveries in hande, and plant there.”

Richard Hakluyt, 15841

In family legend, Thomas Simpson (1739-1833) is a mythic figure. He was born in Scotland where, according to some stories, he may have left a valuable estate. He knew General Washington, fought in the Revolutionary War and lived to be more than 100 years old.2 Contrary to the legend, he was neither born in Scotland nor more than 100 years old at the time of his death. It is unclear whether he fought in the war and doubtful that he knew General Washington. Thomas Simpson was born in 1739 in Baltimore County, Maryland where his family had lived since the late seventeenth century. With his father and other relatives, he moved to North Carolina sometime before 1759.          Thomas Simpson married twice and raised a large family in North Carolina before moving to Tennessee in the first decade of the nineteenth century. It is possible but not certain that he was the Thomas Simpson who signed the Watauga petition at the beginning of the Revolutionary War in what later became Tennessee.3

 The Maryland Colony

In June 1632, King Charles I granted a large tract of land which he named Maryland to Cecilius Calvert, second Lord Baltimore (1605-1675). Calvert’s father, George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore (1580-1632), had been a loyal supporter of King James I serving as secretary of state and member of the privy council until his public declaration of Roman Catholic faith made him unable to continue service in the Stuart court. In gratitude for his service to the crown, King James had made Calvert a knight. After the death of James I, his son, Charles I elevated George Calvert to the Irish peerage as baron of Baltimore in County Longford. Like other members of the embattled English Catholic aristocracy of the seventeenth century, Calvert was developing lands in Ireland while exploring opportunities to establish colonies in North America. Calvert attempted to form a colony in Newfoundland where he had been granted the Province of Avalon in 1623. In 1628, he moved his family to the new colony but abandoned the project after one bitterly cold winter and returned to England seeking a royal grant of lands that would be warmer and more hospitable to settlement.4

Although the first Lord Baltimore died before the Maryland grant was completed, he was able to persuade King Charles to approve a charter in which Calvert, as Lord Proprietor, would have virtually unlimited power over ten million acres of land north of the Potomac River on Chesapeake Bay. The grant included all of what is now Maryland and Delaware as well as the southern part of what is now Pennsylvania and that part ofVirginia on the Delmarva peninsula. The grant was unbounded on the West. In the charter, the king granted,

… the now Baron of Baltimore, and his Heirs, the true and absolute Lords and Proprietors of the Region…as ample Rights, Jurisdictions, Privileges, Prerogatives, Royalties, Liberties, Immunities and royal Rights, and                   temporal Franchises whatsoever, as well by Sea as by Land, within the Region, Islands, Islets, and Limits aforesaid, to be had, exercised, used, and enjoyed, as any Bishop of Durham, within the Bishoprick or County                     Palatine of Durham, in our Kingdom of England, ever heretofore hath had, held, used, or enjoyed, or of right could, or ought to have, hold, use, or enjoy.5

The Lord Proprietor, as Count Palatine, acquired feudal rights that had not been granted by any English king since Edward I at the end of the thirteenth century. The rights included authority to declare war, regulate trade, administer justice, appoint local officials, impose and collect taxes, punish criminals and grant pardons. The charter authorized subinfeudation, the creation of subordinate and dependent feudal lands, as well as the granting of lesser titles of nobility. The only limits on the authority of the proprietor were that laws enacted in the province must be,

…of and with the Advice, Assent and Approbation of the Free-Men of the same Province, or the greater Part of them, or of their Delegates or Deputies…[and] consonent to Reason, and be not repugnant or contrary, but                (so far as conveniently may be) agreeable to the Laws, Statutes, Customs, and Rights of this Our Kingdom of England.6

During times of emergency, the proprietor could declare martial law and was not subject to the limitations described in the charter.

The royal charter granted Maryland to Lord Baltimore and his successors, in free and common Soccage, by Fealty only for all Services, and not in Capite, nor by Knight’s Service.  Yielding therefore unto Us, our Heirs and             Successors Two Indian Arrows of these parts, to be delivered at the said Castle of Windsor, every Year on Tuesday in Easter Week.7

In addition to the symbolic annual payment of two arrows, the proprietor also agreed to pay the king one-fifth of any gold or silver discovered in the new province. As it turned out, there was no gold or silver in Maryland.

By November 1633, Lord Baltimore had appointed his brother Leonard Calvert (1606-1647) to be the resident governor and recruited 130 adventurers and servants to sail to Maryland. The first colonists arrived in March 1634 and established a settlement at St. Mary’s on the southwestern shore of Chesapeake Bay where they purchased land from the Indians. The first settlers, like the proprietor, were Catholic but their servants were primarily Protestants who traded several years of indentured service for passage to North America. As an inducement to attract settlers, the proprietor offered free land. Called “concessions” or “conditions of plantation”, Calvert offered 100 acres of land for each adult settler in 1633 and 2000 acres for each “adventurer” who brought five servants. In later years, the incentives were reduced somewhat although 1648 concessions added manoral rights as part of grants of 2000 acres or more.8

Despite offering generous incentives, the Calverts were unable to attract the number of settlers necessary to make the colony profitable. The small population also left Maryland vulnerable to invasion by its neighbors. Susquehannock Indians successfully raided the Maryland settlements for a decade beginning in 1642 and settlers from Virginia invaded Maryland in 1644, 1645 and 1646. With enemies on every side, Lord Baltimore entered an alliance with Puritans who were opposed to the established church in Virginia. When Leonard Calvert died in 1647, Lord Baltimore appointed a Protestant from Virginia to be governor of Maryland.

Large numbers of Puritans moved to the Severn River area of Maryland after 1647 to escaping the intolerance of the Church of England in Virginia. Taking advantage of the religious freedom allowed in Maryland and the chaos resulting from the civil war in England, the Puritans allied themselves with other opponents of the Calverts and deposed the proprietary government in 1652. Three years later, factions supporting and opposing the Calverts clashed in the Battle of the Severn where Calvert militia was defeated and the governor captured. In 1657, civil war in Maryland was ended with a compromise in which the Calvert government was restored to power, Protestants were guaranteed religious freedom and the insurgents were granted amnesty and the right to keep their weapons. In 1675, Maryland militia joined militia from Virginia in a successful campaign against the Susquehannock Indians. The campaign united former adversaries in a war against Indians with whom each colony had been allied at various times. The Indian war resulted in Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia but permanently ended the Indian threat in the Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland.9

By 1675, the population of Maryland was approximately three-quarters dissenting Protestants, one-sixth Church of England and one-twelfth Roman Catholic. In spite of their differences, the various denominations lived together in relative peace from 1660 to During this period, the economic structure of the colony began a process of transformation. The feudal system based on land grants and indentured servants was gradually replaced by a plantation system based on slave labor. By 1697, wealthy Mar;land planters were buying slaves directly from Africa.10 The growth of the plantation and slave economy, as it had in the Virginia tidewater, resulted in restricted opportunities for small farmers. Children of small farmers, unable to support themselves in the tobacco economy, struggled to survive or moved to the frontier where land was available and slaves did not dominate the labor force.

Life in the Maryland Colony

With settlement scattered along the shore of Chesapeake Bay and its many tributaries, life in Maryland was precarious, isolated and primitive during the seventeenth century. There was religious tolerance far beyond that which existed in any other part of North America at the time and there was religious conflict which sometimes led to bloodshed. Learning from the early experience in neighboring Virginia, the Maryland colony attempted to avoid unnecessary conflict with the Indians and starvation during its early period. While the first colonists were able to feed themselves, they were unable to avoid the consequences of near-total dependence on tobacco production. With a single­ crop economy, Maryland was vulnerable to the fluctuating prices in the London tobacco market. During the period after 1680, when tobacco prices were severely depressed, Maryland suffered a long period of economic hardship.

The many rivers and creeks provided Maryland planters direct access to English shipping but resulted in an economy that had strong vertical relationships with markets in London but little horizontal relationship with other parts of Maryland or North America. As a consequence, there were few roads, few markets, no towns of any size and little development of indigenous crafts or industry. In contrast to New England, where towns were self-contained economic units offering a variety of skills and functions, the plantations of Maryland were almost exclusively devoted to the production of tobacco for export and food for their own consumption. Apart for the basic skills necessary for survival, colonial Maryland was dependent on trade with England for manufactured goods.

Despite the vigorous efforts of the Proprietor to attract settlers and increase his rental income, the population of Maryland grew slowly during the early years and depended on continued immigration. Recent scholarship has calculated that total European migration to Maryland during the 1634 to 1680 period was less than 40,000 persons.11 The immigrant population was young, relatively unskilled and disproportionately male. The immigrants encountered diseases and died young. During the first decade of settlement, there were six male immigrants for every female. The ratio of men to women improved somewhat during the 1640-1680 period when there were three men immigrants for each woman immigrant but the lack of women remained an obstacle to the formation of families and the internal growth of the colony until sometime in the eighteenth century. As late as 1700, there were twice as many men in Maryland as women.12

In addition to the shortage of women, living conditions in the Chesapeake Bay region were poor. Immigrants had adequate diets but were exposed to diseases that killed many new arrivals and shortened life expectancy. Malaria, typhoid fever, dysentery, smallpox, pneumonia and influenza were the result of primitive living conditions but were part of the “seasoning” process that newcomers to the tidewater encountered in the seventeenth century and a major obstacle to the formation of families and the establishment of farms. One scholar, attempting to quantify the high death rate in Maryland during the early colonial period, estimated that 17 percent of the immigrants who reached age twenty-two died by age thirty and 41 percent died by age forty.13

During the first fifty years of the Maryland colony, the majority of the settlers, more than 70 percent, were persons who had originally immigrated as indentured servants. They were predominantly men, particularly during the early years, but also included women who were transported to North America as indentured servants. In either case, the servants tended to be young people with limited skills and limited prospects for advancement in seventeenth century England. Averaging seventeen years of age when they arrived in Maryland, the indentured servants exchanged several years of free labor for transportation to North America as well as food, clothing and shelter during the period of indenture and the payment of “freedom dues” upon the completion of the contract.14 The indentured servant agreed,

To do such service and employment as he…shall employ me in, not absenting myself at any time without my said master’s privity, and consent. And also I…do hereby bind myself to observe my aforenamed master’s                       command and also to keep his lawful secrets, not purloining any of my said master’s goods…15

Indentured service was onerous. Servants worked long hours. If they refused orders or ran away, they were subject to harsh punishment, including whipping or, in some cases, an extension of the period of indentured service. Like slaves, they could be purchased, sold and inherited. Terms of indenture varied depending on the age and skills of the servant. As an inducement to prospective servants with skills needed in Maryland, recruiting agents in England would offer shorter terms of service, specific working conditions or increased payments at the completion of the contract service. In Maryland, the typical indenture was for a period of four to six years.16 In contrast to slaves, who had almost no rights, indentured servants could use the Maryland courts to enforce the conditions of their contracts and reduce abuses by their masters.

Indentured servants, called redemptioners at the time because they were working in exchange for their transportation, left little record of their experience. Few of them had the opportunity, means or skills to write about their lives. One exception was George Alsop, an Englishman who was transported to Maryland in 1658 and served a four-year indenture on the plantation of Capt. Thomas Stockett at or near Oakington in the Swan Creek area of Old Baltimore County on the shore of Chesapeake Bay. Alsop completed his contract service and returned to England in 1663, where he published poetry and a pamphlet promoting the Maryland Colony. He reported that conditions were good and that his master provided adequate food and clothing. He explained that

“servants here, in Mary-Land of all Colonies, distant or remote Plantations, have the least cause to complain either for strictness of Servitude, want of Provisions or need of Apparel.”17

Alsop reported that the work week was five and one-half days in the summer but that there was relatively little work in the winter beyond hunting and cutting firewood.

Upon the completion of the indenture, the servant was paid “freedom dues.” These usually included food, clothing and tools. In some cases, they also included a plot of land. Servants and recruiting agents could negotiate their own arrangements or could follow the “custom of the country.” A 1638 Maryland law defined the customary payment,

…three barrels of corn, a hilling hoe and a weeding hoe, an a felling axe; and to a man servant one new cloth suit, one new shirt, one pair of new shoes, one pair of new stockings, and a new monmouth cap; and to a maid               servant one petticoat and waistcoat, one new smock, one pair of new shoes, one pair of new stockings…18

Alsop confirmed the benefits that the servant would receive upon the completion of his indenture and optimistically described his transition to independence and self-sufficiency:

He that lives in the nature of a Servant in this Province, must serve but four years by the Custom of the Country; and when the expiration of his time speaks him a Freeman, there’s a Law in the Province, that enjoyns his               Master whom he hath served to give him Fifty Acres of Land, Corn to serve him a whole year, three Sutes of Apparel, with things necessary to them, and Tools to work withall; so that they are no sooner free, but they are               ready to set up for themselves, and when, once entred, they live passingly well.19

While the former servant was free to leave at the completion of his indenture, the transition to independence was difficult and the former servant often chose to continue working for the same master as a hired laborer.                 Wages for free labor were relatively good, because of the chronic shortage of workers, and former servants often worked as hired laborers or tenant farmers for a few years while accumulating the capital to establish their             own farms and families.

The settlers who served out indentures in Maryland included young people seeking to improve their lives and well as people on the margins of English society. During the period before 1660, when economic conditions in England were poor, the immigrants were primarily single men between the ages of 16 and 25 from middling social levels, including the sons of tradesmen, artisans and small farmers, as well as unskilled youth from the lower classes. As economic conditions in England improved, the immigrants were increasingly recruited from the ranks of the lower classes, including vagabonds, orphans, criminals and the unemployed.20 Robert Beverley, an early historian of Virginia, described the settlers as, “…persons of low circumstances…chiefly single men, who had not the encumbrance of wives and children…21

An analysis of fragmentary land records suggests that indentured servants, including both women and men, accounted for about 70% of the total immigrants to Maryland during the period 1634 to 1681. Of the free immigrants during that period, about 30% were single men, 20% were men with families, 20% were women and 30% were children. It appears that all free women immigrating to Maryland during this period were traveling as part of a family group headed by a man.22

In most respects, the living conditions of indentured servants were similar to that of their masters. They lived in the same crude houses, ate the same food and suffered from the same diseases. When servants completed their contracts, they were free to leave. Because most former servants had only their “freedom dues,” they sought temporary arrangements as hired farm workers, sharecroppers or tenant farmers while saving to buy land, tools and seed. During the period that land was cheap, the former servant could acquire land within a few years. As land became scarce, the capital formation period extended to ten years or more.23 The increasing cost of land also proved to be an obstacle to small planters attempting to expand their holdings or to acquire more productive land.

Religious life in the Maryland Colony was more diverse than other parts of North America where a single denomination was dominant and others were excluded. Although the Maryland Colony had been established and governed by Catholics as a refuge for their co-religionists, the predominance of Protestants among immigrants from England and Virginia required a policy of religious tolerance to protect the Catholic minority. In 1649, at a time when the Lord Proprietor was welcoming Protestant dissenters from Virginia, Maryland adopted a law protecting diverse religious beliefs and practices:

…no person or persons whatsoever within this province…professing to believe in Jesus Christ, shall, from henceforth, be troubled, molested, or discountenanced for or in respect of his or her religion nor in the free                         exercise thereof…nor any way compelled to the belief or exercise of any other religion against his or her consent.24

The 1649 law reassured Protestant settlers in Maryland, both women and men, that they would be able to practice their religion without interference.

In 1657, as part of the agreement to end civil war in Maryland, the Lord Proprietor promised never to overturn the 1649 law establishing religious freedom in the colony. Catholics, Quakers, Presbyterians and others established congregations, constructed churches and supported a resident clergy. The Church of England, although it would become the official religion of the colony in 1692, was slow to send ministers to organize congregations. As late as 1676, the Church of England had but three ministers in all of Maryland.  One of the three, the Reverend John Yeo, in desperation, appealed to the Archbishop of Canterbury for relief. Yeo described the “Deplorable estate & condition of the Province of Maryland for want of an established Ministry.” According to Yeo, religious toleration had fostered the growth of “Papery, Quakerism or Phanaticisme” and had made Maryland “a Sodom of uncleaness and a pest house of iniquity.”25 The Church of England was unaccustomed to a missionary role and indifferent about the need to support clergy in the colony.

In 1692, The Church of England, although its congregants were but a minority of the population, became the official religion of Maryland by royal proclamation. The act establishing the church prohibited “any bodily labor or occupation upon any Lord’s day, commonly called Sunday” by anyone including “children, servants or slaves” and also prohibited “drunkeness, swearing, gaming, fowling, fishing, hunting, or any other sports, pastimes or recreations whatsoever.”26 To provide the financial support necessary to buiid churches and maintain a resident i\nglican clergy, the 1692 Act established a government structure to collect taxes from all residents, regardless of their religious beliefs. The law imposed an annual tax of forty pounds of tobacco on “every taxable person within each parish…to be collected and gathered by the sheriff of the county.”27

Old Baltimore County:

The upper Chesapeake Bay shore had been known since 1608 when John Smith and a small party of Virginia settlers charted the bay, its inlets and tributaries. Smith and his companions explored as far as the Susquehanna River at the north end of the bay and recorded the physical descriptions Smith used in his 1612 “Map of Virginia”.28 Although the bay had been thoroughly explored early in the seventeenth century, initial settlement was concentrated in the southern part of Chesapeake Bay and expanded northward slowly as new settlers arrived. Fur buyers like William Claiborne and Edward Palmer established temporary trading posts on islands at the North end of Chesapeake Bay in the 1620s but settlement remained below the Patapsco River until the late 1650s.29

In 1659, Old Baltimore County was formed at the north end of Chesapeake Bay. The county included an area of 3000 square miles from the Patapsco River on the western shore of the bay to the Chester River on the eastern shore and north into what is now southern Pennsylvania.30 The county was unpopulated in 1659 when Nathaniel Utie obtained land grants near present-day Aberdeen. A political refugee from Virginia who had graduated from Harvard College in 1635, Utie received patents for the 800 acre Oakington Plantation in February 1659 and the 2300 acre Spesutie Island in August 1661.31 During the same period, Matthew Goldsmith settled on Swan Creek about three miles from Spesutie Island and Thomas Stockett settled between Swan Creek and Chesapeake Bay.32

George Alsop, who had been an indentured servant on the plantation of Thomas Stockett between 1658 and 1661, described the area,

…this Country of Mary-Land abounds in a flourishing variety of delightful woods, pleasant Groves, lovely Springs, together with spacious Navigable Rivers and Creeks, it being a most healthful and pleasant situation.33

Alsop remembered the herds of deer and swarms of hogs in the woods, as well as plentiful swans, geese and wild turkeys available to the hunter.

The two land grants to Utie were among the largest and earliest in what is now Harford County. In the same area, Godfrey Harmer received a patent for 200 acres called Swantown in 1659 and William Palmer received the 500 acre Swan Harbor Plantation in 1675.34 All of these plantations were along the Chesapeake Bay shore in the area southwest of the mouth of the Susquehanna River. Spesutie Island, a few hundred yards off shore, was variously defined as “Utie’s Refuge” or “Utie’s Hope,” and is today part of the 80,000 acre military installation at Aberdeen Proving Ground. The wider area, including what is today the Proving Ground and the nearby cities of Aberdeen and Havre de Grace, was called Spesutia in the seventeenth century. Spesutia was the only manor granted in the area and Utie had the title and authority as lord of the manor. He erected a proper manor house at the north end of the island and engaged in the Indian trade while also serving in civil and military positions.35

As the settlements along Chesapeake Bay advanced toward the mouth of the Susquehanna River, colonists and Indians collided in brief but bloody encounters. In April 1661, two canoes of armed Seneca Indians were spotted coming down Bush River toward the settlements along the Bay. Six colonists armed themselves and sailed in two small boats to intercept the Indians. The little armada challenged the Indians and traded threats until a settler’s dog, impatient with the negotiations, bit an Indian. The Indian shot the dog in retaliation and set off an exchange of musket fire that left five Indians and one settler dead.

On May 13, 1661, the colonial governor convened his council at Spesutie Island to investigate complaints against the Indians as well as Indian complaints against the settlers. The Council heard testimony from participants about the Bush River battle with the Seneca and about Indian raids attributed to the local Susquehannock. One settler testified that Indians had raided his Gunpowder River home in April killing his wife, plundering his cabin and butchering his livestock. Another settler reported that ten Indians, including one woman, had arrived at the plantation at Foster’s Point where they stole goods worth one thousand pounds of tobacco and engaged in a three hour battle in which one settler was killed and one wounded. After negotiation, the Maryland Council agreed to a treaty of peace and mutual assistance with the Susquehannock.  As part of the treaty of 1661, the settlers agreed to assist the Susquehannock to construct a fort in what is now Pennsylvania to protect the tribe against marauding Seneca from the north.36

Two years later, Indian raids resumed in Old Baltimore County. Two settlers were killed at the head of the bay, one was killed on the Patapsco River and two boys were kidnapped. The following year, colonists discovered a band of twenty-two Seneca on the Patapsco River and captured one Indian. The settlers’ Susquehannock allies identified the prisoner as a fierce Seneca warrior and advocated his immediate execution. The colonists refused to kill the prisoner but held him hostage to discourage additional raids by the Seneca. In 1667, Major Samuel Goldsmith and Sheriff George Utie enlisted a company of thirty-six men from Baltimore County to join a colonial expedition against the Wicomico Indians. Later that year, Baltimore County residents joined the Susquehannock in an expedition against the Seneca.37 In 1687, Nanticoke Indians complained that a member of their tribe had been murdered by three white men on Bush River. The Indians identified one of the alleged killers but were impatient with the failure of the local authorities to punish the man they had identified. Soon after, a group of Indians attacked and killed a family on Middle River. The settlers responded by building a string of fortified cabins across the northern frontier from Garrison Forest to the Susquehanna River.38

After the early flurry of Indian incidents, the little colony prospered. Settlers paid the proprietor to buy the land and paid semi-annual quitrents to the proprietor. Settling in the lowlands around the Bay, the seventeenth century Maryland colonists grew tobacco which they shipped to England. Planters would germinate tobacco in seedbeds during March and April. By June, when the danger from frost had past, the tobacco was transplanted to iilittle hillocks in distant rowes.”39 The colonists had cleared land by girdling trees and they planted the tobacco in little hills four feet apart among the stumps. During the humid summer, field workers would tend the tobacco, hoeing, weeding and thinning the plants, as well as pinching off small leaves growing on the stalks of the plants. By the middle of September, the colonists began cutting and drying the tobacco in sheds. After about six weeks, the tobacco was sufficiently cured and workers would strip the leaves from the stalks and pack them in hogsheads for shipment to England during the winter or spring.40

The tobacco industry stimulated active commercial traffic on Chesapeake Bay as colonists traded tobacco for manufactured goods from England and New England. Alsop remembered:

Between November and January there arrives in this Province Shipping to the number of twenty sail and upwards, all Merchant-men loaden with Commodities to Trafique and dispose of, trucking with the Planter for                   Silks, Hollands Serges, and Broad-clothes, with other necessary Goods…41

He contrasted the Maryland tobacco trade with England with coastal trade with the New England colonies. The New England merchants arrived earlier in the year in smaller boats and appear to have transported more practical goods than luxury goods. In contrast to the British, who traded for tobacco, the New Englanders preferred to trade for pork. Alsop described the New England merchants:

Medera-Wines, Sugars, Salt, Wickar-Chairs, and Tin Candlesticks is the most of the commodities they bring in: They arrive in Mary-Land about September, being most of them Ketches and Barkes, and such small                          Vessels, and those disappearing themselves into several small Creeks of this Province, to sell and dispose of their Commodities, where they know the market is most fit for their small Adventures.42

The settlers also produced corn, wheat, oats, barley, rye and peas as well as pork and beef. The grains and meats they produced were primarily for their own use and for local consumption. In 1692, as part of an effort to encourage diversification of the tobacco economy, these commodities were, like tobacco, authorized for payment of debts and taxes in the colony.43

Meanwhile in England, the long struggle between Protestants and Catholics, between hereditary royal succession and constitutional government, resulted in the revolution of 1688. King James II abandoned his throne and fled to France as British leaders invited the Protestant King of the Netherlands, William of Orange and his wife, the eldest daughter of James, to the British throne. The bloodless revolution in England resulted in a similar transformation in Maryland where, between 1689 and 1692, the proprietary government of Lord Baltimore was replaced by the colonial government of the British. In 1690, the Crown revoked the Maryland charter to the Calvert family and formed a colonial government that repealed the laws of Maryland and relocated the Maryland capital from the Catholic community at St. Mary’s to the Puritan settlement at Providence later called Annapolis.44

The transfer of authority from the proprietors to a colonial government required the formation of rudimentary local government in Maryiand. The Religious Act of 1692, which established the Church of England in Maryland, also described the procedures to be followed to organize local government in the colony. In consultation with local land owners, commissioners and justices were directed to:

divide and lay out their several and respective counties into several districts and parishes…to be laid out by metes and bounds and fair certificates of each parish…45

In each parish, the freeholders were ordered to select six men to act as a vestry responsible for the parish treasury and for the construction of a church building. The structure of local government, with its counties, districts and parishes, was organized to collect taxes to support the Church of England but became the basis for all local government in the colony.46

The smallest unit of local government was the “hundred”. Although described by geography, the hundred was defined by population and would change as population patterns changed. The hundred was the area inhabited by approximately one hundred families and was the basic unit for taxation and the administration of justice. One or more hundreds comprised a parish and one or more parishes a county.47 To assure that taxes were uniformly and fairly collected, the 1692 law required local constables to visit every household in the hundred each year and prepare a list of taxable persons. As defined in 1692, taxables included:

all Male Children…shall be taken and Accompted Taxables at the Age of sixteen years and upwards, and all male Children Servants…at the age of sixteen years and upwards…And all Slaves whatsoever, whether Male or                Female Imported or born within this Province at or above the Age of sixteen years…And that all freemen…shall be taxables above the Age of Sixteen years.48

The 1692 law, explicitly exempted “Clergymen and such poor & Impotent persons that receive Alms from the County.11 By elimination, the law exempted all children under the age of sixteen, whether free or bonded, and free women of any age. In 1715, a similar law also exempted from taxation, “…all such slaves as shall be adjudged by the County Court to be past labor…49

The Simpson Family in Maryland

Simpson was a common family name in 17th century England and Scotland and several Simpsons were among the early settlers of Maryland. Between 1646 and 1680, 31 people named Simpson arrived in Maryland. Of these, 26 were men and 5 were women. The first Simpson recorded in Maryland was Anslowe who immigrated in 1646 and died in Maryland about 1649. The other thirty Simpsons, the largest number of whom arrived during the 1660s, included 21 who were transported and became indentured servants, four who were servants of other immigrants, four who immigrated, like Anslowe Simpson, paying their own transportation as well as one indentured servant brought from Virginia and one sailor. The five women named Simpson arrived in Maryland between 1664 and 1680. They all appear to have been unmarried at the time they were transported and presumably all had to work as indentured servants to repay the expenses of their transportation.50 It is possible that one of the 26 male Simpsons was an ancestor of the Simpson family that lived in Old Baltimore County in the 1690s but no connection between the later Simpsons and the earlier arrivals has been established. 51

The first record of Richard Simpson is in Old Baltimore County, Maryland in the late 1680s. Fragmentary early records show a Thomas Simpson living on property called Jacob’s Point on the south side of South River in November 1676. Simpson paid rent of 5 1/4 shillings for the 21 acre property owned by James Smith.52 The name Thomas was commonly used among the Maryland Simpsons and there was a long association between Simpson and Smith families in Maryland but there is no evidence linking the Jacob’s Point Simpson of 1676 with the Richard Simpson family. Among the thirty-one Simpsons who arrived in Maryland between 1646 and 1680, three were named Thomas. These included one who arrived as a servant in 1649 or 1650. He may have been the Thomas Simpson who arrived in St. Marys County in July 1649. The other two were “transported” and arrived in Maryland in 1651 and 1673. Any of the three could have been the Thomas Simpson at Jacobs Point in 1676.53

 In July 1688, Richard Simpson (c. 1663-1711) had 53 acres surveyed in Old Baltimore County. Called “Simson’s Choice”, the land was at the head of Swan Creek and was subject to a quitrent of 2 shillings 1 1/2 pence. Richard Simpson’s Swan Creek property was occupied by “Emmanuei Smith’s orphans” at the time of the 1688 survey.54 Swan Creek is located in what is now Harford County, Maryland approximately thirty miles northeast of Baltimore.55 The small creek drains a suburban area southwest of Havre de Grace and forms a sheltered cove in Chesapeake Bay at the northeastern corner of Aberdeen Proving Ground. While the upper part of Swan Creek flows through a steep and rocky area, the lower three miles of the creek flows through fertile and rolling countryside near the bay.56

Baltimore County of 1692 had a population of approximately 500 families scattered along a forty mile shoreline and inland up to four miles. To govern this large but thinly-populated community of shoreline farms, the county was divided in 1692 into three parishes and five hundreds. St. George’s Parish, was established about 1671 in the eastern part of Baltimore County. One of thirty original parishes of Maryland, St. George’s comprised the area along Chesapeake Bay from Bush River on the southwest to the Susquehanna River on the Northeast and North to the boundary of the colony in what is now Pennsylvania.57 Spesutia Hundred was the area northeast of Gunpowder River to the Susquehanna River and “as farre as the County extends.”58

The original parish church was called Spesutie and was built of wood in about 1671 near Red Lion Branch of Delph Creek at a place called “Gravelly” about a half mile southwest of Michaelsville. As settlement moved inland from the bay shore, Spesutia church was rebuilt in 1718 at a new location about four miles away on donated land along the Old Post Road near the town of Perryman.59  In 1726, St. George’s Parish acquired 200 acres on Swan Creek to serve as a parish glebe. The Rector of the parish described the land in 1851,

…it was located on “Swan Creek” and is now the most productive land in Harford County.60

The glebe land was neglected and subsequently sold. Richard Simpson was a resident of St. George’s Parish and Spesutia Hundred but there is no evidence that he or his family were active members of Spesutia Church.61

Richard Simpson married twice. With his first wife, whose name is not known, he had a son, Richard, Jr, born sometime before 1690.62 By 1690, Richard Simpson had married Anne Gilbert (c.1670-c. l 715), the daughter of Spesutia Hundred neighbors Thomas and Elizabeth Gilbert. In 1691, Richard and Anne Simpson had their first child, a son Thomas, born November 5, 1691 “near to Susquehanna River” in St. George’s Parish, Old Baltimore County.63 The Susquehanna River flows into Chesapeake Bay at Havre de Grace and is today the boundary between Harford County and Cecil County. The city of Havre de Grace, originally known as Harmer’s Town, was first laid out at the time of the Revolutionary War on land that slopes gently into Chesapeake Bay. Godfrey Harmer owned land in the area in 1659, when he sold a parcel to Thomas Stockett. In 1688, Stockett sold his land to Jacob Looten.  John Stokes bought the Looten land in 1713, and by 1734 had acquired 619 acres, including a property known as “Symson’s Hazard.”64  William Simpson, one of the sons of Richard Simpson, had sold the 100-acre “Simpson’s Hazard” in 1726.65  Robert Young Stokes, a great-grandson of John Stokes, laid out and named the city of Havre de Grace in 1781.  The city was destroyed by British troops May 3, 1813, as part of the War of 1812.

Richard Simpson and his family were residents of Spesutia Hundred when the first tax lists were prepared in 1692. He appears as Richard “Sympson” in the 1692 list, one of 128 taxables.66 At the time, there were 51 households in Spesutia Hundred including nine households with a total of twenty-eight slaves and forty-two households without slaves.67 In 1695, Richard Simpson was living on 150 acres of land called “Gilbert Adventure” owned by his father-in-law Thomas Gilbert for which he paid an annual quitrent of 6 shillings.68 Although Richard Simpson and his family were farming in Old Baltimore County at the end of the seventeenth century when slaves were replacing other forms of labor, there is no record that they owned any slaves during the period between 1692 and 1706. Richard Simpson continued to live in Spesutia Hundred until at least 1706.69 Thomas Gilbert, Sr. and his son Thomas, Junior were taxpayers in Spesutia Hundred from before 1699 to 1706.70

Richard and Anne Simpson had at least ten children born between 1691 and 1707 in Old Baltimore, County. The first four children, those born between 1691 and 1697, were registered as having been born on or near the Susquehanna River. Since the births were registered in St. George’s Parish, the Simpson family was likely to have been living near the mouth of the river in the general vicinity of present-day Havre de Grace. Since the Simpson births over a six year period are listed together in the parish records, it is likely that Richard Simpson and his family were not members of the church and may have lived several miles away.71 By 1698, Richard and Anne Simpson appear to have left the land near the Susquehanna River and returned to the Swan Creek property. In September 1698, their fifth child was born, “at the head of Swan Creek” and Richard Simpson was listed as ”of Swan Creek.”72

By 1699, the Richard Simpson family appears to have returned to “the Bay Side near to the mouth of the Susquehanna River” for the birth of their sixth child.73 The same “bay side” designation is used to describe the location of the Emanuell Smith family.74 In 1708, the Richard Simpson family listed seven living children in the St. George parish register including four sons and three daughters. From the 1708 register, it appears likely that Richard and Anne Simpson had a total of ten children between 1691 and 1707 of whom three had died in infancy.75

At about the same time that the Simpson family was registering seven children in the parish register, Richard Simpson was testifying in the probate of a Swan Creek estate. Thomas Browne, a planter who died January 24, 1707/8, left his Oakington Plantation to his son John Browne. Richard Simpson was one of three neighbors testifying.76

Richard Simpson died in 1711 leaving his widow Anne Gilbert Simpson and seven children between the ages of two and twenty as well as, Richard, Jr., an older son by a previous marriage. In his will, dated March 9, 1710/11, he left “…my boy Richard Simpson the sum of twelve pence sterling” and specified:

“my whole Estate both Real and person all be equally divided amongst my seven Children which I had by my last wife called Anne and that every one of them have equall share alike in both my land and moveable                            Estate…”77

Richard Simpson appointed his son Thomas, then twenty years old, executor of the estate and guardian of the younger children. The will directed Thomas to: “keep the small Children til they come to Age and to be ruled by hime and to pay them their equall portion as they shall come of Age.”78 By 1715, the widow Simpson was having difficulty supporting herself and her family. With the consent of her son Thomas, the two youngest Simpson children, Anne, ten years old, and Elizabeth, eight, were “bound” to John and Elizabeth Clarke who raised and cared for the girls in exchange for housework.79

Thomas Simpson (1691- n.d.) married twice. With his first wife, Eleanor, he had a son Richard born December 26, 1714 in St. George’s Parish. On February 13, 1717/18, in St. George’s Parish, Thomas Simpson married Mary Smith, the daughter of Emmanuel Smith. Thomas and Mary Simpson had seven children between 1718 and 1737 of whom one died in infancy.80  In 1722, Thomas Simpson and his wife sold 120 acres of land at Sister’s Discovery to Joshua Wood.81

Richard Simpson, the only child of Thomas and Eleanor Simpson, married Elizabeth Reese and had three sons and three daughters. The oldest of the six children, Thomas, was born September 23, 1739 in Baltimore County, Maryland and may have signed the Watauga petition 37 years later on the frontier.82 Sometime in the 1750s, Richard Simpson and his family left Maryland, where they had lived for three generations, and moved to the frontier of North Carolina.83

Family Life in Old Baltimore County

The St. George’s Parish register, with its record of births, marriages and deaths, provides a great deal of information about family life in Spesutia Hundred during much of the century after 1692. With early settlement completed, Maryland residents of this period were beginning to stabilize family life and build permanent communities. Tidewater residents had overcome the high mortality rates and the scarcity of women which had impeded family formation a generation or two earlier, but the colonists continued to live in relatively primitive conditions and suffer economic hardship due to depressed tobacco prices. Spesutia, although it was settled somewhat later than other parts of Chesapeake Bay, was typical of the living and economic conditions of that time in the Maryland colony.

 Compared to twentieth century families, the Spesutia families were large. The 123 families listed in the parish register had an average of 5.2 children. Despite the large families, young adults appear to have delayed marriage, presumably until they had established themselves sufficiently to support families. The average man was 27 years old when he married and the average woman was nearly 22 although approximately one-third of the women had their first child before the age of twenty. Spesutia mothers of the eighteenth century appear to have had children at two year intervals which suggests that they nursed their own children rather than using slave wet nurses.

The parish records include no mention of divorce or separation but list 42 births to unmarried women during the 1681-1765 period including one unmarried women who had three children and two unmarried women who, like Susanna Simpson, each had two children before they married. While there is no record of punishment or sanctions for unmarried mothers, the parish vestry would sometimes order unmarried couples to “cease cohabitation.” Although living conditions were primitive in Colonial Maryland, infant deaths in St. George’s Parish were relatively low. Parish records, while probably underestimating infant mortality, show that 2718 children were born between 1703 and 1761 and that only 48 were recorded as infant deaths.84

Housing on the Maryland tidewater was crude and crowded during the seventeenth century. Except for a few brick buildings erected by wealthy planters, the small, wood-frame houses of the colonists were similar to the rural cottages they had left in England. The houses were one story with a gable roof and a sleeping or storage loft. They were often a single room or divided into two tiny rooms. The walls of the house were homemade clapboards split from nearby trees and nailed to vertical posts set in the ground.  The floors were usually compacted dirt and the interior walls were plastered with wattle and daub, essentially mud applied to twigs, to fill gaps as the green lumber used for clapboard dried.

A fireplace at one end of the tiny building provided the heat for cooking throughout the year and heating during the winter. The chimney was on an exterior wall at the gable end of the little house and was also commonly constructed of mud that had dried on twigs. Some Maryland colonists used thatch roofs of the type they had used in England. The weight of the thatch, the skills required and the scarcity of appropriate straw and grasses contributed to the early use of shake roofs in Maryland. Wooden shakes could be riven during the winter when the colonist was otherwise unoccupied, but required tools to make and nails to install. The houses were dark and poorly-furnished. The small windows had no glass but were closed with shutters which neither protected against the cold in winter nor against mosquitos and other insects in summer. The tidewater settlers of this period appear not to have used curtains. Because the houses were poorly constructed of rough materials, they required frequent repair and were often abandoned after a few years because colonists believed it was easier to build a new house than to renovate the existing house.85

 Like the houses, the furnishings were crude but practical. The poorest houses were furnished with beds, benches, tables and chests, as well a cooking and eating utensils. Of the poorest households in Maryland during the 1656-1719 period, more than 90% had beds and cast iron cooking pots or kettles. Nearly 60% had iron frying pans or skillets, while 29% had books, and only 24% had chairs. The poorest colonists, including particularly servants and slaves, slept on beds of straw or “flock” mattresses stuffed with bits of wool. As colonists advanced in economic status, they acquired bed frames with feather mattresses on a rope grid. The most wealthy planters had large beds with curtains for privacy and extensive investment in feather piilows and woolen blankets.

Colonists used cheap earthenware pottery for dishes and bowls but relied on the more-expensive but more-durable pewterware for beverage containers like the tankard or drinking pot a family would share at meals. Colonists also used woodenware bowls, plates and trenchers, as well as wooden utensils. Among the poorest families, spoons, soap and spinning wheels were rare and forks were not used. Because of the need for expensive equipment, it appears that most lower-income families in Maryland did little oven baking and no weaving during the period before 1700. Because of the poor quality of the wool from Maryland sheep, the “countrymade cloth” produced locally was coarse and considered inferior to imported wool. The Chesapeake settlers, unlike their contemporaries in New England, appear not to have dipped their own candles or made their own soap.

 Recent scholarship has concluded that the free women of colonial Maryland had rather traditional responsibilities in the families of small planters. They appear to have been exempt from the most arduous part of agricultural work but certainly had responsibility for tending the vegetable gardens and dairy cows that enabled the family to survive between tobacco crops and during the years when tobacco prices were depressed. In addition, women had the primary responsibility for the “inside” tasks of cooking, laundering and child-rearing. It is likely that the “outside” responsibilities of women were greater during the early years of marriage and during periods when low tobacco prices forced families to expand production. Because of the work of women, Maryland families generally produced enough food to be self-sufficient but were dependent on the proceeds of the tobacco crop to buy the clothes, shoes, tools and other manufactured goods they were unable to provide for themselves.86

The diet in the Maryland tidewater of the seventeenth century and eighteenth century was similar to the diet throughout the English-speaking colonies of North America. It was narrow, repetitive and relied heavily on Indian corn, prepared in a variety of forms, augmented by the produce of the garden and meat from domestic animals or hunting. Maryland settlers grew their own corn, ate it fresh-roasted, ground or pounded it by hand, and prepared it as corn bread, corn pone or corn porridge or mush. Meals were often of the one-pot variety, with corn, vegetables and any available meat boiled together into a thick soup. The meal would often be accompanied by some form of corn cake or corn bread. The colonists, learning from the Indians, also grew beans, squash, sweet potatoes and other vegetables. As they became settled, they planted orchards growing peaches and pears and particularly apples to be eaten fresh, cooked or squeezed into sweet cider, or allowed to ferment into hard cider.

In Maryland, the diet of corn products was also augmented with meats, including particularly various forms of salt pork.87 Chesapeake Bay settlers, during the early period, relied on hunting and fishing for much of the protein in their diet. They hunted deer, squirrels and raccoons, as well as quails, turkeys, ducks and geese. They also ate seafood, including fish, oysters, crabs and turtles. In that latter part of the seventeenth century, the proportion of game and fish in the diet declined as farmers shifted their diets to cattle, chicken and swine. Throughout the 1660-1710 period, a majority of Chesapeake households raised chicken, cattle and hogs for domestic consumption. Sheep, for their meat or wool, appear to have been rare until after 1690, when the risk of loss to wolves and other predators had abated.88

For all but the richest settlers, the quality of tidewater life was dreary and characterized by hard work and continued decline in real income as tobacco prices slipped. Because tobacco rapidly depleted land, planters were forced to shift to new land, leaving tobacco land fallow. This may have contributed to the impermanence of much of the housing and the widespread grazing of livestock on exhausted tobacco land. While the housing was practical and economical, it was crowded and uncomfortable. Sanitation was primitive. More than 90% of Maryland houses owned no chamber pots and it appears that there was no effort to dig pits or latrines for garbage or human waste. Since hogs were running loose outside the houses and water was drawn from nearby streams, disease was common.

Inside the houses, there was little comfort, culture or beauty. In one sample of 606 Maryland estates between 1656 and 1719, only thirty-three had window curtains. Of the poorer families, only 24% had chairs, 3% had warming pans and 2% had soap and washtubs. While 29% of the poorer families had one or more books, most frequently a Bible or other religious book, musical instruments were rare. An analysis of 700 Maryland estates identified only eight with musical instruments, including eight violins, one flute and one jews harp. Although earthenware pots were cheap and widely available, not even the richest households had a container for flowers.89

By the early eighteenth century, disparities in economic conditions began to emerge among the Chesapeake colonists. Lord Baltimore, emulating the social structure of England, had envisioned a society in which wealthy landowners would maintain social stability through heredity control of courts, tax collection and the legislative council. The inability of the proprietor to attract and retain aristocratic immigrants and the conflict between religious groups resulted in a society that was somewhat more egalitarian than the original design. The early settlers had encountered obstacles to family formation and often died before they were able to accumulate significant wealth. After 1700, this pattern changed and, with the shift from indentured servants to slave labor, disparities in wealth and social position reemerged.

The shift from indentured labor to slave labor in Maryland took place at the end of the seventeenth century during a period of improving economic conditions in England and extended depression in tobacco prices. The improved conditions in England resulted in a declining supply of workers willing to emigrate under contracts of indenture, while the depressed tobacco prices reduced the capacity of small and middling planters to expand operations by buying land and hiring labor. The large planters, in contrast, could afford the investment required to purchase slaves and additional land. The initial investment in a slave was two and a half times greater than the cost of an indentured servant. As a consequence, the ratio of servants to slaves in the Maryland tidewater was two to one before 1685, about even in 1690, and nearly one to three by 1700. Despite the chronic need for workers in the labor-intensive tobacco industry, most families had neither slaves nor indentured servants. During the period 1656 to 1719, 80% of the estates in the six Maryland counties around Chesapeake Bay owned no slaves and 61% owned neither slaves nor servants.90

While the affluent planters owned more slaves, larger houses and more furniture, their lives were rather similar to that of the small and middling planters. They had more possessions with greater value than their neighbors but their fortunes were governed by the same dependence on the tobacco economy and they shared the same lives of hard work, monotonous diet and limited cultural enrichment. In contrast to the aristocratic planters of the Virginia tidewater, the successful Maryland colonist was still struggling to establish himself and his family in 1700.

The children of colonial Maryland, particularly at the beginning of the eighteenth century, had limited opportunities for education. A few wealthy planters engaged tutors for their children and accumulated libraries of books imported from England. Most residents however received little or no formal education. At best, they obtained irregular guidance or tutoring from clergymen, the best-educated group in the colony. Although there was little formal schooling, several of the early settlers maintained personal libraries of religious and other books. On the remote Chesapeake Bay shore that would later become Harford County, the first private library was organized twenty years before the first permanent settlement. Edward Palmer, who had a fur trading post on an island at the mouth of the Susquehanna River, brought books with him for his personal use. Palmer’s library was lost before 1659 when Old Baltimore County was established and settlers moved into the area.

Apart from sporadic tutoring by preachers augmenting meager incomes, there was no school in the area until after 1710. According to one account, the first Spesutia schoolmaster was hired in 1711.91 By the early 1720s, the rector of St. George’s Parish, an Oxford graduate, organized a school at Spesutia Church near Perryman. In 1723, the Maryland General Assembly required each county to establish a “Free School” and set aside one hundred acres of land in each county to provide firewood and rental income to support the school.92

During the same period that the first schools were being formed, the Rev. Thomas Bray was promoting the formation of lending libraries in each parish in Maryland Colony. Bray purchased and sent packages of books from England to Maryland in the 1690s. These books were intended “For Instruction in All Things Necessary to Salvation” and included Bibles, prayer books and books of sermons. Bray also sent multiple copies of tracts like the iiPreparative Discourses…to take Care of the Soule” and “Dr. Asheton’s pieces against Cursing, Swearing, Blasphemy and Drunkeness” for distribution in Maryland and other colonies. After a visit to Maryland, Bray returned to England in 1701 and sent a collection of more than 800 copies of 36 religious books to St. George’s and ten other parish libraries in Maryland.93

In addition to the books available in the parish libraries, clergymen often maintained substantial personal collections. The Rev. Evan Evans, an O\:ford graduate, died in 1721 at St. George’s Parish and left a library of fifty-five volumes. While Rev. Evans’ library was primarily religious in nature, it also included several books on British history, a biography of the Duke of Marlborough and a volume of Maryland laws.94

The four generations of the Simpson family who lived in Maryland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries experienced enormous change in less than one hundred years.  In the 1680s, settlement was scattered along the Chesapeake Bay shoreline, a shortage of women made it difficult to form families and slaves from Africa had not yet replaced indentured servants in the tobacco economy.  By the middle of the eighteenth century, when the Simpson family decided to leave Maryland, the population had grown and the economy had changed.  The scattered, shoreline farms of the 1690s had been replaced by large plantations, small towns, diverse agricultural production and growing urbanization.  The town established at Baltimore in 1729 had emerged as a major commercial center and the primary seaport for Maryland and Pennsylvania.

By 1742, St. George’s Parish in Harford County had grown to 991 taxables and an estimated population of 4,000.95 The Maryland Colony got its first newspaper in 1745 and, by 1748, had a population of 150,000 including 42,764 slaves.96 Harford County grew in population to 12,765 by 1776, when there were 3342 slaves in the county, which the Simpson family left in the 1750s. The area in which the Simpsons had lived, by then called Spesutia Lower Hundred, had become the most prosperous part of the county. Land throughout Harford County had an average value of $1.36 an acre in 1786 but land in the 21,000 acres of Lower Spesutia had an average value of $2.37 an acre. Whether the cause of the local prosperity or a result of that prosperity, Lower Spesutia also had an high proportion of slaves. Where the slave population was 26% throughout Harford County in 1776, it was 45% in Lower Spesutia.97

By 1776, the character of Spesutia Hundred had changed with the growth of wealth and the expansion of slave labor. The 1776 census found 1440 people in Spesutia including 790 whites and 650 blacks.  Of 167 households, 54 owned slaves and 22 owned no slaves but had white servants. Of the 54 households with slaves, 37 also had white servants.  In contrast to the Spesutia of 1692, where 18% of the families owned slaves, 32% of the Spesutia families of 1776 owned slaves. The average slave-owning family of 1692 had three slaves while the average was twelve for the slaveowning families of Spesutia in 1776.  Of the 167 Spesutia households in 1776, 113 were families including one or two parents and at least one child.98

The documentary record of the Simpson family in Maryland is incomplete. It is certain that the elder Richard Simpson arrived in Maryland sometime before July 1688. There is no evidence whether he, like many of his neighbors, had arrived in Maryland as an indentured servant or whether he had first served out an indenture in Virginia before moving to Maryland. It is also possible, but less likely, that he was born in North America, the son of parents who had arrived a generation earlier. His choice of the St. George’s Parish area in 1688 suggests that he had most likely settled in another area and had moved to Old Baltimore County where land was available when he had accumulated the resources to establish his own farm and family.

He settled in the eastern part of Old Baltimore County near Chesapeake Bay between Swan Creek and Havre de Grace at the mouth of the Susquehanna River, in What is now Harford County.  While he appears to have lived at several locations over the next twenty years, he confined his movements to farms within St. George’s Parish. Through business transactions and marriage, Richard Simpson established enduring relationships with his Spesutia Hundred neighbors the Smiths and the Gilberts.  He married Anne Gilbert and raised at least seven children while farming near the Chesapeake Bay shore. He paid his taxes and supported his family but failed to achieve the level of prosperity to own slaves or to accumulate an estate adequate to support his widow and young children after his death in 1711.

Thomas Simpson, the oldest son of Richard and Anne Gilbert Simpson, continued farming in the St. George Parish area until the mid eighteenth century. He owned land, married twice and raised a large family. Like many of his neighbors, he had been able to support his family through farming in Maryland but his children were unable to remain in Old Baltimore County after the middle of the 18th century. The undeveloped Chesapeake Bay tidewater of the 1680s was thickly populated by the 1750s and offered few opportunities for young families whose patrimony was hard work rather than accumulated land or wealth. The younger Richard Simpson, the son of Thomas Simpson and the grandson of the older Richard Simpson, like many of his Old Baltimore County relatives and neighbors, moved to the new frontier and new opportunities of North Carolina in the mid eighteenth century.

Colonial Maryland Notes

I am much indebted to Wenonah S. Williams, who has edited and published Simpsons, A Gathering of the Clan since 1985. A newsletter for genealogists and others interested in the Simpson family, Gathering of the Clan has enabled a large number of Simpson descendants to share their research, sources, speculations and frustrations. Nona’s newsletter introduced me to the research of Donald Ray Simpson and the Simpson families of North Carolina and led me to the 17th century Simpsons in Maryland.

1  Richard Hakluyt, Discourse of Western Planting. 1584 quoted in John Fiske, Old Virginia and Her Neighbors, Vol. I (Boston, 1897), p. 45. The Discourse was prepared at the request of Sir Walter Raleigh to persuade Queen Elizabeth to promote colonization in the New World.

2 The primary sources of the family legend are letters written in 1897 by two grandsons of Thomas Simpson. The legend and sources are described in Kirke Wilson, For We Cannot Tarry Here (San Francisco, 1990), pp. 121-125 and pp. 131-133.

3  Ibid., pp. 46-47 and pp. 131-132.

4 Russell R. Menard and Lois Green Carr, “The Lords Baltimore and the Colonization of Maryland” in David B. Quinn, editor, Early Maryland in a Wider World (Detroit, 1982), 167-215; Fiske, Old Virginia , Vol. I, pp. 255-275.

5 The Charter of Maryland Granted to Lord Baltimore, June 20, 1632 in W. Keith Kavenagh, Foundations of Colonial America, Vol. II (New York, 1973), pp. 757-758. The medieval and quasi-regal palatinate rights granted the Calverts vastly exceeded the rights granted in the corporate charter of Virginia or the later proprietorships in North America including Carolina, Maine, New York, Nova Scotia and Pennsylvania.

6 Ibid., pp. 758-759. While the charter suggested a modicum of political participation by the inhabitants, the proprietor could exercise control through his power to appoint officials and veto legislation.

7 Ibid., p. 758. In contrast to other ancient forms of land tenure, socage was free of continuing military or financial obligations beyond the annual rent Under “free and common socage”, the land was held of the proprietor rather than the king (”in Capite”) and the grantee was not required, as a condition of the grant, to perform military service (“Knight Service”) or provide men and arms at his own expense.

8 Herbert L. Osgood, The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. II (New York, 1904), pp.20-21. The 1633 concessions were modified for new settlers in 1636, 1642, 1648 and 1649. Kavenagh, Colonial America, Vol. II, includes Conditions of Plantations: 1636, pp. 1521-1522; 1648, pp.1525-1529; 1649, pp. 1529-1530.

9 J. Frederick Fausz, “Merging and Emerging Worlds” in Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan and Jean B. Russo, editors, Colonial Chesapeake Society (\Villiamsburg, Virginia and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1988), pp. 47-91.

10 Gloria L. Main, “Maryland and the Chesapeake Economy, 1670-1720” in Aubrey C. Land, Lois Green Carr and Edward C. Papenfuse, Law. Society. and Politics in Early Maryland (Baltimore, 1977), pp. 149-150. Fiske, Old Virginia, Vol. II, pp. 148-150.

11 Russell R. Menard, “British Migration to the Chesapeake Colonies in the Seventeenth Century,” in Carr, Colonial Chesapeake, pp. 101-105. Using a variety of quantitative techniques, Menard concludes that migration to Maryland between 1634 and 1680 was between 23,501 and 40,000 with a best estimate of 31,751.

12 Ibid., p. 129.

13 Russell R. Menard, “Immigrants and their Increase: The Process of Population Growth in Early Colonial Maryland”, in Land, Law, Society, and Politics , p. 93.

14 Menard and Carr, in Quinn, Early Maryland. p. 204.

15 Indenture Agreement of December 14, 1645 between Edward Fisher, master, and Walter Guest, servant, in Kavenagh, Colonial America, Vol. II, pp. 1183-1184. Walter Guest was already in North America, perhaps having completed a previous indenture, when he agreed to three years of bonded service in exchange for 6000 pounds of tobacco.

16 Menard and Carr, in Quinn, Early Maryland, p. 205; Menard, in Carr, Colonial Chesapeake, pp. 106-108.

 17 George Alsop, “A Character of the Province of Maryland” in Clayton Colman Hall, ed., Narratives of Early Maryland, 1634-1684 (New York, 1910), p. 357. Alsop’s narrative was published in London in 1666.

18 Act of 1638, in Kavenagh, Colonial America, Vol. II, p. 1183.

19 Alsop, “A Character of the Province of Maryland,” p. 358.

20 Menard, in Carr, Colonial Chesapeake, pp. 126-129.

21 Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia, originally published 1705, in The Annals of America, Vol. I (Chicago, 1968), p. 325.

22 Menard, in Carr, Colonial Chesapeake, p. 120. The proportion of indentured servants may be far greater than 70 percent because a large number of Maryland immigrants were persons who had served out indentures in Virginia before moving to Maryland.

23 Gloria L. Main, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650-1720 (Princeton, New Jersey, 1982), pp. 113-122.

24 Act Concerning Religion, April 27, 1649, in Kavenagh, Colonial America, Vol. II, pp. 1322-1324.

25 John Yeo letter of May 25, 1676 to the Archbishop of Canterbury in Percy C. Skirven, The First Parishes of the Province of Maryland (Baltimore, 1923), pp. 26-27. The Reverend John Yeo, a graduate of Oxford, subsequently served as rector of St. George’s Parish, Old Baltimore County from 1683 to 1686.

26 Act of June 2, 1692, in Kavenagh, Colonial America, Vol. II, pp. 1324-1328.

27 Ibid., p. 1327.

28 William P. Cumming, “Early Maps of the Chesapeake Bay Area: Their Relation to Settlement and Society,” in Quinn, Early Maryland, pp. 280-281.

29 C. Milton Wright, Our Harford Heritage (Havre de Grace, Maryland, 1967), pp. 17-19. Edward Palmer’s trading post was established at Palmer’s Island at the mouth of the Susquehanna River about 1622 and subsequently abandoned. The island was later named Watson’s Island and, since 1885, when the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was built through the area, Garrett Island.

30 George W. Archer, “Early Settlements on What is Now Aberdeen Proving Ground in Harford County,” Harford County Historical Bulletin, Winter 1986, p. 3. Old Baltimore County included what is now Baltimore, Carroll, Cecil and Harford Counties in Maryland and parts of what is now Chester, Lancaster and York Counties in Pennsylvania.

 31 Robert W. Barnes, Baltimore County Families 1659-1759 (Baltimore, 1989), p. 655. Oakington Plantation continues in operation 330 years later.

32 George W. Archer, The Early Settlements in the Bush River Neck, Introductory to History of St. George’s Parish (Bel Air, Maryland, 1890), p. 5.

33 Alsop, “A Character of the Province of Maryland,” p. 378.

34 Wright, Harford Heritage, p. 20.

35 Ibid., p. 22.

36 Walter W. Preston, History of Harford County, Maryland (Baltimore, 1901), pp. 26-27; Archer, Bush River Neck, pp. 4-6; Wright, Harford Heritage, pp. 23-24.

37 Archer, Bush River Neck, pp. 6-7.

38 Preston, Harford County, p. 42.

39 Alsop, “A Character of the Province of Maryland,” p. 363. The description of tobacco growing is from Alsop.

40 Main, Tobacco Colony. pp. 31-41.

41 Alsop, op. cit., p. 363.

42 Ibid., p. 364.

43 Kavenagh, Colonial America, Vol. II, 1274-1275.

44 Fiske, Old Virginia, Vol. II, pp. 161-173. George I restored the proprietary government of the Calverts in 1715 after the 4th Lord Baltimore became a Protestant. Charles Calvert, 5th Lord Baltimore and his son Frederick, the 6th and last Lord Baltimore, continued as proprietors of Maryland until 1771 when the barony of Baltimore became extinct for lack of legitimate heirs.

45 Kavenagh, Colonial America, Vol. II, p. 1326.

46 Ibid., pp. 1324-1326.

47 Fiske, Old Virginia, Vol. I, pp. 227-228. The hundred had been the basic unit of local government in rural England. It was the geographical subdivision for the administration of justice, political representation and military organization. The hundred had a local court serving several rural townships and, in ancient times, had been the area that could furnish 100 armed men in time of war. In eighteenth century Maryland, county government replaced the hundred as the basic unit of local government although vestiges of the  hundred system persisted into the early nineteenth century.

48 An Act for the Constables Taking a List of Taxables, enacted June 2, 1692 in Skirven, First Parishes, p. 59.

49 Kavenagh, Colonial America, Vol. II, pp. 1033-1034.

50 Gust Skordas, The Early Settlers of Maryland (Baltimore, 1979), pp. 419-420.

51 Several other Simpsons appear in the early records of Maryland.  Paul Simpson was a witness in June 1648 when Giles Brent placed two cows in trust for “Mr. Coxe’s two children,” (Kavenagh, Colonial America, Vol. II, p. 1567).  In August 1648, Angel Simpson was a member of a coroner’s jury to investigate the death of Thomas Allen at St. Michael’s Manor, (Ibid., p. 1615). William Simpson resided at St. Clement’s Manor in 1672 where he was fined in a Court Leet and Court Baron for letting his hogs run in the manor lands, (Ibid., pp. 1414-1415).  None of these Simpsons appears to have been related to the Richard Simpson family of Old Baltimore County, Maryland.

52 Robert W. Barnes, Maryland Rent Rolls: Baltimore and Anne Arundel Counties, 1700- 1707, 1705-1724 (Baltimore, 1976), p. 183.

53 Skordas, Early Settlers, p. 420.

54 Marion Hull Headington and Clifford E. Headington, Maryland Genealogical Notes, Early Parishes and Hundreds (Baltimore,1954), pp. a-g. Barnes, Maryland Rent Rolls, p. 25, 34.

55 Neal A. Brooks and Eric G. Rocke!, A History of Baltimore County (Towson, Maryland, 1979), pp. 1-3. Harford County was carved out of Baltimore County in 1773. The county was named for Henry Harford, the illegitimate son and heir of Frederick Calvert, sixth Lord Baltimore.  When the playboy Frederick Calvert died in 1771 without legitimate heirs, the Baltimore barony and proprietorship expired.  Fiske, Old Virginia, Vol. II, pp.168-173.

56 The Swan Creek area is approximately thirty miles northeast of Baltimore on U.S. 40, called the General Pulaski Highway, between Aberdeen and Havre de Grace. Swan Creek crosses U.S. 40 near the Oakington Road/Maryland Route 132 exit. North of U.S. 40, Swan Creek is a brook through a residential subdivision along Robin Hood Road. The likely site of “Simson’s Choice” on the “head of Swan Creek” is south of U.S. 40 near the present location of Havre de Grace Consolidated School and along Maryland Route 132, the “Old Post Road” from Alexandria to Philadelphia. The putative Swan Creek site is 1.3 miles northeast of Aberdeen and 3 miles southwest of Havre de Grace. Public access to Swan Creek cove is from Oakington Road and Swan Creek Country Club on the east. On the west, the Swan Creek shore is part of Homer’s Point Plantation and a residential area of Aberdeen Proving Ground. There is no town of Swan Creek but the Swan Creek name survives locally at the country club, Swan Creek Farms, Swan Harbor Dell Trailer Park and Swan Creek Point. The Swan Creek area is in Aberdeen (Maryland) Quadrangle, United States Geological Survey map 39076-E2- TF-024.

Swan Creek, identified as “Swane Creek” appears in Augustine Herrman’s 1673 map published in London. J. Louis Kuethe, “A Gazetteer of Maryland, AD. 1673,” Maryland Historical Magazine, December 1935, pp. 310-324. Other Swan Creeks are in Anne Arundel County and Kent County and there is a Swan Jut in Worcester County.

In Chesapeake Bay there are Swan Islands in Dorchester County and Somerset County, as well as a Swan Point in Kent County. There is also a Swan Point in the Potomac River in Charles County. Henry Gannett, A Gazetteer of Maryland and Delaware (Baltimore, 1976, originally published 1904), p. 74.

57 Skirven, First Parishes, p. 142. As late as 1694, there were only nine Anglican clergymen to serve the thirty parishes of Maryland.

58 McHenry Howard, “Some Abstracts of Old Baltimore County Records,” Maryland Historical Magazine , 1923, p. 3. Since 1918, when the War Department bought 35,000 acres of Harford County farmland to establish Aberdeen Proving Ground, the Chesapeake Bay shoreline between Gunpowder River and Swan Creek has been government property. Surviving remnants of Spesutia include Spesutie Island on the Upper Western Shore of Chesapeake Bay in the restricted area of Aberdeen Proving Ground and Old Spesutie Church built in 1851 to continue service to St. George’s Parish.

59 Savington Warren Crampton, A Brief History of St. George’s Parish (Baltimore, 1851), 6, 8-9, 22-23. The Spesutia Church was rebuilt in 1758 and again in 1851 at the Perryman site. The 1851 building remains in use. The Rev. Mr. Crampton was Rector of Spesutia Church in 1851 when the fourth church was erected. Spesutia Church is 3.7 miles west of Aberdeen and 0.8 mile south of U.S. 40 on Spesutia Road in Perryman. The site of the 1671 church at Gravelly is now within Aberdeen Proving Ground. No evidence of the 1671 church survives.

60 Ibid., p. 13.

61 Bill and Martha Reamy, St. George’s Parish Registers. 1689-1793 (Silver Spring, Maryland, 1988), pp. 99-100. None of the Simpsons served as vestryman, warden or registrar in St. George’s Parish between 1718 and 1790.

62 Jane Baldwin, ed., The Marvland Calendar of Wills, Vol. III (Baltimore, 1907), p. 206. The 1711 will of Richard Simpson makes a distinction between the bequest to young Richard and the distribution of property among children “by last wife”.

 63 Barnes, Baltimore Families , p. 582; Reamy, Parish Registers, p.2. In a 1708 registration, Thomas Simpson appears to have been born in 1690. (Ibid., p. 13) Since the 1697 registration was eleven years closer to the event, the 1691 date is more likely to have been accurate. A register of births, deaths and marriages, written on parchment, was maintained in St. George’s Parish from 1692 and survives nearly 300 years later. Registers for the periods 1692 to 1745 and 1745 to 1799 have been found. The “St. George’s and St. John’s Register and Vestry Proceedings, 1671-1883” are in six volumes in the Maryland Historical Society Library, Baltimore.

64 Peter A. Jay, Havre de Grace: An Informal History (Havre de Grace, Maryland, 1986), p. 3.

65 Barnes, Baltimore Families, p. 582.

66 Headington, Maryland Notes, p. 7. The 1692 tax list for Spesutia Hundred is folio 228- 229 in the Maryland State Archives at Annapolis.

67 F. Edward Wright, ed., Inhabitants of Baltimore County, 1692-1763 (Silver Spring, Maryland, 1987), pp. 3-4.

68 Barnes, Maryland Rent Rolls, p. 25.

69 Headington, Maryland Notes: 1694 is folio 272, p. 10; 1695 is folio 522, p. 17. Raymond B. Clark, Jr. and Sara Seth Clark, Baltimore County Maryland Tax List 1699- 1706 (Washington, D.C., 1964), lists Richard Simpson: 1699, p.l; 1700, p.7; 1701, p.14; 1702, p.29; 1704, p.40. There is no listing for Richard Simpson in Baltimore County in 1703, Ibid., pp. 30-38. In 1705, Richard Simpson is listed with his son as Richard “Sampson” senior and junior, Ibid. p.49. In 1706, father and son are correctly listed, Ibid. p.57. 7°Clark, Maryland Tax List, lists Thomas Gilbert, Sr. and Jr.: 1699, p. 1; 1700, p. 7; 1701, 14; 1702, p. 29; 1703, p.30; 1704, p. 40; 1705, p. 49; 1706, p. 58. Thomas Gilbert, probably the junior, died in 1714. Bettie S. Carothers and Robert W. Barnes, Index of Baltimore County Wills, 1659-1850 (Lutherville, Maryland, 1979) p. 26. The Gilbert name is variously spelled Gilbord, Gilburts, Guilbert and Gilbard. Thomas Gilbert, Sr. appears to have lived in Spesutia since 1692 or earlier. Barnes, Baltimore County Families, p. 252.

71 Reamy, Parish Registers, p. 2. In addition to Thomas born 1691, the register shows Susanna, born April 5, 1693; William, born February 14, 1695; and Elizabeth, born April 5, 1697. The 1691-1697 entries spell the family name “Simson.”

72 Ibid., p. 4. The girl born September 30, 1698 was named Elizabeth suggesting that the Elizabeth born in 1697 had died in infancy.

73 Ibid., p. 5. Jonathan was born November 12, 1699.

74 Ibid., p. 4.

75 Ibid., p. 13. The 1708 list includes Thomas (but erroneously lists his age as 17 when he was actually only 16), Susan (correctly listed as 15 years old but with an April 2 birthday) and William (erroneously listed as 14 in February 1707–he was 13 at the time.) The 1708 listing does not mention either the Elizabeth born in 1697 nor the Elizabeth born in 1698 but includes an Elizabeth born seven months before February 27, 1708 (e.g. July 27, 1707). The 1708 listing does not mention the Jonathan born in 1699 but includes an infant Jonathan born November 12, 1707. Since the 1708 register lists siblings born five months apart, it appears likely that the surviving Elizabeth was born in late 1706 or early 1707 but not in July 1707. The 1708 listing also includes a son Mathew (born August 27, 1702) and a daughter Ann (born January 25, 1705). Susanna Simpson, the oldest daughter of Richard and Anne Simpson, gave birth to two children before her marriage to Thomas Knight in 1719. She was indicted for bastardy in 1711 and named Garrett Close as the father of her child born that June. In 1716, she named James Collins as the father of her daughter Sarah Collins Simpson born the year before. (Barnes, Baltimore Families, p. 582; Reamy, Parish Registers, p. 18) In November 1718, she married Thomas Knight and , in June 1719, gave birth to a son Light Knight. (Barnes, p. 104; Reamy, p. 19) In 1743, Light Knight married Rachel Ruse (perhaps Reese) and had seven children between 1746 and 1760 including Mary Knight born in Old Baltimore County, February 10, 1748. (Reamy, p. 93) This Mary Knight may be the same Mary Knight (c. 1751-1836) who married the second Thomas Simpson (1739-1833) in the 1770s in North Carolina. They would have been second cousins.

76 Baldwin, Maryland Wills, p. 114. The Oakington Plantation was sold several times before 1935, when it was purchased by Millard Tydings (1890-1961) and others. Tydings represented Maryland in the United States Senate from 1926 to 1950, where his son Joseph Tydings served 1964-1970. The Tydings family continues to own Oakington but sold part of the plantation to the developers of the Swan Creek Country Club. Jay, Havre de Grace, pp. 158-162.

The new calendar proclaimed by Pope Gregory in 1582 was adopted in much of Europe two years later. England continued using the old style Julian Calendar until September 1752. Because the new year began March 25 on the Julian calendar, old style dates between January 1 and March 24 are often presented as 1707/8. Old style dates are twelve days earlier than the same date on the Gregorian calendar. 77 The will is in the Maryland State Archives at Annapolis. The 1711 will is described in Baldwin, Maryland Wills, p. 206. The will is also listed in James M. Magruder, Jr., ed., Index of Maryland Colonial Wills, 1634-1777, Vol. 3 (Baltimore, 1967), p. 432; Barnes, Baltimore Families, p. 581; Carothers, Baltimore Wills, p. 64. Richard Simpson, Senior, Last Will and Testament, filed Baltimore County, Maryland, June 6, 1711. Baltimore County Wills, Book 1, pp. 88-89. Richard Simpson’s neighbors, Garret Garretson and John Brown and his nephew Thomas Gilbert, were witnesses. It appears that neither Richard Simpson nor Thomas Gilbert could sign his name.

78 Ibid.

79 Barnes, Baltimore Families, p. 581. Carothers, Baltimore Wills, p. 64. This form of indentured servitude was common during the early colonial period when children, particularly children from families of modest means, were “put out” to learn a trade or simply to obtain care and supervision.

80 Robert W. Barnes, ed., Man1land Marriages, 1634-1777 (Baltimore, 1976), p. 164, 167; Barnes, Baltimore Families, p. 582; Reamy, Parish Registers,pp. 24-33. It is unclear whether the Smith family into which at least two Simpsons married between 1717 and 1726 was related to the James Smith family that had owned property on which Thomas Simpson had lived in 1676. It is likely that Mary Smith Simpson was related to Samuel Smith, perhaps an older sister. According to Reamy, the children of Thomas Simpson and Mary Smith Simpson included William born 1718, Gilbert born 1724, Mary born 1726/7 and Thomas born 1729/30. Barnes also includes Eleanor, born 1721; Martha, born 1736; Joshua, born 1737. Gilbert died in infancy.

81 Barnes, Baltimore Families, p. 582 Property in colonial Maryland often had colorful descriptive names.

82 Ibid. The Thomas Simpson born in 1691 was the grandfather of Thomas Simpson born in 1739. Thomas Simpson of 1691 also had a son Thomas Simpson born in 1729 who was an uncle of Thomas Simpson born in 1739. During the sixty years 1690-1750, related Simpson families in Maryland also named four sons William, three daughters Anne and three sons John or Jonathan while using the names Elizabeth, Mary, Richard and Sarah twice. Unrelated Simpson families in Maryland used many of the same names during the same period. Gathering of the Clan, III:6, pp. 1-4.

83 The last record of the Richard Simpson family in Maryland is July 1745 when Nathaniel, the son of Richard and Elizabeth Simpson is born in St. George’s Parish, Old Baltimore County. Reamy, Parish Records, p. 74; Barnes, Baltimore Families, p. 582.

84 Ruth Anne Becker, “Spesutia Hundred, 1681-1799: A Study of a Colonial Maryland Parish,” unpublished MA thesis, University of Maryland, 1978.

 85 Main, Tobacco Colony, pp. 140-166. See also, Menard and Carr in Quinn, Early Maryland, p. 202. No example of the Chesapeake pole-set frame house of the seventeenth century survives. &, Main, Tobacco Colony, pp. 167-189. Main analyzed the personal property of 3,454 men who died in six Maryland counties between 1656 and 1719. The six counties included Baltimore County.

87 Ibid., p. 190-205. Main concludes that corn, in all its forms, comprised about half of the diet. The diet of wealthy planters included imported “luxury” items, including wine, spices, wheat flour, sugar and rum, as well as locally-grown fruits, vegetables and meats.

88 Henry M. Miller, “An Archaeological Perspective on the Evolution of Diet in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1620-1745,” in Carr, Colonial Chesapeake, pp 179-195. Miller and his colleagues analyzed the composition of tidewater trash deposits to identify diet trends.

89 Main, Tobacco Colony. pp. 170, 246-248, 256, 258.

90 Ibid., p. 26, pp. 102-103. p. 276. These data, because they are based on probate records, are likely to overestimate the actual wealth of Maryland families during this period.

91 Archer, St. George’s Parish, p. 21.  Rectors of the parish who were graduates of Oxford were Rev. John Yeo (1683-1686), Rev. Evan Evans (1718-1721) and Rev. Robert Wayman (1722-1724).

92 Wright, Harford Heritage, pp. 230-240.

93 Joseph Towne Wheeler, “The Laymen’s Libraries and the Provincial Library”, Maryland Historical Magazine, XXXV (1940), pp. 60-67.

94 Wheeler, “Reading Interests of the Professional Classes in Colonial Maryland, 1700- 1776”, Maryland Historical Magazine, XXXVI (1941), p. 186.

95 Walter G. Leslie, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, History of Harford County. 1951 manuscript, Maryland Historical Society, p. 83.

96  Fiske, Old Virginia, Vol. II, pp. 191, 268.

97 Wright, Harford Heritage, p. 73.

98 Becker, “Spesutia Hundred,” pp. 28, 44, 71.

 

INDEX

 

Aberdeen, 15-16

Aberdeen Proving Ground, 16, 23

Alsop, George, 9-10, 15, 18-19

Annapolis, 20

Avalon, Province of, 2 Baltimore City, 38

Baltimore County, Old, 9, 14-15, 17, 23

Beverley, Robert, 11 Bray, Rev. Thomas, 37 Browne, John, 27

Browne, Thomas, 26

Bush River, 16-17

Calvert, Cecilius (second Lord Baltimore), 2, 5 Calvert, George (first Lord Baltimore), 2

Calvert, Leonard, governor of Maryland Colony, 4-5 Chesapeake Bay, colonial living conditions, 8

Church of England, 13, 20

Claiborne, William, 14

Clarke, John and Elizabeth, 27 Education in colonial Maryland, 36-37 Evans, Rev. Evan, 37

Foster’s Point, 17

Freedom dues, 10

Gilbert Adventure, 25

Gilbert, Anne (see Anne Gilbert Simpson) Gilbert, Elizabeth, 24

Gilbert, Thomas, Sr., 24-25 Gilbert, Thomas, Jr., 24-25 Goldsmith, Matthew, 15 Goldsmith, Maj. Samuel, 17 Gravelly, 24

Gunpowder River, 17, 23

Harford County, 15, 23, 38

Harmer, Godfrey, 15, 24

Harmer’s Town, 24

Havre de Grace, 16, 23-26

Housing in colonial Maryland, 29-31 Hundred, The, 20

Libraries in colonial Maryland, 36-37 Looten, Jacob, 25

Lord Proprietor, rights of, in Maryland, 3

 

Maryland Colony: charter, 2-3

Council, 17

diet, 32-33

education, 36

family life, 28-39

first newspaper, 38

furnishings, 31-32, 34

housing, 29-31

libraries, 36-37

population, 7

Michaelsville, 24

Middle River, 18

Nanticote Indians, 17-18

Newspaper, 38

North Carolina, 1, 28, 40

Oakington Plantation, 9, 15, 27

Palmer, Edward, 14, 36

Palmer, William, 15

Patapsco River, 17

Providence (later Annapolis), 20 Puritans, in Maryland, 5 Religion, in Maryland, 5, 12-13

Act of 1692, 20

Revolution of 1688, 19

St. George’s Parish, 23-24, 26, 29, 37-38

St. George’s Parish Register, 26, 28-29

St. Mary’s, Maryland, 4, 20

Seneca Indians, 16-17

Servants, indentured, 8-12, 35 Severn River, Battle of, 5 Simpsons in Maryland, 21-23 Simpson, Anne (b. 1705), 27

Simpson, Anne Gilbert (c. 1670 – c. 1715), 24-27, 40

Simpson, Anslowe, 22

Simpson, Eleanor, 27

Simpson, Elizabeth (b. 1707), 27 Simpson, Elizabeth Reese, 28 Simpson, Mary Smith, 27-28

Simpson, Richard (c. 1663 – 1711), 22-27, 39-40

Simpson, Richard, Jr., 24-25, 27

Simpson, Richard (1714 – 1795), 27-28, 40

Simpson, Susanna, 29

Simpson, Thomas of Jacob’s Point, 22-23 Simpson, Thomas (1691 – n.d.), 24, 27-28, 40

Simpson, Thomas (1739 – 1833), 1, 28

 Simpson’s Hazard, 25

Simson’s Choice, 23

Sister’s Discovery, 28

Slaves of Maryland, 35, 38-39

Smith, Emmanuel, 23, 27

Smith, James, 22

Smith, John, 14

Smith, Mary (see Mary Smith Simpson) Spesutia, 16

Spesutia Church, 24, 36

Spesutia Hundred, 23-25, 28-29 Spesutia Lower Hundred, 38-39 Spesutie Island, 15-16

Stockett, Capt. Thomas, 9, 15, 24

Stokes, John, 25

Stokes, Robert Young, 25 Susquehanna River, 14, 16, 24, 26

Susquehannock Indians, 4-5, 16-17

Swan Creek, 9, 15, 23-24, 26 Swan Harbor Plantation, 15 Swantown, 15

Symson’s Hazard (see Simpson’s Hazard), 25 Taxes in colonial Maryland, 14, 19, 21

Tobacco, production of, 6, 18

Utie, Nathaniel, 15-16 Utie, Sheriff George, 17 Watauga Petition, 28

Wicomico Indians, 17

Women in colonial Maryland, 12, 32

Wood, Joshua, 28 Yeo, Rev. John, 13