Alexander Bartram

~• Loyalist pottery manufactures of Philadelphia; removed to NYC when British abandoned that city in 1778 leaving his wife Jane behind. retirned after the war to make claims for a Loyalist Pension w/ some success. Legally estranged from wife and child.

~• convicted of treason by the fledgling Continental Congress; a United Empire Loyalist who eventually died in Nova Scotia

sources

• https://www.jstor.org/stable/20092604
• https://hsmcpa.org/images/thebulletin/1968vol16no3.pdf page 166
  • "Although not a resident of our county-to-be, Alexander Bartram appropriately leads the list. As a Philadelphia trader in china and glassware, with home and shop in Market Street near the Indian King, he had extensive land holdings††† also in Bucks, Chester, Northampton, and Northumberland Counties.

Among his properties was a farm of approximately 55 acres adjoining land of Richard Mather on Washington Lane in Cheltenham Township.
In the spring of 1775 Bartram met regularly with a group of Englishmen who "wished and drank success to the British arms." According to Isaac Atwood, a comb maker, Bartram
was "very much against the [Continental] cause. He proposed making collections for the prisoners in gaol for their support and said . . . that we might fall upon some way to get money to them with as much secresy as possible . . The group, which called itself The Association, was headed by Dr. John Kearsley. It proposed taking up arms, and felt confident it could enlist 3,000 men of similar sentiments "within three miles of the Court House." Bartram apparently had a network of correspondents. Atwood told how he "gets intelligence very early. I have heard him communicate it the evening before expresses arrived with it."
"Association plans never materialized. By late summer, 1775, some of the group had been arrested. Samuel Morris, writing to his brother, Cadwalader, on September 7, noted:
". .. the City was yesterday amused with Isaac Hunt and Doctor Kearsly Paraded in a Cart through all the streets to their great Mortification and unpitied by every person who saw them — their Crimes were speaking disrespectfully of the present Measures — the Doctor made some resistance and was wounded in the hand with a Bayonet — People are ripe for everything — great confusion must of course follow."

Bartram seems to have avoided, temporarily, the wrath of his neighbors, but when the British occupied Philadelphia he joined them actively. William Moore, who later became Presi dent of Pennsylvania after serving on the Committee of Safety and the Board of War, made claim against the confiscated estate of Bartram for £ 81, 10 sh. for "a most elegant Fusee for which I have been frequently offered £20, another Fusee be longing to my son, and three Knapsacks ... The above Articles were taken forcibly by Arms, out of my House by the said Bartram .

When the British left the city, Bartram accompanied them. His wife, Jane, stayed in Philadelphia and apparently†† became part of his communications network.. (snip)

†† this contention in dispute with other historians
††† other land in Dauphin County as well

RESEARCH: Another brother may be James who settled in Jamaica in the same era. See The Original Scots Colonists of Early America, 1612-1783

Surnames, A-B (accesses on ancestry dot com)

• Reference: Ancestry Genealogy - SmartCopy: Nov 13 2023, 17:10:41 UTC