Peter Blow

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FAMILY ANCESTRAL FILE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott

In the late 1790s, Dred Scott, famous slave was born into slavery in Southampton County, Virginia, as property to the Peter Blow family.

From http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/resources/africanamerican/scott/scot...

Dred Scott was born to slave parents in Virginia sometime around the turn of the nineteenth century. His parents may have been the property of Peter Blow, or Blow may have purchased Scott at a later date. The mystery of exact ownership is one that would follow Dred Scott, and later his family, throughout their lives as slaves. With few records extant, it is difficult to identify exactly when ownership of the family was transferred to various parties. By 1830, Peter Blow had settled his family of four sons and three daughters and his six slaves in St. Louis. This was after having moved from Virginia to Alabama, to attempt farming near Huntsville, and, when that failed, a move from Alabama to Missouri. In St. Louis, Peter Blow undertook the running of a boarding house, the Jefferson Hotel. Within a year, though, his wife Elizabeth died and on June 23, 1832, Peter Blow passed away.

The Blow children remained in St. Louis after the deaths of their parents and became well established in the city's society through marriage to prominent families. Charlotte Taylor Blow married Joseph Charless, Jr., in November 1831; his father had established the first newspaper west of the Mississippi River and had been a leading opponent of slavery while editor. Charless, Jr., operated a wholesale drug and paint store, Charless & Company (later Charless, Blow, & Company when brothers-in-law Henry Taylor Blow and Taylor Blow became partners). Martha Ella Blow married attorney Charles Drake in 1835. Drake is better known in history for his role in the creation of Missouri's 1865 constitution. As a leader of the Radical Republican Party after the Civil War, he was determined to punish those considered Southern sympathizers; the constitution he helped author took away many of their rights, including enfranchisement. Peter Ethelrod Blow married Eugenie LaBeaume in 1833. She was from an old French banking family; her oldest brother was a wealthy businessman who, in partnership with Blow, formed Peter E. Blow & Company. She had two other brothers; one was the St. Louis County sheriff for a time in the 1840s, and one, Charles Edmund LaBeaume, was a St. Louis attorney who played an important role in Dred Scott's freedom suits. All of these St. Louis connections proved helpful to Dred Scott.