My Genealogy Hound

JOHN THAW. John Thaw, late of Pittsburgh, Pa., was born March 11, 1779, and died Sept. 3, 1866. The grandfather, John Thaw, was born in Philadelphia in 1710, where he lived to a ripe old age, dying in 1795. His bones now lie buried near Philadelphia, in Abingdon churchyard.

Benjamin, next in the line of succession, was born in Philadelphia in 1753, and married Hannah, daughter of Joseph Engle, whose parents, Benjamin and Deborah Engle, were English Quakers who settled in Philadelphia late in the seventeenth century. Of the children of Benjamin and Hannah Thaw, the subject of this sketch, John Thaw, was the second son. On July 2, 1802, he married Elizabeth Thomas, daughter of a sea captain lost at sea some years previously.

His early manhood was as adventurous and unsettled as his long subsequent career was uneventful and serene. Apprenticed early in life to Paul Beck, a Philadelphia shipping merchant, and from his calling having much to do with those that “did business in great waters,” he acquired a fondness for a seafaring life, which he soon was offered the opportunity to gratify. He was appointed supercargo of a vessel, which, upon its first West Indian voyage, was seized (under Napoleon’s Milan decree) and taken into Guadeloupe, whence, when at length released, he managed to return, only to be overtaken on the way, however, by a more serious distress, the yellow fever, that fell disease breaking out and striking down his crew, he, almost alone of all on board, escaping.

Afterward, undertaking to trade on his own account, he sent a ship laden with such wares as were merchantable there to Senegal, Africa. The captain of the vessel, reaching his destination, disposed of his goods, bought slaves on his own account, and, returning, sold them in the West Indies and ran away with the proceeds. (A curious memorial of this adventure is preserved in the office of Mr. W. L. Jones, agent of the Insurance Company of North America in Pittsburgh, being the policy of insurance issued to John Thaw in 1801 for this voyage to Africa, which was presented to Mr. Jones more than sixty years afterward, and is valued by him as an interesting evidence of the venerable standing of his company.) The loss resulted in financial ruin to Mr. Thaw. He next sought and found service in the Bank of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia; was one of two sent out shortly after to establish a branch at Pittsburgh, in 1804, which, in 1817, was transferred to the old United States Bank, he shifting with it to serve as its cashier until the doom decreed by President Jackson brought it to an end Dec. 31, 1836.

Having acquired a comfortable competency, he then retired from active business, and spent a serene old age, holding no position but that of secretary of the Monongahela Smithfield Street Bridge company. He had filled this little place from the incorporation of the company in 1816, and in his old age its light but systematic duties were so agreeable to him that only in 1864, after forty-eight years of service, did he consent to lay them down.

His wife died in June, 1865, and his own death followed Sept. 3, 1866 — a union unbroken for sixty-three years, sixty-one years spent in Pittsburgh, during which a large family sprang up around them, marrying and multiplying to the fourth generation so that in his last years he was the still living head of a numerous and widespread connection. Mr. Thaw’s characteristics were marked. His straightforward business methods were upright and severe to the verge of austerity, but at heart he had a broad and comprehensive tolerance, and a practical regard for the welfare of all that made his daily life that of a good and kind as well as just man.

His extremely systematic habits are curiously illustrated by a continuous set of books of account found in his private desk after his death, and never before seen by his family, in which his entire private business was conducted in the most precise forms of double-entry bookkeeping, balanced regularly every year, and covering the whole period from March 11, 1800, to March, 1864—two years before his death. These books open with an account of stock taken the day he was twenty-one, when little more than his personal outfit constituted the items of this first entry in a set of books destined to have such a prolonged, unbroken life. It is, however, as the pioneer banker that Mr. Thaw’s biography appears in this publication, his career in that capacity, though a long one, having ended more than fifty years ago.