Taylor, Thomas

Thomas Taylor was a wealthy Quaker and plantation owner from Frederick County, Maryland. Taylor was born in England on 19 April 1728 and died in Loudoun County on 20 July 1797. He came to Maryland as an indentured servant at the age of thirteen. In 1748, upon completion of his indenture at the age of twenty-one, he received Pile-Hile, a 188-acre tract of land, from Lord Charles Calvert, 5th Baron Baltimore. Taylor soon purchased multiple other tracts of land in nearby Fredericktown, Maryland. These included a 448-acre plantation and two other tracts designated as “excellent timbered land.”

Taylor married Caleb Pierpoint on 28 December 1750. They had four sons and four daughters. Taylor insisted that his daughters receive only the finest and most expensive education for girls in Baltimore.

On 8 October 1784, Taylor bought a three-hundred-acre land tract on Catoctin Creek in northern Loudoun County from another Quaker, Mercer Brown. This land was called Millford and included houses, mills, and orchards. Taylor moved to Virginia and took up residence at Hunting Hill, a house built by Richard Brown in the early 1730s that is now one of Loudoun County’s oldest standing buildings. In 1796, Taylor began selling quarter-acre plots from Millford. These plots were the start of the town known today as Taylorstown.

The grist and sawmills at Millford added to Taylor’s wealth. The settlement’s waterside location allowed for easy passage of goods up the creek to the Potomac River, then to market in Alexandria. Catoctin Creek also supplied the water power necessary to turn the mill wheels, which provided mechanical energy to heavy grindstones that crushed raw grain into flour.

Thomas Taylor took full advantage of the regional switch from tobacco to wheat farming. He bequeathed two large stills to his youngest son, Henry Taylor, which suggests that Thomas also had a distillery and produced whiskey from wheat processed in his mill. Along with the whiskey stills, Henry inherited Millford and its grist mill. Portions of the mill that Henry built sometime around 1800 are still used today as a private residence.

Taylor bought and sold enslaved people, which caused contention within his Quaker community. Although Quakers were allowed to rent or hire enslaved workers, they considered owning people morally wrong. Taylor’s enslaved people were mentioned in at least five monthly Quaker meetings. They were first mentioned in June 1762, and fifteen years later it was recorded that Taylor had been “much laboured with on account of slaves, yet he continues in the practice of keeping them in bondage.” In February 1778, fellow Quakers visited Taylor to persuade him to manumit his enslaved people. The Quaker community even offered to pay Taylor for his laborers, and to pay them their fair wages if he released them, but Taylor declined the offer. In May 1778, Taylor condemned his own actions of owning enslaved people, but he nonetheless never freed them. Moses and Jude, two of Taylor’s enslaved people, formed part of his estate’s inventory when he died in 1797.

By Andrew Snowman