Author: GILPIN, Joshua
Biography:
GILPIN, Joshua (1765-1841: ancestry.co.uk)
He was the eldest son of a prosperous Quaker merchant and flour miller, Thomas Gilpin (1728-78), and his wife Lydia Fisher (1736-1807) and was born in Philadelphia PA on 8 Nov. 1765. After inheriting his father’s business he established a paper mill on Brandywine Creek in Delaware. As early as 1787 his company, Joshua Gilpin and Co., advertised in Delaware newspapers for rags for the paper business. He later set up partnership with a younger brother, Thomas (1776-1853). Gilpin made his first tour to England and Europe in 1795-1801 and he filled numerous notebooks with his careful observations particularly of roads, canals, and manufacturing premises; as a Quaker he was also interested in schools and prisons. In England he visited the Rev. William Gilpin (1724-1804), a distant relative known as a travel writer and for his theories of the picturesque. It was during this European tour that Gilpin saw the fountain of Vaucluse in the south of France and composed the poem listed in this bibliography. He married Mary Dilworth (1777-1874) on 5 Aug. 1800 at Yealand Conyers, Lancashire; they had eight children but one, a daughter, died in infancy. On a second tour to England in 1811-15 Gilpin collected information about John Dickinson’s new cylinder mould method of paper making and in 1817 he established similar machines at his Delaware mill. Although his company had also operated a mercantile business, after 1817 it specialised in paper making until Gilpin sold the mill in 1837. In his later years he settled at an estate, Kentmere, which was located near Wilmington DE and named for the ancestral Gilpin estate in Kendal, England. He died there on 22 Aug. 1841 and was buried at Laurel Hill cemetery in Philadelphia. His eldest son, Henry Dilworth Gilpin, was the US attorney general under President Van Buren. (ancestry.co.uk 4 Sept. 2024; Delaware Gazette 11 Apr. 1787; J. W. Jordan, Colonial and Revolutionary Families of Pennsylvania [2004]; Hagley Museum and Library Archives finding aids)