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Author: McCoy, Joseph

Biography:

MCCOY, Joseph (fl 1809-20)

He was probably born in Philadelphia but he settled in Wilkes-Barre PA, where he worked as a cashier in the Philadelphia Branch bank and where it seems his descendants live to this day. (Like Thomas Campbell's earlier Gertrude of Wyoming, his poem deals with the defeat of local patriots by the British and their Iroquois allies in Wyoming PA in 1778.) The 1820 US census records McCoy as a man between 26 and 45, head of a household that included five other members who, judging by sex and age, must have been his mother or mother-in-law, his wife, and their son and two daughters. He had sent a poem to Thomas Jefferson in 1809 as from "a Youth, who is fond of making verses." According to Pearce, he was so dissatisfied with The Frontier Maid that he burnt every copy he could find. (Stewart Pearce, Annals of Luzerne County[1866] 401-6; "Joseph McCoy to Thomas Jefferson, 3 July 1809," Founders Online 4 Dec. 2019; ancestry.com 4 Dec 2019)

 

Books written (1):

Wilkesbarre PA: printed by Steuben Butler and Samuel Maffet, 1819