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- According to Worrall, in a section about the movement from stage coached to railroads, "William Hartshorne (1742-1852) and Phineas Janney (1778-1852), Quaker merchants from Alexandria, were the main promoters of the Little River Turnpike. After Phineas took over management of the turnpike compan in 1802, it was observed that his reports to his board of directores were invariably ‘full of thees and thous and common sense.' Phineas's father, Israel Janney (1752-1823), Quaker farmer, store-keeper, and miller of Goose Creek, was a leading light for the building of the Leesburg-Georgetown turnpike."
Worrall also records that, in 1793, "William Hartshore, 51, a Quaker merchant from Alexandria, who had been on friendly terms with [George] Washington for twenty years, was one of the six Friends who went to Sandusky [Ohio, to meet with the Iroquois]. The six were away from home four summer months in 1793. Ten tribes were represented at Sandusky, of whom the Iroquois, Shawnees, Wyandots, and Delawares expressed pleasure at the Quakers' presence ‘as peaceable and just men.' The six friends listened quietly while Indian spokesman addressed the U.S. Commissioners, headed by Timothy Pickering, Washington's Postmaster General. Is the Great White Father willing to make the Ohio River the boundary line?, the Indians asked. Will he move the whites off our land west of the River? Timothy Pickering replied at length, saying in essence, No, it is not possible but the U.S. will pay well for the land.
The Indians did not accept this reply, and another treaty talk was set for the summer of 1794 at Lake Canandaigua in New York State. The Iroquois asked for Quakers to be present again and William Savery and three more Philadelphia Friends attended. But this conference, too, ended inconclusively.
Then the U.S. turned again to a mailed fist solution of the problem. In August 1794 Anthony Wayne commanding the Western Army crushed a force of 2,000 braves in Ohio's Miami River valley. General Wayne then burned the surrounding Indian villages, and in 1795 he dictated the terms of the Treaty of Greenville. That opened Ohio for settlement and condemned the tribes to live on reservations."
For an article about him, see A. Glenn Crothers, "Quaker Merchants and Slavery in Early National Alexandria, Virginia: The Ordeal of William Hartshorne," in Journal of the Early Republic 25.1 (Spring, 2005): 47-77. Among much other information about his life and community, this short biography appears early in the article:
"Hartshorne's early life in Virginia offered little foreshadowing of his future radicalism. Born in New Jersey in 1742, he moved south in 1774 at the tail end of a significant migration of Friends to northern Virginia that began in 1740s. In early 1775 he established a partnership with local merchant John Harper and in the 1780s established his own "general hardware and all purpose store," where he sold a wide variety of imported manufactured goods and purchased the agricultural products of the northern Virginia countryside. The town of Alexandria grew and prospered in the postrevolutionary years when northern Virginia's farmers shifted from tobacco to grains, sparking significant economic development. Hartshorne'sbusiness grew along with the town. Responding to the increased production of grains in the 1790s he constructed a mill on the outskirts of the town on what he soon called the Strawberry Hill plantation. By the early nineteenth century the mill had become the centerpiece of his business activities and in 1803 he moved his residence to the plantation. Hartshorne also invested heavily in Alexandria real estate, at his peak owning eighteen town lots. At the same time, he joined in the political life of the community. After Alexandria was incorporated in 1780 he served in the town government, beginning as a tax commissioner and surveyor of the streets, and eventually serving as a member of the city council in the late 1780s and early 1790s. Thereafter,he left active politics, though he remained a staunch Federalist and, like most Quakers, supported the new federal constitution in 1787." (48-9) [2, 3]
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