Page:History of the University of Pennsylvania - Montgomery (1900).djvu/109

Rh the Trustees; the last he attended was on 22 November, 1758. At the meeting of 8 July, 1760, Mr Thomas Willing was elected his successor.

was born in London in 1704, the son of William White of London and Elizabeth Leigh his wife; his father died when he was but four years of age, and in 1720 he came to America as apprentice to Mr. Stokes the Clerk of the County of Baltimore; he eventually became his deputy and having pursued the study of law with the limited means then at command in the colonies, he practiced it at the Maryland bar. He became deputy surveyor of the province for the then County of Baltimore, which includes what we now know as Harford County created in 1773, and gradually acquired lands and was fortunate in developing them to the cultivation of tobacco, the great staple of the day, and was successful in producing bar iron from the ores found on his estates, thus becoming one of the earliest iron producers in the colonies. He married Sophia, daughter of John Hall of Cranbury, of one of the oldest settled families in Baltimore County; but when he was left a widower in 1742 with three young daughters, he was in a few years induced to make his residence in Philadelphia not alone for their better education but as well also to increase his business connections, for when settled in the commercial metropolis of the colonies, he could more readily export the produce of his plantations and make importations in exchange therefor. He attained the rank of Colonel in the provincial militia, and bore this title to his new home. He must early have made the acquaintance of Franklin in establishing himself in Philadelphia, through a common friend Richard Peters, who as Secretary to the Pennsylvania Council must have often encountered the Maryland Surveyor in the boundary controversies between the Penns and Calverts. He was at the early age of twenty-seven made a Vestryman of old St. George's, Spesutiæ, now in Harford County, his attachment to the Church of England being drawn from the traditions of several ancestral generations who leaned rather to the House of Stuart, and when he came to Philadelphia he at once attached