Joseph Gilpin ²

   Ancestral File Number: 1MCL-GC.

  General Notes:

Elizabeth Montgomery, who tells in her "Reminiscences of Wilmington" (2d Ed., p. 218) of the estate of Joshua and Thomas Gilpin along a "curve of the Brandywine Creek about two miles above the City of Wilmington" and the homestead of Joshua, called Kentmere after the family estate in England, and of her visit there in 1795, and of delightful rambles there later in 1802 with an ancient female friend, with whom "the Battle of Brandywine and many a link in that eventful chain was bright in the memory" (Chap. III, 2d Ed.) ; also tells that Israel Gilpin "raised the first military company of this town to join the Revolutionary Army, of which he was captain" (Ibid., p. 218).
The company became a part of Colonel McKinley's regiment that saw service in the war. Israel Gilpin was then in the 36th year of his age, and had married Elizabeth Hannum some ten years prior thereto. He must have been a farmer at the breaking out of the war, for Lossing's Field Book of the Revolution con- tains the picture of the Gilpin place on the Brandywine and says that he was the owner of it when Howe occupied it as his headquarters (Vol. 2, p. 172), and it is related in the "Colo- nial Families of Philadelphia" (Jordan, 1911, Vol. 1, p. 418, et seq.), that Israel's brother, Vincent, sent large stores of molasses and rum from Wilmington to him, then residing in the old Gilpin home at Birmingham, to save it from seizure by the British; but it was lost as the old homestead became the headquarters of General Howe after the Battle of Brandywine (p. 432).
The Military Records at Washington show that Israel entered the service of the United States in the County of Newcastle, Delaware, where he then lived, in the spring of 1776 and continued in command of his company in the service for about eighteen months under Colonel McKinley, and about the beginning of the fall of 1777, or just about the time of the Battle of Brandywine, in which he took part, he was ordered to the Commissary Department and left his old company under the command of Capt. Patrick O'Flinn, who had been First Lieutenant under him. The battle was fought on the farm that then belonged to him and from that time on and for more than three years afterwards, he continued to serve as purchasing commissary until hostilities ceased in that part of the country, during which time he was in only one engagement, that of the Battle of Brandy- wine. He was principally engaged in the State of Delaware and adjoining states and frequently under General Gates and General Wayne. The year before his death, some of his friends in Kentucky, where he then resided, including Gen. Richard M. Johnson, the reputed killer of the Great Indian Chief, Tecumseh, at the battle of the Thames in the War of 1812, interested themselves in procuring him a pension, and General Johnson, who was then a member of Congress from Kentucky, presented the papers showing his military service and secured the pension allowance. (Pension Office M 4695, April, 1833.)
He died July 4, 1834, at Burlington, Ken- tucky. His grave is in the village graveyard there, and on his tombstoone are the following lines, requested by him to be put there. He is said to have composed them. If so, they furnish the only evidence coming to his later descendants of poetical talent, although possessed of literary attainments and of the unbounded love of country shown in the verse:

"Pause, stranger, ere your wandering steps you
turn
And from the grave this lesson deign to learn:
A soldier's ashes sleep beneath your feet, A patriot's heart once in his bosom beat.
That freedom which in youth he fought to gain He leaves to you to cherish and maintain."

The Pennsylvania Archives, to which state that part of Delaware had become attached (Vol. XII, pp. 379 and 543), show, that in the Bir- mingham district Israel Gilpin in 1781 was listed with 200 acres of land, five horses and five cattle, and in the same year assessed with taxes amount- ing to £8.5.9.
Mary Gilpin, the eldest, born 1770, married David Hanway, in Kentucky, July, 1797. Sarah, or Sallie, the youngest but one of the children of Israel and Elizabeth Gilpin, was married to John Cline in Paris, Kentucky, in 1798. (Record 1, p. 34, Bourbon Co., Clerk's Office.) The family must have been in the state a length of time previous to a marriage of one of its mem- bers.
In May, 1792, Gen. Isaac Shelby, who lead the Kentucky forces beyond the Ohio River against the British Redcoats and the Indians in the War of 1812, was elected the first Governor of the state, which was admitted to the Union the same year. Israel Gilpin escaped the Pennsylvania Tax list of 1782, which would have been improbable if he were still liable. He had evidently converted his possessions, was on his way to Kentucky and had made his home there in the early 1780's, some years before the state had achieved its long fight for admission to the Union.
"Joseph Gilpin (father of Israel), of Christiana Hundred and County of Newcastle, in the State of Delaware, Yeoman" made his will December 2, 1788, bequeathing the use and profits of a considerable estate in land and per- sonality to his wife during her natural' life, with remainder to children and grandchildren. He died late in 1792 and his will was probated in 1793. Israel Gilpin and his younger brother, Joseph, after serving in the Delaware contingent of Revolutionary War troops, had then gone over the long and hazardous trail of mountains and wildernesses to Kentucky, where only sturdy and intelligent colonists were wanted or wel- comed. It was at a period well within a decade of Daniel Boone's incursions into its wilds. It was when Indians still disputed occupancy by the whites and colonists had yet to arm and assemble to repel assaults of the savages on their settlements. They were there to help build a new civilization beyond the southern shores of the Ohio River with the family force of charac- ter and courage that, a century earlier, had brought the founder of the family in America,
across the Atlantic Ocean from England to Virginia and along the course of the Chesapeake Bay to the banks of the Brandywine on the heels of its cession, in the reign of Charles II, to William Penn-a territory exacting pioneer hardihood, a territory then still shared with the Indians, a territory, to which as a private citizen and member of its General Assembly, he gave his prowess and endowments, a territory which he witnessed enter the Union of States and be- come the first one to ratify the Federal Constitution.
Elizabeth Hannum, the wife of Israel Gilpin, died in Kentucky, 1802, and was buried at Paris. Her father, Mr. Robert Hannum, who was a landholder in the township of Birmingham as early as 1717, became a resident of Wilmington in 1732, was Chief Burgess for the year 1744 and Burgess for a number of years thereafter.
Robert Hannum was the son of John Hannum and Margery (Southery) Hannum, who were married in England and removed to America. Margery took land near Birmingham from her father, Robert Southery, who had it from his brother-in-law, John Gibbons, who took from William Penn by deed, August, 1681.

Joseph married Mary Caldwell, daughter of Vincent Caldwell and Betty Pierce, on 17 Dec 1729 in Kennett Mm, Chester, Pennsylvania.¹ (Mary Caldwell was born in 1709 in Birmingham Township, Chester, Pennsylvania and died in 1761 in Christiana Hundred, New Castle, Delaware, USA.)