Thomas Esau Price

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Thomas Esau Price (1675–1764), an 8× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Cecil County, Maryland, his mother Margaret Lee, his marriage to Mary Price, his son Col. Thomas Joseph Price, and the early colonial Chesapeake era in which he lived.

Thomas Esau Price (1675–1764) was born in Cecil, Maryland, in the year 1675, and there, nearly nine decades later in December of 1764, he closed his long life. His was among the earliest generations of Anglo-American settlers in the upper Chesapeake, and his ninety years spanned a remarkable stretch of colonial history — from the proprietary disputes of the late seventeenth century, through the founding of neighboring Pennsylvania, the wars with France, and into the very years preceding the American Revolution.

He was the son of Margaret Lee (1658–1704), who herself lived but forty-six years and was lost to the family when Thomas was a young man of twenty-nine. Cecil County, situated at the head of the Chesapeake Bay where the Susquehanna empties into its waters, was in those decades a frontier of tobacco plantations, mixed Anglican and Quaker settlement, and the steady commerce of the bay. It was in this landscape of tidewater farms and river landings that Thomas came of age, married, and raised his family.

His wife, Mary Price, shared his surname — whether by family connection or coincidence the record does not say — and together they brought into the world a son of distinction, Col. Thomas Joseph Price (1711–1796), who would in time bear a military title and live to see the establishment of the new American republic. Through this son the Price line continued forward into the generations that would eventually join, by marriage, the families gathered in this archive.

That Thomas Esau Price lived to the age of eighty-nine was itself an uncommon attainment in the colonial period, when the hazards of disease, accident, and the rigors of frontier life claimed many far earlier. His longevity stands as a quiet testament in the family record.

Thomas Esau Price was the compiler's 8× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.