Alexander Macomb (merchant)

Alexander Macomb (1748–1831) was a prosperous American merchant and land speculator, who purchased nearly four million acres from New York after the American Revolutionary War. A Loyalist sympathizer, he operated from New York City after the war. Before the New York purchase, he had speculated on land in North Carolina, Kentucky and Georgia. He was unable to sell the New York land fast enough to meet his debts and never regained his fortune.

Alexander Macomb was born in Ballynure, a tiny rural village in County Antrim, Ireland, in 1748. His father John Macomb was a merchant. Alexander also had a brother and sister. In 1755 the whole family moved to New York, setting in Albany, a center of fur trading with the Iroquois and other Native American tribes.

As adults, Macomb and his brother William also became merchants and fur traders, operating around the Great Lakes as far west as Detroit. The French traders were more numerous and competition was fierce in the west. In Aug. 27, 1774, Phyn & Ellice, fur traders in Schenectady in the Mohawk Valley, sold its Detroit stock to the Macomb brothers and appointed them as its agents in that post; this was a coup for 26-year-old Alexander and his younger brother.

In Detroit, Michigan during the American Revolution, Macomb and his brother William continued their fur trade with British and Native Americans. They traded supplies in exchange for furs, doing a huge volume of business with the British government post at Detroit, supplying the militia as well as the Indian Department. The brothers took a partner because of the volume of their business, and invested 100,000 dollars in New York currency in the fall of 1781.

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