Nicholas Gassaway
| Nicholas Gassaway | |
|---|---|
| Member of the Committee of the Twenty | |
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In office < 1690 – 1691 |
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| Constituency | Anne Arundel County Maryland |
| Gentleman Justice of the Quorum, later Justice of the (Maryland) Provincial Court | |
| Commissioner of Londontown, Commissioner of the Peace, & Colonel, Maryland Provincial Forces | |
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Assumed office 1683 & 1686 |
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| Personal details | |
| Born | 1634 London, England |
| Died | 1691 Anne Arundel, Maryland |
| Spouse(s) | Anne Besson |
| Relations | Ancestor of Henry G. Davis |
| Children | Ann Gassaway Watkins (2nd Burgess, 3rd Jones), Captain Nicholas Gassaway, Captain John Gassaway, Jane Gassaway Cotter (2nd Sanders), Lord Sheriff Captain Thomas Gassaway, Margaret Gassaway Larkin, and Hester Gassaway Groce (2nd Warman) |
| Residence | Love’s Neck, Bessondon, Poplar Ridge & Gassaway's Addition Plantations, Anne Arundel, MD |
| Occupation | Plantation owner, provincial military officer, justice and politician |
Colonel Nicholas Gassaway (Baptized 11 March 1634, died between 10 and 27 January 1691Julian Calendar) was a colonial military and political leader and justice in early Maryland. He is the progenitor of the some five and a half thousand Americans who bear the family name in the 2000 census.
Col. Gassaway is also notable for having settled on "Gassaway" as the family name (also spelled Gasaway, Gasway and Gazaway), a variant of his father Thomas Gaswaie’s family name. The "Gassaway" spelling had already appeared sporadically in England, as in a baptismal record of 1620, and Nicholas's own baptismal record, in the registers of St. Margaret's, Westminster, has "Gasway." Several spellings are used in the records for his siblings. Mary (1622) and Thomas (1628) have "Gaswaie"; Joyce (1626) has "Gasway"; Jane (1636) and Anne (1639) have "Gassaway"; but when Ann dies as a young child, in 1632, her burial record has "Gaswaie.". Sister Hester's baptismal record (1642) has "Gassoway", while a second Anne, baptized in 1644, has "Gaseaway."
Nicholas Gaswaie was born to a Welsh merchant family belonging to St. Margaret's Parish Westminster in London England. He emigrated to the colony as a professional plantation manager around 1650 and settled south of Londontowne, a southerly district of Annapolis Maryland today. Within a decade he was the owner of a sizable tobacco plantation exporting to his Gaswaie family back in England from his dock at the neck of the South River on Chesapeake Bay. He served as an officer in the Maryland Provincial military quickly rising to the rank of Major during skirmishes with local Indigenous peoples. He died one of the largest landholders in the Maryland colony.
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