Wake County, NC - William Boylan

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Excerpt from Dr. Kemp Battle Centennial address:

Successor to Colonel Polk at the State Bank was William Boylan, the first of 
the name. He was editor of the Raleigh Minerva, sometime state printer, and 
he was also a rich planter, dying worth a million dollars at the time when 
millionaires were most unusual and money was far more valuable. 

Mr. Boylan came originally from New Jersey, but had kin in North Carolina. His 
portrait shows a face of a very different character from the others of that 
gallery. He looks, among those great lawyers, like a sedate business man and
his qualities of mind were the prophecy of coming times. 

Mr. Boylan was public-spirited and progressive. He first saw the possibilities, 
and set the example of raising great quantities of cotton on the uplands of 
Wake. Whitney's cotton gin had made the growing of cotton profitable because 
the gin could remove the seed from a thousand pounds of cotton in a day, which 
labor previously had to be done slowly and tediously by hand. 

Also the invention of the power-driven loom and spinning machinery made more 
cotton necessary to keep the looms of the world at work, and the development 
of the necessary inventions had built up a mighty industry. Mr. Boylan planted 
acres of cotton where square rods had been the custom before. He also became
interested in transportation, and a heavy investor in our first railroads. 

He was at one time president of the Raleigh and Gaston Railroad. Governor 
Swain says of him that he was dignified and grave, and it also is sure that 
he must have been charitable, for he is responsible for the building of the 
first county poor-house in Wake. Before that the county poor were boarded out 
with the lowest bidder at county expense; a hard arrangement.

Doctor Kemp Battle, from whose centennial address many details of this old 
time may be gathered, tells a story of how Mr. Boylan sent loads of wood around 
to the poor, caught as they were withtout fuel in the time of the wonderful 
"big snow of '57." He states that one "son of rest" keeping warm that coldest 
morning, humped up in his mound of bedding to inquire whether Mr. Boylan "had 
had that wood cut up to fit his fireplace before it was loaded on the wagon?"

Mr. Boylan lived in the Joel Lane house which he had bought from Peter Brown. 
But one undignified thing is told of him — that is his part in the fight which 
he and Joseph Gales, rival editors, fought about some political question. In 
this Mr. Gales was worsted, and brought suit for damages, which were awarded 
to the sum of two hundred dollars, which amount he donated to the Academy.

Source:
Elizabeth Reid Murray Collection
"People" - Box 1 of 3
Olivia Raney Library

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This file was contributed for use in the USGenWeb Archives by
Elizabeth Reid Murray
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