John Wildgoos

born 1800

Born in 1800, the son of Alexander Wildgoos, John Wildgoos emigrated to Grand Bahama where he prospered. He opened a liquor store and owned slaves and he also became a Member of the House of Assembly. He married Emily Mitchell who had been born in Nassau and the couple went on to have four daughters and a son.

However, in 1831 John committed one of his female slaves to the gaol workhouse for an unknown offence where she was given 39 lashes.  He then visited the prison and ordered her to be whipped again. He also caused a slave belonging to his mother to be treated in a similar fashion.

Sir James Carmichael Smythe, the Colonial Governor, opined that John had acted illegally by ordering these whippings and that he had no authority to give orders to the gaoler or to the gaoler’s assistant inside the prison. Sir James appealed to the House of Assembly and a furore ensued culminating in Sir James dissolving the House on 31^st. May 1831. The Solicitor General also considered John’s actions to be illegal but the Attorney General and the Chief Justice took the opposite view and the Grand Jury ignored bills of indictment against John.

Perhaps because of these events, John emigrated once more, this time taking his family with him to America, arriving in New York in June 1832.

The date or place of John’s death is not yet known but his widow, Emily, eventually settled in the township of Lower Merion in Pennsylvania where she kept a very popular summer boarding house on the Main Line near Haverford College. During the winter months her daughters, Adelaide and Mary, ran a children’s school. The house had ten acres of woodland, which provided a pleasant recreation area for the boarding house guests in summer and the pupils in the winter.

Emily died in 1876, followed by Mary in 1905 and Adelade in 1908. Another daughter, Eliza, married Edward Lyddon Lycett and had several children. Little is know of the fourth daughter, Emily, or the son, John.

Neither is it known what fate beheld the two unfortunate slaves.

To read more about the slaves of John Wildgoos, please click here