Series 13 - William Gilliland journal

116pp

Photocopy of Watson, Winslow C. (1865), Pioneer History of the Champlain Valley; Being an Account of the Settlement of the Town of Willsborough by William Gilliland, Together with His Journal and Other Papers, and a Memoir, and Historical and Illustrative Notes (Albany, New York: J. Munsell); plus Bruce D. Boling’s email to Kerby A. Miller informing him of the memoir; and Kerby A. Miller’s notes on Irish settlers in colonial New York, particularly William Gilliland.
‘About 1758 William Gilliland (1734-1796), who came from Armagh as a British soldier, established himself as a teacher along with his brother James, who continued the school until the Revolution when he served in the rebel forces as a captain of a company of miners and sappers and was in the meantime made a freeman. While a tutor in the family of Phagan, a Jamaican merchant living in New York, William Gilliland with an eye to the future married his employer's daughter and was associated in the shipping business with his father-in-law. With the opening of Upper New York at the end of the French and Indian War, he patented tracts of land in the region between Crown Point and Ticonderoga estimated as high as 65,000 acres. Here he encouraged settlements and attracted a considerable number of Irish pioneers, especially Scotch-Irish Presbyterians from their American centres and from Ulster. While there was some doubt as to his patriotism in the Revolution, he maintained that he had raised a company of minute men in his effort to answer charges made against him. It must be remembered that men of property were naturally cautious and also that, in the drive for confiscated loyalist estates, charges were easily made. At any rate, Gilliland's properties suffered during the Burgoyne campaign, and he was virtually ruined -- to the extent of even languishing in a debtor's prison for six years. In 1795 he lost the trail while he was wandering about in the Champlain Valley and died of exposure -- leaving, however, an interesting diary dealing with the settlement of that extensive region.’