TAYLOR, GEORGE (1787-1858)

TAYLOR, GEORGE, retail merchant; b. Miramichi, 1787-88, s/o Patrick Taylor and Isabella McLean; m. Isabella Milne, d/o William Milne and Isabella Henderson; d. Caraquet, N.B., 6 Dec 1858.

In a petition dated 15 April 1788 George Taylor's father stated that he arrived on the Miramichi from Scotland in August 1787. In a petition dated 10 February 1810 George Taylor stated that he was born on the Miramichi twenty-two years previously. If both statements are factual, he was born in the fall of 1787 or in 1788. His mother, Isabella McLean, whose father, Daniel McLean, was once the collector of customs in Montego Bay, Jamaica, died in 1791, at age twenty-seven, when he was only three or four years old. His father, who was a younger brother of Alexander Taylor, died in 1823, at age sixty-seven.

Taylor was an early resident of Chatham, where he had established himself as a retail merchant by 1808. He was a member of the first Miramichi chamber of commerce in 1826. In 1831 he was appointed a commissioner of the Seamen's Hospital. Although his father's family was Protestant, and his mother's tombstone stands in the Presbyterian cemetery at Moorfield, he was a leading Catholic layman in Chatham, and it was he and the hotel keeper James White who called in 1836 for tenders for the building and finishing of the first Catholic church.

Taylor was an administrator, with Alexander Goodfellow, of his father's estate in 1823. In the same year, he was appointed a captain in the 1st Battalion of militia. In 1838 he was among the officers serving under Lieut. Col. Alexander Fraser Jr who declared their loyalty to the crown in the face of the rebellion in Upper and Lower Canada. He retired from the militia as a major in 1839.

Taylor's business failed in 1838, and he was forced to assign in favor of Joseph Cunard & Co. Soon afterwards he and his family moved to Shippegan. He was a tide waiter in the customs service at Caraquet at the time of his death. His wife and several children survived him. His son Peter Taylor was a physician in Chatham in 1840-41 and later in Campbellton. Another son, William Taylor, was a businessman in Shippegan and an MLA for Gloucester County.