Berkeley was born in the parish of Saint George’s Hanover Square, London, England, where his parents, John Symes Berkeley and his second wife, Elizabeth Norborne Berkeley, resided while Berkeley attended the House of Commons as a Tory member for Gloucestershire. Their only other child, Elizabeth, married Lord Charles Noel Somerset, who became the fourth duke of Beaufort. From 1756 until 1765 Norborne Berkeley served as guardian of his sister’s son, who in the latter year became the fifth duke. Berkeley never married but provided handsomely and obtained a commission in the Royal Navy for a son who became Vice Admiral Sir Charles Thompson, baronet (ca. 1740–1799).
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John Baylor III was a wealthy planter and one of the most significant importers and breeders of thoroughbred horses in pre-Revolutionary America. The son of a slave dealer described by Robert “King” Carter as “the greatest merchant in our country,” Baylor was educated in England and, upon his return to Virginia, granted land along the Mattaponi River, where he built his estate, Newmarket. He represented Caroline County in the House of Burgesses (1742–1752; 1756–1765) and on the county court before falling out of political favor in a dispute over how best to oppose the Stamp Act (1765). Baylor’s deepest passion was elite horseflesh and it nearly bankrupted him. By the mid-1750s, he had given up racing and was instead importing, at great expense, a dozen or more of the colony’s best thoroughbreds, which attracted the mares of George Washington, among others, for breeding. In 1764, he purchased the thoroughbred Fearnought for the unprecedented price of a thousan
Print Made from Bodleian CopperplateBlair was the only recorded son of Archibald Blair and his first wife, whose name is not known. He was born in Scotland around 1687 and before his father immigrated to Virginia in the 1690s. He was educated at the College of William and Mary and lived virtually all of his life in Williamsburg.
Blair was a manager of the mercantile house in Williamsburg known as Dr. Blair’s Store, of which his father was the largest shareholder, until Archibald Blair died in 1733. For about fourteen years during the 1740s and 1750s Blair was a partner of John Blair Jr., the son of a cousin, in another Williamsburg store. The names of John Blair and John Blair Jr. often appear together in the records of York County. Blair also owned several valuable properties in Williamsburg, including the Raleigh Tavern, which he rented to a succession of tavern keepers and sold in 1742, and the Chowning Tavern, which he owned from 1726 to sometime before 1739. In 1745 Blair and