Elizabeth “Betsy” MERRITT

  General Notes:

John A Merrit wrote a brief sketch about conversations recalled from her visits to his father’s house (Lucius Manlius Merritt) on July 4th holiday dinner, she being in the company of her sister Polly.

“Aunt Betsy said she lived in Scituate with her father Noah until his death in 1831. She then came south travelling all the way by coach to Covington, LA to live with her brother Noah (John A. Merritt’s grandfather). She was about 42 at the time.

Her sister had also come south and married her brother’s business partner, William Bagley.

After the death of her brother Noah, Betsy raised his two boys Charles and Lucius (Noah died in Conington in 1839). She lived with my father until her death in 1888.

Some time after the death of Noah Merritt, the family moved to new Orleans, where my father was married to Eliza Harriet McGaughey. After the birth of their two oldest children Adelaide and Erastus Bryant, the family moved to Pensacola, between 1855 and 1859.

During the war my father was running the blockade, carrying cotton from the Confederate states to England. he owned several sailing vessels, which had been built in Bucksport Me around 1856. One of them, the brig L.M. Merritt, I saw in Pensacola Bay in 1884, still in active sevrice. There was one named W.e. Anderson, and another the “davey Jones.” Mr. Anderson was my father’s business partner, afterwards mayor of Pensacola.

During the winter of 1863 my father was captured by the Ynakees at Oakfield, and kept a prisoner at Ft. Pickens until the close of the war. The family went to Columbus, GA, where they found refuge in the home of Dr. John Abercrombie, a friend, and where I was born 3/16/1864.

After the war they went back to New Orleans, where they lived until after my mother’s death in 1868, returning to Pensacola in July 1869. Aunt Betsy had been with the family the entire time.”

(s) John A. Merritt, 1935