Richard Henry Corbin (abt. 1708 - 1790)

Born about 1708 in Buckingham, Middlesex County, Virginia [uncertain]

Ancestors

Descendants

Died 20 May 1790 at about age 82 in King and Queen, Virginia, United States

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Biography

Richard Corbin was a Virginia colonist.

Richard Corbin was engaged, influential, and well-connected in the Virginia colony in the period leading up to the Revolutionary War. He was active in colonial administration, oversaw several large land holdings and estates and owned a significant number of slaves. His marriage to the daughter of another influential colonist linked two of the more important Virginia families, the Corbins and the Tayloes.

He was born around 1708^[1][2] ( some sources say 1713 or 1714) probably in Middlesex County, Virginia and was the eldest son of Col. Gawin Corbin and the second of Gawin’s three wives, Jane Lane-Wilson, and the grandson of Henry Corbin, the progenitor of the Corbin family in Virginia who had arrived from England in 1654. On July 29, 1737, he married Elizabeth “Betty” Tayloe,^[3] a first cousin 1x removed (Betty was Henry Corbin's great granddaughter) who was the twin sister of John Tayloe II, the builder of Mt. Airy Plantation, in Richmond County. The twins' father was John Tayloe. The link between the Corbins and Tayloes was strong: the often-reproduced image of Henry Corbin in his councillor’s wig and robe hung at Mt. Airy.^[4][5] Richard and Betty's three daughters and five sons included Gawin who sat on the governor's Council at the end of the colonial period and Francis who served in the Constitutional Convention of 1788.

He probably attended the College of William and Mary late in the 1720s. In the 1750s, his interest in the settlement of the lands west of the colonies led him and others to patent about 20,000 acres of land on the Mississippi River^[6]; in the late 1750s he re-built Laneville, the estate that came into the Corbin family on the marriage of his parents (which had burned in 1758)^[7] in King and Queen County, said to have been one of the largest and finest houses in Virginia, which is where he lived for the rest of his life. He was active in and generous to the Church of England, donating items for the services including bread and wine for the Holy Sacrament, and providing land for a new church building.^[8]

His attention to detail in all of his affairs is evident in the letters he wrote to merchants, purveyors, fellow colonists, and others regarding purchases, and shipments and the difficulties of growing and shipping tobacco. That attention is also evident in a letter he wrote on January 1, 1759, to James Semple, the man who was probably his estate manager, about how his slaves were to be taken care of and organized and about how the lands were to be managed^[9].

Richard was a Loyalist and remained so throughout the period leading up to the break from England; on 29 July 1775 King George III issued a commission appointing Corbin lieutenant governor, fearful that the situation in the Virginia colony would lead to Governor Dunmore’s return to England and leave the colony without an executive. Corbin was the only native Virginian ever commissioned to so high an office in the colony.^[10]. He was at various times a member of the House of Burgesses for Middlesex County, the County Lieutenant of Essex County, President of the Virginia Council, and Receiver General of the King’s Quittances for the colony for the twenty years leading up to the start of the Revolutionary War. His Loyalist fidelity notwithstanding, he maintained his friendship with George Washington and others engaged in breaking the colonies away. When he was President of the Council, his friend, a young George Washington, wrote to him in 1754^[11] to ask for a commission as Lieutenant Colonel in a new regiment of the Virginia militia fighting the French and Indians, to which Richard is said to have responded “I enclose your commission. God prosper you with it. Your friend, Richard Corbin” (there is speculation that Richard's son Francis may have fabricated that reply).^[12]

It is possible that the profile image of Richard is the miniature referred to in the will of his daughter-in-law Maria Waller Corbin; she writes "I give unto my second daughter Martha Maria the miniature picture of her tender and best of Grandfathers the Honble. Richard Corbin."^[13]

After the Revolutionary War, he was one of a handful of Loyalists^[14] who submitted claims to the Crown, in his case for estates in Jamaica and England, as reward for his loyalty; in 1775 he sent his son Richard, Jr. to England to chase down the claims and not having heard from "Dickey" in several years, wrote to the new President George Washington for help in finding him in New York for a report on the claims.^[15][16]

He lived nearly fifteen years beyond the end of the Revolutionary War as a wealthy^[17] but private man. By one account, in 1780 he was one of the hundred most wealthy Virginians.^[18] His wife died on 13 May 1784, and he died at Laneville on 20 May 1790. They were buried at Buckingham, the family's ancestral residence in Middlesex County. In 1941 the surviving family gravestones were moved to Christ Episcopal Church in that county.

Written by his fourth great grandson Sig Corbin Smith based on family files, and public records.

Sources

1. ↑ Bruce, Philip Alexander and Stanard, William Glover, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Volume XXIX, for the year ending December 31, 1921, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Virginia. page 522. [1]
2. ↑ Watson, W.M. In Memoriam: Benjamin Tayloe Ogle. Privately printed 1872. page 364. [2]
3. ↑ Scheib, Jeffrey L. The Richard Corbin LetterBook 1758-1760 (master’s thesis in History at College of William and Mary) 1982. page 18. [[3]]
4. ↑ Bruce, Philip Alexander and Stanard, William Glover, between pages 375 & 375. [4]
5. ↑ Bolton, Charles Knowles, The Founders: Portraits of Persons Born Abroad Who Came to the Colonies in North America before the year 1701 with an Introduction, Biographical Outlines, and Comments on the Portraits. Boston Athenaeum, Boston, Ma. 1919-1926. page 127. [5]
6. ↑ Bruce, Philip Alexander and Stanard, William Glover, page 522.
7. ↑ Scheib,page 46.
8. ↑ Scheib, page 9.
9. ↑ Scheib, page 80.
10. ↑ Evans, Emory G.,"Richard Corbin (1713 or 1714–1790)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2006, accessed 29 Jun 2021 [6]
11. ↑ “From George Washington to Richard Corbin, February–March 1754,” Founders Online, National Archives. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, vol. 1, 7 July 1748 – 14 August 1755, ed. W. W. Abbot. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983, pp. 70–71.] [7]
12. ↑ Scheib, page 13.
13. ↑ Fleet, Beverley, 1883-. Virginia Colonial Abstracts. Volume 4, page 75. Baltimore. Genealogical Publishing Co., 1961. [8]
14. ↑ see footnote on page 1 of Calhoon, Robert M. "A Sorrowful Spectator of These Tumultuous Times: Robert Beverley Describes the Coming of the Revolution". The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 73, no. 1 (1965): 41-55. Accessed July 12, 2021. [9]
15. ↑ “To George Washington from Richard Corbin, 18 February 1783,” Founders Online, National Archives. (This is an Early Access document from The Papers of George Washington. It is not an authoritative final version.) [10]
16. ↑ “From George Washington to Richard Corbin, 19 March 1783,” Founders Online, National Archives, . (This is an Early Access document from The Papers of George Washington. It is not an authoritative final version.) [11]
17. ↑ Fleet, pages 63-66. [12]
18. ↑ Main, Jackson T. “The One Hundred.” The William and Mary Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1954): 354–84. https://doi.org/10.2307/1943311

See also

• Meigs, Return Jonathan. “The Corbins of Virginia : a genealogical record of the descendants of Henry Corbin who settled in Virginia in 1654”. self-published, 1940. [13]

• Corbin genealogy in Richmond Times Dispatch, September 11, 1910.[14]

• Hardy, Stella Pickett. Colonial Families of the Southern States of America; a History and Genealogy of Colonial Families Who Settled in the Colonies prior to the Revolution. Corbin genealogy pages 171-181. Tobias A. Wright, Printer and Publisher, New York. 1911. Note: some report that this book, in particular the 1911 edition, is not fully reliable, e.g. on page 178, she writes that "Anna Munford Beverley was daughter of Col. Robert Beverley, the historian" which is not accurate. [15]

Acknowledgment

Corbin-1186 was created on Oct 26, 2015 through the import of Huron Arlee Satterfield Family Tree.ged by James Hill. The biography and sources were subsequently substantially modified in June 2021 and at later dates by Corbin Smith with the permission of James Hill.