My Genealogy Hound

JUDGE WILLIAM PEACOCK. The roll of the prominent, influential and public-spirited citizens of western New York, as well as Chautauqua county, would be incomplete without especial mention of the long and useful career of Judge William Peacock, whose name will be honorably preserved from oblivion in the history of the Erie canal, the surveys of the Holland land company, and the material development of Dunkirk, Mayville and the county. He was born in Ulster county, New York, February 22, 1780, and was a son of Thomas and Margaret (Anderson) Peacock. His father served under Washington in the Revolutionary war; and shortly after the treaty of peace removed with his wife and family to a farm which he owned near Geneva, this State. He had three children, two sons and one daughter. The sons were: Judge William, John and Absalom; and the daughter, Geneva, who married Samuel Hughinson, who lived in Washington D.C.

William Peacock was reared on his father’s farm, received a good education, and studied surveying. In 1803 he went to Batavia with the intention of going to New Orleans, but was dissuaded from his contemplated trip by Joseph Ellicott, agent of the Holland Land company, and entered the employ of that company as a surveyor. He surveyed large bodies of their lands on the Genesee river and the western part of the State. He surveyed a large part of the site of Buffalo, where he purchased several lots, as well as buying from the company some valuable tracts of land in Chautauqua county. In 1810 he came to Mayville, when there were but two or three cabins there, and where he acted as agent for the Holland Land company until it disposed of the last of its unsold lands in 1836, when his office was destroyed by a mob of debtors of the company, who sought by the unlawful measure to obliterate all record of their indebtedness to the company, but in which they were signally foiled, as he had sent copies of all his papers to the general office of the company. A full account of this trouble will be found in the history of the Holland Land company which in given in another place in this volume. Judge Peacock was a very accurate surveyor and business man, and had often exposed himself to great dangers while in the service of the Holland Land company. After 1836 he devoted his time mostly to the management of the valuable real and personal estate which he possessed at Mayville and elsewhere in south-western New York. He was appointed as one of the commissioners for building the first court-house at Mayville, and was one of the most liberal patrons of the academy at that place.

He was one of the early associate judges of the county court, and in 1821 served as treasurer of Chautauqua county. Prior to his removal from Batavia Judge Peacock took great interest in the conception and subsequent construction of the Erie canal. He gave Jesse Hawley, the engineer in charge of the work, valuable information, and the route he marked out for the canal through western New York was adopted with but little variation. In 1816 he surveyed and located the western part of this canal, and two years later was appointed to survey and report on the construction of a harbor at Buffalo. Judge Peacock was a strong democrat, and a great admirer of General Jackson and all democratic leaders of the Jacksonian school. He was a Free and Accepted Mason from 1803 until his death.

On October 3, 1807, he married Alice Evans, a niece of Joseph Elliott, and who passed away after a short illness on April 19, 1859, when in the seventy-ninth year of her age. They had no children, and the Mayville Sentinel stated that Mrs. Peacock was no ordinary woman, and that her mental and physical powers were alike vigorous and active. Her numerous deeds of charity, the lives she saved, and the aid which she rendered to the sick and sorrowful have been handed down from parent to child. Her hand, her heart and her purse were ever open to aid any Christian enterprise. Her remains were interred in the family lot in the Mayville cemetery, where over them was erected a plain but costly monument. Being without other heirs, the Judge’s nearest relatives were the children of his brother Absalom, who married Jane Nichols, of Newburg, this State, and in 1814 came to Westfield, where he followed farming until his death in 1836. Absalom Peacock had eight children, one of whom, Mrs. Sarah J. Birdsall, of Mayville, is the widow of Judge John Birdsall, a native of eastern New York, who was a well-known lawyer and served on the bench.

Eighteen years after the death of his wife, Judge Peacock entered upon his final rest on the 21st of February, 1877, when he had attained nearly to his ninety-seventh year. His body was laid to rest with the impressive ceremonies of the Masonic ritual. He left no will, and his large estate was inherited by his nephews and nieces. He sleeps by the side of his wife, and although the monumental marble above his resting-place only records his age and the day of his death, yet his memory and virtues are written in the hearts of the people among whom he lived and labored.