Chew, Samuel, 1693-1744

Dr. Samuel Chew (1693-1744), three generations removed from John, was born and lived in Maryland much of his life, residing at the family estate of Maidstone in Herring Bay, Maryland; and afterward at Whitehall, in Duck Creek, Delaware. He and his family also lived in Dover and the Lower Counties (now Delaware), as well as in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dr. Chew received training in law and medicine, eventually acting as a doctor in Kent County, Delaware, and later as the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the Lower Counties. In 1715, he married Mary Galloway (1697-1734) and after her death, he married Mary Paca Galloway (d. 1746), the widow of his brother-in-law. The two marriages resulted in five children who lived to adulthood: Elizabeth; Ann; Benjamin; Samuel, who lived in Chestertown, Maryland, administering the family's farms and plantations; and John, who also lived in Chestertown, working as a merchant. Both of these men kept up with the Philadelphia branch of the family through frequent correspondence and occasional visits. Dr. Samuel Chew is perhaps best known for his challenge of the Quaker meeting in Duck Creek. Refusing to accept the meeting's criticism of his daughter's 1740 marriage to a non-Quaker, and their censure of his grand jury charge encouraging the taking up of arms as a means of defense, Chew was eventually expelled in 1742. In response, he authored an advertisement sent to the Pennsylvania Gazette but never published, in which he admonished the Quakers for denying him the same liberty of conscience that they clamored for. As a result of this rift with the Duck Creek Meeting, Samuel Chew and his descendents broke from the Quaker faith, joining the Anglican and, later, the Episcopal Church.