Horsfield, Timothy, 1708-1773.

Timothy Horsfield was a justice of the peace in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Timothy Horsfield (1708-1773) was a butcher and prominent citizen of the Moravian town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He was appointed Justice of the Peace by Governor James Hamilton (1710-1783, APS 1768), when Northampton County was founded in 1752. At the outbreak of the French and Indian War, Horsfield was one of the citizens given responsibility for raising a local militia, mustering supplies, providing intelligence for the military authorities and caring for refugees. In July 1763 he was commissioned a colonel of the militia forces, a position he soon resigned.

Horsfield was born in 1708 in Liverpool, England, and was educated in the parish school. In 1725 he emigrated to Long Island, New York, where his brother Isaac taught him the butcher’s trade. He married Mary Doughty, daughter of a prominent Long Island butcher, in 1731, and in 1734 he became a freeholder. In 1735 Horsfield and his brother leased two stands in the Old Slip Market at the corner of Pearl Street and Old Slip in New York City.

In 1739 Horsfield, who was a member of the Church of England, attended a religious revival meeting of the Methodist evangelist George Whitefield, an event that impressed him. Subsequently, Horsfield became acquainted with the Moravian missionaries Peter Bohler and David Nitchmann, and later regularly opened his home near Brooklyn Ferry to other Moravian missionaries, who were traveling between Europe and the West Indies.

In 1748 Horsfield applied to the Bethlehem authorities to become a resident of the Moravian town. Although permission for him to settle there was not granted until the following year, he did place his children in the town’s Moravian schools in 1748. After Horsfield and his family took up residence in the Oerter house on Market Street they reserved two rooms for visitors to the the town.

Horsfield was the owner of two slaves when the family moved to Bethlehem from New York. His slave Joshua, better known as “Horsfield’s Tony,” was originally from Ibo in Africa, where he had been captured and sold into slavery at the age of 14. In 1750 Joshua was baptized by the Moravian bishop Cammerhoff, and sent to the Moravian colony of Christian’s Spring near Nazareth, Pennsylvania. There, as a result of the experience he gained working for Horsfield, Joshua secured employment as a butcher. Horsfield’s other slave, named Cornelia, was born in Red Hook, New York, in 1728 and died in Bethlehem in 1757.

In 1752 when Northampton County was created out of Bucks County, Governor Hamilton appointed Horsfield Justice of the Peace. His commission began on June 9, 1752, several years prior to the eruption of conflict between the Delaware Indians and British settlers on the Pennsylvania frontier. The influx of European settlers into the Pennsylvania hinterland and the concomitant dispossession of the Indians by legal and extralegal means (such as the notorious Walking Purchase of 1737) had fueled resentments that resulted in Indian raids against their white neighbors. Subsequently, the intertribal rivalry between the Iroquois and the Delaware, and the rivalry between the English and French, provided tinder for the French and Indian War that erupted in 1754. As a public official and a prominent citizen, Horsfield was one of those given responsibility for shoring up local defenses, raising a militia, providing intelligence to military authorities and caring for refugees. He was commissioned a colonel in the militia in 1763, an appointment that caused considerable jealousy. The resentment not only led to his resignation but also cost him his position as Justice of the Peace.

Horsfield died in Bethlehem in 1773. His wife Mary died later that year. The couple had eight children. They included Joseph, born in 1750, a delegate to the Pennsylvania Convention to ratify the Federal Constitution of 1787.