Fox family

Associates and friends of Benjamin Franklin and his family, the Fox family came to Philadelphia in 1686, when the Quaker convert Justinian Fox (1673-1718) arrived aboard the Desire from his native Plymouth, England. Justinian's son Joseph Fox (ca.1710-1779) prospered after taking an apprenticeship with the carpenter James Portues, a founder of the Carpenters' Company, acquiring substantial property holdings in the city and serving in offices ranging from City Commissioner to Member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, including two stints as Speaker and one as a member of the Committee of Correspondence, a group responsible for communications with the colony's Agents in London, Benjamin Franklin and Richard Jackson. Read out of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1756 for refusal to withdraw from public office, and for "having violated our testimony against war," Fox's principaled refusal to accept Continental money for debts owed him in 1775 fueled rumors that he held Loyalist sympathies during the Revolution. He was a member of the revived American Philosophical Society at the time its merger with the American Society in 1769.

Joseph and his wife Elizabeth Mickle (1729-1805) had thirteen children, of whom only six survived to adulthood. These six, however, continued the family's prosperity. Their daughter Thomazine Fox (1748-1821) married into the Roberts family, while sons George (1759-1828) and Samuel Mickel Fox I (1763-1808) distinguished themselves in business and intellect. George, who was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1784, represented Philadelphia in the Assembly in 1800, and was widely known as an organizer and director of the Delaware and Chesapeake Canal and as one of the early supporters of the bank of North America, of which he was Director from 1818 until 1828. He traveled extensively in France in the 1770s and 1780s, nearly dying at the chateau of the Comte de Champlost in 1780. He named his estate Champlost, built on the property that his grandfather Justinian Fox had inherited from James Portues.

Samuel Mickle Fox I served in a number of public offices, including the City Council, the Common Council (1793-1797), and the Upper Chamber (1797-1800), and he was both an incorporator of the Bank of Pennsylvania and its President from 1797-1808. After the Indian treaties of 1784 and 1785, Samuel and his brother George acquired immense tracts of land in northwestern Pennsylvania near the Allegheny River north of the Clarion that were patented in 1796. At his death, Samuel held 118,000 acres.

Samuel's son George (1806-1882) was born in a house on the southeast corner of 5th and Chestnut Streets in Philadelphia. He studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with an AB in 1825 and MD in 1828. A prominent surgeon and Fellow of the College of Physicians, Fox was a member of the delegation from the College of Physicians to the organizing convention of the American Medical Association in 1847.

From the guide to the William Temple Franklin-Charles Pemberton Fox Legal Records, 1692-1881, (American Philosophical Society)