Webb, James, 1774-1855

James Webb (20 February 1774-17 Febraury 1855), physician of Hillsborough, Orange County, N.C., a founder of the North Carolina State Medical Society, Presbyterian educational leader and philanthropist, merchant, and banker.

From the description of James Webb papers, 1725-1918. WorldCat record id: 33834201

James Webb (20 February 1774-17 February 1855) was a physician in Hillsborough, N.C., a founder of the North Carolina State Medical Society, Presbyterian educational leader and philanthropist, merchant, and banker. He was born at Tally-Ho, Granville County, N.C., the second child and eldest son of the ten children of William (1745-1809) and Frances (Fannie) Young Webb (died 1810), and the grandson of James (1705-1771) and Mary Edmondson Webb (1712-1795) of South Farnham Parish, Essex County, Va.

Webb attended the University of North Carolina, 1795-1796. In 1798, he enrolled in a medical course at the University of Pennsylvania under Benjamin Rush, and established himself as a physician and merchant in the town of Hillsborough in the closing years of the eighteenth century.

On 26 January 1807, in preparation for his coming marriage, Webb bought from James Phillips the five lots on the north side of E. Queen Street in Hillsborough--three lots where there stood an old inn that he evidently converted gradually into a house, and two lots on the south side of E. Queen Street, one where he built his office and dispensary (with a saddler's shop just above it) and a barn lot.

In the late autumn of 1799, Webb was a principal figure in the establishment of the North Carolina State Medical Society, which met in Raleigh on 17 December for its organizational meeting. Webb was elected vice-president and was also appointed a member of the Board of Censors, established to examine and accredit would-be doctors. At the Society's second meeting on 1 December 1800, Webb read a paper on the causes and prevention of gout and rheumatism. The State Medical Society ceased to exist after only five years. When Webb's ward and best-known medical student, Edmund Charles Fox Strudwick, revived the medical society in 1845 and was made its president, the 75-year-old Webb was made an honorary charter member.

The numerous students who came to Hillsborough to study medicine with Webb included Edmund C. F. Strudwick, William Webb, Henry Young Webb, Walter A. Norwood, Thomas H. Turner, H. O. W. Hooker, J. E. Williamson, Thompson N. Johnston, George H. Mitchell, and probably Johnston D. Jones and L. D. Schoolfield.

As early as 1804, Webb took an interest in education in Hillsborough. On 13 December 1804, Webb, as trustee, signed advertisements in the Raleigh Register for the Hillsborough Academy under Richard Henderson. He was still a member of its Board of Trustees in 1839, when William James Bingham was principal. In addition, Webb served as guardian for boys attending the Hillsborough Academy, many of whom boarded in his own home and for whom he sometimes became financially responsible.

Webb also initiated and underwrote two schools in Hillsborough--Mary W. (Polly) Burke's School and the Burwell Female School. In 1817, he erected a log schoolhouse in which Polly Burke conducted a day school for his children and those of his neighbors. This school continued until 1834. In 1837, Webb suggested to Mrs. M. A. Burwell that she teach his daughter Mary and two other Presbyterian girls. The new Burwell Female School, which replaced Miss Burke's School and provided an additional four-year curriculum for older girls, operated from 1837 to 1857, with Webb always listed as its patron. In 1825, Webb was also the president of the Orange County Sunday School Union, which petitioned unsuccessfully to gain state support for 22 Sunday schools to teach poor and indigent children to read and write.

Webb was a trustee of the University of North Carolina for 38 years, from 1812 to 1850. In 1827, he served on the University's Board of Visitors and, in 1830, on an emergency committee to help restore the University to a sound financial basis after the Panic of 1825.

Although only his wife, Annie Alves Huske Webb, was formally listed in 1816 as one of the nine organizers of the new Hillsborough Presbyterian Church, Webb signed the first pew rental lists on 20 September 1816 and, over a period of years, made large contributions to the Reverend John Knox Witherspoon's salary and to other church expenses. In 1835, Webb took in his own name a 99-year lease on a lot, where he erected a frame Sessions House with bell tower, used as a Presbyterian Sunday school room and eventually, until 1934, as a public library. He also served as a Presbyterian elder from 1835 until his death in 1855.

In 1822, Webb provided the trustees of the Methodist congregation with money and lumber to erect the first Methodist Church in Hillsborough on one of his lots. A paper, written in 1832 by Joseph B. Bacon, a Methodist trustee, mentions in considerable detail the indebtedness of the church to Webb, noting his many gifts and loans and that he has waited patiently Ten years for the money that we still owe him.

Like most early doctors, Webb necessarily supplemented his uncertain income from the medical profession in other ways; his mercantile and medical careers ran concurrently until the end of his life. From 1799 to 1801 or a little later, Webb may have been a silent partner in the Hillsborough store of the successful Raleigh mercantile firm of Southey and William Bond. He was also the major partner for several years with his brother Thomas in James Webb & Co., a mercantile establishment near their father's home in Granville County. For two and a half years, from 1 January 1805 to 1 July 1807, Webb served as postmaster of Hillsborough.

Webb's mercantile undertakings also included a general store and lumberyard, later known as Webb, Long & Co., in which his son-in-law Dr. Osmond F. Long was a partner, and a sizable brickyard, Webb & Hancock, operating near the Eno River. He entered into brief partnerships with various fellow townsmen on occasion (e.g., with J. J. Freeland under the name Webb & Freeland). A sideline that almost amounted to a business with both Webb and Judge Thomas Ruffin was the hiring out on an annual basis of the slaves of widows and of ailing or absent owners. Webb also served as Clerk and Master in Equity in scores of estate settlements and as the executor of innumerable Hillsborough and Orange County wills.

In 1815, Webb was appointed Hillsborough agent (cashier) of the Bank of the Cape Fear, a post he held until the closing of the office in 1846. The Bank's Hillsborough branch was staffed by five directors in addition to the agent.

On 1 November 1842, James Webb was declared bankrupt and, on 11 December, his possessions were sold at public auction.

On 12 February 1807, Webb married Annie Alves Huske (13 January 1785-23 June 1852), daughter of Englishman John Huske (died 1792) and Elizabeth (Betsy) Hogg (died 1788), and the granddaughter of Scottish merchant James Hogg (died 1805) and Elizabeth McDowell Alves (died 1801). Ten children, nine of whom survived, were born to the Webbs: Henry Young, Frances Helen, Elizabeth, Ann (Annie), James, William (who died at age 2), John Huske, Mary, William, and Thomas. Two of the sons, Henry Young and William, became physicians; James Junior, became a merchant in Hillsborough. Annie Alves Huske Webb died in 1852 and Webb died three years later at the age of 81 years. Both were buried in the Webb-Long plot in Hillsborough's Old Town Cemetery.

[Adapted from James Webb, by Mary Claire Engstrom, in William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming).]

From the guide to the James Webb Papers, 1725-1918, (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library. Southern Historical Collection.)