Judge Henry Baldwin March 5, 2020

Copyright © 2020                               John F. Oyler

March 5, 2020

Judge Henry Baldwin

We have been aware of Judge Henry Baldwin’s illustrious career and his minor place in Bridgeville history for a number of years. We know that he built a summer home, Recreation, in what is now the Greenwood neighborhood in Bridgeville in the early 1800s, which he eventually sold to Moses Coulter in 1818.

We know that the eastern end of Station Street was originally a country lane leading from the Washington Pike to Recreation. We know that Coulter sold Recreation to the Walter Foster family in 1842. They in turn sold it to Dr. William Gilmore in 1879, who left it to his daughter, Capitola, when he died. She married Ulysses. L. Donaldson in 1888; the Donaldson family maintained it until it was demolished in the mid-1900s.

Our study of Pop Ferree’s workbooks documenting the early real estate transactions in the Bridgeville area have turned up information that suggests that Judge Baldwin played a much bigger role in the development of our community than we had realized. Consequently it is appropriate that we review his career and then discuss this role.

Henry Baldwin was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1780. He graduated from Yale at the age of seventeen and then read law at the Litchfield Law School for a year. In 1799 he moved to western Pennsylvania and was elected as the first district attorney for Crawford County.

By 1802 he was in Pittsburgh, combining a successful law practice with lucrative investments in the iron-making industry. Following the death of his wife Marina Baldwin married Sally Ellicott in 1805. Along with his associate, Walter Forward, and their close friend, Tarleton Bates, Baldwin was a member of “The Great Triumvirate”, a trio of three staunch “Constitutionalists” supporting Governor McKean.

 In 1805 they took control of “The Tree of Liberty”, Pittsburgh’s second newspaper, a Democratic-Republican organ established in opposition to John Scull’s “Weekly Gazette”, a publication with Federalist leanings.

Discord over McKean’s re-election campaign ultimately led to Bates’ death in a duel on January 8, 1806. It was the last duel to be fought in Pittsburgh; Bates’ death was a major shock for Baldwin. The site of the duel is the end of Bates Street, at the Monongahela River.

In 1816 Baldwin was elected to the United States House of Representatives, where he served for three terms. While in Congress he earned the gratitude of Andrew Jackson for defending Jackson’s unauthorized invasion of Spanish Florida in 1818. He then supported Jackson’s unsuccessful candidacy for the presidency in 1824 and his successful one four years later.

Jackson rewarded Baldwin’s loyalty by nominating him as Secretary of the Treasury. Strong opposition by Vice President John C. Calhoun, who feared Baldwin’s preference for tariffs, derailed that attempt. When Bushrod Washington died, Jackson appointed Baldwin as an Associate Judge of the United States Supreme Court in 1830. He served on the court until his death in 1844.

Baldwin’s years on the high court were significant. He is credited with initiating the practice of publishing dissenting opinions on non-unanimous verdicts. John Marshall was Chief Justice; it was his practice to render decisions with no explanation of the opposing arguments. Baldwin chose to publish independently the dissenting opinion, the permanent record of the other side of the debate.

Two of his dissents are cited in Wikipedia. In “Worcester vs Georgia”, 1832, he affirmed the right of the state (Georgia) to deny the sovereignty of the Cherokee Indians as a nation. Similarly, in “Groves vs. Slaughter”, 1841, he upheld the classification of slaves as “property”, a precedent later followed in the “Dred Scott” decision.

Baldwin died in 1844. His legacy is his published dissents and a remarkable document he wrote in 1837 in which he advocated a centrist position between the two extreme judicial factions, the strict interpreters of the Constitution and the evolutionary ones. One wishes he were on the high court today.

A remarkable entry in Pop Ferree’s workbook, on November 8, 1813, records the sale of 2023 acres of land in the Bridgeville area, by Presley Neville, to Henry Baldwin for $32,000. The land includes six major sites – Wingfield (588 acres), Reno (310 acres), Bower Hill (256 acres), Redman’s Place (265 acres), Sidgefield (404 acres), and Wheatfarm (200 acres).

Referring to the Allegheny County Warrantee Atlas gives us a good idea of what this encompassed. Wingfield was Alexander Fowler’s property on the east side of Chartiers Creek from Bridgeville south to Mayview (now known as Hastings). Reno is the Benjamin Rennoe warrant which covered most of Bridgeville northeast of Station Street. The other four occupy the southwest corner of Scott Township, bounded by Painter’s Run on the south and Scrubgrass on the north.

This is an impressive block of land for one man to own. Presley Neville was heavily involved in real estate in this area at the time although he had moved to Pittsburgh, where he served as Burgess from 1804 to 1805. He would have been the perfect person to organize such a transaction. He did indeed retain ownership of “Woodville” at that time.

Baldwin’s motives for such a move are a puzzle. Perhaps he was a land speculator or possibly a serious investor with ambitious plans for this area. The price he paid, $16.00 an acre, appears to be excessive; George Washington had sold his Miller’s Run property for $4.25 per acre twenty years earlier. Thirty-two thousand dollars in 1813 was a fortune, equivalent to five or six million dollars today.

At any rate the Greenwood neighborhood was part of the Rennoe warrant and we presume that 1813 is when Baldwin built Recreation. This was, of course, prior to his becoming a Congressman, a time when his primary occupation was that of an attorney.

On September 10, 1814, Baldwin paid Stephen Barlow $2,400 for three plots totaling 875 acres – “Reno Place”, “Dennison’s”, and “Wingfield”. We presume these were blocks of land that complemented his larger holdings. We suspect that “Dennison’s” applies to Dennison’s Run which may be the name of the tiny creek running down Cow Hollow to Chartiers Creek.

At any rate by this time Baldwin owned a continuous swath of land three miles long by one mile wide running all the way from Scrubgrass Run in Scott Township to Mayview in Upper St. Clair.

On July 15, 1816, Baldwin began to sell off land with a block of 396 acres going to James Sawyer for $8,000 (about $20 per acre for land he bought three years earlier for $16 per acre). This appears to be most of Wingfield, bounded on the north by the aforementioned Dennison’s Run. On the same date Mr. Sawyer sold the same property to John McKown for $8,700.

Baldwin was busy again on November 22, 1819. He traded a small plot to Moses Middlewarth for another small one, which then permitted him to sell a major block of land to Moses Coulter, 402 acres for $15,000 ($37 per acre!). Our concern that he paid too much for the land originally was unjustified. This transaction probably included Baldwin’s summer home, Recreation.

The next, and probably final, appearance of Henry Baldwin’s name in Pop Ferree’s workbook is dated November 19, 1827. It reports a sheriff’s sale of 1050 acres,

“lands and tenements of Henry Baldwin, late of Allegheny County, yeoman” to the Bank of the United States for $8,000. We can understand the necessity for a sheriff’s sale; the involvement of the federal bank is a puzzle.

Judge Baldwin was certainly a significant national figure in the early years of the nineteenth century. We were surprised to learn how significant he was in the early development of Bridgeville.