William Allason (d. 30 or 31 January 1800), merchant, was born in Glasgow, Scotland, one of five or six sons and three daughters of Zacharius Allason and his second wife, Isobel Hall Allason. As a boy he apprenticed as a baker, the trade of his father and of one of his three elder half-brothers, and he attended the Glasgow Grammar School, although the dates of his attendance are unknown. His half brother Robert Allason was a rising international merchant in Glasgow from the 1740s to the 1770s. In 1748 and again during the years 1750–1752 William Allason traveled to Virginia as a supercargo and merchant's factor, or agent, and in 1755 and 1756 he made two similar voyages to Antigua and Saint Kitts in the West Indies.

In 1757 Allason returned to Virginia on another trading voyage and remained. Although he never did business on a very large scale, the stages through which his career passed symbolized the metamorphosis of foreign traders into American businessmen. From 1757 until 1759 he served as an itinerant factor for Baird and Walker, of Glasgow, in what was known as the "lumping trade," in which packaged assortments of merchandise were sold rather than retailed as individual items from a store or on a circuit. He took tobacco in payment and shipped it back to Scotland on ships that Baird and Walker chartered.

The second phase of Allason's Virginia business career began in 1760, when he opened his own store in Falmouth, Stafford County, in partnership with John Mitchell, of Fredericksburg, and John Gray, of Port Royal, Caroline County, with Robert Allason acting as their agent in Scotland. The firm operated exclusively in Falmouth until 1770, except for a brief interval early in the 1760s when his brother David Allason conducted an outlet in Winchester. William Allason did not engage in the traditional consignment system, under which local merchants took orders for merchandise from Virginia planters, imported these goods from a single British source, and then paid for the merchandise with tobacco received from the planter. Allason instead dealt with many specialty suppliers in Glasgow, Whitehaven, Liverpool, Leeds, Bristol, and London, obtaining the best prices wherever he could. He sold the tobacco that he received from his customers to other Virginia merchants and paid his British suppliers in cash or bills of exchange. This system reduced his profit margin on each transaction, but he rarely had quantities of his own tobacco at risk on the high sea, and he was shielded to some extent from the volatile European tobacco trade. So energetically did Allason strive to open markets in the northern Virginia Piedmont and in the Shenandoah Valley that by the end of the decade nearly 20 percent of his customers lived west of the Blue Ridge. During the 1760s Allason's annual profits increased substantially, from £492 to £3,243.

From 1770 until the American Revolution, Allason conducted his business without any partners. He expanded his markets in the Shenandoah Valley and dealt in agricultural commodities such as wheat, milled flour, and hemp, rather than tobacco. The subsequent wartime shutdown of the tobacco trade consequently produced relatively little financial hardship for Allason. By October 1775 his only British creditor was Robert Allason, and he was able to turn his energies to the erection of a gristmill and a sawmill and to other interests. During the 1770s and 1780s he purchased about four thousand acres of land in the Piedmont and in the Shenandoah Valley and acquired a labor force of fifty-seven slaves. As a planter he concentrated on producing corn and wheat. Although he reopened his Falmouth store in 1783, he placed it under the management of David Allason and worked on expanding his trade in flour and timber products. By the end of that decade the Scottish factor had become an American planter and businessman and a prosperous, though perhaps not wealthy, gentleman. His land and taxable slaves were worth more than £11,000 altogether.

Allason married Anne Hooe on 26 June 1772. Their only son and one of their two daughters died in infancy. Allason was a founding member of the Masonic lodge in Falmouth. His role in the American Revolution might best be described as observer rather than rebel or loyalist before 1776, while he supported independence during the conflict. William Allason died during the night of 30–31 January 1800 and was buried with full Masonic rites in Saint Paul's cemetery in Falmouth.

Sources Consulted:
Robert William Spoede, "William Allason: Merchant in an Emerging Nation" (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 1973); Edith E. B. Thomson, "A Scottish Merchant in Falmouth in the Eighteenth Century," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (VMHB) 39 (1931): 108–117, 230–238; birth not recorded in largely complete Scottish parish registers and evidence on its date conflicts: Allason twice gave an age pointing to a Dec. 1731 birth date, but he became a Glasgow burgess on 23 July 1747, a dignity not bestowed on fifteen-year-olds, and he may actually have been the son baptized James on 29 Sept. 1728, with a subsequent name change (Stuart M. Nisbet and Thomas C. Welsh, Robert Allason and Greenbank [1992], esp. 14, 25–27, 35–37, 40, 60–63, and letter from Nisbet to editors, 8 Mar. 1994); Allason's business ledgers and papers (Accession 13) in the Library of Virginia form one of the largest and best collections of their kind and contain many biographical facts; marriage recorded in George H. S. King, ed., Register of St. Paul's Parish, King George County, Virginia (1960), 66; David D. Plater, "Building the North Wales Mill of William Allason," VMHB 85 (1977): 45–50; Ronald E. Heaton and James Royal Case, eds., The Lodge at Fredericksburgh: A Digest of the Early Records (1975), 32–33; Fauquier Co. Will Book, 2:249–251; death date and description of funeral in Walter Colquhoun to David Grinnan, 2 Feb. 1800, Grinnan Papers, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Peter V. Bergstrom.

How to cite this page:
Peter V. Bergstrom, "William Allason (d. 1800)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 1998 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Allason_William, accessed [today's date]).

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