James Dunlop (bap. 31 August 1776–13 July 1827), tobacco manufacturer, was baptized on 31 August 1776 in Dundonald Parish, Ayrshire, Scotland, possibly on the same day he was born. He was the son of David Dunlop and Margaret Dickie Dunlop. Nothing is known about his education. About 1790 or 1791, according to family traditions, Dunlop traveled to Virginia, where in 1794 his name first appeared on the Petersburg personal property tax returns in the household of William Sharp, a merchant with whom he was serving an apprenticeship. Dunlop paid for a merchant's license in his own name in 1802 and by 1806 was in partnership with John Massenburg in a general mercantile business operating as James Dunlop and Company, which they dissolved in September 1808.
Dunlop never married. He built a brick mansion for himself in Petersburg after buying the land for it in July 1814. About that same time he and Richard Griffin Orgain formed the partnership of Dunlop and Orgain. Dunlop built a one-story, L-shaped, brick tobacco factory soon thereafter and in June 1817 insured it for $8,000. By that time Dunlop and Orgain were shipping their products, which included several varieties of chewing tobacco, to Baltimore and were soon trading regularly with agents in Bremen, Liverpool, and London. A few years after Dunlop's death his heirs filed claims suggesting that the company had also been trading with ports in the Baltic as well. In 1820 Petersburg's manufacturers exported almost 16,000 hogsheads of tobacco and produced $61,380 worth of manufactured tobacco. The portion of the whole that Dunlop and Orgain produced is uncertain. The company was listed as one of the two classed as general merchants and tobacco manufacturers in Petersburg in 1823, and at that time there were seven other tobacco manufacturers in the city. On 1 January 1827 Dunlop's share of the capital stock in the company was worth $35,845.63.
Presumably because Dunlop had no heirs to inherit his tobacco company, he sent for his Scottish nephew David Dunlop (1804–1864), who moved to Petersburg about 1820 and worked in the Dunlop and Orgain tobacco factory. James Dunlop later requested that another nephew, David Dunlop Brydon, also join him in Petersburg. Both young men learned the tobacco business under Dunlop's tutelage and became prominent and prosperous Petersburg manufacturers with money they inherited from him.
Dunlop relied on enslaved labor at his tobacco factory. He had owned a few slaves, perhaps for running his household, before forming his partnership with Orgain. Dunlop and Orgain paid taxes on thirteen slaves in 1814, and while the number fluctuated during the next decade, the company's slave labor force increased from seventeen in 1825 to twenty-nine in 1827. Most of them probably worked in the tobacco factory.
Dunlop freed one of his own slaves in 1822 for many years of faithful service and for the care he had taken of Dunlop during a recent dangerous illness. Before he emancipated his slave, however, he petitioned the General Assembly for an act to ensure that the man could remain in Virginia with his enslaved wife and children. When Dunlop composed his will in 1826 he provided freedom for four girls, one woman, and three men and instructed his executors to buy the wife and children of the one of the men and to emancipate them as well. He also asked his partner to free one of the men the company owned "on account of his remarkably good character." Dunlop bequeathed to each of the four men legacies ranging from $50 to $250. He suggested that the freed men and women would probably find a better life in the American colony in Africa, but he did not require them to immigrate there as a condition of their freedom. Dunlop directed that his remaining slaves be appraised at their full value and that his executors sell them to "good masters of their own choice."
In addition to the tobacco factory and their mercantile house, Dunlop and Orgain also owned a popular hotel in Petersburg, first known as the Exchange Coffee House, constructed in 1818 and insured for $15,000. The building was also called Niblo's Hotel, for John Niblo, who leased it from them in 1819 and then purchased it from Dunlop's executors in October 1827, about three weeks before a fire destroyed the building. Dunlop became a member of the Petersburg Presbyterian Church (later Tabb Street Presbyterian Church) in 1822, and sometime thereafter the Petersburg Hustings Court chose him, along with Hugh Nelson, a ruling elder of the church, as commissioners to sell the church's old building. At his death, Dunlop left the minister, Benjamin Holt Rice, and Hugh Nelson $500 each. In addition, Dunlop paid $500 toward the building and endowment of the Presbyterian theological seminary at Hampden-Sydney College. James Dunlop died in Petersburg on 13 July 1827 and was buried in Blandford Cemetery.
Sources Consulted:
Baptism on 31 Aug. 1776 in Dundonald Parish Register of Births and Baptisms, General Register Office, New Register House, Edinburgh, Scotland; birth date of 31 Aug. 1776 on gravestone (also recording "a residence in the State of Virginia of thirty years"); Land Tax Returns (1805–1828) and Personal Property Tax Returns (1802–1827), Petersburg, both Record Group 48, Library of Virginia (LVA); Mutual Assurance Society Declarations, nos. 841 (1817), 1207 (1818), 1405 (1819), 1437 (1820), 3301 (1822), 5007 (1823), Accession 30177, LVA; Dunlop petition to free John Brown, 13 Dec. 1820, Legislative Petitions, Petersburg, Accession 36121, LVA; Petersburg Hustings Court Deed Book 7:58; J. Dunlop the Younger, John Dunlop et al. v. Exors. Of James Dunlop et al., Petersburg City Chancery Causes, 1834-024, LVA; In the Circuit Court of the City of Petersburg: Tennant et als. Vs. Dunlop et al. [ca. 1895], 290; Petersburg Hustings Court Will Book, 2:250–252 (quotations); obituary in Richmond Enquirer, 20 July 1827, reprinted in part in Raleigh Register, and North-Carolina Gazette, 21 July 1827.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Emily J. Salmon.
How to cite this page:
Emily J. Salmon,"James Dunlop (1776–1827)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2016 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Dunlop_James, accessed [today's date]).
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