John Enders (16 July 1776–20 October 1851), tobacco manufacturer, was born in York County, Pennsylvania, and was the son of Nicholas Enders and Susannah Fahnestock Enders, both German immigrants. By 1806 he had moved to Richmond, Virginia, and in January 1807 he received a license from the city to stem and manufacture tobacco. Having started with only his own labor, Enders soon began hiring or purchasing enslaved persons to work at his factory and within four years was shipping tobacco as far away as New England. During the War of 1812 he served as a private in the 19th Regiment Virginia Militia. Suspension of exports during the war disrupted his business, but he quickly recovered and in 1818 insured his three-story brick factory for $5,000. Enders resumed shipments along the East Coast of the United States and to Germany, where his ability to correspond in German proved advantageous in conducting business. In 1820 his workforce consisted of approximately seventy men and boys, probably all of them enslaved, to manufacture chewing tobacco. By that year he had become one of the leading tobacco producers in Richmond.
In April 1810 Enders won election to represent Jefferson Ward on Richmond's common council. During the next twenty years he was reelected twelve times to nonconsecutive one-year terms, and the council also occasionally named him to fill a vacancy. Enders sat on the board of aldermen in 1817. During the 1830s he served on several citizen committees that urged the General Assembly to construct a canal connecting the James River with the Ohio River to facilitate commerce with the West. Named a director of the Farmers' Bank of Virginia in 1832, Enders also worked for many years as a director of the Savings Institution of Richmond. Often, he provided financial assistance to fledgling entrepreneurs in the city. Believing that Richmond businessmen lacked sufficient local options for insuring their property and goods, Enders joined his son, two of his sons-in-law (including the merchant Poitiaux Robinson), and two other men in 1851 in incorporating the Merchants and Mechanics Insurance Company of Richmond.
By the 1820s Enders had begun investing in real estate in Richmond and neighboring eastern Henrico County. Between 1835 and 1841, as the result of a lawsuit, he owned a half-interest in the dock at Rocketts Landing, the city's primary shipping terminal just below the falls of the James River. At the time of his death, he owned at least forty-eight town lots as well as a 400-acre farm. Enders constructed many brick houses, stores, factories, and warehouses near the riverfront and dock. Three of the four-story buildings completed between 1845 and 1852 became part of a notorious Confederate prison during the Civil War. Known as Libby Prison for a ship chandler who had rented one of the three component buildings during the 1850s, the structures located at Cary and 20th Streets were dismantled in 1889 and reassembled in Chicago as a war museum.
As Richmond became the center of Virginia's tobacco-manufacturing industry, Enders continued to expand his business. He employed business agents, known as factors, who marketed and sold his tobacco products in Maine, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Wilmington, and Savannah. Eschewing speculation, Enders skillfully managed his resources during the financial panics of 1819 and 1837. In 1850 he ranked among the top third of the more than thirty tobacco manufacturers in Richmond, with about 126 laborers at his several factories annually producing a half-million pounds of tobacco worth $90,000.
Enders married Sarah Lambert Ege on 5 March 1814 in Richmond. They had one son and six daughters, one of whom died in infancy. On 20 October 1851 John Enders fell nearly twenty feet from a ladder at one of his new warehouses and died because of a resultant fractured skull. He was buried at Saint John's Episcopal Church. His estate, including tobacco, factory equipment, and more than 115 enslaved persons, was valued at $332,703.
Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Thompson P. Ege, History and Genealogy of the Ege Family in the United States, 1738–1911 (1911), 27–29, and Valentine Museum, Richmond Portraits in an Exhibition of Makers of Richmond, 1737–1860 (1949), 64 (portrait); life dates and birthplace on gravestone; Richmond Daily Compiler, 8 Mar. 1814; United States Census, 1820 Manufacturing Schedule, 1850 Industrial Schedule, Richmond City, Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; Joseph Clarke Robert, The Tobacco Kingdom: Plantation, Market, and Factory in Virginia and North Carolina, 1800–1860 (1938), 192, 223; many building insurance policies in Mutual Assurance Society of Virginia, General Business Records, 1795–1965, Accession 28135, Business Records Collection, Library of Virginia; will and estate inventory in Richmond City Hustings Will Book, 13:532–537, 612–622; account of death in Richmond Enquirer, 21 Oct. 1851; obituaries in Richmond Whig and Public Advertiser, 31 Oct. 1851, and Richmond Enquirer, 7 Nov. 1851; Henry S. Keppler, The Nearness of Death: Being the Substance of a Sermon Preached in St. John's Church, Richmond, on Wednesday Afternoon, October 22, 1851, on the Occasion of the Death of Mr. John Enders, Sr.… (1851).
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Leah M. Thomas.
How to cite this page:
Leah M. Thomas, "John Enders (1776–1851)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2023 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Enders_John, accessed [today's date]).
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