♂Sylvanus Blanchard

Sylvanus Blanchard^W (9 April 1778 – 6 January 1858) was a sea captain and shipbuilder of North Yarmouth and Yarmouth, Maine, for whom an Italianate house on Main Street, Yarmouth, was built in 1855. He was a second cousin of Nicholas Blanchard (1766–1849), the fourth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through Nicholas’s son Alexander Blanchard (1799–1850), and so a second cousin once removed of Alexander, another master mariner of the same Weymouth stock.

Family and early life

Sylvanus was born at North Yarmouth, then part of the District of Maine^W in Massachusetts, on 9 April 1778. The Maine births index gives his parents as Joshua Blanchard (1748–1835) and Jane, who Wikipedia says was a Prince (1750–1850). He was one of eleven children, with brothers and sisters born between 1772 and 1794, among them Perez, who was born in 1785.

Joshua was born at North Yarmouth on 1 April 1748, according to the Maine births index, which names his parents as Nathaniel Blanchard and Hannah. The Weymouth marriage register records the marriage of Nathaniel Blanchard and Hannah Shaw on 9 February 1726/7, and the town recorded their children’s births from 1728 to 1740. A compiled family history says that this Nathaniel, born at Weymouth on 19 May 1701, the son of John and Abigail Blanchard, moved to North Yarmouth in 1743, was admitted to its church by letter from Weymouth in 1745, and died there on 15 August 1773. That Joshua was his son is probable but not proved: no record found names the Nathaniel of North Yarmouth as the one from Weymouth, though the name, the wife’s name and the dates agree.

Lines of descent

The Weymouth Nathaniel was a son of John Blanchard (1660–1733), so that Sylvanus was John’s great-grandson through Nathaniel and Joshua. John’s son John (1691–1752), Nathaniel’s brother, was the grandfather of Nicholas Blanchard (1766–1849) through Nicholas Blanchard (1736–1801). The two cousins’ fathers, Joshua and Nicholas of 1736, were therefore first cousins, one family settling in Maine and the other staying at Weymouth. In the next generation Nicholas’s son Alexander, who became a master mariner and was called “Capt. Alexander Blanchard” in the records, belonged to the same seafaring stock as Sylvanus.

Master mariner and shipbuilder

Wikipedia describes Sylvanus as a merchant sea captain who, after leaving the sea, became a shipbuilder and owner of one of the four main shipyards of Yarmouth harbor. With three of his sons, Paul, Sylvanus Cushing and Perez, he is said to have formed the firm of Blanchard Brothers, which ran from 1857 to 1893. Under the master builder Joseph A. Seabury the firm is said to have built ships including the Admiral, Commodore, S. C. Blanchard, Pacific, Star and Detroit. The three sons named were also sea captains. Yarmouth had been set off from North Yarmouth as a town of its own in 1849.

Marriage and children

On 25 October 1804 Sylvanus married Dorcas Prince Blanchard (1781–1863), a daughter of Cushing Prince and Hannah Blanchard, according to Wikipedia. They had eight children. The Maine births index names Sylvanus and Dorcas Prince as the parents of David Prince Blanchard, born in 1806, and of Paul Greely Blanchard, born in 1808. Wikipedia gives the others as Sylvanus Cushing (1811–1888), Perez Nathaniel (born 1815), Samuel Woodbury (1818–1857), Dorcas Jane (1822–1862), Ammi Mitchell (born 1825) and Olive Elizabeth (1826–1861). David Prince died young, in 1828.

The house on Main Street

Wikipedia records that before 1855 Sylvanus lived elsewhere on Main Street in Yarmouth. In that year he had the Captain S. C. Blanchard House^W built nearby, to designs by the Portland architect Charles A. Alexander. It is a two-story Italianate house with a hip roof and an eight-sided cupola, deep eaves with paired carved brackets, a decorated porch and bay windows, and it is counted among the finest Italianate houses of Yarmouth. He lived in it for only three years, and it passed to his son Sylvanus Cushing Blanchard, whose name it carries. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places^W in 1979.

Death

Sylvanus died at Yarmouth on 6 January 1858, aged 79, and was buried in the Old Baptist Cemetery there, according to Find a Grave. His wife Dorcas outlived him by five years.