Administrative Information

Access Restrictions

The collection is without restrictions.

Use Restrictions

See the University of Virginia Library’s use policy.

Preferred Citation

Inventory and appraisal of the estate of John W. Gantt, 1860, Accession #11430, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

Acquisition Information

Purchase: L & T Respess, Charlottesville, Va., July 26, 1998.

Biographical/Historical Information

Dr. John W. Gantt (1797?-1860) was the son of Henry Gantt, a former Prince George County, Maryland, resident who lived in North Gardens, Albemarle County, from 1813 to December 1821 on a 784-acre estate near Cross Roads. After winning a $40,000 Maryland lottery he returned to that state and gave his Albemarle holdings to his son John. Dr. Gantt later moved to another farm in the county and was appointed a magistrate in 1830. He and his wife Sarah had four children; seven years later he sold this farm to Joseph Sutherland but continued to reside in Albemarle.¹

The 1860 federal census, taken shortly before Dr. Gantt's death, enumerated him as a sixty-three-year-old farmer in St. Anne's Parish with his wife and children (Henry, Octavia, Price and Thomas); he owned $90,000 in real estate and $78,155 as personal estate. His eldest son, twenty-seven-year-old Henry Gantt, also a farmer, owned $15,600 in real estate and $14,590 as personal estate. Father and son together owned 83 slaves as of September 1860: John Gantt, 62 slaves, his son Henry, 21 slaves. During the Civil War, Henry Gantt (1831-1884), a 1851 graduate of Virginia Military Institute, served the Confederacy as colonel of the 19th Virginia Infantry.²

¹Edgar Woods, Albemarle County in Virginia (Charlottesville: The Michie Company, 1901), 198.

²Population Sechedules of the 8th Census, U. S., 1860: Virginia, Albemarle [County], 7 September 1860, John W. Gantt, page 668, census page 152, line 12, dwelling number 1140, family number 1124; 1860 Slave Census--Virginia: Albemarle County, St. Anne's Parish, 8 September 1860, line 20, column 1, Henry Gantt, 21 slaves, page 114, census page number 79; John W. Gantt, line 1, column 2, 40 slaves and line 1, column 1, 22 slaves, pages 114-115, census pages 79-80).

Information on Henry Gantt found in John Hammond Moore, Albemarle, Jefferson's County, 1727-1976 (Charlottesville: Published for the Albemarle County Historical Society by the University Press of Virginia, 1976), 197 ; Robert K. Krick, Lee's Colonels: A Biographical Register of the Field Officers of the Army of Northern Virginia (Dayton, Ohio: Press of Morningside Bookshop, 1979), 135 ; Ervin L. Jordan, Jr. and Herbert A. Thomas Jr., 19th Virginia Infantry (Lynchburg: H. E. Howard, Inc., 1987), 24, 70.

Scope and Content Information

This four-page court document is an "Inventory and appraisement of the personal Estate of John W. Gantt decd in the County of Albemarle, taken on the 29th day of November 1860 in pursuance of an order of Court hereunto annexed." The inventory, compiled by executor Henry Gantt and recorded by clerk of court Ira Garrett¹ on 4 February 1861, lists 57 slaves (including their names and ages ranging from one to seventy, whose individual value was between $70 and $1100), with furniture (including "Setting Room" and parlor furnishings), livestock (cows, hogs, horses, mules, oxen, and sheep), crops (corn, hay, tobacco, and wheat), farming equipment (cultivators, hoes, plows, reapers, scythes, and wheat fans), vehicles (buggy, carriage, carts, wagons), and 42 shares of stock in the State of Virginia and the Scottsville Woolen Factory. Of the estate's $41,274.83 estimated value, Gantt's slaves were worth $33,720.

¹Ira Garrett (1791-1870) served as Albemarle County's deputy sheriff (1815-1817), deputy county clerk (1818-1830), and county and circuit court clerk (1830-ca. 1866). See accession number 11034.