Place Name
James Ivers (1754 – 1843) was the nephew of Barlow Trecothick, a City of London merchant who had been brought up in pre-revolutionary America in the colonial Province of Massachusetts Bay. Trecothick was the son of a sea captain, and he may have been born in Stepney, but by 1724 the family appeared to have steeled in Boston. By 1734 Trecothick was apprenticed to Charles Apthorp, a wealthy English-born merchant and slave trader of Boston remaining with him until 1740. He later moved to Jamaica buying plantations in the West Indies before returning to London where he became a successful cloth merchant. In 1768 Trecothick bought the manor of Addington for £38,500, and added to it until it had covered some 5,000 acres. In the meantime he had become an MP and Lord Mayor of the City. When he died in 1775, he left a will leaving all his property to his nephew when he married, on condition that Ivers changed his surname to Trecothick. In 1777, Ivers married Susanna Margaret Edmonstone, daughter of Sir Archibald Edmonstone and took ownership of the Surrey estate plus the settlement of a Boston plantation, which included slaves. Ivers, a Harvard graduate whose mother Hannah had been Trecothick’s younger sister, continued the improvements that had been started by his uncle, having the substantial grounds and gardens landscaped by Lancelot “Capability” Brown. But he had to sell the Surrey estate in 1802 due to financial difficulties. However, he kept his Jamaica and Grenadian interests and in 1833 received £10,247 5s 1d for the 474 slaves he owned there. Interestingly, there is no road in London named after Barlow Trecothick despite his high profile.
