#52 Ancestors 2020 Week 2 Favorite Photo: William Boswell Scrivener

This photo of William Boswell Scrivener and his son, my great-grandfather, Frank Phillip Scrivener, is one of my favorites because it is one of the oldest photos I have.  Frank was born in 1864 and looks to be about 6 in this picture, so I date the picture at about 1870.

William Boswell Scrivener, the fifth of twelve children and the third son of John Scrivener and Eliza Smith Boswell, was born in the town of Friendship, Anne Arundel County MD in 1828.  I think he was named for Eliza's brother, William Henry Smith Boswell.

William inherited a farm and seven slaves from the will of his father in 1849.  In 1855, he added to his holdings by purchasing Holly Hill, a plantation near Friendship, from his brother-in-law, John Howe Somervell who had run into financial difficulties. In all, he had about 600 acres of farm land in southern Anne Arundel County.

In 1856 he married Sally Jane Barber, at Silverstone, the home of her parents, Jonathan Yates Barber and Mary Wheeler Kent, in Calvert County. William and Sally had ten children between 1857 and 1877, five sons and five daughters.  The children were all born and raised at the family home, which they called Rose Valley (AKA Holly Hill).

William was a tobacco farmer and active in the community, serving as a trustee of the primary school in Friendship in 1869, and advocating in 1880 for the county to support a railroad line between Baltimore and Drum Point.

William Boswell Scrivener died after a fall from a horse in July of 1895 at age 67.  While he had at one time owned considerable land and many slaves, the inventory of his estate shows a modest lifestyle of a tobacco farmer with horses, cows, oxen and hogs along with wood stoves and oil lamps and simple furnishings. After William's death, much of his land and farm animals were sold by his sons although the family continued to live at Rose Valley until 1936. Sally Barber Scrivener died in Baltimore in 1911.

Frank Scrivener, like his brothers and sisters, was baptized at All Saints Episcopal Church in Sunderland, just over the Calvert County border near Friendship.  His Barber grandparents were his baptismal sponsors.  He was educated at the local public schools and since there was no high school in Anne Arundel County at the time, he attended Glenwood Academy in Howard County.  About 1896, he moved to Baltimore where obtained work as a bookkeeper and accountant.

In Baltimore, he met Louise Gwynn, the daughter of  Confederate Captain, Andrew Jackson Gwynn, who was attending Mt. Saint Agnes College.  They married in 1899 and had one son, Frank Phillip Scrivener Jr., in August 1900.

Frank died in Upper Marlboro, where he and his wife had moved after his retirement, in May 1939, at age 75.