George Gordon

1. George Gordon was born 04/03/1790, the second son of ‘John, of Stapleton Grove, Bristol’ and grandson of Bristol Alderman Robert Gordon of Auchendolly.

2. George Gordon owned enslaved people at his Moor Park property and was an attorney for many properties in western Jamaica. In 1828, was Moor Park estate registered to George Gordon, with 191 enslaved persons. (Higman shows him as owning no enslaved people, but it appears that the George Gordon who was the awardee of the compensation for Moor Park was the same man as the attorney, purchasing Moor Park in 1820 from John Gordon of Bristol, his father, or perhaps another relative.)

3. George Gordon ‘was known as austere and as opposed to the education of the slaves.’ Around 1830, George Gordon, manager of Blue Hole estate, rejected Presbyterian Rev Hope Waddell’s request for extra time for the enslaved people to attend meetings: ‘Extra time! I am one of those that would not give five minutes for any such purpose. I want the people to work.’

4. In the Jamaican Emancipation War of 1831-2 (also called the Baptist War or Sam Sharpe’s rebellion), Gordon’s Moor Park was among the first estates to be burned by the insurgents. William Stennett and other enslaved men at Moor Park set fire to Gordon’s works, stores and house. Stennett and others were convicted and executed on the estate that they had burnt. George Gordon, with naval half-pay officer Lieutenant F. B. Gibbs, led a party of the St. James militia on 3 January 1832 and set fire to Salter's Hill Baptist Chapel, near Montego Bay. In the severe reprisals that followed the conflict, George Gordon was ‘President of the Court Martials in Montego Bay’, sentencing men and women to beating and hanging.

5. In 1838, the Baptist Missionary Society Committee reported that ‘Camberwell Day-School has been recommenced at Silver grove, by the liberal assistance of George Gordon, Esq., who in this and many other similar instances has manifested his desire for the lasting welfare of the Island.’ He also provided patronage to six evening estates’ schools at Glasgow, Windsor Lodge, Moor Park, Paisley, Leyden, and Guilsborough and for land at Moor Park for building a school-room for a day-school.

6. ‘George Gordon, esq. eldest surviving son of the late John Gordon, esq. of Bristol’ died on 23/05/1850 ‘at Moor-park, Jamaica, aged 61.'

We are grateful to Steven Carter for his assistance in compiling this entry.

1. Bernard Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain & Ireland, vol 1. Harrison, 1886. p. 755. St James Church of England, Bristol, Baptisms, 1770-1796, entry for 15 April 1790.

2. T71/222 p.195. Jamaica Almanac (1828). B. W. Higman, Plantation Jamaica 1750-1850: Capital and control in a colonial economy. University of West Indies Press, 2005, p. 85; ibid. p. 70.

3. Jeannette Augustus Marks, The Family of the Barrett: A Colonial Romance. Macmillan, 1938, p. 360.

4. Jeannette Augustus Marks, The Family of the Barrett: A Colonial Romance. Macmillan, 1938, pp. 399, 402-3, 411-2. Miles Ogborn, ‘Burning of Moor Park Estate’, in Jamaica Gleaner (online), 15/01/2023. Philip Manderson Sherlock, Jamaica Way. Longmans, 1962, p.48.

5. Baptist Missionary Society, Report of the Committee. 1838, pp. 36-37.

6. The Gentleman's Magazine, vol xxxiv, J. B. Nichols and Son, 1850, p. 454.