27 March Sunday – A shower of Rain at sunrise, but afterwards an uncommonly fine Spring day and very Warm, the Thermometer as high as 75 in a Shade. Din’d at home without company, aferwards drove to Furley & Fortune – Wm. R. Smith & Jno. Merryman call’d
From the journal of Captain Henry Thompson, March 27, 1814. Courtesy the Friends of Clifton.
On February 14, 1814, John Merryman died in Baltimore at age 77. Born on February 16, 1736 on the 1000-acre “Hereford Farm,” Merryman moved to Baltimore Town around 1763 and built a home on Calvert Street just south of Baltimore Street.
In 1774, he helped to found the “Baltimore Town Committee of Observation,” one of many citizen groups organized around the beginning of the American Revolution to challenge the weakening authority of the British Colonial government. Merryman was commissioned as a Justice for Baltimore County in 1778 and served as a judge for the Orphan’s Court of Baltimore County in 1784. He survived by his wife Sarah Rogers Smith and four children.
Source: Browne, William Hand, and Louis Henry Dielman. 1915. Maryland Historical Magazine. Maryland Historical Society. p. 286-287.