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- (Handwritten at top of page - Gift of 21 Oct 1943
Mrs. Bassett, 58 Pomeroy Terrace, Northampton, Massachusetts
Typed as original - misspellings included)
John Spencer Bassett
Soon after the war of 1812, in Virginia two young Bassetts, William and Richard, became heirs of their father's plantation near Williamsburg, called Eltham, and a small property of their mother's, whose maiden surname was Spencer. They decided to divide and settle up their possessions. Richard left the ancestral home, bought a few slave carpenters, and opened a contracting business in Williamsburg. His son, Richard Baxter, continued his father's business for a time, but later moved to North Carolina.
Williamsburg, although the home of one of the oldest societies in America, was then and still is, a place where there is the greatest amount of equality. This mingling of the good people of the town made a deep impression on the plantation-born elder Bassett, and the democratic idea waxed greater in his son.
Richard Baxter Bassett in his building career in North Carolina designed, as well as built, many structures of note in his adopted state. And it was while he was building at Tarboro that his second son, John Spencer Bassett, was born December 19, 1867.
The son has this to say of his father: "My father was unlike anybody else I have ever known. He was as pure-minded as a woman. I never heard him make an improper or profane remark. He was strict in his household, but never unkind. He was deeply religious, absolutely opposed to slavery, charitable, hospitable, industrious, and generous in his expenditure of money."
The mother of John S. Bassett, Mary Jane Wilson, whose father was John Wilson, a Maine yankee, was a woman of remarkably sweet disposition and great personal beauty. I quote "My mother possessed a very quick and retentive mind, a clear Madonna-like face, fine complexion, and handsome, grey eyes."
The earliest education of the boy John was in the neighborhood schools of Richlands, a plantation his father owned in Eastern North Carolina, and at Goldsboro, not far away; the town that became the permanent residence of the Bassett family. It was here that John graduated from the high school in June, 1883. In the high school under the instruction of a man of good spirit and modern educational methods literature came to mean something to the sensitive, impressionable, and somewhat shy boy. At this point, however, a delicate state of health, as the result of a severe attack of pneumonia, interrupted his attendance at school for two years.
(continued under John Spencer Bassett)
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Bassett Family Association Database
