Nicholas Hawk deed

[spgordon]

I don't know much about Nicholas Hawk, beyond what was written about him when the Jacobsburg Historical Society was moving and reconstructing his gunshop, but I know folks on this list are interested in Hawk so I thought I would post this in case it is of any interest:

Yesterday I found a deed recorded in the Moravian Archives from 1808. It records Hawk's purchase of 51 acres in Chestnut Hill township (then Northampton County, now Monroe County) for $271.46. Here's the survey of the area:

[JTR]

Thanks for that, Scott! So that would have been the property where he had his shop!
I've always admired Hawks work and have a couple of his rifles. Interestingly, on the deed his first name is spelled with an h as it is commonly. However on his guns he spelled it Nicolas.
John

[spgordon]

So that would have been the property where he had his shop!
I've always admired Hawks work and have a couple of his rifles. Interestingly, on the deed his first name is spelled with an h as it is commonly. However on his guns he spelled it Nicolas.

Well, maybe. As I say, I've done no research on Hawk--and only know the little information that the Jacobsburg foiks have written. They state that "On December 16, 1801, Nicholas Hawk purchased the original Hawk family homestead in Gilbert from Richard and Thomas Penn." I'm not sure the "Richard and Thomas Penn" part of this statement makes any sense and cannot confirm the rest of it. He would have been nineteen in 1801. But Hawk may have had his gunshop on this earlier tract of land ... and notice that in the 1808 deed he is referred to as a "gunsmith," so he had to have been practicing that trade somewhere before the 1808 purchase...

[Mark Elliott]

This may be a minor point,  but what you show isn't actually the deed.  It is the plat in the tax record book exactly as shown in every tax record book I have ever seen, including for my own land purchases.   Then again all the counties in which I ever bought land go back to the early 18th century.       

[spgordon]

Very true. As I wrote in the initial post, the image that I included showed the survey of the land. I thought that the plat would be the thing that might interest people. This plat was drawn next to the copy of the deed itself (see image below).

But the volume isn't a tax record book; it's a large ledger in which the Moravian administration copied outgoing correspondence related to financial matters, records of their land transactions, and their accounts with the commissioners during the French and Indian War.

[Mark Elliott]

Thank goodness for the Moravian's obsessive record keeping.    I find that deed record and plat so interesting, mainly in that it reads just like the paper work in my own file cabinet.    Lawyers cannot be accused of being progressive. 

[spgordon]

Thank goodness for the Moravian's obsessive record keeping.   

I'll second that! My career would have been very different in the last decade or so if they hadn't written everything done and preserved every scrap of paper...