Lentorama 2022: It Happened on Easter

Day 37: A planter gets planted

The Harrison family has roots in Virginia going back to around 1630, when Benjamin Harrison arrived and quickly established himself. Within three years he was made clerk of the state's Governor's Council, setting a course in public service that future Harrisons - many also named Benjamin - would follow.

Notable among them is Benjamin Harrison V, who by the age of 20 was managing several plantations covering thousands of acres (which included a manor house, a grist mill, a fishery, and a number of slaves). This all was due to the untimely death of Benjamin Harrison IV, who also left other plantations to others of his 10 children.

Harrison flourished, and followed in his father's footsteps by being elected to Virginia's House of Burgesses (although he was too young to serve when first elected, which makes you wonder how he got elected in the first place). Harrison quickly fell in with those opposed to direct British rule, and served on several bodies which argued that colonists should have a voice in the laws (and taxes) applied to them.

Not surprisingly, Harrison was voted to be a delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses (one of his roomates at the latter was George Washington), and would be one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He spent most of the Revolutionary War in Virginia, serving in the new House of Delegates and working with the fledgling government to secure military aid for the southern states.

Just a month after the American victory at Yorktown, Harrison became the fifth governor of Virginia, and focused mainly on maintaining peace and improving the local economy, which the war had damaged greatly. After his term he returned to the legislature, where he served until his death on April 24, 1791, of unknown causes (though he was often in ill health thanks to what one source calls his "persistent corpulence").

For all that, Harrison's greatest legacy may be that he fathered one president - William Henry Harrison - who then fathered another - Benjamin Harrison. Who, as you might have noted, was not one of the line of Benjamin Harrisons. Benjamin Harrison V's oldest son was Benjamin Harrison VI, who like his dad was a planter and state politician. He would father Benjamin Harrison VII (with his first wife after the death of his second wife), and he would beget Benjamin Harrison VIII, and after that I can't bother to look. One other notable detail of the Harrisons is that they are also related to Abraham Lincoln through Thomas Harrison, who established a branch of the Harrison family in the Shenandoah valley.