Meet the Ancestors: Jeremiah Townley Chase

Jeremiah Townley Chase (1748-1828)

Jeremiah’s parents died when he was 9 at which time he was adopted by his uncle, Rev. Thomas Chase, who raised him with his own son, Samuel Chase. He read the law with his cousin Samuel and was admitted to the bar in 1771. He joined the prerevolutionary Maryland Committee of Correspondence and helped to draft the state constitution of Maryland. He was a delegate from Anne Arundel County to the Maryland Convention convened to ratify the Constitution of the United States, which he opposed because it did not have a Bill of Rights and made no provision for the abolition of slavery. Over the next three decades, he became a justice to Maryland’s General Court, served in the Maryland State Senate, and became Chief Justice of the Maryland Court of Appeals.

Jeremiah married Hester Baldwin in 1779 and fathered 5 children. While living on King George St., he rented one of the wings of the Hammond-Harwood House for his law office. In 1811 he purchased the house for his daughter, Frances Loockerman and her husband, Richard. The house remained in that family until 1925. Jeremiah and many of his decendants are buried in St. Anne’s Cemetery.