Meet the Ancestors: Thomas Stockett Brewer (1753-1823)

Photo: Find A Grave, Dave Crouse, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/76262261/thomas-stockett-brewer

Thomas Stockett Brewer was born around 1753 to Joseph and Mary Eleanor Stockett in Anne Arundel County. He was about 21 when he enlisted as a private in Captain Nathaniel Ramsey’s Fifth Company of the First Maryland Regiment. They mustered at Londontowne before traveling to join George Washington in New York prior to the Battle of Long Island. He survived that battle and went on to fight in other skirmishes as well as the Battle of White Plains, after which he returned to Maryland before reenlisting as a non-commissioned officer in the Second Maryland Regiment under Colonel William Smallwood in 1777. He continued to serve until he was discharged in 1780, possibly due to an injury to his leg. Returning to Annapolis, he was able to buy a small plot of land with another craftsman and set up shop as a shoemaker, for which he had been trained as a youth. There he stayed for 35 years until he was able to buy a larger lot at the corner of Duke of Gloucester and Green Streets, where he lived out his life with his wife, Suzanna Lampley, whom he had married shortly after returning from the war and with whom he had eight children.

Thomas Brewer was never a wealthy man. At his death, he was assessed as owning just $270 worth of property, partly because he owned no slaves. But he was a craftsman and a store owner and he seems to have led a comfortable life, helped by a pension for his service in the Revolutionary War, which was granted him in 1818. He died in 1823 at his home in Annapolis.