JAMES BARRETT, ESQUIRE
James Barrett. Esquire was born circa 1752 in the English Colony of Virginia. According to family tradition, he was the son of an Irish "Sea Captain" and probably of a Scottish mother possibly named "Hannah." It is believed, but not proven, that his father was Captain James Barrett, master of the ship Bridgetown that carried tobacco from the port of Baltimore in the Colony of Maryland to London during the period 1747-1749. He married Eloise ("Elsie") Earle in early January 1780 in, or near, the colonial village of Hackensack, Bergen County, New Jersey. According to a family tradition, Elsie was a "full-bloodied German woman," although the evidence suggests that she was more likely of Dutch or German-Dutch descent.
James Barrett was a veteran of the American War of Independence and participated with his regiment in such major engagements as the Battle of Peekskill, Battle of Butt's Hill, Battle of Brandywine and both segments of the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, and was among the thousands who suffered that terrible winter at Valley Forge. At the time of his marriage, he was a 1st Lieutenant and Quartermaster of the 3rd Company, 4th New York Regiment of Light Foot Infantry-New York Line then encamped in winter quarters at Morristown, New Jersey. He resigned his commission January 1, 1781 and, with wife Elsie and their ten-week old son James Barrett, Jr., immediately settled in the Town of Orangetown near the village of Tappan in old Orange (now Rockland) County, New York where they were associated with the Tappan Low Dutch Christian Reform Church. A second son, Philip Barrett, was born there to James and Elsie in 1782. The family had moved to the City of New York by 1785 where a daughter Eleanor Barrett was born in September 1786.
In early March 1790, James, Elsie, James, Jr., Philip, Eleanor and a newly born daughter Hannah Barrett, removed to the Northwest Territory where they joined other early Symmes Purchase settlers of "Coleraine," a fortified settlement north of Cincinnati more commonly known as "Dunlap's Station" or "Fort Dunlap," in what is now Colerain Township, Hamilton County, Ohio. The Barrett family was one of the eleven families at the settlement in 1791 when it came under siege by a large body of Indians led by the infamous Simon Girty, immortalized in Stephen D. Cone's account Indian Attack on Fort Dunlap. The family lived at Dunlap's Station until 1800 when the collapse of the Coleraine settlement forced them to obtain new land in Lemon Township, in what is now Butler County, Ohio. In 1802, the family settled permanently on a 320-acre tract of land outside the village of Bellbrook, Sugar Creek Township, in present-day Greene County, Ohio where James Barrett, Esquire died May 1822.
James Barrett achieved the honorific title "Esquire" in 1793 when the Governor of the Northwest Territory General Arthur St. Clair appointed James Barrett a Justice of the Peace of Coleraine and, concurrently, an Associate Judge of the Court of Common Pleas and of the Quarter General Assembly of old Hamilton County. He is better known, however, for his subsequent appointment in 1803 as an Associate Judge of the Court of Common Pleas of the newly created Greene County that he helped to organize and served for seven years. The town of Xenia named a street after him to honor his contributions to Greene County; however, it has since been renamed Galloway Street.
From: Genealogy of Carin Green
