Daniel Malott

Research note: a sheriff’s sale, and slavery in the family

This is the first record on this site of a member of the family holding people in slavery. It is set down here as the notice gives it.

An undated newspaper notice headed “Sheriff’s Sales” announces that, under writs from the Washington County Court “against Daniel Malott, at the suits of Theodore Malott, D. Westenberger’s Adm’rs, Catharine Malott, Conococheague Bank, &c.,” his property would be sold for cash “on Wednesday the 23d inst. at the house of said Malott.” The first property listed is fifteen people:

• a man about 40
• a woman about 30 and her child
• a girl about 14, a boy about 12 and a girl about 11
• a man about 30
• a man “to serve 7 years,” that is, due his freedom at the end of that term
• a woman and her six children, a boy and five girls, from one to ten years old

None of them is named. What became of them, and whether the mothers and children were sold together, is not known.

The rest of the list shows a large farm: two wagons and eight horses, eighteen cattle, thirty sheep, twenty-five hogs, wheat and rye in the stack, and about sixty acres of wheat and thirty of rye in the ground.

What is not yet known. The clipping carries no newspaper title or date. It names the Conococheague Bank of Williamsport, whose banking house was built in 1814 and which had given way to a new bank by 1832, so the sale falls between those years. Daniel was not yet sheriff; the sale was held by one of his predecessors. Daniel Malott, son of Peter, is the only man of that name known in Washington County then, and the identification rests on that. The Theodore and Catharine Malott who sued him were surely relations, but which ones is not established: his brother Dory was a Theodore and had been in Ohio since 1805, his sister Catherine was in Canada, and there were nephews and nieces of both names.

Daniel recovered from the sale: within a few years he was again a leading man of his district, and in 1833 he was elected to county office. Slavery was legal in Maryland until 1864, and Washington County farmers of his standing commonly held enslaved workers.

Source: newspaper clipping, “Sheriff’s Sales,” Washington County, Maryland, supplied by Mark Malott; newspaper and date to be identified.

Research note: Colonel Malott’s public life, and where he may lie

Two county histories fill in his career. In 1812 he commanded the Tenth Regiment of militia as lieutenant-colonel, and he was “Col. Daniel Malott” for the rest of his life. He qualified as a justice of the peace in 1823. In 1827 he helped found the Masonic lodge at Williamsport and sat on the county committees for the two great projects of the day, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. In 1828 he ran for the Assembly as a supporter of President Adams and lost in the Jackson landslide.

Sheriff or legislator? The printed lists of Washington County sheriffs, and the Maryland State Archives, give “1833, Daniel Malott.” But Williams’s narrative says: “In January, 1834, Col. Daniel Malotte, who had just been elected to the Legislature, died, and Col. Wm. Fitzhugh, who was next highest on the poll, succeeded him.” The two do not agree, and no newspaper of the time has yet been checked. Either way, he died within weeks of winning office.

A possible burial place. He is recorded only as buried at Hagerstown. Williams describes the graveyard of an old Episcopal chapel in “Chapel Woods,” near the College of St. James south of Hagerstown, and says that “the last interments in the graveyard were those of the Malotte family, who were buried there between 1830 and 1840.” Daniel, who died in 1834, may be one of them. By Williams’s time the stones had been pulled up and piled in a fence corner to make room for the plough.

His wife. Sarah Ensminger is said to have died in Illinois, where she was buried with the family of their daughter Eliza. Unsourced family trees give her dates as 1792–1874.

Sources: J. Thomas Scharf, History of Western Maryland (Philadelphia, 1882), vols. 1 and 2; Thomas J. C. Williams, A History of Washington County, Maryland (1906); Maryland State Archives, list of Washington County sheriffs; a typed Ensminger family genealogy, page 17, supplied by Mark Malott; William P. Marlatt, Families of Peter Malott and Joseph Malott (2002).