Col. Israel Thorndike (1755-1832)
East & West India Merchant; State Representative of Boston & Beverly, Massachusetts
He was born in Beverly, Massachusetts. He was a strong supporter of American independence and served as Captain of the privateer Resource during the revolution. After the war, he went into partnership with his brother-in-law, Moses Brown. The firm of Brown & Thorndike conducted a lucrative commercial trade. He built his fortune exporting flour and fish to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, buying coffee, sugar, molasses, and rum to sell in the States and European markets. His business interests connected him with the Perkins brothers, and he also traded in small numbers of slaves, buying them at one port to sell at another. Having made his fortune, in 1810 he moved to Boston (maintaining a summer home in Beverly) and served as a State Representative. His business interests shifted to the China trade, as well as to investments in New England’s textile industry. He played a key role in founding the Boston Manufacturing Company and entered the China and East India trade with his son-in-law, Ebenezer Francis, and David Sears, becoming one of the first New England merchants to profit significantly from the China trade. In 1818, he paid $6,500 for a large American history collection from a Professor Ebeling of Hamburg as a gift for the Harvard library.
