Joshua Henshaw (1765-1840)

He was born at Middletown, Connecticut, and was named for his great-uncle, Joshua Henshaw, a prominent Boston merchant and Member of the Governor's Council of Massachusetts. By 1800 he had moved to Middlebury, Vermont, when he built a large frame house on South Pleasant Street. He was a Merchant and a director of the Vermont State Bank, and was described as, "a gentleman of wealth". In about 1800, Joshua and his wife had their portraits painted by William Jennys which are now in the Detroit Institute of Arts. In 1814, the Vermont Bank was robbed of $28,000 and the next morning Henshaw left for Montreal, never to return. All the signs pointed to an inside job but somehow Henshaw's name managed to avoid suspicion until a duplicate key to the bank was found hidden in the attic of his former home. However, all was not so apparently obvious, and during the trial it appeared that Henshaw had been used as a convenient scapegoat by three of the other directors, Horatio Seymour, John Willard and Daniel Chipman. He died at Montreal in 1840 and his wife died at Flushing on Long Island.