Samuel Breck Biography
About Samuel Breck:
Birth And Background | Samuel Breck Moves To Sweetbriar | Politics, Religion And Business | Arts And Charity Work | Diary And Other WritingsSamuel Breck Moves To Sweetbriar
Samuel Breck, author of the Diary, had a brief career as a shipping merchant. In 1795 he married Jean Ross, daughter of John Ross who had amassed a fortune in the East India trade. Ross was a merchant prince who added lustre to Philadelphia society in its federal period.
Soon after his marriage Breck moved two miles out of the city to a property on the west bank of the Schuylkill. “The mansion on this estate,” he wrote in 1830, “I built in 1797. It is a fine stone house, roughcast, fifty-three feet long, thirty-eight broad, and three stories high, having out-buildings of every kind suitable for elegance and comfort. The prospect consists of a river, animated by its great trade carried on in boats of about thirty tons, drawn by horses; of a beautiful sloping lawn, terminating at that river ... of side-screen woods; of gardens, greenhouse, etc. Sweetbriar is the name of my villa.” Today Sweetbriar is one of the notable houses in Fairmount Park.
This removal to the country, for until 1836 Sweetbriar was to be Breck’s year-round residence, terminated his mercantile career, but did little to impede his participation in many activities in the city. However, it did give him leisure hours for study and writing, and permitted him the pleasures of gardening and farming.