Jacob Mills (1732-1812) & Sarah Vaughan (1736-c1780)
Jacob Mills, born c1732, may have had family connections with Herefordshire (in 1791 he was listed as a steward of the Herefordshire Society which met in London). Most probably he married Sarah Burges, from Christ Church, Southwark, in 1753 when he was described as a dyer from Bow by Stratford.
Sarah Vaughan was the daughter of Robert Vaughan, a printer, and his wife Martha, and was baptised on 26 December 1736 at Saint Giles Cripplegate.
On 25 April 1760 at the church of St Andrew by the Wardrobe, Jacob Mills, a widower from the parish of All Hallows the Great, married Sarah Vaughan of the parish of St Clement Danes.
Jacob and Sarah lived in the parish of Christ Church, Southwark, where their three daughters were baptised, Sarah born in 1765, Elizabeth baptised on 2 November 1768, and Martha born in 1774.
Sarah died at some point over the next few years, of which event no record has remained.
In 1775 Jacob entered into a partnership with Peter and John Banchard, who owned dyeworks on the Wandle in Wandsworth and who provided scarlet cloth to the East India Company. They also had premises in Montague Close, Southwark, which was just to the north of the church of St Saviour (Southwark Cathedral).
When this partnership ended in 1781, Jacob set up his own dyeworks, also in Montague Close, most likely close to (Old) London Bridge and Pepper Alley.
Jacob married Ann Heylyn, a widow of Wandsworth, in 1782.
In 1782 Jacob was listed as an annual guardian of the “Asylum, or, house of refuge, situate in the parish of Lambeth” and was recorded in Kent’s Directory of 1793 as a Scarlet and Woad dyer.
In 1783, his daughter Sarah, aged seventeen, married Joseph Connop, Esq.
Jacob Mills and his family lived at Mount Pleasant in the parish of St Mary’s Battersea from the 1790s, where a small number of brick-built houses were on the Wandsworth road, which was then still relatively rural. Jacob’s daughter Elizabeth married Peter Davey at St Mary’s church in 1791.
In 1801, Jacob’s daughter Elizabeth (the wife of Peter Davey) died; later that year Jacob’s eldest daughter, Sarah Connop, was widowed (her husband had a memorial in Southwark Cathedral). Following this in 1804, Peter Davey and Sarah Connop were married. [The practice of “marriage with deceased wife’s sister” was commonplace but became more controversial over the C19th.]
Jacob entered into a business partnership with his stepson, and the Office Directories of 1808 and 1817 listed him trading as Mills and Heylin, still based at Montague Close, and records from the steam engine company of Boulton and Watt indicated Mills & Heylin bought a boiler in 1800.
Jacob bought and rebuilt a country house in Herefordshire. His will, dated 1811, described him as being “late of Montague Close…but now of Lawton in the county of Hereford”. This property was a “desirable country residence consisting of a substantial brick dwelling house, a great part thereof newly built, with about forty acres of very fertile and valuable meadow, orchard, and arable land, conveniently, connected with the house, and situated at Lawton, near Leominster, late the residence of Jacob Mills Esq”. (Hereford Journal March 1813).
Jacob died on 29 September 1812 at Chepstow “a gentleman deeply regretted by the poor of his neighbourhood Laughton [sic], to whom he was a constant and liberal benefactor”.
He was buried at St Saviour’s, Southwark.
In his will he left his daughter Sarah, the wife of Peter Davey (who was his executor), his diamond ring (with his wife, Ann, having possession of it for the remainder of her life) and his chariot and horses, as well as substantial business interests.
The dyers business was carried on by Henry Heylin (Jacob’s stepson) and Jacob Connop (Jacob’s grandson), “eminent dyers”, who were forced to move from their Montague Close/Pepper Alley as the premises were in the direct line of the propose New London Bridge (work started in 1824, but consultation had been going on for several decades). They received £12,700 compensation for the loss of their leasehold and costs as “it appeared that a steam engine, and machinery of considerable value, had recently been erected on the premises”. There is correspondence in the London Metropolitan archives (1824) from the firm of “Heylin & Connop undertaking to the Mayor Etc. to clear all rent, taxes & outgoings in respect of Montagu close premises, & a receipt for £9.500 received from the Mayor Etc”