Joshua Maddox was born in 1685, a native of England. He was a member of the Vestry of Christ Church for many years, at intervals from 1728 to 1746, and a Warden, 1731–33; and was made a Justice of the Orphans' Court 1 March, 1741, commissioned 4 April following on the same day with Robert Strettell, a justice of the Court of Common Pleas, and 6 October, 1747, an alderman and associate justice of the City Court. With his associate justices, Thomas Lawrence, Edward Shippen and Benjamin Franklin (probably the latter's first hearing) he sat in trial of a case in June Term, 1749 of Lawrence William vs. William Till, of unusual magnitude at the time for the Common Pleas. Mr David Paul Brown illustrates this in the following sentences:[1]
We have in this record a singular exhibition of the social and judicial system of the province. Taken in connection with the large influence of Friends in the civil concerns of that day, it seems to present a mixture of the times of the patriarchal government with that of the reign of the merchant princes, and that of the highest state of artificial English law. We find here four persons, not one of whom was ever at the bar, nor, so far as we know, ever professionally educated, seated on the seat of judgment, hearing an important case of commerce, and adjudging it by rules of scientific common law jurisprudence * * * He sat from March 1741 until his death in April, 1759, a term of eighteen years, upon the seat of judgment, constantly partaking in its councils and attending its adjudications; and when he died at the age of seventy four, had almost become personified in this province with the administration of its local justice.
Mr. Maddox was engaged in mercantile pursuits, with success, and was a citizen of influence and honor. His education had been a liberal one, and his library in its choice of books showed him to be a man of studious and contemplative tastes. He died 12 April, 1759. His wife survived him many years, dying in 1783, at the advanced age of 102 years, as is told on their grave stone in Christ Church Yard. His only child, Mary, married John Wallace, of Hope Farm, Somerset County, New Jersey, a native of Scotland, and was mother of Hon. Joshua Maddox Wallace, an alumnus of the College in 1767.
Mr Maddox was a frequent attendant on the meetings of
- ↑ Forum, i. 237–238.
