Later Life and Legacy
Unlike many Loyalists, Leavitt was never forced to flee the country, nor give up his substantial holdings. Whether his successful transition to the age of American independence was due to his personality, sheer pluck, or to a change of heart is unknown.
While Leavitt was one of Hingham's most visible Tories, his son Dr. Martin Leavitt, born in 1755, had different politics. A close friend and Harvard classmate (1773) of Bela Lincoln of Hingham, Martin Leavitt practiced medicine until he died aged thirty on November 27, 1785, when he drowned in the town's mill pond.
Elisha Leavitt died in 1790 at his home on North Street in Hingham, not far from Leavitt Street, where Elisha's great-grandfather John Leavitt had settled in 1636.
At his death Leavitt willed ownership of Gallops Island to his grandson Caleb Rice, son of Col. Nathan Rice of the Continental Army, and former aide de camp to General Benjamin Lincoln, a Hingham native. Col. Rice had married Elisha Leavitt's daughter Meriel. Caleb Rice subsequently purchased the half of Gallops Island that his grandfather Leavitt did not own. Rice later sold the entire island to the government.
Read more about this topic: Elisha Leavitt
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or legacy:
“The life of a good man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringement as in the observance, and our lives are sustained by a nearly equal expense of virtue of some kind. The decaying tree, while yet it lives, demands sun, wind, and rain no less than the green one. It secretes sap and performs the functions of health. If we choose, we may study the alburnum only. The gnarled stump has as tender a bud as the sapling.”
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