Hunter Gowan
John Hunter Gowan(the second) born c. 1730, died ?
He was the son of John Hunter Gowan (b.1699) and Anne Hatton(b.1699?). His father John Hunter Gowan was the son of John Gowan (b.1668) who married a daughter of John Hunter of the County Tipperary. John Gowan Sr. was an officer in King William’s army and bought property in Wexford for his eldest son, John Hunter Gowan, an attorney. John Hunter Gowan the second had one brother Henry Hatton Gowan (b.1736).[1]
John Hunter Gowan was execrated for his brutality as a magistrate and commander of the Wingfield Yeomanry (the “Black Mob”) in 1798. He married Frances Morton in 1771 and had four sons and twelve daughters [2].
Perhaps by a second wife, he had another son, Ogle Robert Gowan, who was a prominent Orangeman newspaper publisher in Brockville, Kingston and Toronto, Canada and was founder and first Grand Master of the Orange Association of Canada and his home in Canada was called Nebo Lodge after his fathers Wexford home Mount Nebo.
The people of Co Wicklow and north Co Wexford became convinced that they were all going to be slaughtered. This impression was reinforced by the activities of a group of loyalists known as the Black Mob, led by the notorious Hunter Gowan. Men were flogged to death, homes and haggards were burned, suspects were tortured with burning pitch caps, and Hunter Gowan stirred the punch at a local celebration in Gorey with the amputated finger of one of his victims.'[3]
- ^ http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nspictou/elect_text/wexfordhattons.html
- ^ H.Ardagh, The Life of Sir James Robert Gowan (Toronto, 1911)
- ^ BBC Short History of Northern Ireland