John Bolton (merchant)

Lieutenant-Colonel John Bolton (22 March 1756 – 24 February 1837) was an English merchant, Volunteer Corps officer and slave trader.

[2] John was educated at the local grammar school, and apprenticed at Liverpool to the firm of Rawlinsons & Chorley, merchants in the West Indies cotton trade, who sent him to the Caribbean, where he was employed by them, on St. Vincent and later St. Lucia, between 1773 and 1783.

[1] He returned to Liverpool a wealthy man in 1784, and undertook a lucrative trade with the Windward Islands in sugar, cotton, coffee, rum, and molasses.

In the same year he bought Storrs Hall and 1000 acres on Lake Windermere, and there received such notable personages as Christopher North, William Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, Canning, and Huskisson.

[1] Bolton died in Liverpool on 24 February 1837, in his eighty-first year, and was interred in St Martin's Church, Bowness-on-Windermere on 9 March.