Nicholas Gassaway

Colonel Nicholas Gassaway (baptized 11 March 1634 – between 10 and 27 January 1691[1] Julian Calendar) was a colonial military and political leader and justice in early Maryland.

[18] Within a decade he was the owner of a sizable tobacco plantation exporting to his Gaswaie family back in England from his dock at the neck of the South River on Chesapeake Bay.

He became a Commissioner of the Peace in 1686 and was appointed one of the Committee of Twenty who governed the Maryland Colony pending the arrival of a Royal Governor from late 1689 to 1691.

Three of Colonel Nicholas Gassaway’s great-grandchildren continued the tradition of colonial military service as officers in the Maryland Line of the Continental Army.

[32] Great-great grandson Colonel Gassaway Watkins of Daniel Morgan’s riflemen[32] also gained distinction in the revolution and served as President of the Maryland chapter of the prestigious Society of the Cincinnati in which the most direct descendant of each of the four is eligible for membership.

[2] Colonel Nicholas Gassaway owned large tracts of land alongside Chesapeake Bay south of modern Annapolis, Maryland.

[35] Their plantation, renamed "Cotter's Desire", passed to their nephew Captain John's three sons and was later sold along with Gresham house to the family of Commodore Isaac Mayo, for whom much of the area is today named.

[35][36] In the 1960s, it was discovered that a footstep at Gresham was in fact the downturned grave marker of Colonel Nicholas Gassaway and it too was relocated to St. Anne’s Church in Annapolis.