John Pagan

John Pagan’s biographical record is one of the slightest among the Alexandria founders. He appears in the Virginia colonial documents as a Scottish tobacco factor active on the Potomac in the 1740s, operating out of the Hunting Creek warehouse landing alongside John Carlyle Person John Carlyle b. 1720 · d. 1780 Scottish-descent merchant born in Carlisle, England, in 1720; one of the eleven founding trustees of Alexandria in 1749, and builder of the stone Carlyle House at the head of what … and William Ramsay Person William Ramsay b. 1716 · d. 1785 Scottish-born merchant, one of the original trustees of Alexandria in 1749, and by local tradition the town's first postmaster and first lord mayor. His frame house on King Street … . In 1748 the three merchants petitioned the House of Burgesses for the chartering of a new trading town at the warehouse — the petition that produced the 1749 town act establishing Alexandria ^[1] Source 1 Powell, History of Old Alexandria, 1928 Book .

Pagan does not appear on the final eleven-trustee body that platted the town, nor among the merchants who built houses in the new town after 1749 — by 1752 Carlyle and Ramsay are documented as resident Alexandria merchants while Pagan disappears from the local record. The Scottish connection that brought him to the Potomac suggests an onward move to one of the Chesapeake’s other Scottish factor stations (Falmouth, Bladensburg, or back to Glasgow); the documentary trail is not strong enough to confirm any of those routes.