User:Ficaia/Walker Baylor

Walker Baylor I (1762–1822) was an American patriot and an officer in the Continental Army. He rose to the rank of Captain of the 3rd Continental Light Dragoons.

Life
Walker Baylor I was the fourth son of Colonel John Baylor III of Caroline County, Virginia, by his wife Fanny or Frances (Lucy) Walker.

Baylor entered the revolutionary army before he was seventeen years of age. He was made Lieutenant, 3rd Light Dragoons, on June 28, 1777, was promoted to Captain of the same regiment in February 1780, and resigned on July 10, 1780. Some sources say he achieved the rank of Major. He commanded the Life Guard of Washington at the battle of Germantown, and there, or perhaps at Brandywine, he was severely wounded by a spent cannonball, which crushed his instep, disabling him. He resigned his commission in 1783. He seems to have incurred his father’s displeasure, and is not mentioned in his will.

He later settled in the Kentucky, and, representing Lincoln county, he was one of the members of the convention in 1787, held in Danville. He was also one of the first trustees of the new town of Stanford. He published an announcement in the issue of the Kentucky Gazette dated January 9, 1796 of the "opening of a house of Entertainment for gentlemen at the house lately Taylor's tavern. A few genteel boarders will be accepted, with special attention given to horses." Early in 1797 the Gazette announced Baylor's appointment as a Justice of the Peace by the Governor.

On the night of January 31, 1803, the building in Lexington containing the records of Fayette county was destroyed by fire, and Baylor was one of the nine commissioners, appointed by Governor Garrard, "with full powers and authority, to meet at some convenient place, and adjourn from time to time, as they shall think fit, and to summons, hear, and examine witnesses, at the instance of any person who has been or may be injured by the destruction of the records of county courts", and who had the fragments of the partially-burned books copied.

He was also appointed by the state of Kentucky one of the electors of president and vice-president of the United States, for the seventh term, from March 4, 1813. The electors from Kentucky all voted for Madison and Gerry. He died in Bourbon county, Kentucky in 1822; the news was announced in the Kentucky Gazette on October 14, 1822, with an account of his Revolutionary War services in command of a troop of cavalry.

In May 1928, during the second national reunion of Baylor and allied families of the United States, the remains of Baylor and his wife were taken from resting places near Paris, Kentucky, and reinterred in the cemetery in Frankfort.

Personal life
He married Jane, daughter of Joseph Bledsoe, of Virginia, and sister of Jesse Bledsoe, a lawyer and United States Senator from Kentucky in 1813 and 1815; her sister, Margaret Bledsoe, was the great-grandmother of Horace Chilton, U.S. Senator from Texas. Of their twelve children, Robert Emmet Bledsoe was a co-founder of Baylor University.

Likenesses
In 1914, Frances Courtenay Baylor, a descendant, owned a portrait of Walker Baylor, in the uniform of the Guard de Corp. She had it painted in Philadelphia some years prior, from a miniature. Orval Walker and Henry Bedinger Baylor remark, "It is a handsome boyish face, he being only seventeen years of age when he carried the colors, and was wounded with them in his hand, at Germantown."

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