CASEY, Willet: 1763 - 1848
Tile ordered and paid for by Marshall Bidwell Ingersoll (grandson), 1888
Willet Casey was born on February 14, 1763 in Kingston, Rhode Island, the son of Samuel Casey (1724-1773), a renowned silversmith in Rhode Island, and his wife Martha. Married about 1753, Samuel and Martha’s children were Mary, Samuel, William and Willet. When Samuel Casey died in 1784, Martha moved the family to Dutchess County, New York.
Despite his Quaker faith, William Casey joined the army and was regularly discharged after five years of service. Willett, however, retained his Quaker faith and as he did not fight for the British during the war, he did not qualify as a United Empire Loyalist. He settled in Adolphustown with other Quakers.
Willett married Jane Niles (born 1763 in New York State) in 1782. They had ten children, seven of whom survived beyond infancy: Martha (Patty) born in 1784, Samuel born in 1786, Elizabeth born in 1792, Sarah born in 1794, Thomas born in 1798, Mary (Polly) born in 1800, and Jane born in 1802. In the 1800 Adolphustown census, when the total recorded population of the settlement was 524, Willet is listed as head of a household of eleven persons—three males, three females, three male children and two female children.
Jane Niles Casey was a young girl in her early twenties when she came to Adolphustown to join her husband. The invention of the daguerreotype made it possible to take a picture of Jane when she was ninety-two years old. As far as is known, hers is the only face recorded of any of the early settlers.(1)
Willet Casey is mentioned in an account of the early history of the area in a description of the Scarce Year, which began in the spring of 1787. In Fourth Town (Adolphustown), he grew a field of grain on the leeward side of a hill but as soon as the wheat heads were barely ripe, hungry settlers came from miles around and “cut it thick as stumps” (as recounted by Willet’s daughter Patty).(2) In the Adolphustown Council minutes of 1792, Willet Casey is recorded as Pound master. He was elected to Parliament in 1811 and sat as a Member of Parliament until 1820. He is said to have built the first iron foundry in the district and to have cast the first mould-board ploughs in Upper Canada.(1)
Jane Casey died on February 12, 1856, age ninety-three and Willet died March 10, 1848, age eighty-six.
Willet Casey, his wife, Jane, and their youngest daughter, Jane, who died in 1837 at age thirty-four, have headstones on the Memorial Wall in the Loyalist Cemetery in Adolphustown Park. Two grandchildren, Joel Ingersoll and Mary Emma Ingersoll, the children of Mary Casey Ingersoll and Isaac Ingersoll, also have headstones on the Memorial Wall.
1. Katharine J. Lamont, Adolphustown 1784 - 1984 (The Adolphustown Bicentennial Committee, 1984), p. 10.
2. Richard and Janet Lunn, The County (Prince Edward County Council, 1967), p. 65.
3. Marilyn Gradick, William and Willet Casey of Adolphustown (Casey Family file, Lennox and Addington County Museum and Archives).