Timothy W. Hoxie

Quick Facts

Significance:

Merchant, Boston Vigilance Committee

Place of Birth:

Powell, Vermont

Date of Birth:

December 1, 1818

Place of Death:

Boston, Massachusetts

Date of Death:

December 18, 1882

Place of Burial:

Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts

Cemetery Name:

Forest Hills Cemetery

Boston businessman Timothy W. Hoxie served on the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee.

Born in 1818, Timothy W. Hoxie spent his early years in Powell, Vermont. He eventually moved to Boston where he became a successful commission merchant, leading T.W. Hoxie and Company. In 1845, he married Mary Elizabeth Palmer and began a family with her. Following her death, Hoxie married his second wife Abby Elizabeth Richmond in 1869, and had children with her as well.¹

In Boston, Hoxie became involved in the antislavery movement. He participated in the Free Soil Party, which opposed the extension of slavery in the country. In 1850, he also joined the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization that assisted freedom seekers escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad. The treasurer of the Vigilance Committee, Francis Jackson, recorded one donation by Hoxie to support the work of the group. Aside from this donation, however, Hoxie’s other contributions to the Vigilance Committee, or larger Underground Railroad network, remain unknown.²

Hoxie passed away in 1882, leaving behind a widow and several children. His remains are interred at Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood of Boston.³

The Timothy W. Hoxie House in Roxbury is listed in the National Registry of Historic Places. 

If you are a researcher or descendant of Timothy W. Hoxie and can provide any further details of his work on the Vigilance Committee, or larger Underground Railroad network, please e-mail us. 

Footnotes

1. George Adams, Boston City Directory, 1850-1851, 196; Leslie R. Hoxie, The Hoxie Family: Three Centuries in America, (Portland, OR: Beattie and Company, 1950), 140-141, Internet Archive.
2.  "Free Soil Rally in Chapman Hall," Emancipator and Republican, September 5, 1850, 2; "Free Soil Nominations," Boston Daily Bee, November 4, 1853, 2; "Members of the Committee of Vigilance," broadside printed by John Wilson, 1850, Massachusetts Historical Society, places his business address at 42 Long Wharf - NPS Maps locate him at the approximate location of this address; Austin Bearse, Remininscences of Fugitive Slave Law Days in Boston, (Boston: Warren Richardson, 1880), 4; Francis Jackson, Account Book of Francis Jackson, Treasurer The Vigilance Committee of Boston, Dr. Irving H. Bartlett collection, 1830-1880, W. B. Nickerson Cape Cod History Archives, 81 https://archive.org/details/drirvinghbartlet19bart/page/n3/mode/2up.
3. "Timothy Hoxie," Find a Grave Memorial, accessed February 2025.