Bellamy Roots

John D. Bellamy and Eliza M. Harriss

JOHN DILLARD BELLAMY
John Dillard Bellamy, of Wilmington, North Carolina, was born in March 24, 1854, a son of Dr. John Dillard Bellamy, physician and planter, and his wife, Eliza M. Harriss. The history of this family in America goes back to the year 1670, when John Bellamy, with Sir John Yeamans and other associates founded the Charleston Colony in South Carolina.
John Bellamy, a native of London, was a youth at the time of the fitting out of the Plymouth Colony, and manifested great interest in this pilgrimage. After the occupation of the Barbadoes Island by the British in 1625, his venturesome spirit prompted him to join the Barbadoes Colony, and it was here that he met Sir John Yeamans and became one of the grantees or charterers of the Yeamans Colony which, in 1665, effected a settlement of English families from Barbadoes at Charleston, South Carolina. According to a map made in 1711, John Bellamy's plantation was between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, and there he came to live about the year 1670. He died possessed of great wealth. His son, John Bellamy, settled on the Santee River, in South Carolina, and was a large planter. He had a son, John, born in St.George's Parish, in 1750. This last-named John Bellamy became the father of Dr. John Dillard Bellamy, mentioned above.
John Bellamy (born 1750) was a man of considerable wealth in slaves, real estate and vessel property. Physically of large and athletic build he was a leader among men. Nothing mean or petty found lodgment in his nature, and he was famed for his lavish hospitality. He craved the friendship that it was his royal nature to bestow, and among his closest friends was the late John Dillard of Rockingham County, North Carolina, for whom he named his son. John Dillard wasthe ancestor of the late Judge Dillard, of the Supreme Court of North Carolina.

Abram Bellamy, a brother of John, was with General Stonewall Jackson in the Spanish War, as a civil engineer, and moved to Florida about 1819, before that State was admitted to the Union. He settled on the site of Jacksonville, which city he laid out. He was accompanied by his son, John Bellamy, who became a man of great wealth, and the progenitor of numerous descendants including Major Burton Bellamy, the largest planter in Florida.
Dr. John D. Bellamy was born in All Saints Parish, South Carolina, September 18, 1835, and married, in Wilmington, Miss Eliza M., daughter of Dr. William James Harriss, a prominent physician, who, when he died in 1839, was Mayor of Wilmington, NC.
Educated at the College of South Carolina, and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Bellamy was a physician of great professional prominence. Politically he was a Democrat, of the John C. Calhoun school, and an ardent secessionist. While he always refused public office, frequently tendered him, yet he was for twenty-five years chairman of the Democratic party of his County, and saw it increase from only two literate whites in the Borough of Wilmington, NC At the breaking out of the Civil War he was one of the wealthiest men of North Carolina, a director in several railroads and banks and owning, in North and South Carolina together, on his several plantations, it was said, nearly eleven hundred slaves. It was his pride and claim that he never sold or separated married slaves, but much of his increase in slave property was due to the purchase of others who had wedded among his own slaves. He had regularly employed, on an annual salary, a Methodist minister to preach to them on the Sabbath, and to perform their marriage and burial services. His home at Wilmington still stands https://www.bellamymansion.org/ , is owned by the family, and is one of the finest pieces of Southern Colonial architecture extant, having immense Corinthian columns surrounding it. It became the headquarters successively of General Alfred Terry, General Schofield and General Joseph R. Hawley, when Wilmington was captured, in 1865, by the Federal troops, near the close of the Civil War. From its portico Chief Justice Chase, then having Presidential aspirations, made the first speech of reconciliation in the South after the war, contending that the Southern States were never out of the Union and were entitled to their electoral votes. This residence was withheld from the family for a number of years by the United States Government, until President Johnson granted a special pardon to Dr. Bellamy, and restored his property rights.