Person

Askin, John, 1739-1815

1739-1815

John Erskine Askin was born in 1739 in Aughnacloy, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland.

He was a fur trader, merchant, colonial and militia officer. He came to North America with the British Army in 1758. After the British took over New France, he entered the fur trade and operated a trading post at Fort Michilimackinac (Mackinaw City, Michigan). He became a commissary for the garrison and farmed. In 1767, Askin built a post at the Lake Superior end of Grand Portage, which became operational the following year. His post was among the first to establish Grand Portage as a major redistribution point of the fur trade to the Canadian Prairies and Athabasca country. From 1786 to 1789, he was part of a group of trading companies known as the Miamis Company. He was also involved in the shipping business and land speculation and was one of the partners involved in the Cuyahoga Purchase along the south shore of Lake Erie. In 1789, he was named a justice of the peace at Detroit. When Detroit was turned over to the Americans in 1796, he became a justice of the peace for the Western District and moved to Sandwich, now Windsor, Ontario, in 1802. Askin bought and sold Native American and African American slaves. He owned twenty-three enslaved people during his lifetime, one of them an Odawa woman named Monette or Manette, whom he freed in 1766. They had three children, John, Catherine, and Madeline. He also had one indentured servant.

In 1772, he married Marie Archange Barthe (1749–1820). He died in June 1815 in Sandwich, Essex County, Ontario.

http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/askin_john_5E.html