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Old 04-02-2013, 07:20 AM
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Taltarzac725 Taltarzac725 is offline
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Default The Grand Ohio Company and the Walpoles.

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Originally Posted by Taltarzac725 View Post
Franklin got to see Lord Hillsborough's dessert doily Why is it called a Doily? as well as some of his family banners when he visited the Lord's family estate in Ireland for almost a week while vacationing in Ireland and Scotland in late August through November of 1771. They had run into one another in Dublin and Lord Hillsborough invited Ben Franklin to visit. Franklin was appalled by how England governed Ireland. Absentee landlords exploited Irish tenants and England put severe regulations on Irish trade. Franklin wrote of the Irish famers "They live in wretched hovels of mud and straw, are clothed in rags, and subsist chiefly on potatoes." Franklin visited his new found friend David Hume in Edinburgh, Scotland where he could catch up on juicy gossip about famous people they both had met.
Ben Franklin had invested in a stocky enterprise involving an Indian grant of land and some of the richest and most influential British. It was a company called the Grand Ohio Company which was the zenith of Franklin's renown in Britain among his contemporaries and would take his often enemy and sometime friend Lord Hillsborough to the nadir of his own position. Hillsborough took on these investors including the very rich Richard and Thomas Walpole to thwart Franklin's business scheme. The king even stepped in to get the Grand Ohio Company's grant approved which it was. The problem is that events in Boston and elsewhere doomed the company for which Franklin had fought so hard. http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3401804378.html You can just see Franklin's work in this YouTube video if his Grand Ohio Company plan had been successful. We would probably have a State named Vandalia there however. Wonder if we would have been hearing more gourd banjos? http://youtu.be/2x3Ajm4sr7E

Last edited by Taltarzac725; 04-03-2013 at 07:10 AM.