Robert Morris was born in Liverpool on April 19, 1711, and baptized four days later at St. Peter's. His father, Andrew, was a mariner. The boy who grew up from that house is the man Oxford still walks past every time it says the name of the inn on Morris Street. He is not the signer. That was the son.

Foster Cunliffe & Sons of Liverpool sent him out as factor about 1738. The years he spent on the Tred Avon were the years Oxford stood second only to Annapolis among Maryland ports. Ledgers that survive from the 1740s show tobacco, pork, hides, lumber, salt, rum, dry goods, and people. Ships in Cunliffe's interest ran the Atlantic triangle. Enslaved Africans were landed here. After Culloden, indentured Scots were landed here. He traded for the house and he traded for himself, with correspondents in Britain, Philadelphia, the West Indies, and up and down the Bay. He kept a farm as well as a counting room. The older county historians said it was no coincidence that Oxford's greatest prosperity and Morris's tenure were the same span.

In 1747 his son Robert, then about thirteen, was sent from Britain to the Oxford house and put for a time under an Anglican clergyman. The boy did not remain. Charles Rappleye, in the standard modern life of the son, has the father as a distant figure whose death arrived in a letter and whose estate, once liquidated, came to some £2,500 sterling.

The death itself is the scene every Oxford walk still stops on.

On the Friday before he died, Morris went aboard a Cunliffe ship that had just made the river, to welcome the arrival as the port always did. Samuel Matthews commanded. When the visit was over, Morris climbed into the boat for the short pull back to the Oxford wharf. The ship's guns were charged for a salute. They fired while the boat was still close aboard. A wad struck his right arm above the elbow, smashed the bone, and left a wound that mortified. He died at his house in Oxford on Thursday, July 12, 1750, three months past his thirty-ninth birthday.

Later storytellers added a fly on the captain's nose, a wave mistaken for a signal, even a dream the night before. Those are after-paint. The wound, the six days, and the grave are enough.

He was buried at White Marsh, outside Trappe, under what became the largest stone in that yard. The restored slab still records the wad, the fractured arm, and the twelfth of July, in the fortieth year of his age. The boom at Oxford ebbed after him. The son went to Philadelphia and into the financing of a war. The father stays where the ships were.

Sources: Oxford Museum, Robert Morris exhibit; a Talbot letter dated July 14, 1750, as printed by Samuel Harrison; Charles Rappleye, Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revolution (2010). The period letter names the ship Liverpool Merchant. The museum exhibit names London Merchant. Both names are in the record.