Royal Judge John Drayton

Born at Magnolia Plantation in 1713, but failing to inherit Magnolia, he purchased an adjoining tract and built Drayton Hall in 1740, but later acquiring Magnolia from his nephew. In a will hastily drawn the night he died while fleeing the British, he willed Magnolia to his son Thomas, and the smaller Drayton Hall tract to his son Charles. For reasons not know understood, though reputed the colony’s richest man, he left nothing to his oldest and most illustrious son, William Henry Drayton, revolutionary patriot, statesman, and soldier, who died while serving in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.