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The Eyre family refers to the descendants of George Eyre and Mary Smith Eyre who comprised a political and business dynasty prominent in the Northeastern United States from the colonial era to the early 20th century. During the American Revolutionary War several members of the family served in key military and political positions, while the Eyre shipping company proved critical in the founding of the U.S. Navy (). In 1803 the family's mercantile business was merged with that of Philadelphia merchant Charles Massey to become the firm of Eyre & Massey, one of the largest trading ventures in the world (). As the Eyres' global shipping empire grew the family continued its involvement in politics at the municipal and state levels, then moved to national prominence when Manuel Eyre, Jr. became a director of the Second Bank of the United States in 1816 (). During the apogee of their power in the late 18th and early 19th centuries the Eyres had personal friendships with such influential political figures as George Washington () (), John Sergeant() James Madison (), and Henry Clay (). In 1828 the family founded Delaware City, Delaware (). Manuel Eyre, Jr.'s sudden death in 1845 led to the dissolution of Eyre & Massey and the beginning of the Eyres' slow decline. The family's habit of staging political marriages (which it had done as far back as the 1760s ()) helped ease this slide; Eyre daughters married into the wealthy Ashhurst () () and Heller () houses, thus inheriting control of Grange Estate and DeLay Plantation, while a Heller son took a wife from the noble Dutch Vanderslice family (). The demise of Leroy Vanderslice Heller's fortune during the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent Great Depression marked the terminus of the family's political and economic influence. ==Background== Unlike other American political families such as the Adamses, the Lees, and, later, the Bushes and the Kennedys, the Eyres were members of an established noble house and had no social or economic incentive to leave England. ''Colonial and Revolutionary Families of Pennsylvania'' reports that George Eyre, founder of the dynasty in the United States, was the great-grandson of arch-royalist Gervaise Eyre(), who served as governor of Newark Castle during the English Civil War, auctioned off one of his personal estates to provide loans to King Charles I (), and eventually died defending the Crown. The family had been of significant repute in England since at least 1066, with the semi-mythical account of their line's founding during the Battle of Hastings evolving into a national legend (). Some sources trace the family's origin even further, linking them to King Ethelred II through the Neville line (Gervaise's grandfather having wed Mary Neville) (). One of the Eyres' palaces was Hope, which, historian Hamilton Hume notes in ''The Life of Edward John Eyre, Late Governor of Jamaica'', "continued in the family until the period of the Civil Wars, when the then head of the family, Sir Gervas Eyre, Governor of Newark Castle, sold it to raise the last loan ever contracted for King Charles the First." Hume writes that at the time of George Eyre's birth in 1700 the Eyres "were for centuries a powerful family...and () of thirty manors...in Derbyshire and Sheffield." () 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Eyre family」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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