George H. Throop

George Higby Throop (c. 1818 – March 2, 1896) (born Higby Throop) was an American schoolteacher and novelist. Under the pseudonym Gregory Seaworthy he wrote three novels, Nag's Head: or, Two Months among "The Bankers." A Story of Sea-Shore Life and Manners; Bertie: or, Life in the Old Field. A Humorous Novel; and Lynde Weiss. The first of these was the first novel in the United States to deal with then-contemporary life in North Carolina.

Life and career Throop was a native of Willsboro, New York; his father, George Throop Sr., was a manufacturer and storekeeper, whose second wife, George, Jr.'s mother, died soon after giving birth to the boy. Initially named "Higby", he later took his father's first name as his own. and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Works

Nag's Head Throop's first book, published under the pseudonym "Gregory Seaworthy" in 1850, was the novel Nag's Head; or, Two Months Among "The Bankers": A Story of Sea-Shore Life and Manners, based on his time with the Capeharts at their summer residence.

The narrator of the novel is the same "Gregory Seaworthy" introduced in Nag's Head, but his history has been changed to make him the nephew of John Smallwood, an actual planter in the county. Other members of the Smallwood family are based on the Capeharts, with whom he had worked; the family home, "Cypress Shore", is almost certainly based on Scotch Hall. The plot of the novel concerns six couples and their various romantic adventures, but large swaths of the work are given over to descriptions of antebellum plantation society in the state and other bits of local color, such as holiday festivals and another summer trip to the sea.

Death He died on March 2, 1896, in the village of Bloomery, Hampshire County, West Virginia.