Timothy Meaher

Timothy Meaher (1812 3 March 1892) was an American slave trader, son of an Irish immigrant father, James Meaher, and an Anglo-Irish American mother, Susannah Millay [Millea]. He was one of eight children and he was raised in rural Whitefield, Maine. In 1835, Timothy and his brother James left Maine for Mobile, Alabama. In that same year, Timothy had worked on a steamboat named the Wanderer. Meaher worked on nine different ships before he owned his own steamboat and a large sawmill in the 1840s. He purchased the slave-ship Clotilda Meaher hired Captain William Foster to complete the slave voyage for him aboard the Clotilda. On March 3, 1860, the Clotilda left Mobile Bay, Alabama, for the West African port of Ouidah. The voyage lasted a total of 126 days.

Meaher's grandson, Augustine Meaher Jr., leased a portion of his family's land to a paper mill in 1926. The land that Augustine leased to the paper mill was already home to hundreds of houses that his family had leased for nearly 100 years to Africatown residents, some of whom were descendants of the enslaved Africans aboard the Clotilda. Meaher's descendants stated that, "Our family has been silent for too long on this matter. However, we are hopeful that we — the current generation of the Meaher family — can start a new chapter."