James Nesmith was born October 20, 1799 in Belfast, Waldo County, Maine. He was among the founding families of Belfast, Maine, a town on Penobscot Bay. He moved to Brooklyn in his late 20s and became a "shipping merchant" based at 28 South Street in lower Manhattan, a business his son Henry later joined. He married Caroline Leeds, who was born in Boston, and they had four children. He died on January 13, 1872 at the age of 72 in Brooklyn. At the time of death, he was living at 213 (or 273) Henry Street, in Brooklyn Heights; according to the 1847-48 Brooklyn City Directory, he was then living at 185 Henry, and in the 1850-51, 1851-52, and 1853-54 Brooklyn City Directories, he was then living at 173 Henry. He is buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
James Nesmith and his brother-in-law Henry Leeds founded a shipping company in the 1820s, called Nesmith & Leeds, which became known as Nesmith & Walsh around 1845, and in 1850, the company became known as Nesmith & Sons. The company commissioned merchant vessels carrying cargoes to ports such as New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Newport, Liverpool, and Le Havre, as well as ports in Japan, Australia, and India. They named their ships after their children!
From Brooklyn, NY, Historical Chronology, 1642 - 2000, posted online at: [http://www.placeinhistory.org/Projects/Dumbo/DumboChron2.htm]: "1855: James Nesmith begins to acquire the major portion of the land on which the Empire Stores stand."
"1869-70: Nesmith begins construction of the four four-story warehouses (the eastern section toward Dock Street)." (From the website Ancestry.com: Ancestry of Bob and Mary Beth Wheeler)
Portrait in possession of Caroline's great-great-great-granddaughter, Ellen Porter
Caroline Leeds was born on June 24, 1804 in Dorchester, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, now part of Boston. She was the youngest of four children and the only daughter of Samuel Leeds (1765-1845) and Mary Ingersol Leeds (1773-1844). The ancestors on both sides of her family were Puritan immigrants from the period of the "Great Migration" in the 1630s. Caroline was the sixth generation of Leeds childrent to be brought up in Dorchester. However, Caroline and two of her brothers moved to New York and raised their own families there, Caroline and Henry went to Brooklyn, where Henry was in business with Caroline's husband, James,
Caroline and James probably met and married in Boston -- they were married on June 8, 1822 -- Caroline was very young, just shy of her 18th birthday. James was from Maine, and why he went to the Boston area, and for how long before moving to Brooklyn, is not known. They had four children, three sons and a daughter. The second son (third child), Henry Edwin Nesmith, born in 1828, joined the family shipping business and carried it on after his father's death; and he is my great-great-grandfather.