Philip Richard Fendall (ca. 24 November 1734–10 March 1805), first president of the Bank of Alexandria, was born in Charles County, Maryland, and was the son of Eleanor Lee Fendall and Benjamin Fendall, who was a prosperous landowner and clerk of the county. Little is known of his childhood or education. Following his father's death Fendall became county clerk in 1756. On 30 September 1759 he married his cousin, Sarah Lettice Lee. She died on 8 January 1761. By the 1770s Fendall was an agent for the London merchant James Russell, who was also a relative by marriage into the Lee family. Fendall shipped tobacco to Great Britain and sent Russell orders for merchandise to be delivered on the return voyages. Keeping Russell abreast of events in the colonies, Fendall warned in 1774 that Parliament's actions could interrupt trade, and he described the county meeting in June of that year that selected delegates for a colonial convention to be held in Annapolis. In January and again in May 1775 Fendall was elected to represent Charles County in the Maryland Conventions.

Fendall went to France in 1778 and was associated for a time with his cousin, Arthur Lee, who was engaged in diplomacy, procurement, and espionage. By the end of February 1780 Fendall had returned to the United States and married Elizabeth Steptoe Lee, widow of Philip Ludwell Lee, of Stratford Hall in Westmoreland County, Virginia. He resided at Stratford Hall with his wife's two daughters and son-in-law Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee, and resumed participating in the tobacco trade. With his wife's ownership of Stratford Hall and his ownership of property in Charles County he was one of the wealthier men in Westmoreland County, but in 1784 Fendall placed his Maryland property on the market and bought a half-acre lot in Alexandria. There he constructed an elegant townhouse, where he lived for the remainder of his life. After 1974 it was the Lee-Fendall House Museum.

Fendall and his wife attended Christ Church in Alexandria, of which he became a vestryman in 1792. He and Robert Young acquired several large tracts of land in various parts of Virginia and formed a commercial partnership that traded as Robert Young and Company. In 1789 in partnership with Lewis Hipkins, Fendall obtained land for the establishment of a mill, a distillery, and a quarry. Fendall also operated a warehouse. In the autumn of 1792 he and 124 other men signed a petition requesting the General Assembly to charter a bank. The act passed on 23 November 1792 and established the first chartered bank in Virginia. Fendall was a member of the board of directors and was elected the bank's first president. He served a one-year term. In 1796 he was elected a director of the Potowmack Company, which had been organized the previous decade at the urging of George Washington and others to construct a canal to open the Potomac River for westward navigation.

Fendall had known Washington since before the Revolution, and they often socialized together in town or at Mount Vernon. When the Marquis de Lafayette visited Washington in November 1784, Fendall and Henry Lee were among the men invited to dinner at Mount Vernon. Fendall's wife suffered from cancer or a similar affliction in the spring of 1787, and when they planned to travel to the Bahama Island for her health, Washington wrote a letter of introduction to the governor recommending them as "much esteemed and deservedly respected." In October 1788 after Fendall told Washington that he had difficulty finding an ass in milk to nourish his ailing wife, Washington offered to lend him one. Fendall's second wife died, probably about May 1791. In the following November he married Mary Lee, of Leesylvania in Prince William County, a sister of Henry Lee. They had one daughter and one son.

At least in part because of financial difficulties resulting from his partnerships with Young and Hipkins, Fendall declared himself an insolvent debtor on 21 March 1800. Lawsuits resulting from the partnerships and debts occupied the county courts for decades. According to a diary entry by James Muir, the minister of the Presbyterian Church in Alexandria, Philip Richard Fendall died on 10 March 1805, after seemingly being in good health at the church service the week before. He was buried in the family graveyard near Alexandria and his remains were later reinterred in the city's Ivy Hill Cemetery.

Sources Consulted:
Biography with birth date from family records or tradition in T. Michael Miller, "Philip Richard Fendall, 1734–1805: Banker, Lawyer, and Entrepreneur," Alexandria History 8 (1990), 16–27; family and biographical data files at Lee-Fendall House Museum and Garden, Alexandria, Va.; first marriage in Annapolis Maryland Gazette, 4 Oct. 1759; third marriage in Virginia Gazette and Alexandria Advertiser, 17 Nov. 1791 (with wife's name as Molly Lee); letters in Russell Papers, Bundle 5, Coutts & Company, London, Eng. (reproduced on Virginia Colonial Records Project microfilm reel 555 at Library of Virginia [LVA]), in Peckatone Collection, Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond, and published in W. W. Abbot, Dorothy Twohig, et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington: Confederation Series (1992–1997), quotation on 5:83; numerous references in Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, eds., The Diaries of George Washington (1976–1979), and Dorothy Twohig, W. W. Abbot, et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington: Presidential Series (1987– ); Journal of the Maryland Convention, July 26–August 14, 1775, reproduced in William Hand Browne, Edward C. Papenfuse, et. al., eds., Archives of Maryland (1883– ), 11:10; Petition of Merchants and Other Inhabitants, Alexandria City, 9 Oct. 1792, Legislative Petitions of the General Assembly, 1776–1865, Acc. 36121, LVA; William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619 … (1809–1823), 13:592–598; J. Everette Fauber Jr., The Bank of Alexandria (1974), 7–8, citing Columbian Mirror and Alexandria Gazette, 26 Jan. 1793; Fendall’s business affairs partially documented in various Alexandria City and Arlington County chancery causes, Chancery Records Index, LVA; bankruptcy established in Turner v. Fendall (1801), United States Reports, 5:117–137; death noted with age "70 years old" in Donald C. Dahmann, ed., Diligent and Unwearied in the Discharge of His Pastoral Duties: The 1805 Diary of the Rev. Dr. James Muir (2011), 33; Alexandria City Will Book B: 137–139; David Heiby, "Uncovering the Mystery: Does Philip Richard Fendall Rest in Ivy Hill Cemetery?" blog posts, 12, 13 July 2023, gravestonestories.com.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Ruth Preston Rose.

How to cite this page:
Ruth Preston Rose, "Philip Richard Fendall (1734–1805)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2025 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Fendall_Philip_Richard, accessed [today's date]).

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