White, Stephen J. (?-?).per

According to one account, Stephen White’s brother-in-law, discovering that Stephen had inherited the bulk of the captain’s estate, “seized White by the collar, shook him violently in the presence of family” and accused him of being the murderer.

The East Boston Timber Company, a Massachusetts company was incorporated in 1834 and sought to supply New York and New England with ship and other timber, plank, boards, staves, joist, scantling, and all and every other article prepared and manufactured from wood. Associates of the company included James W. Paige, Francis J. Oliver, Gideon Barstow, and President Stephen White. James W. Paige also acted as company treasurer. In 1834, the sawmill town of Whitehaven Mill was established on Grand Island located in the Niagara River as well as a wooded property near Tonawanda Creek. An assortment of wood products was shipped down the Erie Canal to Albany, where they were loaded on sloops and taken down the Hudson and up the coast to Boston harbor. In January 1837, the company hired Jedediah H. Lathrop (1806-1889) to act as their agent and hired two other agents to oversee their business affairs in New York City and Boston. Lathrop, based in Tonawanda, Erie County, New York, represented the absentee owners throughout upstate New York and traveled as far east as Albany arranging financing, appraising the owners about market conditions, and overseeing work at the mill. Increasingly, the company sought financial help through the reduction of tolls on the Erie Canal and re-negotiation of note payment schedules. Throughout 1838 and 1839, they defaulted entirely on their borrowed capital. The company was dissolved May 20, 1840.

• Letters of Lathrop, Baker Library Special Collections, Harvard Law Library
• Records of the East Boston Timber Company, New York State Archives
• The White Oaks of Grand Island, Clarence C. Picard (WNY Heritage, September 2011) 
• https://windhamnhhistory.org/tag/stephen-white/
• A History of East Boston (1858) (no Tonawanda)
• A Murder in Salem, Smithsonian Magazine, of uncle Joseph White. Prosecutor "Black Dan" Daniel Webster's artful summation said by some to have influenced Poe.