Peter Joseph Chevallié (15 May 1791–21 February 1837), flour manufacturer, was born in New York. His father, Jean Auguste Marie Chevallié (who later anglicized his name to John Augustus Chevallié), had visited Virginia at the end of the Revolutionary War to secure full payment for supplies the French playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais had sold to the state. In 1790 he married Sarah Magee, a sister of Mary Magee Gallego, whose husband, Joseph Gallego, owned a large flour mill in Richmond. Peter Joseph Chevallié's mother died five days after his birth, and his father sent him to live with the Gallego family. Chevallié's father soon returned to Richmond, married again, and prospered as a French consul, as Gallego's partner, and as an investor in land and in commercial and manufacturing enterprises.

Educated in Richmond and in Paris, Chevallié served for twenty-seven days as a corporal in a Richmond militia company during the War of 1812. He married Elizabeth Green Gilliam on 23 November 1815. They had at least four sons and three daughters. In January 1817 he published Claim of Beaumarchais' Heir against the United States, a forty-two-page pamphlet on the legal action that had first brought his father to Virginia. In 1818 Chevallié inherited the bulk of Gallego's estate, because the miller's wife and adopted daughter had died in the 1811 Richmond Theatre fire. Chevallié's inheritance included the Gallego Mills, a large flour mill on the banks of the James River near Richmond, and Gallego's mansion, Moldavia, where he lived until 1825.

Chevallié became one of Richmond's leading industrialists. He operated cornmeal-, lumber-, and tobacco-manufacturing enterprises and directed the Gallego Mills, by 1831 the largest in the city and whose flour was regarded as the best. Richmond was then the leading flour-producing and -exporting city in the South. Operating under the style of P. J. Chevallié and Company, the mills produced between 45,000 and 50,000 barrels of flour a year, most of which was exported to London and South America.

On 6 February 1833 the Gallego Mills burned. Chevallié then purchased a lot on Twelfth Street between Cary and Canal Streets in downtown Richmond and erected a huge new water-powered flour mill that he described as larger than any other in the United States. The new mill, operating by mid-1834, contained twenty-four pairs of grinding stones, four times the number in the first mill. Milling capacity increased to 900 barrels of flour a day, significantly more than the Haxall mill, which was the next-largest milling operation in the city. The Gallego mill was one of many successful industries in Richmond that used both free and enslaved laborers. Chevallié took his son-in-law Abraham Warwick into the business about the time the new mill opened.

In January 1834 Chevallié incorporated and collected subscriptions for the Gallego Manufacturing Company, a proposed cotton mill and iron-, paper-, and wool-manufacturing enterprise, but he did not form the authorized venture. At about the same time a House of Delegates committee rejected his petition to incorporate the Gallego Milling Company. On 14 December 1835 Chevallié sold all of his inherited property, except the Gallego Mills and a lease for the land and water for operating it, for $85,000.

Peter Joseph Chevallié died in Richmond, without having made a will, on 21 February 1837 and was buried in Shockoe Cemetery. Warwick formed a partnership with William J. Barksdale to operate the Gallego Mills, which was then one of the largest in the United States and remained the largest flour miller in the South until the end of the Civil War, when the mill burned in the evacuation fire. Warwick and Barksdale built another mill and continued flour production.

Sources Consulted:
Biography in Valentine Museum, Richmond Portraits in an Exhibition of Makers of Richmond, 1737–1860 (1949), 39 (portrait); birth and death dates from gravestone; Henrico Co. Marriage Bonds; Peter Joseph Chevallié Journal (1825–1831), Accession 32028, Library of Virginia (LVA), Richmond; Chevallié letters and documents in various collections, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond; commercial and residential properties described in various Mutual Assurance Society Declarations, LVA; Chevallié petitions, 3 Dec., 5 Dec., 31 Dec. 1833, 15 Feb. 1836, Legislative Petitions, Richmond City, Record Group 78, LVA; Thomas S. Berry, "The Rise of Flour Milling in Richmond," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 78 (1970): 387–408; obituaries in Richmond Enquirer, 23 Feb. 1837, Alexandria Gazette, 27 Feb. 1837, and Charles Town Virginia Free Press, 2 Mar. 1837.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Amanda Morrell.

How to cite this page:
Amanda Morrell, "Peter Joseph Chevallié (1791–1837)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2006 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Chevallie_Peter_Joseph, accessed [today's date]).

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