| Notes |
--- "Visitation of England and Wales Notes" Vol. 5, 1903, page 59:
John Baring of Palace Street, Exeter, and of Larkbear House, co. Devon (son of Dr. Franz Baring, Minister of St. Ansgar's Church at Bremen); born 31 January 1697/8; came to Exeter in 1717; naturalised by Act of Parliament 1723; bur. at St. Leonard's, Exeter, 3 November 1748.
--- http://www.exetermemories.co.uk/em/_buildings/larkbeare_house.php
The Baring's woollen factory
It was let to tenants by its owner, a Mr Lavington. The house, along with 37 acres, was sold in 1737 to John Baring, of the Baring Bank family. Johann Baring was a German Lutheran from a family of wealthy cloth manufacturers who came to Exeter in 1717. In 1723 he was naturalized and married Elizabeth Vowler, the daughter of a tea and coffee wholesaler.
Baring's fortune was initially made as a woollen serge manufacturer and merchant, and he built a manufactory on the land next to the house. The house had "large press-shops, packing rooms, linhays, tenter-grounds, and all conveniences on the demesne for finishing woollen cloths." After Baring's death in 1748, his son, also John, purchased and moved into Mount Radford House in 1770, while his other son, Charles, remained in Larkbeare. John Jnr., leased a fulling mill in Exwick that would supply the Larkbeare manufactory with cloth. A third son, Francis Baring moved to London as a merchant, where he purchased materials for his brother's Exeter business and found new markets for their output. It was Francis who founded Baring Brothers, the merchant bank.
The manufactory at Larkbeare House survived into the early nineteenth-century but Exeter's woollen trade was no longer pre-eminent and was in fast decline. The Barings vacated the house in 1819 to let it to tenants, and disposed of the house in 1832 to a Mrs Hodge. The house started to deteriorate and in 1889 it was partly demolished when Roberts Road was developed and Holloway Street widened. It would seem that a Mr G Digginnes rescued and gave a "number of carvings in stone from the old Larkbeare House, lately demolished; and these it is hoped may some day be built into some portion of the Museum". (FP 1890) In 1770, John Baring Jnr., established the Devonshire Bank.
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1697 - 1748 (50 years)
