Gawin Corbin Sr.

Born to the First Families of Virginia, his mother Martha Bassett being the daughter of one of the members of the Virginia Governor's Council and his father serving in the House of Burgesses for many terms in various counties in which he owned significant acreage. His mother was his father's third wife, and while the elder Gawin Corbin had no children before his first wife died, he had two sons and several daughters with his second wife, Jane Lane.

Since the boy was under legal age when his father drafted his will (although the elder Gawin Corbin would live until 1744), that will named his tutor as Mr. Christianall, and his guardians as his eldest brother Richard, as well as relatives William Bassett (his grandfather), Benjamin Needler (clerk of the council and husband of one of his aunts) and Robert Tucker (husband of another aunt). The father's will announced that young Gawin would receive the Peckatone plantation and lands in Westmoreland, Lancaster, King George, Prince William and Spotsylvania counties.

His father having died in 1744, this Gawin Corbin was one of the original investors in the first Ohio Company of Virginia, organized in 1748 by Thomas Lee, with his sons Philip Ludwell Lee and Thomas Ludwell Lee., as well as prominent planters John Tayloe, Lawrence and Augustine Washington, Robert Carter II and George Fairfax.^[2] Both Lyon Gardiner Tyler and the Corbin family biographer believe he succeeded his father in the House of Burgesses, although he did not receive land in either Middlesex nor King and Queen Counties.^[3] His elder half-brother Richard Corbin lived in and inherited lands in those counties and may have been grooming his younger half brother, and indeed succeeded to the Middlesex burgess position after the man who probably defeated this Gawin in the 1748 election, Philip Grymes, accepted a royal appointment disqualifying him from legislative duties. However, a recent expert on the Virginia General Assembly believed only the father won election to the House of Burgesses representing Middlesex County for the lengthy but intermittent session that began in 1742 and continued without further election until 1747 (three years after the father's death, without an interim election, as generally happened when a burgess died during a term).^[4]