Rivers, Bartholomew (c.1730–1809), merchant, banker, and developer of Tramore, Co. Waterford, seems to have been the eldest son in the family of five sons and three daughters of Michael Rivers, a merchant at Dungarvan, Co. Waterford, but very likely originally from Dublin, and his first wife Mary, daughter of Richard Stritch, a merchant at Clonmel, Co. Tipperary. By 1753, when he married Mary (d. 1799), daughter of Philip Blake, a Dublin penmaker, Bartholomew Rivers was in business at Waterford and by the late 1760s was one of the principal merchants, dealing from his warehouse in Broad St. in wines, spirits, tea, coffee, sugar, spices, oils etc. He was also owner of a ship, the Earl of Tyrone, trading with Rotterdam. In 1777 he sold off his stock, by then even more extensive, and went into partnership with Henry Hayden of Snowhill, Co. Kilkenny, as a banker. The Hayden & Rivers bank, with offices in Barronstrand St., Waterford, flourished. Rivers moved his private residence to Tramore, a small coastal village with a fine beach 12 km south of Waterford. Between 1778 and 1793 he acquired property at Tramore, erected a market-house, an assembly room and other buildings, and sold plots to promote building by others, thus developing the place into a seaside resort. Such was his stature locally that in December 1792 he represented the city and county of Waterford at the Catholic Convention, took the chair at one of the sessions and signed the delegates’ petition to the king. Four months later, however, Hayden and Rivers's bank failed. Rivers lived quietly at Tramore until his death there on 27 September 1809.
The Rivers property at Tramore was not all lost in 1793. Part of it belonged to Bartholomew's surviving son Joseph Rivers (1772–97), a lieutenant in the Gaultier cavalry militia, who left it to Bartholomew's daughter Kate, widow of Nicholas Power (d. 1794) of Ballinakill. Kate Power (1754?–1831) supported her brother, aged parents and sister Anne, and eventually inherited her father's house at Tramore. Her eldest son, Patrick, later of Bellevue, near Slieverue, Co. Kilkenny, inherited from his father Tybroughney Castle and 652 acres near Carrick-on-Suir, of which he made Bartholomew Rivers's nephew Michael Rivers (1771?–1834) agent. Michael's second son, Joseph Michael Rivers (1800–84), eventually inherited Tybroughney and engaged in local politics, most prominently in 1848 when, after he proposed at a meeting at Carrick a resolution deploring the arrests of John Mitchel (qv), Thomas Francis Meagher (qv) and Charles Gavan Duffy (qv), a warrant was issued for his arrest for high treason, causing him to flee to France and not to return until August 1849, the warrant presumably withdrawn. He too owned property at Tramore, which he finally sold in 1866; he died 29 June 1884 at Carrick.