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William Gray Purcell
Biographical Notes: The Gray Family (1699-1830)
Biographical essay in Guide to the
William Gray Purcell Papers.
Copyright by Mark Hammons, 1985.
The Grays placed their earliest memories in the
Irish village of Moneagle, near Londonderry. The Reverend Neil Gray (d. 1715)
had charge of a Protestant congregation there until his death when his son
William, who had entered the ministry in 1699, succeeded to the post. Rebelling
against the strictly conservative doctrine of the presbytery, William Gray fell
into disfavor with church elders and in 1721 the synod transferred him to nearby
Usher's Quay. Although he ministered there for seven years, William became
dissatisfied and returned to Moneagle in defiance of the church authorities to
gather a new assembly. Dropped from ecclesiatic records for contumacy, he
continued to maintain the congregation until he died in 1747, when guardianship
of his young son Robert (1744 1843) was left to relatives by marriage.
Despite his having the advantage of an education, prospects in Ireland were poor
for Robert Gray when he reached manhood. Outfitted by his grandfather for
passage to the American colonies, the twenty one year old Irishman arrived at
Philadelphia in 1764 where he supported himself by teaching school. Robert
mustered into the Continental army three times during the American War of
Independence, first against the British forces at Sandy Hook and later to
suppress Indian uprisings along the Juniata River. After his final two months of
service ended in 1776, he married Agnes Gray, who was not a relation (1753
1831), and settled in Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, to become father of a large
family. In 1788 through an act providing for the sale and settlement of lands in
the territory northwest of the Ohio River, Congress established a million acre
land grant program under the administration of pioneer jurist John Cleve Symmes.
Word of the fertile homesteads to be had in the Symmes, or Miami Purchase,
reached across the Allegheny Mountains to the populous farmlands of southern
Pennsylvania. Although well into his sixties, Robert Gray acknowledged the
pressures of five maturing sons and joined the westward movement in 1806.
The oldest boys went overland by horseback from Pittsburgh while the rest of the
family loaded provisions and livestock onto a flatboat and followed the water
route. Their original destination, the river port of Columbia, turned out to be
unsuitable since little land was remained to be claimed. Told of better
prospects southward, the family took a military road toward Fort Hamilton, where
a small town was accumulating under the protection of the garrison. Infrequent
surveyors' stones guided the wagons from the trail into the surrounding
wilderness, the journey finally ending in a heavily forested valley beribboned
by the confluence of the Little and Big Miami Rivers.
The Grays registered a claim at the land office in Cincinnati and settled on a
160 acre quarter section in Butler County, Ohio, which they named Pleasant Run.
The immediate need for shelter was met by two cabins joined by a common roof to
form a central court. Squash and potatoes grown in a small natural clearing
provided the first winter store. With spring melt, the Grays began the hard work
of taking fields from the slowly yielding walnut, beech, and oak forest. On
Sundays, the Grays joined the meager social life of the scattered farm families
that centered around the church in Hamilton. They discovered among their
neighbors other pioneers of Scotch Irish stock and after worship services would
spend the afternoon merrymaking with dance music and shared meals. Within this
developing rural community young people found wives and husbands.
Title deed to the Gray family farm in Ohio, dated April 1814, and signed
by James Madison
Final payment for the Pleasant Run farm was made on April 1, 1814, and the
property secured with a deed signed by President James Madison. Now aging and
argumentative, Robert Gray could no longer hold his sons to the Pleasant Run
land. Four moved on to seek their own homesteads in the recently opened
tracts of Indiana, Jonathan Gray (1794 1871), the second youngest, found he
could manage both the farm and the sharp tongue of his father. For his wife,
Jonathan chose between two sisters of a nearby family, and in 1825 brought Mary
Woods Gray (1803-1880) home to a newly built cut lumber house where the next
generation of the family would be born.
During the time of Jonathan and Mary the Pleasant Run farm attained its greatest
prosperity. Their six children provided help with the chores, which included
tending an apple orchard and a vineyard. Meat was plentiful from still abundant
game, and cornbread was accompanied by wild honey to be found in the woods. The
Gray sons who had settled in Indiana returned yearly, driving their hogs to
market. Education was highly prized in the family, and the abundance of these
good years allowed both sons and daughters to attend nearby Carey's Academy.
With their good humor and respect for fairness, the Gray family got along well
with most of their neighbors. Some events in the rough countryside, however,
would bring dangerous confrontation. As the ugliness of slavery spilled across
the border from Kentucky, the Grays acted upon their abolitionist convictions
and sheltered fugitive slaves from the brutality of bounty hunters. Jonathan
Gray sometimes had the escaped slaves sleep next to the gun at his bedside
before they were helped further north to safety, even though the penalty for
their discovery on his property would have meant forfeiture of the farm. A
family tradition tells of one instance when use of the gun was necessary to
prevent that from happening after several slaves had been seen coming from the
Gray house by two bounty hunters.
Life was sometimes bitter in other ways. In 1835 nine year old Alexander Gray
(b. 1826) disappeared from a swimming party on the Miami River. The waters were
in freshet, and word came later that the body of the boy had washed up at
Louisville. Daughter Agnes Marilla Gray (1829 1854) was said by surviving
siblings to have been a delicate and melancholy woman who found the wilderness a
cruel and lonely place in which to live. Briefly married to contractor Andrew
Clyde, whom Jonathan had summoned to build a new brick house on the rise from
which Robert Gray first surveyed his acreage, she died shortly after the birth
of her first child, a son who also did not survive.
The remaining children took different paths in life. Joanna Gray (1837 1884)
never married and remained at Pleasant Run in charge of the household until her
death. The youngest son, Jonathan's namesake (1842 1925), made a bad marriage
that divided the family with serious arguments and ultimately ended in divorce.
After the death of his parents and sister Joanna, he lost interest in life. His
fields leased to tenants, Jonathan Gray, Jr., kept to himself and acquired a
reputation among nieces and nephews as a cold and bitter man. As if in echo of
these events, one summer a series of tornadoes severely damaged the farm
buildings and devastated the fields and orchards with a destructiveness from
which Pleasant Run never completely recovered.
Of the generation born on the Gray homestead, only two had descendants second
born daughter Mary H. Gray (1835 1916) and eldest surviving son, William
Cunningham Gray (1830 1901). Mary Gray left the farm on the eve of the Civil War
when she wed Andrew Ritchie, a quiet but persuasive clergyman who published
strongly worded arguments against the sin of slavery. Although excused from
military duty, her husband volunteered to serve in the camps of the wounded
around Cincinnati. When Confederate armies threatened the city, Ritchie passed
out guns to the men of his congregation and went with them for guard duty until
the danger had passed. The courage of his actions gained the attention of the
Western Tract and Book Society, a religious publishing house, and his
appointment as secretary of the organization shortly after the war ended was an
important connection in the career of Mary Ritchie's highly successful brother,
William Cunningham Gray.
research courtesy mark hammons