#william-beall — Public Fediverse posts

Griffith James (abt. 1725? – 1795): Sharpsburg, Maryland, Beginnings

Frederick County, Maryland, Deed Bk. J, p. 799

Or, Subtitled: “I have no tradition of her parents, except their nationality, they were Welch, but Hannah was born and reared in Maryland”

“Don’t know much about history”: Sam Cooke’s song “Wonderful World” is scrolling through my head as I launch a new series of postings, this one about Griffith James (abt. 1725? – 1795). Griffith James ties into my family tree through the marriage of his daughter Hannah (1752-1842) to Thomas Leonard about 1775 in Frederick County, Maryland. I’ve just finished a series of postings about the Leonard line. This new series about Griffith James follows that Leonard series, which began with the posting I’ve just linked, about Thomas Leonard (1752-1832), Hannah James’ husband. In a posting launching a previous series about my Lauderdale family line, I offer two charts showing my line of descent from Griffith James, James Lauderdale, and Robert Leonard, family lines that tied together in my family tree when Thomas Lewis Leonard (1781-1870) married Sarah M. Lauderdale (abt. 1785 – abt. 1866) — my 4th g-grandparents. (To read the continuation of this posting, please click the numeral 2 below.)

The reason Sam Cooke’s line “Don’t know much about history” has been playing in my head as I begin gathering and organizing my information about Griffith James is this: before I undertook this gathering and organizing process, if you’d asked me what I know about Griffith James, I’d have told you confidently that I have a considerable amount of information, and that I was fairly certain I could tell you a lot about his origins, where he came from, who his parents were.

But now, I’m not so sure about that. One of the advantages of working on postings here that gather, organize, and analyze genealogical material I’ve accumulated for over fifty years is that I have a chance to look at that material from new perspectives, to correct and expand it, and in some cases, to reframe entirely what I had thought I’d known about an ancestral figure. Griffith James is a case in point.

The Documentary Trail That Begins at Sharpsburg

I’ll illustrate this point in the following posting by talking about what I know with certainty about Griffith James from the point at which a documentary trail of him begins in the area of Sharpsburg in what eventually became Washington County, Maryland. I know nothing — not with any certainty — about Griffith James before he begins showing up in records of Frederick County, Maryland, Washington County’s parent county. Prior to that point, I have not found any reliable information about where he was born, who his parents were, or where he may have lived before he settled in Frederick County prior to September 1763.

I do not know precisely when Griffith James was born. As a previous posting has shown, the gravestone of his oldest child, his daughter Hannah, in the Leonard family cemetery near Petersburg, Tennessee, gives her birthdate as 2 November 1752. If Hannah was born to a young couple who had married not long prior to her birth, then it would appear that Griffith James and his wife, whose name appears in various records as Mary, would likely have been born in the time frame 1725-1735.[1] We’ll see later that Griffith made a will in Pendleton District, South Carolina, on 20 April 1795, which was recorded (with no probate date stated) on 12 April 1796, so he died in Pendleton District between those two dates.[2] A death date of 3 October 1795 appears in a study of the Dean family entitled Country Cousins: Descendants of Samuel Dean with no information about the source of this date.[3]

Griffith James’ wife Mary, who is named in his will as “my Dear wife Mary James,” outlived him and was still living as late as 1817 when the minutes of Mountain Creek Baptist church in Pendleton District, of which Mary was a member, document a dispute between her and her daughter Mary, wife of Harmon Cummings, that began in April and continued until it was resolved in August 1817.[4] I have not found a document that provides a good indicator of when Griffith James’ wife Mary was born, or of her maiden surname.[5] As we’ll see in a moment, Thomas Dunlap Leonard, a grandson of Thomas Leonard and Hannah James, who compiled a history of the Leonard family in 1883 and who knew Thomas and Hannah personally, appears to have thought that Griffith James was married only once and that his first and only wife (i.e., Mary), whom Thomas D. Leonard does not name, was the mother of all the couple’s children.

Frederick County, Maryland, Deed Bk. J, p. 798, opening portion of ironworks agreement

The first absolutely certain record I’ve found for this Griffith James places him in Sharpsburg in what was then Frederick County by 4 September 1763. On 4 September 1763, Joseph Chapline made an agreement between himself and Samuel Beall, David Ross, and Richard Henderson to be partners in an ironworks to be erected in Frederick County. The agreement states that Joseph reserved to himself and his heirs his mill on the Antietam with 50 acres joining it, and that Joseph was also excluding from the land he was making available for the ironworks 215 acres he had sold to Daniel Moore and Griffith James.[6] This agreement was recorded 31 October 1765, but the agreement itself was dated 4 September 1763. (See the top of this posting for a snapshot of the section of the ironworks agreement stating that Chapline had sold 215 acres to Daniel Moore and Griffith James.)

I have searched Frederick County deeds for a deed made by Joseph Chapline to Daniel Moore and Griffith James prior to September 1763 without finding any such deed. What I do find are two separate deeds made, one to Daniel and one to Griffith, years down the road from 1763, after both men had been living with their families for years on the land that Chapline deeded to them, and which was clearly the land comprised in the 215 acres Daniel Moore and Griffith James had acquired from Joseph Chapline by September 1763.

As far as I can determine, Griffith James lived continuously on a tract of land just southeast of the town of Sharpsburg until May 1792, when he sold the Pough tract and then moved the following year to Pendleton District, South Carolina. Pough was a 75-acre tract contiguous to Hunting the Hare, one portion of which Richard Dean, whose son Samuel married Griffith James’ daughter Gwendolyn, owned, and another portion of which Daniel Moore seems to have acquired from Joseph Chapline.

Arthur G. Tracey’s patent/tract index and map locations for Carroll, Frederick, and Washington Counties at Maryland government’s Maryland History site Maryland Land Office Rent Rolls 1748-1775, p. 5 Arthur G. Tracey’s patent/tract index and map locations for Carroll, Frederick, and Washington Counties at Maryland government’s Maryland History site — note Hunting the Hare contiguous to Pough

Joseph Chapline patented Pough on 23 November 1761.[7] The patent record states that the tract contained 75 acres, the same amount of land that Griffith James sold on 13 May 1792 when he sold Pough (the name for the land is given in this deed) before leaving Maryland for South Carolina.[8] Though Griffith James evidently lived continuously on this land from at least September 1763, he did not receive an official deed from the Chapline family for Pough until 10 April 1787, when Joseph and James Chapline, acting as executors of their father Joseph who died in 1769, sold Griffith the Pough tract for￡5.[9] This deed specifies again that Pough was a 75-acre tract.

Washington County, Maryland, Deed Bk. E, pp. 332-3

Note the nominal price of￡5, far less than the￡330 for which Griffith James sold Pough in May 1792. This nominal price is another indicator that though this land, for which Griffith James appears on the tax list in Washington County in 1783, was Griffith’s home tract, Joseph Chapline (and then his estate) had retained the title of it for all the years on which Griffith lived on this piece of land.[10] The ￡5 also suggests to me that Griffith James may have lived on this land all the years he was at Sharpsburg as a kind of retainer of Joseph Chapline and his family, given use of a tract of land while not holding clear title to it as he lived on it. A retainer who may have had some kinship connection to Chapline? Or a retainer doing work of some kind to Chapline while cultivating his own patch of land?

After 1761 when Chapline patented Pough until 1768, I do not find Pough showing up in the Debt Books of the Provincial Land Office of Maryland. In 1768, it is listed as 75 acres belonging to heirs of Joseph Chapline, and it continues to appear in the Debt Books for Frederick County from 1770-1773, with the name given as “Tough.” Again, these documents indicate to me that Joseph Chapline perhaps had some special arrangement with Griffith James whereby he was living on Pough as its owner in the absence of a deed prior to April 1787, when Chapline’s heirs officially deeded the land to him — though, to repeat, a 1783 tax list for Washington County shows Griffith James taxed for this tract of land.

Washington County, Maryland, Deed Bk. R, pp. 181-2

The story of Pough and Griffith James’ ownership and occupation of it parallels the story of Daniel Moore, who owned another portion of the 215 acres that he and Griffith James had acquired from Joseph Chapline prior to September 1763. Daniel Moore’s portion of the 215 acres was a tract of 138 acres named Mores Delight, which Joseph Chapline sold him on 17 August 1754 with the deed stating that Daniel Moore was living on this land when Chapline sold it to him in 1754, and that the land was on the waters of the Antietam.[11] But though Daniel Moore lived on this piece of land up to his death in 1792, the deed for the land was not recorded until 11 May 1805.

We know that Daniel Moore lived with his wife Mary on this 138-acre tract at the time of his death because the will that he made in Washington County on 1 January 1792 states this and leaves Mary the land: “I give and bequeath unto my loving & faithfull Wife Mary the whole of my Land and Plantation on which I now live Containing One Hundred and thirty Eight Acres.”[12] Daniel Moore was taxed for this land in 1783.[13]

As we’ve seen, Griffith James’ Pough tract consisted of 75 acres. Daniel Moore’s home tract, on which he was already living prior to August 1754 and on which he continued living to the end of his life, was 138 acres. Joseph Chapline’s September 1763 ironworks agreement states that he had sold Daniel Moore and Griffith James 215 acres by that date. Put these two pieces of land owned by Griffith James and Daniel Moore together, and you have a total of 213 acres, very close to the 215 acres cited by Joseph Chapline in his ironworks agreement.

I have not been able to find Mores Delight on lists of land patents and tracts in Washington County, so I’m not certain of its precise location. There has been confusion about whether the name of this piece of land is Moses’ Delight or Mores Delight, and this adds to the difficulty of finding its location. If Joseph Chapline’s September 1763 ironworks agreement excluded 215 acres he had sold to Daniel Moore and Griffith James from this agreement, it makes sense, I think, to assume that Daniel’s and Griffith’s pieces of land were in the same vicinity and perhaps adjoining.

Daniel Moore’s will states that he had a son Richard. The 1783 tax assessment for Washington County shows Richard Moore assessed for a 50-acre tract called Hunting the Hare. As a descendant of this Moore family who maintains the West Virginia Family Tracks and Trails blog notes, the 1790 federal census for Washington County shows Richard and Daniel Moore as immediate neighbors, and on 10 April 1790, Daniel Moore and wife Mary sold 50 acres described as part of a tract called Hunting the Hare.[14] This deed suggests to me that Daniel Moore’s 138-acre home tract, Mores Delight, was likely originally part of a larger tract of 250 acres called Hunting the Hare on Antietam Creek that Joseph Chapline patented on 13 November 1747 after having claimed the land on 9 April 1744.[15]

Arthur G. Tracey’s patent/tract index and map locations for Carroll, Frederick, and Washington Counties at Maryland government’s Maryland History site Prince George’s County, Maryland, Deed Bk. BB, pp. 396-7.

On 22 March 1747, prior to his obtaining a patent for Hunting the Hare in November 1747, Joseph Chapline sold Richard Dean, both of Prince George’s County, 50 acres of land described as “Deans purches being part of a tract land called hunting the hair [sic].”[16] On 17 October 1747, Joseph Chapline acknowledged the deed with wife Ruhamah (née Williams) relinquishing dower rights, and on the same day, Joseph made a receipt to Richard for the £20 for which he had sold the land. The deed for this transaction is filed in Prince George’s County since the portion of Frederick County taken from Prince George’s in 1748 that became Washington County in 1776 was originally in Prince George’s.

As I stated previously, Richard Dean’s son Samuel married Griffith James’ daughter Gwendolyn about 1773 in Frederick County. We know that Richard Dean was in the location that would later become Sharpsburg along with Joseph Chapline as early as 1746, since the tax list for Antietam Hundred in Prince George’s County in that year shows both of these men taxed in that hundred.[17] This is not very long after Chapline arrived in this location around 1736, a point I’ll discuss in more detail later. Beverly Dean Peoples, the premier researcher of Richard Dean’s family, thinks that it’s entirely possible that Chapline brought Richard to the Sharpsburg area or Richard followed Chapline there due to some connection between the two men in eastern Maryland prior to Chapline’s decision to move west.

Beverly Peoples writes,[18]

When he came to this western most part of MD, Joseph brought with him men to build his home, settlers to clear the land, workers to build and work the Iron Works that he was establishing as well as men to defend the settlement from the Indians. Since this area was remote in the 1730’s and 40’s it is unlikely that many people arrived individually. Richard’s appearance in the 1740’s would possibly indicate he had contact with someone in the Chapline family in the eastern part of the state who had motivated him to [move] west.

It seems to me this is a thesis well worth considering. And given what appear to be close ties between Richard Dean, Griffith James, and Daniel Moore, I’d also suggest that it’s possible both Griffith and Daniel arrived in the Sharpsburg area not far down the road from Richard because they, too, had prior ties to Joseph Chapline and/or to Richard Dean. If Daniel Moore’s 138-acre homeplace was part of the original Hunting the Hare tract — and I think this may well have been the case — then he, Richard Dean, and Griffith Moore settled on adjoining tracts of land just southeast of Sharpsburg. Note the contiguity of Deans Purchase, Hunting the Hare, and Pough on this map of Sharpsburg that appears in Evelyn Vigdahl’s previously cited “Another Flooded River” article:[19]

Evelyn Vigdahl, “Another Flooded River Valley: The Deans of Huntingdon Co., Pennsylvania,” at Our Family History

Google Maps actually labels the “historic Moore farm” near the intersection of Burnside Bridge Road and Mills Road southeast of Sharpsburg as “Hunting the Hare.”[20] Both Pough and Deans Purchase are in this same location, near the intersection of Burnside Bridge Road and Mills Road.[21]

Google Maps snapshot of Hunting the Hare, historic Moore farm, southeast of Sharpsburg Photo I took in August 2007 of the entrance to Pough from the entrance to the property at Burnside Bridge Road Photo I took in August 2007 of Deans Purchase viewed from Pough across the road

So note the following:

• By September 1763, Griffith James and Daniel Moore owned 215 acres near Antietam Creek purchased from Joseph Chapline.

• We learn from other documents that the portion of this land, 75 acres, that Griffith James owned and lived on was called Pough, and that Pough was adjacent to Chapline’s Hunting the Hare tract. Chapline’s heirs deeded this land formally to Griffith James in 1787.

• In 1747, Richard Dean bought 50 acres from Chapline’s Hunting the Hare tract; this land was given the name Deans Purchase. Deans Purchase is contiguous to both Pough and the rest of the Hunting the Hare tract.

• In 1754, Chapline deeded Daniel Moore 138 acres that appear to have been also part of the original Hunting the Hare tract, and also appear to have been contiguous to Pough and Deans Purchase. We know from a subsequent deed that Daniel Moore owned another 50 acres of Hunting the Hare on which his son Richard lived for a time.

• Griffith James’ daughter Gwendolyn married Richard Dean’s son Samuel Dean.

• The 14 February 1788 will of Richard Dean in Washington County names a daughter Mary.[22] We learn from the 7 August 1795 will of Richard’s widow Priscilla that Mary’s married name was More/Moore.[23] Noting that documents from 1761 through 1792 show Daniel Moore’s wife as Mary, and that Daniel and wife Mary named a son Richard Moore, Beverly Peoples proposes that Daniel Moore may have married another of Richard Dean’s daughters — an eminently reasonable proposal, it seems to me, even if not yet entirely proven.[24]

Joseph Chapline, Founder of Sharpsburg

Because the three interconnecting men on whom I’m focusing here — Griffith James, Richard Dean, and Daniel Moore — all acquired their adjoining pieces of land from Joseph Chapline and arrived in the Sharpsburg area in its formative period when Chapline appears to have been attracting to the area settlers with pre-existing ties to him, it’s important to take a close look at Chapline’s biography and his connection to Sharpsburg, which he founded. As John Bedell and Jason Shellenhamer note, “Of all of the early residents of Maryland’s Great Valley, Joseph Chapline was most responsible for shaping settlement along Antietam Creek in the eighteenth century.”[25]

Joseph Chapline was born 5 September 1707 in Queen Anne’s parish of Prince George’s County, the son of William Chapline (1686-1752) and Elizabeth Travers. The Chapline family, whose roots were in England and which had marital ties to the Calvert family, had been in the colonies four generations prior to Joseph, first in Virginia and then in Maryland, where family members lived in Calvert and Dorchester Counties in the eastern part of that colony.[26]

Joseph spent his formative years on his father’s plantation Forrest in the easternmost part of Prince George’s County, with his father William sending him to England for a period of time to be educated. In 1730 Joseph’s father, William, moved to the western “back-parts” on the Virginia-Maryland border, settling on the Potomac about four miles above Shepherdstown and leaving Joseph, his oldest son, in charge of the Forrest plantation and of the family’s younger children.

By 1736 Joseph had followed his father west, settling across the Potomac in what was then western Prince George’s County, and after that Frederick and finally Washington County. As Bedell and Shellenhamer note,[27]

Maryland colonial records for that period show that Chapline was an active member of a community developing west of the Monocacy River. In May 1739 Joseph Chapline was a signatory on a petition of 88 inhabitants of the “back-parts” of Maryland.

On 22 October 1741 in All Saints parish in Frederick County, Joseph married Ruhamah, daughter of Reverend William Williams and Sarah James of Carmarthenshire, Wales. Ruhamah and her sisters Sarah and Jane had come to Virginia with their father, a Presbyterian missionary, following their mother’s death in Wales. By 1739, William Williams had bought land in Prince George’s County, Maryland, in the area that would later be Frederick and then Washington County.[28]

In 1744 Joseph Chapline began patenting and buying tracts of land on Antietam Creek in the vicinity of what would soon be Sharpsburg. As Bedell and Shellenhamer indicate, one of these tracts, acquired in 1747, was the 250-acre Hunting the Hare tract.[29] It is in this period from the latter half of the 1730s into the 1740s that Beverly Peoples suggests Joseph may well have brought with him to this remote backcountry part of western Maryland men to help improve his properties, build houses and structures on them, clear and settle the land, and work his ironworks once they were established. As Beverly states, “Since this area was remote in the 1730’s and 40’s it is unlikely that many people arrived individually.”[30]

Joseph Chapline prospered and accumulated wealth and status following his settlement in the Sharpsburg area. He was a justice of Prince George’s county court from 1739-1748 and after that of the Frederick court for some years. From 1749-1768, he served in the lower house of the Maryland legislature. In 1763 Joseph founded the town of Sharps Burgh, naming it in honor of Maryland’s governor Horatio Sharpe. The town was laid out on a 200-acre tract, Hickory Tavern, that Joseph bought from Edmund Cartledge on 11 July 1763, close to his plantation Rush Bottom and adjacent to his Hunting the Hare and Resurvey on Abston’s Forest tracts. The appeal of the Hickory Tavern land for a town site was that it had a good freshwater spring and was on the wagon road to Philadelphia. In 1764, Joseph out a plan for the new town, consisting of 187 lots located around the spring, with each lot measuring 103 feet wide by 206 feet long.[31]

On 12 January 1769 the Maryland Gazette reported,[32]

Lately died in Frederick County, Capt. Joseph Chapline, who, for many Years, has been one of the Representatives for that County in the General Assembly.

Joseph was initially buried on his Elias Grove estate west of Sharpsburg, and in 1893 his great-great-niece Maria Ligget Dare had his remains along with those of his wife Ruhamah and several other family members buried in Mountain View cemetery at Sharpsburg.[33] Maria Dare indicates that Joseph died owning 12,257 acres of land.[34] According to Edward C. Papenfuse, Joseph’s landholdings at the time of his death included at least 6,385 acres in Frederick County and probably as much as 15,000 acres in Frederick County and in Virginia.[35]

I’d like to return now to the 4 September 1763 document that started this discussion of Griffith James’ early years in the Sharpsburg area. As I stated previously, the 4 September 1763 agreement that Joseph Chapline made with Samuel Beall, David Ross, and Richard Henderson to be partners in an ironworks to be erected at Sharpsburg is the first absolutely certain document I’ve found placing Griffith James in this part of Maryland.[36]

Several of my previous postings (here and here) about the Leonard family connecting to Griffith James’ family through the marriage of Thomas Leonard, son of Robert Leonard and Honor Pritchard, to Griffith’s daughter Hannah note both not only ties between Robert and Thomas Leonard Joseph Chapline and his family, but also ties between the Leonards and the Beall family to which Joseph Chapline’s business partner Samuel Beall belonged. As these postings indicate, Joseph Chapline helped construct Fort Frederick near Hagerstown in Washington County, Maryland, in 1756, and from the time that fort was constructed, a trail of documents places Robert Leonard there as a soldier guarding the western frontier of Maryland.

Moreover, when the first military company in Washington County was organized for the Revolutionary War in Hagerstown on 6 January 1776, that company was under the command of Joseph Chapline’s a son Joseph. Serving in that military company were Griffith James’ sons-in-law Thomas Leonard and Samuel Dean, as well as Samuel’s brother Thomas Dean and Richard Moore, son of Daniel Moore. Previously, in 1755, Daniel Moore had served in the Frederick County militia company of Captain Moses Chapline, brother of the elder Joseph Chapline who founded Sharpsburg.

In addition, in the years in which Robert Leonard was stationed at Fort Frederick, he was under the immediate command of Captain Alexander Beall (1712-1759). Alexander was the son of William Beall (1684-1756), whose brother John Beall (1689-1742) was father of the Samuel Beall (1713-1778) who was Joseph Chapline’s business partner in the Antietam ironworks business. Samuel lived at Hagerstown.

As this previous posting states, Alexander Beall left a will in Frederick County dated 9 April 1759 which shows him owning part of a large tract of land in that county called King Cole.[37] The original King Cole tract consisted of 1,970 acres patented to Henry Crabb on 30 August 1754.[38] As we’ll see later, by 1783, fifty acres of the King Cole tract belonged to Griffith James’ son Joseph, who obtained it from his father-in-law James Austin.[39] In April 1791, Joseph sold this land to his father Griffith James, who then sold it along with James Austin in March 1792.[40]

None of the preceding information about Griffith James tells us exactly when and how he arrived in the Sharpsburg area or where he may have been prior to his arrival there. It does, however, give us a clear snapshot confirming his presence in the Sharpsburg area prior to September 1763 and his continuous residence on a piece of land he had acquired from Joseph Chapline prior to that date. All of the information I’ve compiled above also raises some tantalizing questions:

• Did Griffith James, Richard Dean, and Daniel Moore have some connections to each other pre-existing their arrival in the Sharpsburg area? And did all or any of these men have connections with Joseph Chapline pre-dating their arrival in the Sharpsburg area?

• Since we know that Joseph Chapline had a Welsh mother-in-law whose surname was James, is it possible that Griffith James had some kind of family connection with Joseph Chapline through Joseph’s mother-in-law Sarah James? There’s also a salient fact I haven’t yet mentioned: Daniel Moore had a daughter Nancy who married John Griffith. This family, too, lived in the Sharpsburg area. Given the vagaries of the patronymic naming system in Welsh families, whereby given names of fathers pass on as surnames of sons, it’s possible John Griffith and Griffith James were related to each other: Was that, in fact, the case?

• If Griffith James was related to Joseph Chapline through Joseph’s mother-in-law, would that explain the fact that he had acquired land from Joseph prior to September 1763 — we know this from Joseph’s own testimony — for which he was not given title until 1787, though he lived continuously on this land all those years? To repeat a question I’ve already asked earlier: If Griffith James was a relative of the Chapline family, was he a retainer of the family, living on land provided to him while the family held title to the land?

Lots of questions, no answers. I ask these questions not to suggest that any of this speculation has been proven, but to put the questions out on the board for consideration, as any researcher seeks to extend information about Griffith James back beyond September 1763 in the Sharpsburg area. Another tantalizing piece of information to place on the board now: in his 1883 manuscript about the Leonard family Thomas Dunlap Leonard says the following about the parents of his grandmother Hannah James Leonard:[41]

[Thomas Leonard, son of Robert Leonard and Honor Pritchard,] married Miss Hannah James of Maryland about the year 1775. I have no tradition of her parents, except their nationality, they were Welch, but Hannah was born and reared in Maryland.

This statement, which evidently relies on information given to Thomas D. Leonard by his grandparents Thomas and Hannah James Leonard, seems to me to imply that Thomas D. Leonard thought Hannah James’ parents were Welsh-born. The Welsh background of the family is fairly evident in the names Griffith and James, both common Welsh surnames. The given name Gwendolyn, which Griffith James and wife Mary gave a daughter, is another Welsh cultural tag. I am also not forgetting that Pritchard, the surname of Robert Leonard’s wife, is yet another Welsh surname.

It’s possible, of course, that Thomas D. Leonard means to say here that Griffith James’ family had recent Welsh roots though it had been in the colonies a generation or two prior to Griffith himself. It seems to me, however, that Thomas thought Griffith James and wife Mary were actually Welsh-born and were the immigrant ancestors of this James family line. If that’s true, then it may also have been the case that this couple arrived in Maryland — perhaps even in the Sharpsburg area — directly from Wales. And that would mean attempts to find information about Griffith James prior to September 1763 in the vicinity of Sharpsburg need to look back to Wales for information. Perhaps to the Carmarthenshire family of Sarah James, mother-in-law of Joseph Chapline?

Frederick County, Maryland, Inventory Bk. A1, p. 459

And then one final surprising piece of information: In updating my notes about Griffith James as I worked on this blog posting, I’ve unearthed a list of debts to the estate of Nathan Peddycoart, who died in 1759 in Frederick County, Maryland. Among the debts that Nathan’s widow Sarah Dorsey Peddycoart listed in her inventory of Nathan’s estate was a debt from one Griffith James for one shilling and sixpence due 10 January 1743.[42]

Is this the Griffith James who had bought land from Joseph Chapline by 1763? Given the Frederick County location of this estate record, that’s entirely possible. If this is “our” Griffith James, then this record would indicate that he was in Maryland, perhaps in Frederick County’s parent county, Prince George’s, by January 1743. If I’m correct in thinking that the Griffith James who lived at Pough outside Sharpsburg was born in the period 1725-1735, and if this record pertains to that same Griffith James, then he’d have been in this part of Maryland as a very young man in 1743.

Lots of questions, no answers. But it’s important to keep asking….

[1] The only federal census on which Griffith James appears, the 1790 census, shows him in Washington County, Maryland (p. 9) with a household comprised of two males aged 16 and over, one male aged under 15, and two females, information that is hardly helpful in determining Griffith’s birthdate.

[2] Anderson County, South Carolina, Will Bk. 1793-8, p. 82.

[3] Era Josephine Morgan Davis, Louise S. Rourke, and Marc B. Smith, Country Cousins: Descendants of Samuel Dean (1996), p. 3. In correspondence with me in January 1997, researcher Barbara Morris of Bellaire, Texas, stated that the 3 October 1795 death of date was sent by Lucy Rebecca Dean to Louise Rourke in the 1980s. Louise Rourke, who lived in Citrus Heights, California, was the primary author of Country Cousins. Unless I’m mistaken, Lucy Rebecca Dean (1942-2023, m. John Kennemur) was a daughter of Richard Brown Dean and Joanne Richardson. Rebecca Dean Kennemur was a DAR member and active genealogist. This Dean line descends from Samuel Dean and Gwendolyn James through their son Richard P. Dean.

[4] Mountain Creek Baptist church appears to have been established in the 1790s some six miles southwest of Anderson, South Carolina. Its original minutes are held by the Special Collections and Baptist Historical Collection at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. Microfilmed and digitized copies of the church minutes are available at FamilySearch. A transcription of the Mountain Creek minutes from 1798 to 1907 by Debbie Giles Harbin was published by the Anderson County Chapter of the South Carolina Genealogical Society in 2002.

[5] Mary James does not appear as a household head on the federal census in either 1800 or 1810. The minutes of Mountain Creek Baptist church state that in 1817, she was living with her the family of her son-in-law Samuel Dean, husband of Gwendolyn Dean. The 1810 federal census shows a female aged over 45 in Samuel’s household in Pendleton District (p. 151).

[6] Frederick County, Maryland, Deed Bk. J, pp. 793-804.

[7] See Arthur G. Tracey’s patent/tract index and map locations for Carroll, Frederick, and Washington Counties at Maryland government’s Maryland History site; and Maryland Land Office Rent Rolls 1748-1775, p. 5.

[8] See Washington County, Maryland, Deed Bk. G, pp. 771-2, stating that on 13 May 1792, Griffith James sold to Robert Hoffman for ￡330 his tract called Pough, 75 acres, with wife Mary releasing dower.

[9] Washington County, Maryland, Deed Bk. E, pp. 332-3.

[10] In 1783, Griffith James is on the Washington County tax list in Lower Antietam Hundred, taxed for the Pough property, with the acreage given as 100 acres. The tax list states that this property comprised 60 acres of woods and 40 acres arable; Griffith was also taxed for four horses and eight beef cattle: see “Washington County 1783 Tax Assessment,” Western Maryland Genealogy 7,4 (October 1991), p. 171; and “Assessment of 1783, Index,” citing Lower Antietam and Sharpsburg, p. 34 (MSA S1161-11-1. 1/4/5/54) at website of Maryland State Archives.

[11] Washington County, Maryland, Deed Bk. R, pp. 181-2.

[12] Washington County, Maryland, Will Bk. A, pp. 279-280. The will was probated 24 March 1792.

[13] See “Assessment of 1783, Index,” citing Lower Antietam and Sharpsburg, p. 35 (MSA S1161-11-1. 1/4/5/54) at website of Maryland State Archives. This transcription reads the acreage as 128 acres and gives the tract name as Moses’ Delight.

[14] Geolover, “Sarah’s Surprise, Part 2,” West Virginia Family Tracks and Trails, citing Washington County, Maryland, Deed Bk.  G-7, pp. 44-46.

[15] See Arthur G. Tracey’s patent/tract index and map locations for Carroll, Frederick, and Washington Counties at Maryland government’s Maryland History site. See also John Bedell and Jason Shellenhamer, Archeological Overview, Assessment, Identification, and Evaluation Study of Newly Acquired Lands at Antietam National Battlefield, Maryland (2014, National Parks Service), pp. 36-7; Evelyn Vigdahl, “Another Flooded River Valley: The Deans of Huntingdon Co., Pennsylvania,” at Our Family History; and “The Farmsteads of Antietam – Jacob Avey Farm,” at the website of Jacob Rohrback Inn.

[16] Prince George’s County, Maryland, Deed Bk. BB, pp. 396-7.

[17] “Tax List, Antietam Hundred, Prince George’s County 1746,” transcribed by Karen Walker for Maryland Genealogical Society.

[18] “Richard Deane (1701-1788) and His Children,” at Rootsweb.

[19] See supra, n. 15.

[20] When Joseph Chapline patented Pough in November 1761 (see supra, no. 7), the tract was described as 75 acres at the head of a spring and the foot of Elk Ridge Mountain next to Keep Tryst, Boston, and Little I Thought It. Little I Thought It is the huge tract out of which the land for the Antietam ironworks was taken. On 25 July 1769, David Ross, one of Chapline’s business partners in the ironworks, had a Frederick County grant for 8,025 acres, a tract called Boston, a resurvey of Little I Thought It, part of Keep Trieste, part of Dutch Loss, and Mill Place. The survey for this land shows it bordering both Pough and Hunting the Hare. Arthur Tracey’s map for plats in Sharpsburg district shows Pough bordering Boston on the east, with Hunting the Hare bordering Boston on the north. On the Little I Thought It tract of 6,352 acres as the site for the ironworks, see Thomas J.C. Williams, A History of Washington County, Maryland, etc. (Hagerstown, 1906; reps. Baltimore: Regional Publ. Co., 1968), pp. 23-4.

[21] For photos of the Deans Purchase portion of Hunting the Hare viewed from Pough that I took in in August 2007, please see this previous posting.

[22] Washington County, Maryland, Will Bk. A, p. 168. The will spells the surname as Deane.

[23] Ibid., pp. 161-2.

[24] Richard Deane (1701-1788) and His Children.”

[25] John Bedell and Jason Shellenhamer, Archeological Overview, Assessment, Identification, and Evaluation Study of Newly Acquired Lands at Antietam National Battlefield Maryland (2014, National Parks Service), p. 36.

[26] See ibid., and Edward C. Papenfuse, A Biographical Dictionary of the Maryland Legislature, 1635-1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 210-211; Lee and Barbara Barron, The History of Sharpsburg, Maryland, Founded by Joseph Chapline 1763 (1972); Maria J. Liggett Dare, Chaplines from Maryland and Virginia (priv. publ., 1902); Thomas J.C. Williams, A History of Washington County, Maryland, etc., vol. 1 (Hagerstown, 1906; repr. Baltimore: Regional Publishing Company, 1968), pp. 23-4; Sharpsburg Historical Society, “Joseph Chapline – Founder of Sharpsburg, MD,” at the website of Sharpsburg Historical Society; and Peoples, “Richard Deane (1701-1788) and His Children.”

[27] Bedell and Shellenhamer, Archeological Overview, Assessment, Identification, and Evaluation Study of Newly Acquired Lands at Antietam National Battlefield Maryland, pp. 36-7.

[28] Dare, Chaplines from Maryland and Virginia, pp. 6, 22; Williams, History of Washington County, Maryland, pp. 23-4; and Grace L. Tracey, Pioneers of Old Monocacy (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2002), pp. 245-7. See also Find a Grave memorial page of Ruhama Williams Chapline, Mountain View cemetery, Sharpsburg, Washington County, Maryland, created by jrrmr910, maintained by Michael J. Chapline.

[29] Ibid.

[30] “Richard Deane (1701-1788) and His Children.”

[31] Bedell and Shellenhamer, Archeological Overview, Assessment, Identification, and Evaluation Study of Newly Acquired Lands at Antietam National Battlefield Maryland, pp. 41-2.

[32] Maryland Gazette (12 January 1769), p. 3, col. 1.

[33] See Find a Grave memorial page of Col Joseph Chapline, Mountain View cemetery, Sharpsburg, Washington County, Maryland, created by jrrmr910, maintained by Michael J. Chapline.

[34] Dare, Chaplines from Maryland and Virginia, p. 7.

[35] Papenfuse, Biographical Dictionary of the Maryland Legislature, 1635-1789, p. 211.

[36] See supra, n. 6.

[37] Frederick County, Maryland, Will Bk. A, p. 127.

[38] See Arthur G. Tracey’s patent/tract index and map locations for Carroll, Frederick, and Washington Counties at Maryland government’s Maryland History site.

[39] “Washington County 1783 Tax Assessment,” p. 171; and “Assessment of 1783, Index.”

[40] Washington County, Maryland, Deed Bk. G, pp. 368, 815-6.

[41] “Biography of the Leonards,” 1883 manuscript circulated as a typescript among Leonard family members and researchers, whose current provenance is not known.

[42] Frederick County, Maryland, Inventory Bk. A1, p. 459.

#AlexanderBeall #AllSaintsParishFrederickCoMaryland #ancestry #AntietamCreekWashingtonCoMaryland #AntietamIronworks #CalvertCoMaryland #CarmarthenshireWales #DanielMoore #DavidRoss #DeansPurchaseWashingtonCoMaryland #DorchesterCoMaryland #EdmundCartledge #familyHistory #ForrestPrinceGeorgeSCoMaryland #FrederickCoMaryland #genealogy #GwendolynJames #HagerstownWashingtonCoMaryland #HannahJames #HenryCrabb #HickoryTavernWashingtonCoMaryland #history #HonorPritchard #HoratioSharpe #HuntingTheHareWashingtonCoMaryland #JamesAustin #JamesChapline #JamesLauderdale #JohnBeall #JohnGriffith #JosephChapline #KingColeWashingtonCoMaryland #LittleIThoughtItWashingtonCoMaryland #MaryDean #MaryMoore #MoresDelightWashingtonCoMaryland #MosesChapline #NathanPeddycoart #PendletonDistSouthCarolina #PotomacRiver #PoughWashingtonCoMaryland #PrinceGeorgeSCoMaryland #QueenAnneSParishPrinceGeorgeSCoMaryland #RichardDean #RichardHenderson #RichardMoore #RobertLeonard #RuhamaWilliams #RuhamahWilliams #SamuelBeall #SamuelDean #SarahDorsey #SarahJames #SarahMLauderdale #SharpsburgWashingtonCoMaryland #ThomasDean #ThomasDunlapLeonard #ThomasLeonard #ThomasLewisLeonard #WashingtonCoMaryland #WilliamBeall #WilliamWilliams

Griffith James (abt. 1725? – 1795): Sharpsburg, Maryland, Beginnings

Frederick County, Maryland, Deed Bk. J, p. 799

Or, Subtitled: “I have no tradition of her parents, except their nationality, they were Welch, but Hannah was born and reared in Maryland”

“Don’t know much about history”: Sam Cooke’s song “Wonderful World” is scrolling through my head as I launch a new series of postings, this one about Griffith James (abt. 1725? – 1795). Griffith James ties into my family tree through the marriage of his daughter Hannah (1752-1842) to Thomas Leonard about 1775 in Frederick County, Maryland. I’ve just finished a series of postings about the Leonard line. This new series about Griffith James follows that Leonard series, which began with the posting I’ve just linked, about Thomas Leonard (1752-1832), Hannah James’ husband. In a posting launching a previous series about my Lauderdale family line, I offer two charts showing my line of descent from Griffith James, James Lauderdale, and Robert Leonard, family lines that tied together in my family tree when Thomas Lewis Leonard (1781-1870) married Sarah M. Lauderdale (abt. 1785 – abt. 1866) — my 4th g-grandparents. (To read the continuation of this posting, please click the numeral 2 below.)

The reason Sam Cooke’s line “Don’t know much about history” has been playing in my head as I begin gathering and organizing my information about Griffith James is this: before I undertook this gathering and organizing process, if you’d asked me what I know about Griffith James, I’d have told you confidently that I have a considerable amount of information, and that I was fairly certain I could tell you a lot about his origins, where he came from, who his parents were.

But now, I’m not so sure about that. One of the advantages of working on postings here that gather, organize, and analyze genealogical material I’ve accumulated for over fifty years is that I have a chance to look at that material from new perspectives, to correct and expand it, and in some cases, to reframe entirely what I had thought I’d known about an ancestral figure. Griffith James is a case in point.

The Documentary Trail That Begins at Sharpsburg

I’ll illustrate this point in the following posting by talking about what I know with certainty about Griffith James from the point at which a documentary trail of him begins in the area of Sharpsburg in what eventually became Washington County, Maryland. I know nothing — not with any certainty — about Griffith James before he begins showing up in records of Frederick County, Maryland, Washington County’s parent county. Prior to that point, I have not found any reliable information about where he was born, who his parents were, or where he may have lived before he settled in Frederick County prior to September 1763.

I do not know precisely when Griffith James was born. As a previous posting has shown, the gravestone of his oldest child, his daughter Hannah, in the Leonard family cemetery near Petersburg, Tennessee, gives her birthdate as 2 November 1752. If Hannah was born to a young couple who had married not long prior to her birth, then it would appear that Griffith James and his wife, whose name appears in various records as Mary, would likely have been born in the time frame 1725-1735.[1] We’ll see later that Griffith made a will in Pendleton District, South Carolina, on 20 April 1795, which was recorded (with no probate date stated) on 12 April 1796, so he died in Pendleton District between those two dates.[2] A death date of 3 October 1795 appears in a study of the Dean family entitled Country Cousins: Descendants of Samuel Dean with no information about the source of this date.[3]

Griffith James’ wife Mary, who is named in his will as “my Dear wife Mary James,” outlived him and was still living as late as 1817 when the minutes of Mountain Creek Baptist church in Pendleton District, of which Mary was a member, document a dispute between her and her daughter Mary, wife of Harmon Cummings, that began in April and continued until it was resolved in August 1817.[4] I have not found a document that provides a good indicator of when Griffith James’ wife Mary was born, or of her maiden surname.[5] As we’ll see in a moment, Thomas Dunlap Leonard, a grandson of Thomas Leonard and Hannah James, who compiled a history of the Leonard family in 1883 and who knew Thomas and Hannah personally, appears to have thought that Griffith James was married only once and that his first and only wife (i.e., Mary), whom Thomas D. Leonard does not name, was the mother of all the couple’s children.

Frederick County, Maryland, Deed Bk. J, p. 798, opening portion of ironworks agreement

The first absolutely certain record I’ve found for this Griffith James places him in Sharpsburg in what was then Frederick County by 4 September 1763. On 4 September 1763, Joseph Chapline made an agreement between himself and Samuel Beall, David Ross, and Richard Henderson to be partners in an ironworks to be erected in Frederick County. The agreement states that Joseph reserved to himself and his heirs his mill on the Antietam with 50 acres joining it, and that Joseph was also excluding from the land he was making available for the ironworks 215 acres he had sold to Daniel Moore and Griffith James.[6] This agreement was recorded 31 October 1765, but the agreement itself was dated 4 September 1763. (See the top of this posting for a snapshot of the section of the ironworks agreement stating that Chapline had sold 215 acres to Daniel Moore and Griffith James.)

I have searched Frederick County deeds for a deed made by Joseph Chapline to Daniel Moore and Griffith James prior to September 1763 without finding any such deed. What I do find are two separate deeds made, one to Daniel and one to Griffith, years down the road from 1763, after both men had been living with their families for years on the land that Chapline deeded to them, and which was clearly the land comprised in the 215 acres Daniel Moore and Griffith James had acquired from Joseph Chapline by September 1763.

As far as I can determine, Griffith James lived continuously on a tract of land just southeast of the town of Sharpsburg until May 1792, when he sold the Pough tract and then moved the following year to Pendleton District, South Carolina. Pough was a 75-acre tract contiguous to Hunting the Hare, one portion of which Richard Dean, whose son Samuel married Griffith James’ daughter Gwendolyn, owned, and another portion of which Daniel Moore seems to have acquired from Joseph Chapline.

Arthur G. Tracey’s patent/tract index and map locations for Carroll, Frederick, and Washington Counties at Maryland government’s Maryland History site Maryland Land Office Rent Rolls 1748-1775, p. 5 Arthur G. Tracey’s patent/tract index and map locations for Carroll, Frederick, and Washington Counties at Maryland government’s Maryland History site — note Hunting the Hare contiguous to Pough

Joseph Chapline patented Pough on 23 November 1761.[7] The patent record states that the tract contained 75 acres, the same amount of land that Griffith James sold on 13 May 1792 when he sold Pough (the name for the land is given in this deed) before leaving Maryland for South Carolina.[8] Though Griffith James evidently lived continuously on this land from at least September 1763, he did not receive an official deed from the Chapline family for Pough until 10 April 1787, when Joseph and James Chapline, acting as executors of their father Joseph who died in 1769, sold Griffith the Pough tract for￡5.[9] This deed specifies again that Pough was a 75-acre tract.

Washington County, Maryland, Deed Bk. E, pp. 332-3

Note the nominal price of￡5, far less than the￡330 for which Griffith James sold Pough in May 1792. This nominal price is another indicator that though this land, for which Griffith James appears on the tax list in Washington County in 1783, was Griffith’s home tract, Joseph Chapline (and then his estate) had retained the title of it for all the years on which Griffith lived on this piece of land.[10] The ￡5 also suggests to me that Griffith James may have lived on this land all the years he was at Sharpsburg as a kind of retainer of Joseph Chapline and his family, given use of a tract of land while not holding clear title to it as he lived on it. A retainer who may have had some kinship connection to Chapline? Or a retainer doing work of some kind to Chapline while cultivating his own patch of land?

After 1761 when Chapline patented Pough until 1768, I do not find Pough showing up in the Debt Books of the Provincial Land Office of Maryland. In 1768, it is listed as 75 acres belonging to heirs of Joseph Chapline, and it continues to appear in the Debt Books for Frederick County from 1770-1773, with the name given as “Tough.” Again, these documents indicate to me that Joseph Chapline perhaps had some special arrangement with Griffith James whereby he was living on Pough as its owner in the absence of a deed prior to April 1787, when Chapline’s heirs officially deeded the land to him — though, to repeat, a 1783 tax list for Washington County shows Griffith James taxed for this tract of land.

Washington County, Maryland, Deed Bk. R, pp. 181-2

The story of Pough and Griffith James’ ownership and occupation of it parallels the story of Daniel Moore, who owned another portion of the 215 acres that he and Griffith James had acquired from Joseph Chapline prior to September 1763. Daniel Moore’s portion of the 215 acres was a tract of 138 acres named Mores Delight, which Joseph Chapline sold him on 17 August 1754 with the deed stating that Daniel Moore was living on this land when Chapline sold it to him in 1754, and that the land was on the waters of the Antietam.[11] But though Daniel Moore lived on this piece of land up to his death in 1792, the deed for the land was not recorded until 11 May 1805.

We know that Daniel Moore lived with his wife Mary on this 138-acre tract at the time of his death because the will that he made in Washington County on 1 January 1792 states this and leaves Mary the land: “I give and bequeath unto my loving & faithfull Wife Mary the whole of my Land and Plantation on which I now live Containing One Hundred and thirty Eight Acres.”[12] Daniel Moore was taxed for this land in 1783.[13]

As we’ve seen, Griffith James’ Pough tract consisted of 75 acres. Daniel Moore’s home tract, on which he was already living prior to August 1754 and on which he continued living to the end of his life, was 138 acres. Joseph Chapline’s September 1763 ironworks agreement states that he had sold Daniel Moore and Griffith James 215 acres by that date. Put these two pieces of land owned by Griffith James and Daniel Moore together, and you have a total of 213 acres, very close to the 215 acres cited by Joseph Chapline in his ironworks agreement.

I have not been able to find Mores Delight on lists of land patents and tracts in Washington County, so I’m not certain of its precise location. There has been confusion about whether the name of this piece of land is Moses’ Delight or Mores Delight, and this adds to the difficulty of finding its location. If Joseph Chapline’s September 1763 ironworks agreement excluded 215 acres he had sold to Daniel Moore and Griffith James from this agreement, it makes sense, I think, to assume that Daniel’s and Griffith’s pieces of land were in the same vicinity and perhaps adjoining.

Daniel Moore’s will states that he had a son Richard. The 1783 tax assessment for Washington County shows Richard Moore assessed for a 50-acre tract called Hunting the Hare. As a descendant of this Moore family who maintains the West Virginia Family Tracks and Trails blog notes, the 1790 federal census for Washington County shows Richard and Daniel Moore as immediate neighbors, and on 10 April 1790, Daniel Moore and wife Mary sold 50 acres described as part of a tract called Hunting the Hare.[14] This deed suggests to me that Daniel Moore’s 138-acre home tract, Mores Delight, was likely originally part of a larger tract of 250 acres called Hunting the Hare on Antietam Creek that Joseph Chapline patented on 13 November 1747 after having claimed the land on 9 April 1744.[15]

Arthur G. Tracey’s patent/tract index and map locations for Carroll, Frederick, and Washington Counties at Maryland government’s Maryland History site Prince George’s County, Maryland, Deed Bk. BB, pp. 396-7.

On 22 March 1747, prior to his obtaining a patent for Hunting the Hare in November 1747, Joseph Chapline sold Richard Dean, both of Prince George’s County, 50 acres of land described as “Deans purches being part of a tract land called hunting the hair [sic].”[16] On 17 October 1747, Joseph Chapline acknowledged the deed with wife Ruhamah (née Williams) relinquishing dower rights, and on the same day, Joseph made a receipt to Richard for the £20 for which he had sold the land. The deed for this transaction is filed in Prince George’s County since the portion of Frederick County taken from Prince George’s in 1748 that became Washington County in 1776 was originally in Prince George’s.

As I stated previously, Richard Dean’s son Samuel married Griffith James’ daughter Gwendolyn about 1773 in Frederick County. We know that Richard Dean was in the location that would later become Sharpsburg along with Joseph Chapline as early as 1746, since the tax list for Antietam Hundred in Prince George’s County in that year shows both of these men taxed in that hundred.[17] This is not very long after Chapline arrived in this location around 1736, a point I’ll discuss in more detail later. Beverly Dean Peoples, the premier researcher of Richard Dean’s family, thinks that it’s entirely possible that Chapline brought Richard to the Sharpsburg area or Richard followed Chapline there due to some connection between the two men in eastern Maryland prior to Chapline’s decision to move west.

Beverly Peoples writes,[18]

When he came to this western most part of MD, Joseph brought with him men to build his home, settlers to clear the land, workers to build and work the Iron Works that he was establishing as well as men to defend the settlement from the Indians. Since this area was remote in the 1730’s and 40’s it is unlikely that many people arrived individually. Richard’s appearance in the 1740’s would possibly indicate he had contact with someone in the Chapline family in the eastern part of the state who had motivated him to [move] west.

It seems to me this is a thesis well worth considering. And given what appear to be close ties between Richard Dean, Griffith James, and Daniel Moore, I’d also suggest that it’s possible both Griffith and Daniel arrived in the Sharpsburg area not far down the road from Richard because they, too, had prior ties to Joseph Chapline and/or to Richard Dean. If Daniel Moore’s 138-acre homeplace was part of the original Hunting the Hare tract — and I think this may well have been the case — then he, Richard Dean, and Griffith Moore settled on adjoining tracts of land just southeast of Sharpsburg. Note the contiguity of Deans Purchase, Hunting the Hare, and Pough on this map of Sharpsburg that appears in Evelyn Vigdahl’s previously cited “Another Flooded River” article:[19]

Evelyn Vigdahl, “Another Flooded River Valley: The Deans of Huntingdon Co., Pennsylvania,” at Our Family History

Google Maps actually labels the “historic Moore farm” near the intersection of Burnside Bridge Road and Mills Road southeast of Sharpsburg as “Hunting the Hare.”[20] Both Pough and Deans Purchase are in this same location, near the intersection of Burnside Bridge Road and Mills Road.[21]

Google Maps snapshot of Hunting the Hare, historic Moore farm, southeast of Sharpsburg Photo I took in August 2007 of the entrance to Pough from the entrance to the property at Burnside Bridge Road Photo I took in August 2007 of Deans Purchase viewed from Pough across the road

So note the following:

• By September 1763, Griffith James and Daniel Moore owned 215 acres near Antietam Creek purchased from Joseph Chapline.

• We learn from other documents that the portion of this land, 75 acres, that Griffith James owned and lived on was called Pough, and that Pough was adjacent to Chapline’s Hunting the Hare tract. Chapline’s heirs deeded this land formally to Griffith James in 1787.

• In 1747, Richard Dean bought 50 acres from Chapline’s Hunting the Hare tract; this land was given the name Deans Purchase. Deans Purchase is contiguous to both Pough and the rest of the Hunting the Hare tract.

• In 1754, Chapline deeded Daniel Moore 138 acres that appear to have been also part of the original Hunting the Hare tract, and also appear to have been contiguous to Pough and Deans Purchase. We know from a subsequent deed that Daniel Moore owned another 50 acres of Hunting the Hare on which his son Richard lived for a time.

• Griffith James’ daughter Gwendolyn married Richard Dean’s son Samuel Dean.

• The 14 February 1788 will of Richard Dean in Washington County names a daughter Mary.[22] We learn from the 7 August 1795 will of Richard’s widow Priscilla that Mary’s married name was More/Moore.[23] Noting that documents from 1761 through 1792 show Daniel Moore’s wife as Mary, and that Daniel and wife Mary named a son Richard Moore, Beverly Peoples proposes that Daniel Moore may have married another of Richard Dean’s daughters — an eminently reasonable proposal, it seems to me, even if not yet entirely proven.[24]

Joseph Chapline, Founder of Sharpsburg

Because the three interconnecting men on whom I’m focusing here — Griffith James, Richard Dean, and Daniel Moore — all acquired their adjoining pieces of land from Joseph Chapline and arrived in the Sharpsburg area in its formative period when Chapline appears to have been attracting to the area settlers with pre-existing ties to him, it’s important to take a close look at Chapline’s biography and his connection to Sharpsburg, which he founded. As John Bedell and Jason Shellenhamer note, “Of all of the early residents of Maryland’s Great Valley, Joseph Chapline was most responsible for shaping settlement along Antietam Creek in the eighteenth century.”[25]

Joseph Chapline was born 5 September 1707 in Queen Anne’s parish of Prince George’s County, the son of William Chapline (1686-1752) and Elizabeth Travers. The Chapline family, whose roots were in England and which had marital ties to the Calvert family, had been in the colonies four generations prior to Joseph, first in Virginia and then in Maryland, where family members lived in Calvert and Dorchester Counties in the eastern part of that colony.[26]

Joseph spent his formative years on his father’s plantation Forrest in the easternmost part of Prince George’s County, with his father William sending him to England for a period of time to be educated. In 1730 Joseph’s father, William, moved to the western “back-parts” on the Virginia-Maryland border, settling on the Potomac about four miles above Shepherdstown and leaving Joseph, his oldest son, in charge of the Forrest plantation and of the family’s younger children.

By 1736 Joseph had followed his father west, settling across the Potomac in what was then western Prince George’s County, and after that Frederick and finally Washington County. As Bedell and Shellenhamer note,[27]

Maryland colonial records for that period show that Chapline was an active member of a community developing west of the Monocacy River. In May 1739 Joseph Chapline was a signatory on a petition of 88 inhabitants of the “back-parts” of Maryland.

On 22 October 1741 in All Saints parish in Frederick County, Joseph married Ruhamah, daughter of Reverend William Williams and Sarah James of Carmarthenshire, Wales. Ruhamah and her sisters Sarah and Jane had come to Virginia with their father, a Presbyterian missionary, following their mother’s death in Wales. By 1739, William Williams had bought land in Prince George’s County, Maryland, in the area that would later be Frederick and then Washington County.[28]

In 1744 Joseph Chapline began patenting and buying tracts of land on Antietam Creek in the vicinity of what would soon be Sharpsburg. As Bedell and Shellenhamer indicate, one of these tracts, acquired in 1747, was the 250-acre Hunting the Hare tract.[29] It is in this period from the latter half of the 1730s into the 1740s that Beverly Peoples suggests Joseph may well have brought with him to this remote backcountry part of western Maryland men to help improve his properties, build houses and structures on them, clear and settle the land, and work his ironworks once they were established. As Beverly states, “Since this area was remote in the 1730’s and 40’s it is unlikely that many people arrived individually.”[30]

Joseph Chapline prospered and accumulated wealth and status following his settlement in the Sharpsburg area. He was a justice of Prince George’s county court from 1739-1748 and after that of the Frederick court for some years. From 1749-1768, he served in the lower house of the Maryland legislature. In 1763 Joseph founded the town of Sharps Burgh, naming it in honor of Maryland’s governor Horatio Sharpe. The town was laid out on a 200-acre tract, Hickory Tavern, that Joseph bought from Edmund Cartledge on 11 July 1763, close to his plantation Rush Bottom and adjacent to his Hunting the Hare and Resurvey on Abston’s Forest tracts. The appeal of the Hickory Tavern land for a town site was that it had a good freshwater spring and was on the wagon road to Philadelphia. In 1764, Joseph out a plan for the new town, consisting of 187 lots located around the spring, with each lot measuring 103 feet wide by 206 feet long.[31]

On 12 January 1769 the Maryland Gazette reported,[32]

Lately died in Frederick County, Capt. Joseph Chapline, who, for many Years, has been one of the Representatives for that County in the General Assembly.

Joseph was initially buried on his Elias Grove estate west of Sharpsburg, and in 1893 his great-great-niece Maria Ligget Dare had his remains along with those of his wife Ruhamah and several other family members buried in Mountain View cemetery at Sharpsburg.[33] Maria Dare indicates that Joseph died owning 12,257 acres of land.[34] According to Edward C. Papenfuse, Joseph’s landholdings at the time of his death included at least 6,385 acres in Frederick County and probably as much as 15,000 acres in Frederick County and in Virginia.[35]

I’d like to return now to the 4 September 1763 document that started this discussion of Griffith James’ early years in the Sharpsburg area. As I stated previously, the 4 September 1763 agreement that Joseph Chapline made with Samuel Beall, David Ross, and Richard Henderson to be partners in an ironworks to be erected at Sharpsburg is the first absolutely certain document I’ve found placing Griffith James in this part of Maryland.[36]

Several of my previous postings (here and here) about the Leonard family connecting to Griffith James’ family through the marriage of Thomas Leonard, son of Robert Leonard and Honor Pritchard, to Griffith’s daughter Hannah note both not only ties between Robert and Thomas Leonard Joseph Chapline and his family, but also ties between the Leonards and the Beall family to which Joseph Chapline’s business partner Samuel Beall belonged. As these postings indicate, Joseph Chapline helped construct Fort Frederick near Hagerstown in Washington County, Maryland, in 1756, and from the time that fort was constructed, a trail of documents places Robert Leonard there as a soldier guarding the western frontier of Maryland.

Moreover, when the first military company in Washington County was organized for the Revolutionary War in Hagerstown on 6 January 1776, that company was under the command of Joseph Chapline’s a son Joseph. Serving in that military company were Griffith James’ sons-in-law Thomas Leonard and Samuel Dean, as well as Samuel’s brother Thomas Dean and Richard Moore, son of Daniel Moore. Previously, in 1755, Daniel Moore had served in the Frederick County militia company of Captain Moses Chapline, brother of the elder Joseph Chapline who founded Sharpsburg.

In addition, in the years in which Robert Leonard was stationed at Fort Frederick, he was under the immediate command of Captain Alexander Beall (1712-1759). Alexander was the son of William Beall (1684-1756), whose brother John Beall (1689-1742) was father of the Samuel Beall (1713-1778) who was Joseph Chapline’s business partner in the Antietam ironworks business. Samuel lived at Hagerstown.

As this previous posting states, Alexander Beall left a will in Frederick County dated 9 April 1759 which shows him owning part of a large tract of land in that county called King Cole.[37] The original King Cole tract consisted of 1,970 acres patented to Henry Crabb on 30 August 1754.[38] As we’ll see later, by 1783, fifty acres of the King Cole tract belonged to Griffith James’ son Joseph, who obtained it from his father-in-law James Austin.[39] In April 1791, Joseph sold this land to his father Griffith James, who then sold it along with James Austin in March 1792.[40]

None of the preceding information about Griffith James tells us exactly when and how he arrived in the Sharpsburg area or where he may have been prior to his arrival there. It does, however, give us a clear snapshot confirming his presence in the Sharpsburg area prior to September 1763 and his continuous residence on a piece of land he had acquired from Joseph Chapline prior to that date. All of the information I’ve compiled above also raises some tantalizing questions:

• Did Griffith James, Richard Dean, and Daniel Moore have some connections to each other pre-existing their arrival in the Sharpsburg area? And did all or any of these men have connections with Joseph Chapline pre-dating their arrival in the Sharpsburg area?

• Since we know that Joseph Chapline had a Welsh mother-in-law whose surname was James, is it possible that Griffith James had some kind of family connection with Joseph Chapline through Joseph’s mother-in-law Sarah James? There’s also a salient fact I haven’t yet mentioned: Daniel Moore had a daughter Nancy who married John Griffith. This family, too, lived in the Sharpsburg area. Given the vagaries of the patronymic naming system in Welsh families, whereby given names of fathers pass on as surnames of sons, it’s possible John Griffith and Griffith James were related to each other: Was that, in fact, the case?

• If Griffith James was related to Joseph Chapline through Joseph’s mother-in-law, would that explain the fact that he had acquired land from Joseph prior to September 1763 — we know this from Joseph’s own testimony — for which he was not given title until 1787, though he lived continuously on this land all those years? To repeat a question I’ve already asked earlier: If Griffith James was a relative of the Chapline family, was he a retainer of the family, living on land provided to him while the family held title to the land?

Lots of questions, no answers. I ask these questions not to suggest that any of this speculation has been proven, but to put the questions out on the board for consideration, as any researcher seeks to extend information about Griffith James back beyond September 1763 in the Sharpsburg area. Another tantalizing piece of information to place on the board now: in his 1883 manuscript about the Leonard family Thomas Dunlap Leonard says the following about the parents of his grandmother Hannah James Leonard:[41]

[Thomas Leonard, son of Robert Leonard and Honor Pritchard,] married Miss Hannah James of Maryland about the year 1775. I have no tradition of her parents, except their nationality, they were Welch, but Hannah was born and reared in Maryland.

This statement, which evidently relies on information given to Thomas D. Leonard by his grandparents Thomas and Hannah James Leonard, seems to me to imply that Thomas D. Leonard thought Hannah James’ parents were Welsh-born. The Welsh background of the family is fairly evident in the names Griffith and James, both common Welsh surnames. The given name Gwendolyn, which Griffith James and wife Mary gave a daughter, is another Welsh cultural tag. I am also not forgetting that Pritchard, the surname of Robert Leonard’s wife, is yet another Welsh surname.

It’s possible, of course, that Thomas D. Leonard means to say here that Griffith James’ family had recent Welsh roots though it had been in the colonies a generation or two prior to Griffith himself. It seems to me, however, that Thomas thought Griffith James and wife Mary were actually Welsh-born and were the immigrant ancestors of this James family line. If that’s true, then it may also have been the case that this couple arrived in Maryland — perhaps even in the Sharpsburg area — directly from Wales. And that would mean attempts to find information about Griffith James prior to September 1763 in the vicinity of Sharpsburg need to look back to Wales for information. Perhaps to the Carmarthenshire family of Sarah James, mother-in-law of Joseph Chapline?

Frederick County, Maryland, Inventory Bk. A1, p. 459

And then one final surprising piece of information: In updating my notes about Griffith James as I worked on this blog posting, I’ve unearthed a list of debts to the estate of Nathan Peddycoart, who died in 1759 in Frederick County, Maryland. Among the debts that Nathan’s widow Sarah Dorsey Peddycoart listed in her inventory of Nathan’s estate was a debt from one Griffith James for one shilling and sixpence due 10 January 1743.[42]

Is this the Griffith James who had bought land from Joseph Chapline by 1763? Given the Frederick County location of this estate record, that’s entirely possible. If this is “our” Griffith James, then this record would indicate that he was in Maryland, perhaps in Frederick County’s parent county, Prince George’s, by January 1743. If I’m correct in thinking that the Griffith James who lived at Pough outside Sharpsburg was born in the period 1725-1735, and if this record pertains to that same Griffith James, then he’d have been in this part of Maryland as a very young man in 1743.

Lots of questions, no answers. But it’s important to keep asking….

[1] The only federal census on which Griffith James appears, the 1790 census, shows him in Washington County, Maryland (p. 9) with a household comprised of two males aged 16 and over, one male aged under 15, and two females, information that is hardly helpful in determining Griffith’s birthdate.

[2] Anderson County, South Carolina, Will Bk. 1793-8, p. 82.

[3] Era Josephine Morgan Davis, Louise S. Rourke, and Marc B. Smith, Country Cousins: Descendants of Samuel Dean (1996), p. 3. In correspondence with me in January 1997, researcher Barbara Morris of Bellaire, Texas, stated that the 3 October 1795 death of date was sent by Lucy Rebecca Dean to Louise Rourke in the 1980s. Louise Rourke, who lived in Citrus Heights, California, was the primary author of Country Cousins. Unless I’m mistaken, Lucy Rebecca Dean (1942-2023, m. John Kennemur) was a daughter of Richard Brown Dean and Joanne Richardson. Rebecca Dean Kennemur was a DAR member and active genealogist. This Dean line descends from Samuel Dean and Gwendolyn James through their son Richard P. Dean.

[4] Mountain Creek Baptist church appears to have been established in the 1790s some six miles southwest of Anderson, South Carolina. Its original minutes are held by the Special Collections and Baptist Historical Collection at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. Microfilmed and digitized copies of the church minutes are available at FamilySearch. A transcription of the Mountain Creek minutes from 1798 to 1907 by Debbie Giles Harbin was published by the Anderson County Chapter of the South Carolina Genealogical Society in 2002.

[5] Mary James does not appear as a household head on the federal census in either 1800 or 1810. The minutes of Mountain Creek Baptist church state that in 1817, she was living with her the family of her son-in-law Samuel Dean, husband of Gwendolyn Dean. The 1810 federal census shows a female aged over 45 in Samuel’s household in Pendleton District (p. 151).

[6] Frederick County, Maryland, Deed Bk. J, pp. 793-804.

[7] See Arthur G. Tracey’s patent/tract index and map locations for Carroll, Frederick, and Washington Counties at Maryland government’s Maryland History site; and Maryland Land Office Rent Rolls 1748-1775, p. 5.

[8] See Washington County, Maryland, Deed Bk. G, pp. 771-2, stating that on 13 May 1792, Griffith James sold to Robert Hoffman for ￡330 his tract called Pough, 75 acres, with wife Mary releasing dower.

[9] Washington County, Maryland, Deed Bk. E, pp. 332-3.

[10] In 1783, Griffith James is on the Washington County tax list in Lower Antietam Hundred, taxed for the Pough property, with the acreage given as 100 acres. The tax list states that this property comprised 60 acres of woods and 40 acres arable; Griffith was also taxed for four horses and eight beef cattle: see “Washington County 1783 Tax Assessment,” Western Maryland Genealogy 7,4 (October 1991), p. 171; and “Assessment of 1783, Index,” citing Lower Antietam and Sharpsburg, p. 34 (MSA S1161-11-1. 1/4/5/54) at website of Maryland State Archives.

[11] Washington County, Maryland, Deed Bk. R, pp. 181-2.

[12] Washington County, Maryland, Will Bk. A, pp. 279-280. The will was probated 24 March 1792.

[13] See “Assessment of 1783, Index,” citing Lower Antietam and Sharpsburg, p. 35 (MSA S1161-11-1. 1/4/5/54) at website of Maryland State Archives. This transcription reads the acreage as 128 acres and gives the tract name as Moses’ Delight.

[14] Geolover, “Sarah’s Surprise, Part 2,” West Virginia Family Tracks and Trails, citing Washington County, Maryland, Deed Bk.  G-7, pp. 44-46.

[15] See Arthur G. Tracey’s patent/tract index and map locations for Carroll, Frederick, and Washington Counties at Maryland government’s Maryland History site. See also John Bedell and Jason Shellenhamer, Archeological Overview, Assessment, Identification, and Evaluation Study of Newly Acquired Lands at Antietam National Battlefield, Maryland (2014, National Parks Service), pp. 36-7; Evelyn Vigdahl, “Another Flooded River Valley: The Deans of Huntingdon Co., Pennsylvania,” at Our Family History; and “The Farmsteads of Antietam – Jacob Avey Farm,” at the website of Jacob Rohrback Inn.

[16] Prince George’s County, Maryland, Deed Bk. BB, pp. 396-7.

[17] “Tax List, Antietam Hundred, Prince George’s County 1746,” transcribed by Karen Walker for Maryland Genealogical Society.

[18] “Richard Deane (1701-1788) and His Children,” at Rootsweb.

[19] See supra, n. 15.

[20] When Joseph Chapline patented Pough in November 1761 (see supra, no. 7), the tract was described as 75 acres at the head of a spring and the foot of Elk Ridge Mountain next to Keep Tryst, Boston, and Little I Thought It. Little I Thought It is the huge tract out of which the land for the Antietam ironworks was taken. On 25 July 1769, David Ross, one of Chapline’s business partners in the ironworks, had a Frederick County grant for 8,025 acres, a tract called Boston, a resurvey of Little I Thought It, part of Keep Trieste, part of Dutch Loss, and Mill Place. The survey for this land shows it bordering both Pough and Hunting the Hare. Arthur Tracey’s map for plats in Sharpsburg district shows Pough bordering Boston on the east, with Hunting the Hare bordering Boston on the north. On the Little I Thought It tract of 6,352 acres as the site for the ironworks, see Thomas J.C. Williams, A History of Washington County, Maryland, etc. (Hagerstown, 1906; reps. Baltimore: Regional Publ. Co., 1968), pp. 23-4.

[21] For photos of the Deans Purchase portion of Hunting the Hare viewed from Pough that I took in in August 2007, please see this previous posting.

[22] Washington County, Maryland, Will Bk. A, p. 168. The will spells the surname as Deane.

[23] Ibid., pp. 161-2.

[24] Richard Deane (1701-1788) and His Children.”

[25] John Bedell and Jason Shellenhamer, Archeological Overview, Assessment, Identification, and Evaluation Study of Newly Acquired Lands at Antietam National Battlefield Maryland (2014, National Parks Service), p. 36.

[26] See ibid., and Edward C. Papenfuse, A Biographical Dictionary of the Maryland Legislature, 1635-1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 210-211; Lee and Barbara Barron, The History of Sharpsburg, Maryland, Founded by Joseph Chapline 1763 (1972); Maria J. Liggett Dare, Chaplines from Maryland and Virginia (priv. publ., 1902); Thomas J.C. Williams, A History of Washington County, Maryland, etc., vol. 1 (Hagerstown, 1906; repr. Baltimore: Regional Publishing Company, 1968), pp. 23-4; Sharpsburg Historical Society, “Joseph Chapline – Founder of Sharpsburg, MD,” at the website of Sharpsburg Historical Society; and Peoples, “Richard Deane (1701-1788) and His Children.”

[27] Bedell and Shellenhamer, Archeological Overview, Assessment, Identification, and Evaluation Study of Newly Acquired Lands at Antietam National Battlefield Maryland, pp. 36-7.

[28] Dare, Chaplines from Maryland and Virginia, pp. 6, 22; Williams, History of Washington County, Maryland, pp. 23-4; and Grace L. Tracey, Pioneers of Old Monocacy (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2002), pp. 245-7. See also Find a Grave memorial page of Ruhama Williams Chapline, Mountain View cemetery, Sharpsburg, Washington County, Maryland, created by jrrmr910, maintained by Michael J. Chapline.

[29] Ibid.

[30] “Richard Deane (1701-1788) and His Children.”

[31] Bedell and Shellenhamer, Archeological Overview, Assessment, Identification, and Evaluation Study of Newly Acquired Lands at Antietam National Battlefield Maryland, pp. 41-2.

[32] Maryland Gazette (12 January 1769), p. 3, col. 1.

[33] See Find a Grave memorial page of Col Joseph Chapline, Mountain View cemetery, Sharpsburg, Washington County, Maryland, created by jrrmr910, maintained by Michael J. Chapline.

[34] Dare, Chaplines from Maryland and Virginia, p. 7.

[35] Papenfuse, Biographical Dictionary of the Maryland Legislature, 1635-1789, p. 211.

[36] See supra, n. 6.

[37] Frederick County, Maryland, Will Bk. A, p. 127.

[38] See Arthur G. Tracey’s patent/tract index and map locations for Carroll, Frederick, and Washington Counties at Maryland government’s Maryland History site.

[39] “Washington County 1783 Tax Assessment,” p. 171; and “Assessment of 1783, Index.”

[40] Washington County, Maryland, Deed Bk. G, pp. 368, 815-6.

[41] “Biography of the Leonards,” 1883 manuscript circulated as a typescript among Leonard family members and researchers, whose current provenance is not known.

[42] Frederick County, Maryland, Inventory Bk. A1, p. 459.

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