Pages 201-204: Chapter III--Early History as Gleaned From Himself

He was born at Mount Vernon, Virginia, January 6, 1764. He was but a mere boy when the war began, and his father being in the army, he, the oldest of eight children, remained at home to help support his family. He sadi that he and his brother would go the forest and fields to catch rabbins, and that was all the meat they had. At one time he worked a whole week at plowing for two bushels and one-half of corn. His father fell at White Plains, and he, then only about 16 years of age, promptly volunteered, took up the musket that had fallen from his father's hands, and carried it until the war was over. He was in a skirmish at Williamsburg, and was one the one hundred and fifty men on that dangerous, but successful expedition of Major Ramsay. He was also at Yorktown at the final surrender, which event occured in his eighteenth year. He was mustered out at Richmond, Virginia, at the close of the war, and returned to field labor near Mount Vernon, his first day's work after his muster out being performed for General Washington at Mount Vernon. Mr. Gray married twice in Virginia and once in Ohio. He survived all his children, except one daughter, who has since died over eighty years of age, and with whom he resided in Noble County, Ohio, at the time of his death. Let it be borne in mind that John Gray was not illiterate. His parents were poor, and lived with much difficulty by their daily labor, but they took pains to give John the best education at their comand. John could read and write when he went into the army. He said about the greatest pleasure he ahd while in the army was in writing home to his poor old widowed mother. He told me that he went to school two winters to Joseph Ross, a gentleman who kept school at his own house, about four miles from where John lived. He used to be up bright and early, chop wood, kindle the fire, feed the stock, and be off on his four mile of a morning walk to school, before seven o'clock in the winter time. Little did he or his teacher think that these humble studies that he then pursued were to be useful to him for nigh well a hundred years of after life. Certain it is, that, for the last ninety years of John Gray's life, the little reading and writing that he learned of Joseph Ross were John Gray's greatest comforts. He read but few books, but with great care, and remembered almost every word. The Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, the Plain Man's Pathway, and the Constitution, he could repeat off the book, almost word for word. For more that three-quarters of a century, after the close of the Revolution, John Gray lived a life of quiet and retirement upon or near the banks of the beautiful Ohio. He left his native Virginia, the banks of the Potomac, the home of his childhood, in 1795, the state for which he had done battle service in no less a cause than the independence of that state. He left her because she denied and confused the right of suffrage to those of her son's who had not "caught Dame Fortune's golden smile" and made his home where --

He wended his way over the mountains and rivers, through the then almost unexplored wilderness of what is now West Virginia, and coming out on the borders of western civilization at Morgantown, Va., he constructed a rude craft, on which he descended the Monongahela to its rude junction with the Allegheny, and thence down the Ohio to the flats of Grave Creek. Here he made his first settlement, and entered with ardor unpon the duties of frontier life, having for his companions in toil, privation, hardship, and frontier warfare such men as the Poes, Wetzel, Hughs, Wheeler, Boone, Kenton, and others, who have made their names conspicuous in the annals of the west. Time rolled on, and the beautiful region "north-west of the river Ohio" was, in the year 1802, erected into a state, and John Gray, after changing his residence once or twice, settled down on the waters of Duck creek, a tributary of the Ohio, within the limits of Noble (then Washington) county, in the new free, and prosperous state of Ohio. Here, for nearly three-score years and ten, he lived and labored. He lvied to see the almost unbroken wilderness "blossom as the rose," and Ohio proudly take the position, the third state in the American Union. He lvied to see men born upon the soil grown up to take the highest positions, military, civil and ecclesiastic, in the land -- men of whom any state or nation might well be proud. He lived to witness the most wonderful achievements of science of an age or any nation in his own country. He saw the majestic steam-boat take the place of the frail canoe upon her lakes and rivers. He saw the giant locomotive drag the ponderous train over the highest peaks of the Alleghenies, through tunnels under mountains, over rives and plains, through forests and praries, and to the very summit of the Rocky mountains. He lived to see the invention of the Franklin and Morse distance time in the transmission of intelligence from London to New York, and, crossing the continent to San Francisco, return the answer to New York just as old father Time reached the shores of America.