---

NEXT - WILLIAM SHERMAN BRADY

 

hings were getting much too close for comfort in the cottage. Even the rooms he added didn't make the house in the glade below the high moor large enough for his growing family. And now, with the older sons wanting to marry, and with not enough land to divide again, it was time for a decision.

The offer of the British crown lands in Eire's windy Ulster County was more and more attractive. Plenty of acreage and a lease of ninety-nine years! In three generations, perhaps the crown would deed the land to successful immigrants from Protestant Scotland. Yes, Shaun MacBraiahde would do it! He would take the government’s offer and move to North Ireland.

It didn't matter any longer that their ancestors came from the tiny village of Braiahde. Nobody in Ulster cared, and the Gaelic spelling was awkward enough. Most of the neighbors called them just plain 'Brady" at any rate, and it was much easier to write it that way.

(ca. 1733) The North Atlantic crossing had been a bit wild. Twice they had thought the four-masted schooner wouldn't make it, but the near-hurricane weather eased, and they rounded the south Jersey cape without too much damage to the ship. Now the passengers felt both reasonably safe and uneasy at the same time. The uneasiness came because the shores of this new and strange land promised unforeseen dangers and trials. But when the port of Philadelphia hove into sight at the mouth of the Delaware River, a general feeling of ease had come to all of their tensions.

With the tardy and slipshod offices of the customs behind them, Brady and his Scotch-Irish neighbors who had ventured with them to America moved on. They journeyed by flatboat up the Delaware to farms they had purchased along its low shores.

Their experiences during the first years, raising pole cabins, and later, low houses, were no different from those of many hundreds of the immigrant families coming to this new country in the early 1700s.

That 'crowded' feeling was upon him again! His near neighbors were increasing with the population of the Delaware valley at a new high. He was sick of the monstrous "Jersey" mosquitoes, and besides, he missed the hills. Wild game was getting scarce, with all those townspeople coming out to shoot deer and squirrels to add to their meager larders.

He had learned of the rich limestone soils of the Cumberland Valley to the southwest. Here there was larger acreage and less crowded conditions. Hugh Brady was moving again.

Their new home was near the little village of Shippensburg, and their new neighbors were the 'Pennsylvania Dutch'--misnamed Palatinate Germans who had come to the shores of America to find peace after the ravages of the Thirty Years War in their homeland.

Altho' Hugh Brady could scarcely understand their broken English, and didn't savor their Lutheran religion, he lived out the rest of his life there. Here the remainder of their nine children were Mom, and here Hugh and Hannah are buried, near Middle Spring Presbyterian Church, about seven miles from Shippensburg.

It wasn't really wanderlust. It just seemed that the Bradys couldn't stand to be crowded! More and more Germans were coming on every boat, and they preferred to be near their own people. The blue Appalachian ridges rose invitingly in the distance, and led the Brady boys to move on. They sold their farms to the "Pennsylvania Dutch" and migrated up the Susquehanna some ninety or a hundred miles to where the river made its great bend to the southwest, after a whitewater plunge out of the mountains, around the shoulder of Bald Eagle Mountain. The village was called Muncy, and is about ten miles east of the present city of Williamsport.

The men of the settlement built a fort of heavy logs, with palisades of timbers set on end against the bands of marauding Indians. They then set about the task of building their own homes. Each family had purchased enough land so that when their sons married they could divide with them and still not feel crowded.

The sons and grandsons of old Hugh Brady were wise in the ways of wilderness warfare. They had observed the Indian's methods, and had stalked the wild animals for food. This made them effective in both defending their homes and in making forays against the wandering tribes that menaced their valley from the west. During the French and Indian Wars their skill was much in demand for waging the wilderness battles against the Indians and their allies from Canada on the North.

The British and Colonials had hardly won their border warfare when the trouble began between the Colonies and the mother country. By tradition, the Scotch-Irish had little love for their English cousins, and after the battles of Lexington and Concord, the Brady men lost little time in joining the Colonials against the British. Just about the whole Brady clan began enlisting in the Colonial Army. Their father was too old to go, but the boys all felt the call to rebel against British tyranny. John (I). Samuel, Hugh (II), William and James marched to New England and were at the Battle of Boston. Young John (II) was a bit too youthful as yet, but he later volunteered, and was wounded at the Battle of Brandywine in 1777.

Three of the sons of old Hugh became officers in the Revolution. John (I) and Samuel became Captains and Hugh (II) a General. When the younger John recovered from his wounds, he again enlisted and was killed in a battle with the Indians in 1779, (now allied with the British against the Colonials).

But there was still another John Brady (III), born in 1773. One of the sons of old Hugh had named his boy for his brother. Samuel and James soon left the regular Continental army, and were commissioned to carry on the fight against the Indians on the western frontier.

James (Jim Brady to his contemporaries) had beautiful fiery red hair, which he wore very long as a kind of badge. His neighbors joshed him about it, and on one occasion, when a woman of the community washed and groomed it for him, she remarked that the savages would delight in collecting his scalp. Jim replied that it could give them "a mighty bright light to escape by." Later, the Indians did scalp him, leaving him for dead but he lived long enough to be carried home in delirium.

Jim lasted five days after his scalp was taken. Tradition says that it was Chief Bald Eagle who scalped him, but it has been proven that this old chief was either on his way down the Ohio River, or was dead himself at the hands of Jim's brother Samuel before James lost his life.

Sam Brady moved west after the Revolution, locating near New Cumberland (now Va.) in the `panhandle' between the Ohio river and the Pennsylvania border. He married a Van Landingham, and has descendants in that area, and in much of northern Ohio.

The Revolution, over after seven long and weary years, left John (III) Brady restless and eager to get away from the crowded and civilized country. He had inherited his family's aversion to near neighbors. He and his wife Jane (?) sold their nearly 4000 acres of Pennsylvania land Courthouse records, Williamsport), and with one child began a journey to the higher and less crowded mountain lands in the distant South.

After several days travel they crossed the Potomac River, and journeyed up the South Branch of that stream, by way of the Old Fields Settlement. Near the small village of Moorefield, Va. (now W.Va.), they turned left up the narrow South Fork Valley. After continuing upstream, they came to the site of abandoned Ft. Seybert. This log fort had been burned by the Indians, and most of its defenders killed. Here, on the northwest side of Shenandoah Mountain, Brady bought a tract of land from J. Fisher.*  The boundary of this land began along the top of the mountain, continued from ridgetop to ridgetop down Fishers Run to the Brandywine-Moore-field Trail. About a mile up the run from the river was a wide, shelf-like flat, large enough for a garden, orchard and a small meadow. Here John built a substantial log house.**   The area of this tract of land has ever since been known as "Brady Hollow." The main bridle trail over the Mountain wound its way down Dry River to Brock's Gap on the north fork of Shenandoah River.
____________________________________
*  J. Fisher is buried in Old Bethel Cemetery, about a mile below the Brady cabin.
** Some 70 years later, John's grandson, Isaac Brady, would tear down the old house and build a frame house on the site. (It is still standing, 1982.) There is evidence that Isaac was the son of Sarah Brady Towberman, and received the land by will from her. Her husband, a much older man, died in 1827, and is buried in the old Brady graveyard, across Fishers Run from the cabin site.


A very few years later, in the new log house, John's wife died in childbirth. Her passing seemed more than the bereaved husband could stand and after determining that the older children could care for themselves, farming the land and killing small game, Brady took the youngest child whom he had named Samuel for his illustrious uncle, and departed on horseback.

(Samuel was born January 27, 1803 - by his tombstone at Mingo, W. Va.) He began a hundred mile trek into the west, riding down to the river, and upstream to the area of Oak Flat, then turned west across South Mountain to the county seat town of Franklin. This village had only recently acquired its title, with the forming of * J. Fisher is buried in Old Bethel Cemetery, about a mile below the Brady cabin.

Pendleton County, in 1787. Stopping at the little wood frame building dignified by the name "Court House", he made and recorded a deed to his farm to his children. (These records were later burned in a court house fire.) He then went by the little general store and purchased some flour and salt pork to supplement their diet of small game, which he would shoot in the forest.

From Franklin, the trail led across steep and rocky North Mountain, and down into the narrow trough called Germany Valley (Named for the Hessians who had deserted from King George's troops and settled there.) Threading a rock-walled pass through the west wall of that vale, he came to North Fork River. Traveling down that stream, he came to the mouth of Seneca Creek, where the Seneca Indian Trail came out of the west. Here Brady gazed upon the highest ledge of rock he had ever seen, almost 1000 feet above the valley floor.

Turning left along the much better path of the old Seneca Indian Trail, they followed the stream to its junction with Long Run, then across a low pass over the Allegheny Mountain. Two days later they had traveled over four more high mountain ridges, crossing Cheat Mountain near where the village of Bemis now stands. Once over that barrier, they entered a wide valley, with much cleared farming land interspersed with virgin forests.

Coming to the village of Beverly, the oldest settlement west of the Alleghenies in what is now West Virginia, John found a general store, and a small tavern. He allowed himself the questionable privilege of a meal at the tavern, and with his small son shared a corn shuck mattress with the bedbugs for one night. At the store he learned of open lands to the south, not far from where the Mingo Indian tribe had their summer hunting camp. Another day's journey up the valley, named Tygarts for two brothers who explored it in the early 1700s, brought them to where the encroaching hills narrowed the flat lands to a mountain hollow. Turning right up a small stream called Elkwater Run, Brady soon recognized, from the many sinkholes and stony outcrops, the fertile soil of limestone ledges. Here he built a small lean-to shelter for himself and his son.

(NOTE: Up to this point the story has been a mixture of tradition, fiction, and conjecture. With the exception of the first name given, Shaun MacBraighde, all other names are authentic, the dates are fairly accurate and places reliable. The details of travel are imagined, but are based on a careful study of maps. Revolutionary historical accounts and details about the Brady family movements are based on facts. John Brady's story after his move to Ft. Seybert area is based on family tradition. It is unfortunate that the Franklin Court House records were burned. ETB )

 

John Brady's nearest neighbors were a family named Ware. They had a daughter named Susanna. After a reasonable time of grieving over the death of his first wife, who lay buried in Brady Hollow, John began to pay court to the Ware daughter. according to Marriage Record book No. 1, Page 14, in the Randolph Co. Court House, Elkins, W. Va., John Brady and Susanna(h) Ware were married on March 12, 1808, by Robert Maxwell, a local Justice.

Susanna bore John two sons and five daughters. Their names were:

Allen

Christian (m. Alkire) (Correct name is "Christina")

Ellen (m. Coburn)

Nancy (m. Elias Simon, 1831)

Ruth (m. John W, Abbott)

Sarah (m. Eliah Butcher)

William Sherman (m. Frances Jane Lemons/Lemon/Lemmon)

NEXT - WILLIAM SHERMAN BRADY

 

---