Patuxent River, Magruder’s Warehouse site. Photo: Margaret Yocom, 2013.
Last weekend, a friend and I made a quick trip to southern Maryland, visiting Magruder’s Ferry and Historic St. Mary’s City, site of Maryland’s first colonial capital. I’ve made a page for photos and snippets of history on Anchovie Hills & Magruder’s Tobacco Landing in the Maryland section.
Coming soon: St. Mary’s City.
Pat Magruder has been researching African American descendants in Frederick County, MD, and has found several households, some using the McGruder spelling. She posts her finds on the African American Magruder Descendants Facebook Group, so if you are interested you may want to join that group. Here are her recent posts–
More Mcgruders, Magruders found in Urbana Frederick County , Md. Rueban Mcgruder 1870 census- 25 years old black male. Boarder of Sarah Nailor also black.
Several of you have been in touch about the reorganization of web access to the ACGS archives at the University of Baltimore; but, like you, I was unable to figure out the new pathway to the yearbooks. Thanks to Lois Ann Garlitz for sending the new link.
http://ubalt.libguides.com/acgs
I have fixed the link on the blogroll but haven’t gone back through all the pages and old posts to fix all links.
And while we’re on the subject of great photos from McGruder country, let’s not forget A ghrá, Liz O’Hara’s beautiful chronicle of her cycling trip through Strathearn in October 2012. Includes Belliclone (where Alexander was born), Inchaffray Abbey, Innerpeffrey Library, the standing stones at Craigneich, and much more. http://www.eaghra.blogspot.com/
Many thanks to Hugh Rose, at Trian House, for sending photos of the farms at Meigor/Meiggar and Craigneich. I’ve given them their own page, Photos of Glen Artney, the McGruder/MacGrouther Heartland in the Scotland section. Enjoy!
For those planning to visit McGruder country in Perthshire–and for those who just wish they could–I just found this website: Highland Strathearn | Papers in a Trunk, by Peter McNaughton, a Comrie native. The history is a might romantic (repeating legends as if they were factual) , but the driving tours look wonderful. Open the Table of Contents and scroll down to the Twentieth Century, at the bottom. There you’ll find routes and a travelogue for
Many thanks to James Louis Bacon for directing me to Civil War Washington, which includes a number of Emancipation Petitions from the war years. In a quick search I found several African American Magruders/McGruders, and others who were owned by, freed by, or had been sold by Magruders / McGruders or McGregors.
Choose “Texts,” where all are searchable by key words. Be sure to search under all possible spellings. The number of documents is not tremendous, but all have been transcribed, and include personal descriptions, detail about how the petitioner acquired the services of each person, and, in some cases, family relationships. Some had been brought from to D.C. from Maryland or Virginia. Good luck in your quest!
Please see comments by Jim Magruder on the page (under Alexander) called “Alexander’s Family Tree.” Continuing that conversation, I have updated the page (under Scotland) called “McGruder / McGregor / Campbell / Drummond: Are you confused yet?” I haven’t changed the argument I make there, but I have added more details, some sources, and some clarifications.
To all who still believe, or want to believe, in the Magruder-MacGregor connection: your comments are welcome. More welcome still would be evidence to back up the legend.
Jim Magruder says in his comments that belief in the connection goes back to the 17th c. I know of no evidence before the 19th; and the 19th c. Magruders whose writing I’ve seen, or whose stories have been published, make no claim pointing farther back than the late 18th.
When I first started researching Alexander and all these related histories, a long, long McGruder-MacGregor tradition was exactly what I expected to find…but I didn’t. I read about Alexander’s life, and I read about Clan Gregor, and I couldn’t find any intersections between them. Likewise, when Don McGruther began researching in Scottish historical records, he expected to prove the McGruther-MacGregor connection: instead, he wound up proving that there is no evidence.
So, really, if you have older evidence from Maryland, I can’t wait to see it. And if you have evidence from Scotland, bring it on! We can start the hunt all over again.
I could as easily have titled this post “Do as I Say, Not as I Do.” I say to always search census records with multiple spellings, and then, if you still don’t succeed, try searching for neighbors. Apparently, I did neither of these things the first time I searched for census records for Washington Magruder and his wife May. I was also under the sway of Alice Maude Ewell’s 1931 memoir, in which she wrote that Washington and May had been free for many years before the war, and that after the war they moved to Washington.
Well, on a second try, I found them still in Prince William County, Virginia, in 1870 and 1880. So if they did “follow their children to Washington City,” as Ewell put it, they did so at a very advanced age. I found no records for them prior to 1870. In 1870, three children named McGruder lived with them, the youngest possibly a grandchild. In 1880, due to extreme fading of the ink, their name has been transcribed on Ancestry.com as “McGruden.” The only child with them at that time was seven year-old James Ward. In both years, they lived next door to Alice Maude Ewell with her parents and many siblings. Read all about it on the updated version of Washington McGruder
I have just finished a major overhaul of my page about the Mullin/Mullen family, whose members were manumitted between 1803 and 1817. The first to gain freedom were “Old Basil” Mullen and his wife Ester or Easter, who were manumitted by the will of Benjamin Hall in 1803. (Benjamin Hall was the father of Eleanor Hall [widow Clark] who married John Smith Magruder.) Basil was a carpenter, and it seems he immediately set about earning money to purchase and manumit his relatives. In 1806, he manumitted his daughter, Sarah Digges, with four of her children, having purchased them from Henry Lowe Hall (son of Benjamin and brother of Eleanor Hall Magruder). In 1810 he purchased another daughter or daughter-in-law, Dolly Mullen, with one of her children, and a son, Basil, who was also a carpenter, with his wife Suck [Sukey] and one of their children. Finally, in 1814, Basil purchased his son Joseph with wife Kate and two daughters from John Smith Magruder, and manumitted them in 1817. Read more about this hard-working and loyal family and the process of “bootstrapping” to gain freedom.
Magruder's Landing 