Rash's Surname Index
Notes for William GREGG
WILLIAM GREGG:
The Gregs, deeply imbued with spiritual piety, were most receptable to the teachings of William Penn when he visited Waterford, Ireland in 1678 and converted many Scottish settlers to the Society of Friends. So the Gregs became Penn Quakers.
As a devout adherent William Gregg was a member of a colonial Friend group which left southern Ireland after October 1623, possibly in the ship "Caledonia" with William Hoge. He had with him the silver-studded ivory-headed cane inherited as next to the oldest son from his father, William Greg, who left Glenarm Barony, County Antrim after May 1653. By this time the cane had become an heirloom whose story he recited many times to his children just as it was the custom for his ancestors to retain a bard whose duty was to sing the exploits of the Greg ancestral line. Charles A. Gregg, Fredericktown, Ohio, now is the proud hereditary owner of the can
The ship of Friends landed at Upland, now Chester, Pennsylvania, 1682. No doubt married relatives came with William Gregg besides his wife and four small children. Sedate and reserved in appearance they later made their way down the Delaware River to settle that part of Christiana Hundred bordering the Pennsylvania line and lying between Brandywine and Red Clay Creeks on the west side of Brandywine Creek near the present site of Centerville. The surface is elevated and broken with generally fertile soil. In this northern part was one of William Penn's principal manors, Rockland Manor, in which William Gregg was granted 200 acres in 1683 and a warrant for 400 acres on January 26, 1684. (Conrad's History of Delaware. Vol. 2, p. 462). Here he built a log cabin on a location which he called Strand Millas. It adjoined the lands of Mattias Defosse on Squirrel Creek, who died May 1708, had wife Sarah. Other neighbors were Henry Hollingsworth, Thomas Hollingsworth, Thomas Woolasten, George Hog, William Hoge, John Hussy, William Dixon.
William Gregg's family of a wife, a young daughter, and three young sons was well cared for and also entertained by his stories of the clan Greg's fortunes and misfortunes. These stories were never forgotten by his children who passed them on to the next generation. He was most congenial in his home.
The earliest monthly meetings of the Quakers on west side of the Delaware River was organized at New Castle about 1681 and held in a private house until 1687 when the meetings were changed to a log meeting house on the grounds given by Valentine Hollingsworth.
In 1686 William Gregg gave 5 shillings "toward a public stock for ye relief of ye friends in necessity" with Cornelius Empson, Edward Blake. Valentine Hollingsworth, John Richardson, Robert Turner, and Thomsa Snelling. He was one of the Friends who in the winter of 1687 was granted permission to hold
their meetings in the winter months on Christiana side instead of going to the Brandywine Hundred Meeting at Neward "by reason of the dangerousness of ye ford" they must cross. When about forty-five he died and was buried on his own plantation at his home of Strand Millas on July 1, 1687.
His four children were successfully reared by the mother, relatives, and friends, as the oldest child John was only nineteen when the father died. The children lived in their own home Strand Millas and kept possession of their father's land.
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