The Parrys left England to practice their Quaker religion without ridicule. They found their home in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where they went on to become one of the region's most illustrious families. Follow two generations of the Parry family, spanning a period of one hundred years from the pre-Revolutionary War to the end of the American Civil War. They rely on their knowledge, skills, and steadfast determination to leave a lasting impact on both New Hope and Philadelphia. The family derived much of its strength from Benjamin Parry, a multifaceted entrepreneur, inventor, and community leader who dominated New Hope for more than half a century. His efforts make the town the industrial capital of Bucks County in the early nineteenth century. The story continues with Benjamin's son, Oliver, who becomes an intrepid pioneer of Philadelphia's Spring Garden District when the city was expanding its boundaries westward in the mid-nineteenth century. Gain a unique perspective of the nation's first one hundred years as it struggles to form a more perfect union by examining the hard work of just one family whose shared sense of destiny helped the nation achieve its potential. Be inspired by The Parrys of Philadelphia and New Hope.
The Parrys of Philadelphia and New Hope
A Quaker Family's Lasting Impact on Two Historic TownsBy Roy ZiegleriUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Roy Ziegler
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4502-8579-7 Contents
List of Illustrations..................................................................................xiAcknowledgments........................................................................................xiiiIntroduction...........................................................................................xvChapter 1 The Parry Heritage..........................................................................1Chapter 2 Benjamin Parry, Father of New Hope..........................................................9Chapter 3 The Old York Road Connection................................................................41Chapter 4 Oliver Parry—Pioneer of Philadelphia's Spring Garden Neighborhood.....................53Chapter 5 The Parry Legacy............................................................................93Notes..................................................................................................107Index..................................................................................................113
Chapter One
The Parry Heritage
Hope, ambition, persistence, and dedication seem to have dominated the Parry family's genetic code. Those strong character traits had an impact on their societies and cultures for centuries. The Parrys boasted a long-standing, honorable lineage beginning in Caernarvonshire, North Wales, in the United Kingdom. The Parry family sprang from those early powerful tribes or clans that existed in North Wales in the twelfth century. Their ranks include magistrates, lieutenants of the county, and a sheriff. Thomas Parry was treasurer to Queen Elizabeth I of England. Lord Richard Parry was Bishop of St. Asaph in 1604. Sir Love P. J. Parry, a member of the British Parliament, was severely wounded and lost a leg at the epic Battle of Waterloo, and Sir Edward Parry was an important Arctic explorer.
The Parry coat of arms vividly depicted them as sportsmen and warriors in ancient times. The crest was a war charger's head with a stag trippant—walking with its right leg raised—on a shield. That was a far cry from the peaceful Quakers who settled in Pennsylvania many centuries later to play their prominent roles in the early development of the two historic towns of Philadelphia and New Hope. The spark that kindled the Parry drive for sport and the battlefield early on in their history continued to drive the family's competitive quest for community leadership and industrial enterprise well into the twentieth century.
Caernarvonshire is located in the northwest corner of Wales and is one of the most beautiful and scenic places in the United Kingdom. It is a land of great castles, lofty headlands, and picturesque valleys along a surging sea. The English biographer Dr. Samuel Johnson once remarked that one of the castles in Wales could contain all of the castles he had seen in Scotland. The county was created in 1284 and was known as Caernarvonshire for nearly eight centuries until it was abolished in 1974 when it became part of the nonmetropolitan county of Gwynedd. Then in 1996 the former territory of Caernarvonshire was divided between the unitary authorities of Gwynedd and Conwy. Today it is known as Gwynedd.
Love Parry's son—Thomas Parry, born in 1680 in Caernarvonshire, North Wales—was the first generation of the Quaker family to settle in the United States. In 1700 he moved to a part of Philadelphia County that is now known as Upper Moreland Township in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Thomas Parry, the grandfather of Benjamin Parry, settled in the old Manor of Moreland, in the beautiful Huntingdon Valley. Indeed, the rolling green hills and sparkling waterways of Montgomery County must truly have given the Parry settlers a warm feeling of home when they arrived there more than three centuries ago.
The Parrys were Quakers who sought to leave England because of the increasingly apparent irreconcilable differences that had developed between them and their more traditional Englishmen. The Quakers were plain and simple people but were not tied to old customs. They would not seek religious advice from clergymen and refused to use secular titles. Their belief that God inspired them through direct communication with their inner spirit or light ran contrary to the submission to authority that the Anglican Church had demanded. Even though the Quakers were Christians and did not become members of the Church, they were required to pay taxes to the institution. It is little wonder why so many Quakers strove to leave England for the new land that promised freedom from the authority that they did not recognize and from which they were experiencing growing animosity and persecution. Even the prospect of becoming indentured servants, as many of them were for years until the cost of their transport to America was paid, did not deter them from their inexorable flight to freedom.
King Charles II gave William Penn, a Quaker, the authority to establish vast estates of land that were called "manors" in America as payment for a huge debt that the king had owed to Penn's deceased father. Of the six manors that Penn established, all but one of them were set aside for his family. The exception was the Manor of Moreland. The manor dates back to 1682 when William Penn deeded about ten thousand acres to Dr. Nicholas More for one shilling silver for every one hundred acres, annually, forever. Dr. More was president of the Free Society of Traders, an English land-trading organization, and later Penn appointed Dr. More to be the first chief justice of Pennsylvania.
The Manor of Moreland
After Dr. More's death in 1687, the land was divided and sold. The Manor of Moreland was located on a strip of land in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, separated by the boundary of Philadelphia County. Visitors to that area are almost certain to be surprised to discover a gigantic, modern shopping complex that includes scores of shops and a Bloomingdale's department store. One can easily imagine the amazement of the members of Dr. More's old Society of Traders if they could see their land today.
Thomas Parry bought about three hundred acres of the Manor of Moreland. He quickly expanded a gristmill on the land in 1731 that Sampson Davis had originally established. It later became known as Morgan's Mill after the Parry family sold it to Benjamin Morgan. Later, William F. Morgan ran an ice mill there. Interestingly, the land had once been owned by James Cooper, grandfather of the legendary author James Fenimore Cooper, whose book The Last of the Mohicans is a classic in early American literature. Thomas Parry eventually owned about one thousand acres of land. Five hundred acres were located in nearby Upper Dublin Township. He sold that land in 1726 and deeded the remaining five hundred acres to his oldest son, Thomas.
Records indicate that a typical mill village called Morganville, consisting of the mill and about ten houses, sprang up around the intersection of Parry's Road (now Davisville Road) and Mill Road (now Terwood Road). In the late twentieth century, Davisville Road became a major four-lane traffic artery connecting Montgomery and Bucks Counties. Today, the location of Parry's old mill is a bustling intersection. The Parrys could never have imagined that, 250 years later, the...
