Brooklyn’s First Settlers: The Pumphreys
Gloucestershire Carpenter was the Patriarch of a Sawmill and Farming Machine
One of the most dominant land-owning families in turn-of-the-century Anne Arundel County Maryland emerged from a colonial-era carpenter who first set foot in America in Brunswick, New Jersey before staking a claim on the shores of Curtis Creek: the ageless Walter Pumphrey. The Pumphreys are a storied family in America who helped pioneer the American mid-Atlantic and midwest.
Walter, who arrived from England with meager resources aboard a Quaker ship immediately set out to carve a life in the new world. Although his resources were slight, he hailed from a proud family heritage. The family legend is that Walter was descended from 11th Century monarch King Richard III, according to family genealogist Larry Pumphrey, who for years published the Pumphrey Press, his genealogical newsletter that printed every morsel of news available about the family’s origins and evolution. Those King Richard assertions are cloudy, especially in Charlton Kings, Gloucestershire, England, where Walter was raised. Formal birth records there weren’t kept until King Henry VIII ordered the practice in 1538, so if there was a lineage that far back to that specific line of royalty it would be difficult to prove.
Walter was born in 1655 in Gloucestershire, but didn’t appear in any formal English records for the next twenty years when he married Hannah Riddall in 1675. Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell was busy trying to populate the American colonies with farmers, but other tradesmen were also badly needed to help support them. Walter, a carpenter, was likely a natural fit. He, Hannah and their newborn daughter, also named Hannah, set sail for America on “a ship full of Quakers,” according to John H. Pumphrey, a descendant and former planner with Anne Arundel County, Maryland. They landed in 1678 in the colony of Burlington, West New Jersey, which later became New Jersey.
Walter set down roots among the Quaker “Society of Friends” in Burlington and stayed there for thirty years. He parlayed his carpentry skills into a successful business that built homes in Burlington County and, according to Pumphrey family research, he partnered with James Fenimore, whose grandson, James Fenimore Cooper, would go on to write the classic American novel Last of the Mohicans. Walter’s wife, Hannah, died in the 1680s or 1690s and he remarried to Marcy Skene. Family records are inconsistent but it appears they had a large family that included six sons, Silvanus, Lazarus, Nathaniel, Walter Jr., Ebenezer and Joseph, and a daughter, Deliverance. There was no record of what became of his daughter Hannah from his first marriage. His children with Marcy would eventually intermarry with some of the wealthier families of the region, including the Cromwells and the Boones.
Baltimore Town was an emerging economic area with lots of growth potential as the 17th Century was coming to a close. Walter and his family pulled up stakes and moved from Burlington to then-Baltimore County in 1713 when he was a lofty fifty-eight years old. Life expectancy statistics of the era pegged the average life span in the mid-1700s at 38 to 40 years, making Walter something of an ageless wonder. Baltimore Town was emerging as a popular shipping port and in need of homes to support its growing population, so that was likely the reason for the move. He bought a 150-acre parcel in South Patapsco on the shores of Curtis Creek from John Frizzell, who had started a frontier church for Puritans there. Walter and his eldest son, Silvanus, then bought 200 acres south of Curtis Creek called Saw Mill Supply Tract to supply their burgeoning lumber business. His sons Ebenezer and Nathaniel built many of the first homes in Baltimore Town using the lumber from Saw Mill and other tracts they aggressively acquired.
Walter died in 1721 when he was 66 years old. After his death the family business continued to prosper. Like many wealthy families of the day they had slaves to work their growing number of farms and sawmills in Baltimore and Anne Arundel Counties. Their property acquisitions continued unabated through the early 1900s, according to family records.
One notable tract was acquired from Jacob Dorsey, who founded the first iron furnace in the region on Curtis Creek. Walter’s family purchased a large tract of land from Dorsey west of Romney Marsh (present-day Brooklyn) in the mid-1800s. That property, adjacent to the Annapolis Road and bounded by Pumphrey’s Marsh to the north near the Patapsco River, was eventually owned by prodigious farmer and sawmiller Charles Pumphrey. It had an expansive white pine forest that was used to build bridges, boats and homes across Baltimore. After Charles’ death the property was sold to African-American families looking for a place to build homes. That community took the name Pumphrey in 1908 from the nearby Pumphrey Station stop on the Baltimore & Annapolis Short Line Railroad, and was one of the first African-American enclaves in the Baltimore area.
Walter’s eldest son, Silvanus, moved with his family to North Carolina, and some of his brother Lazarus’s children would join him there. Walter’s youngest son, Joseph, would move to West Virginia and many of the Pumphreys in Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio descend from him. The rest of his children remained in Anne Arundel County and, as a whole, were prolific landowners. Martinet maps from 1860 and 1878, which often identify properties by land owner, show a Pumphrey presence across Anne Arundel County, but not with the dominance of other major families of the era, notably the Cromwells and the Hammonds. Things changed around 1900. “By the turn of the century [the Pumphreys] held large tracts in Ferndale, Millersville and virtually the entire Mountain Road peninsula,” John H. Pumphrey told the Baltimore Sun in 1980. “When I was a kid everything east of Ritchie Highway was large Pumphrey farms, and every other farm in the Millersville area was owned by us or a relative.”
Into the early 20th Century suburban sprawl began to take over much of the region and large farms were carved up to make way for subdivisions and highways. The dominance of the Pumphrey family as farmers and sawmillers waned. But legacy of the Pumphrey family in Brooklyn, Curtis Bay, Anne Arundel County, and, indeed, parts of the nation’s midwest, branched out from carpenter from England who put down roots on the shores of Curtis Creek, by way of New Jersey.
Citations:
- Howard, M. (1923). Some Abstracts from Baltimore County Records, Maryland Historical Magazine, 17(1), pp. 16.
- Newman, H.W. (1933). Anne Arundel Gentry, p. 201, 259, 398, 445, 536, 538, 539, 552, 601, 602, 604. Baltimore, MD: Lord Baltimore Press;
- Baltimore Evening Sun. (June 15, 1978). Pumphrey clan plans reunion for fall at Lake Waterford;
- Abell, K. (September 20, 1979). Once-vast Pumphrey land vanishing, Baltimore Evening Sun;
- Wikitree.com, Douce, R. (December 6, 2014). Walter Pumphrey, Retrieved from https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Pumphrey-107;
- Low, S. (August 14, 1980). Home-Come Pumphreys tout roots, Baltimore Sun;
- Low, S. (August 14, 1980). Pumphreys gather in the shade of their large family tree, Baltimore Evening Sun;
- Lu-Lien Tan, C. (October 12, 1997). Residents united by common history Pumphrey district established by blacks after the Civil War, Baltimore Sun
- Tacyn, J. (June 28, 2017). Jack Pumphrey And Millersville Plumbing Have Deep History In Maryland, Severna Park Voice
- Ancestry.com, Gallar, P. (September 3, 2020). Walter Pumphrey, Retrieved from https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/151665488/person/322170748414/facts
