More soon....
10/30/10
When We Were Greers, Part III
by Glenn N. Holliman
James Greer Comes to Maryland
(For the Greer lineage from Scotland to the G.W. and Frances Wilson Osborne generation in Western North Carolina and Tennessee, please go to the Lineage page of this blog; scroll to the bottom of the page. The material for this posting comes from a history of Herford County, Maryland and many Joppa, Maryland historical web sites.)
Born in 1627, my generation's 8th great grandfatherimmigrated from Dumfries, Scotland in 1677, old for a crossing and a new start in life. However, he must have been a young fifty. He married teenager Ann Taylor, born 1660, according to some sources, in Baltimore County, Maryland. Ann was the daughter of large land owner parents, Arthur and Margaret Taylor. Both the Taylors and Greers had land along the Gunpowder River inJoppa, Maryland. (More work remains to discover the Taylor family line.)
In the map above of modern Maryland, one will find Joppatown, a new town built in the 1960s on the site of old Joppa.Joppatown (lower middle - left on the map) is just off the busy railway and motor vehicle corridors from Washington, D.C. to Boston. Gunpowder State Park is in light green just south ofJoppatown. In the early 1700s, a common phrase in Maryland was that 'all roads lead to Joppa'.
Joppa was located on the Gunpowder River which flowed into the Chesapeake Bay. In the early 1700s Joppa was one of America's main ports as Baltimore City had not yet been founded. Planters like the Greers and Taylors grew tobacco and loaded it on the many wharves at Joppa.
As the back country of Pennsylvania developed in the first half of the 18th century (note map above), German and Scotch-Irish farmers 'rolled' their hogsheads of tobacco to Joppa and sent their crops to England. Joppa prospered but her days of commercial glory were numbered.
The historical marker above stands on the site of St. John's Episcopal Parish, now the site of Church of the Resurrection (Episcopal). The neighborhood was a model community built in the 1960s on the site of Joppa, which by the early 1800s had become a ghost town. Once Joppa was a leading North American port until the Gunpowder River silted up and year by year the number of ocean going vessels declined (along with the fortunes of the Greer families!)
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