Benjamin Grayson of Bardstown

Kentucky Ancestors, and a Document Bridging Past and Present

Benjamin Grayson… was sent to Kentucky by his father to look after valuable tracts of land. He married Miss Taylor, an English Lady of birth, great beauty and accomplishments, and settled at Bardstown, Kentucky; having in some manner in the attractions and fascinations of a beautiful wife, lost all recollections of his business in Kentucky to secure the lands, which were lost to the family through his neglect.

“The Grayson Family,” ca. 1877 unpublished history pg. 24

Benjamin Grayson (1761-1833), oldest son of Mary Elizabeth Wagener (1741-1810) and Spence Monroe Grayson (1734-1798), was named for his paternal grandfather, a successful merchant in colonial Virginia.

Settlement of Kentucky

Following the French and Indian War, the lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River were ceded to the British. A series of treaties with Indian tribes followed.¹ By 1775, migration began into what was then Kentucky County, Virginia. In 1780, Kentucky County was subdivided into Jefferson, Fayette, and Lincoln Counties. In late 1785, as the population increased, Nelson County and three others were formed. Nine counties were in existence when Kentucky was admitted as the 15th State of the Union in 1792.

Land Survey, Fayette County

In March 1785, 6,212 acres in then-Fayette County were surveyed in the name of Benjamin Grayson, age 23, presumably the “valuable tracts of land” he was sent to look after. The survey location, copied from the original, was cited as “Lulbergreed and Red R.” The Red River flows west for 92 miles through rural east-central Kentucky. Lulbegrud Creek, named by Kentucky pioneers including Daniel Boone, meanders south for some 25 miles to the Red River. The junction of these watercourses is extremely isolated today, inaccessible by road perhaps 12 miles down the Red River from Clay City, and about 20 miles upriver from its mouth at the Kentucky River. Did Benjamin Grayson choose this remote site? Whether or no, it is dubious that the location could ever have been considered a “valuable tract.”

Marriage, Jefferson County

Benjamin married Caroline Malinda Taylor (ca. 1765-1830) four months later in Jefferson County (not Fayette, where his land was located). The Jefferson County Courthouse would in 1785 have been a primitive structure located on the public square within the fortified and as-yet lightly settled town of Louisville, at the falls of the Ohio River. The July 1785 marriage record says Caroline was the daughter of a William Thomas Taylor, who apparently lived nearby. An entry two months earlier lists the union of a second daughter, Margaret, to a William Davenport. As to the birth, beauty, accomplishments, and living arrangements of the Taylor family, no additional details were found.

Clerk, Nelson County

Family trees suggest all four children of Caroline and Benjamin Grayson were born about 40 miles south of Louisville in Bardstown, the nascent village which served as the seat of newly-formed Nelson County. How Benjamin made a living in or near that town for the next 20 years is unknown, but by 1806 he had been appointed Nelson County Court Clerk, a role in which he served through at least 1824. The Grayson family history relates the following anecdote:

“A gentleman with a lady apparently about 18 years of age, came to his office to obtain a marriage license. As he could not legally issue a license to a lady under 21 without the consent of her parents or guardians he proposed to put the lady upon her “voir dire.” The lady insisted that she was above 22 and would swear to nothing else. Mr. Grayson after much unavailing expostulation and persuasion finally concluded that as the major necessarily included the minor, and if the lady was over 22, she must indeed be over 21, to issue the license after administering the oath as the lady insisted. She was in point of fact under 18. Her parents prosecuted him for the penalty of $500.00 and upon the trial of the case the feminine artifice was exposed. The lady had written the figures “22” on a slip of paper and placed it between the sole of her foot and her shoe. Her conscience was thereby saved. She had sworn she was over 22 and she was literally correct.”²

Benjamin was afterward described as “a man of fine manners and scholarship.” The four children of Caroline and Benjamin each earned a measure of prominence. Their daughter married a Kentucky congressman, the son of a founder of Louisville. Their sons became, respectively, a Marine Corps officer, a Kentucky judge, and Attorney General and a leading candidate for president of the Republic of Texas.

A Surprising Document

Many marriage licenses signed by Benjamin Grayson of Bardstown have been preserved and digitized, likely including that of the couple from the preceding anecdote. One license in particular grabbed my attention, however. It authorized the 1814 union of Charles Thompson (1789-1836) and the widow Jane (Levitt) Haden (1793-1836), the 4th great-grandparents of my wife Jean’s Kentucky-born dad. Benjamin Grayson, for his part, is my 4th great-granduncle, older brother of our Georgia branch patriarch. Thus we see in an 1814 document a family connection that, solemnized by Jean’s and my marriage nearly two hundred years later, bridges past and present.

¹ Zwicker, Robert and John Stewart, “The Kentucky Migration,” https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~slhessick/genealogy/peakes04.htm accessed 12/19/2024

² “The Grayson Family” ca. 1877 unpublished manuscript pg. 25