Gabriel McCauley Lea was born at Pleasant Grove, Orange (now Alamance) Co., NC and died in Washington, DC. He married Phebe Smith Holmes at the home of her father's half-sister Mary Smith (Mrs. Nathaniel) Weed in Darien, CT, two months after the sudden, early death of Phebe's mother.
The couple must have met while Gabriel was working in New York City for merchant James Weed. After the wedding the Leas returned to Pleasant Grove, where Gabriel and his brother James ran a store (see notes under James) until 1860. On September 5 of that year Gabriel bought another store from A. G. McCray a few miles away, and his family moved to the adjoining farm. Apparently he ran that store throughout the Civil War. It couldn't have been a very lucrative undertaking, even though Alamance County was far from the theaters of war: there wasn't much money around for people to buy goods with, and the available goods themselves weren't abundant.
Document LFDC-40 in my Lea file is a typescript copy of a short summary of Gabriel's immediate family history, written by himself on June 10, 1897. He wrote (in the third person), "…after leaving school was a merchant at Pleasant Grove for six years. In 1851 went to New York and was employed as a salesman by James M. Weed, hardware merchant at 179 Pearl Street, for three years. In 1854 returned to Pleasant Grove, there engaged in merchandising with his brother James six years, then moved to McCrays seven miles west of Pleasant Grove, there engaged in merchandising until the breaking out of the Civil War in 1861. After the war, in 1865 he moved to Burlington, NC where he was connected with the North Carolina RR Co. as Treasurer until 1873 with the exception of two years…"
Note that his whereabouts during the Civil War are not accounted for above. Later in the same memorandum he wrote, "After marriage lived four years at Pleasant Grove, six years at McCrays, eight years at Burlington [then called Company Shops], one year at Bergen Point, NJ, nine years at Elizabeth, NJ, ten years at Brooklyn, NY, three years at Elizabeth, NJ, and in Feb. 1896 moved to Washington, DC." He lived at 1506 Kenesaw Avenue NW in Washington when he wrote this account. The two chronologies of his moves don't match perfectly, but they're close. From the second version and other sources, it appears that his home throughout the Civil War was at McCrays. He was then in Graham Twp. (Burlington) 1866-73; Bergen Point, NJ 1873-4; Elizabeth 1874-83; Brooklyn 1883-93 (he was "of Brooklyn, NY" when he sold 50 acres in Pleasant Grove to his brother James on 9/14/1883, and still living there when his father-in-law died in 1886), Elizabeth again 1893-96, and in DC from early 1896 until his death.
Gabriel M. Lea and family appeared in the 1880 census at 1025 Elizabeth Avenue, Elizabeth, NJ (Vol. 21, E.D. 169, Sheet 12, Line 39). Phoebe's widowed aunt Mary Weed, 84, b. NY, was living with Gabriel, Phoebe, Minerva, Charles M., and Frederick A. Lea. Gabriel's occupation was given as "retired merchant."
McCray, aka McCray's Store, is a rural crossroad about nine miles SW of the NE corner of Alamance County, six miles from the Lea farm in Pleasant Grove, 20 crow-flight miles SSW of Leasburg, and six miles NNE of Burlington center. There is still a little general store there, but the building isn't old enough to have existed in Gabriel's time. I walked in and introduced myself to five or six older ladies gossiping there over coffee, and explained that my great-great grandfather had kept a store there through the Civil War. That didn't elicit as much interest as I had hoped for, but when I told them his name, one of them thought she might have heard it before and mentioned that there are still some Leas in the vicinity. There were several dozen Leas within 20 miles as much as 200 years ago, so it was no surprise to me that a few of their descendants should have stuck around; they could be descendants of Gabriel's brother James, or of more distant relatives from up in Caswell County. None of the ladies seemed to have more than a perfunctory acquaintance with the area's history, and that did surprise me quite a bit. I'm used to elderly ladies in New England, many of whom know LOTS of local history (some of which actually happened!)
As a Southerner from slave-owning, tobacco-growing stock who had married a Michigan Yankee (and vice versa), Gabriel and Phoebe must have found themselves in some peculiar, probably uncomfortable situations during the Civil War. I wonder how they coped with that.
Regarding Gabriel's loyalties during the war, early Lea family researcher/raconteur Frances Powell Otken claimed that he had served as "Lt. Col. War 1861-5," but I don't believe her. At one time I thought perhaps he had served with the 6th North Carolina Confederate Infantry, in which his brother and business partner James W. Lea was a captain and major for a year before being discharged with a disabling hand wound. But the National Archives has no Confederate military record for any Gabriel Lea: I requested a search in 1995. A huge, ten-volume list of North Carolina CW troops (which I consulted at the NC State Library and the Burlington public library) doesn't list him either. If he really had been a senior officer in the Sixth or any other regiment, he would certainly have shown up: there were only a handful of men who held the rank of Lt. Colonel or Colonel in that regiment during the war, and Gabriel wasn't one of them. Nor did he mention anything about military service in his own accounts of his life. Yet in a deed from the NCRR to another of its employees, the lot conveyed was described in part as "adjoining Col. Lea's lot." So apparently someone thought in 1871 that Gabriel had been a senior officer, unless "Colonel" at that time, in that region, was a purely honorary title having nothing to do with a military rank of record. I've increasingly gotten the impression from reading Southern documents and genealogies that it has always been considered barbaric down South to seek proof of anyone's claim to military rank, no matter how improbable the claim may be. This tacit code of honor seems to require that hearers assume all such claims to be true, but it seems not to require that those making the claims tell the truth. Thus we have "Captain" Gabriel Lea, Gabriel M.'s grandfather, though there's no shred of evidence that he ever performed military service; his father James, who is laughably credited by the DAR with five years of Revolutionary War service (as a private) despite the fact that he was over 60 years old for more than half of that time and there were three or four much younger James Leas then living in his neighborhood who may well have served; and "Colonel" Gabriel M. Lea, who likewise left no military record anywhere. Finally, G. M. Lea's son Edwin was called "my old friend Capt. Lea" in a 1929 letter from Virginia SAR Registrar William MacFarlane Jones to Edwin's widow Sarah -- but without proof, I wouldn't bet two cents on Edwin's ever having done military service.
Gabriel M. and Phoebe Holmes Lea had four children in 1897: Edwin Holmes Lea (who later wrote that he had been born "in the old Gabriel B. Lea homestead at Pleasant Grove"); Minerva Carlisle Lea, born there just before the family's move to McCrays; Charles McCauley Lea, born at McCrays (he m. Hattie L. Moore at Richmond, VA, and both were buried there in a plot that he and Edwin bought to bury their parents in); and Frederick Alfred Lea, born in Burlington. Fred moved to California, reportedly after his father's death in 1908, and did not return to the East.
In the 1870 federal census (Alamance 068 Graham Twp.) Gabriel, 45, and "Peggie" [sic] Lea, 32, appeared with children Edwin, 13, Minnie, 10, Charles, 5, Frederick, 1/12, and Josephine, 12 — listed in that order. I don't know who Josephine was: an orphaned or visiting cousin? A sister who died young? (But if the latter, why was she not buried with or near any other members of the family? Why didn't she show up in the 1860 census, when she was 2 years old? And why didn't Gabriel, Edwin, or Minerva ever mention her in any of their writings?) Also in the household were black servants Pattie Ligon, 25, and Lucy Harbor, 30, and Lucy's son Thomas, 2. Gabriel was listed as "Treasurer, NCRR", the position he held from 1866 until 1873, except parts of 1867 and 1868. His personal property was valued at $2000 (equal to his railroad salary for the census year), but he owned no real estate. He was then living in a house built and owned by the railroad, and apparently he had sold all the real estate he had owned before — perhaps only the 138-acre McCray's Store farm. I haven't had a chance to investigate his holdings in the land records. The next year (1871) the NCRR — which up to then had been so tight with its property that even the company's president wasn't allowed to buy a houselot from it — relaxed that policy under heavy financial strain and began selling lots in Company Shops at auction. Gabriel paid $250 for a prime 2.5-acre lot on the north side of East Davis Street, between Spring Street and Lexington Avenue. The site is now a municipal parking lot beside the Burlington Public Library.
Graham Township in 1870 included Company Shops, which afterward became Burlington. So there is no disparity between the census locality and Gabriel's 1897 notation that he was in Burlington in 1870.
Gabriel is reported to have "participated in several commercial ventures while employed by the railroad." Among these was a store the railroad authorized him to build and operate at Company Shops in 1869. In the same year Phebe Lea was the secretary for an association of leading citizens' wives who solicited and received a donation from the railroad in support of the new Union Church, then under construction.
The most important cause of the railroad's financial problems about this time was the well-publicized intent of a larger and better-capitalized road to inaugurate a new service from Richmond to Atlanta. Part of this route would directly compete with the NCRR's, unless the lines joined forces. So on January 11, 1871 the NCRR's directors leased its track, rolling stock and buildings to the Richmond & Danville RR for 30 years. The decisionmaking control over its operations gradually shifted from Burlington to Richmond, leaving a few upper-level NCRR employees out of work and others, including Gabriel Lea, employed but "out of the loop." Turning down the R&DRR's offer of a similar job in Richmond, he resigned from the company on Jan. 31, 1873, sold his home later in the year, and on May 5 gave a power of attorney to his lawyer cousin John W. McCauley to dispose of the share of his father's real estate he had recently inherited. Then he moved north to NJ. What business he pursued after that, I don't know, but I presume it drew on his three decades of mercantile experience, and he may have stayed involved with railroading in some capacity.
!n 1880 the census showed Gabriel, 55, retired merchant, living at 1085 Elizabeth Avenue, Elizabeth, NJ with wife Phoebe S., 47; dau. Minerva C., 20; sons Charles M., 15 and Frederick A., 10; "aunt-in-law" Mary Weed, 84; and servant Hanah Broderick, 22. The three children had all been born in NC.
The census of 1900 found Gabriel and Phebe at 1506 Kenesaw Avenue in Washington, DC (E.D. 12, sheet 18). Living with them was servant Bessie E. Shanks, 23, born in DC.
The couple must have met while Gabriel was working in New York City for merchant James Weed. After the wedding the Leas returned to Pleasant Grove, where Gabriel and his brother James ran a store (see notes under James) until 1860. On September 5 of that year Gabriel bought another store from A. G. McCray a few miles away, and his family moved to the adjoining farm. Apparently he ran that store throughout the Civil War. It couldn't have been a very lucrative undertaking, even though Alamance County was far from the theaters of war: there wasn't much money around for people to buy goods with, and the available goods themselves weren't abundant.
Document LFDC-40 in my Lea file is a typescript copy of a short summary of Gabriel's immediate family history, written by himself on June 10, 1897. He wrote (in the third person), "…after leaving school was a merchant at Pleasant Grove for six years. In 1851 went to New York and was employed as a salesman by James M. Weed, hardware merchant at 179 Pearl Street, for three years. In 1854 returned to Pleasant Grove, there engaged in merchandising with his brother James six years, then moved to McCrays seven miles west of Pleasant Grove, there engaged in merchandising until the breaking out of the Civil War in 1861. After the war, in 1865 he moved to Burlington, NC where he was connected with the North Carolina RR Co. as Treasurer until 1873 with the exception of two years…"
Note that his whereabouts during the Civil War are not accounted for above. Later in the same memorandum he wrote, "After marriage lived four years at Pleasant Grove, six years at McCrays, eight years at Burlington [then called Company Shops], one year at Bergen Point, NJ, nine years at Elizabeth, NJ, ten years at Brooklyn, NY, three years at Elizabeth, NJ, and in Feb. 1896 moved to Washington, DC." He lived at 1506 Kenesaw Avenue NW in Washington when he wrote this account. The two chronologies of his moves don't match perfectly, but they're close. From the second version and other sources, it appears that his home throughout the Civil War was at McCrays. He was then in Graham Twp. (Burlington) 1866-73; Bergen Point, NJ 1873-4; Elizabeth 1874-83; Brooklyn 1883-93 (he was "of Brooklyn, NY" when he sold 50 acres in Pleasant Grove to his brother James on 9/14/1883, and still living there when his father-in-law died in 1886), Elizabeth again 1893-96, and in DC from early 1896 until his death.
Gabriel M. Lea and family appeared in the 1880 census at 1025 Elizabeth Avenue, Elizabeth, NJ (Vol. 21, E.D. 169, Sheet 12, Line 39). Phoebe's widowed aunt Mary Weed, 84, b. NY, was living with Gabriel, Phoebe, Minerva, Charles M., and Frederick A. Lea. Gabriel's occupation was given as "retired merchant."
McCray, aka McCray's Store, is a rural crossroad about nine miles SW of the NE corner of Alamance County, six miles from the Lea farm in Pleasant Grove, 20 crow-flight miles SSW of Leasburg, and six miles NNE of Burlington center. There is still a little general store there, but the building isn't old enough to have existed in Gabriel's time. I walked in and introduced myself to five or six older ladies gossiping there over coffee, and explained that my great-great grandfather had kept a store there through the Civil War. That didn't elicit as much interest as I had hoped for, but when I told them his name, one of them thought she might have heard it before and mentioned that there are still some Leas in the vicinity. There were several dozen Leas within 20 miles as much as 200 years ago, so it was no surprise to me that a few of their descendants should have stuck around; they could be descendants of Gabriel's brother James, or of more distant relatives from up in Caswell County. None of the ladies seemed to have more than a perfunctory acquaintance with the area's history, and that did surprise me quite a bit. I'm used to elderly ladies in New England, many of whom know LOTS of local history (some of which actually happened!)
As a Southerner from slave-owning, tobacco-growing stock who had married a Michigan Yankee (and vice versa), Gabriel and Phoebe must have found themselves in some peculiar, probably uncomfortable situations during the Civil War. I wonder how they coped with that.
Regarding Gabriel's loyalties during the war, early Lea family researcher/raconteur Frances Powell Otken claimed that he had served as "Lt. Col. War 1861-5," but I don't believe her. At one time I thought perhaps he had served with the 6th North Carolina Confederate Infantry, in which his brother and business partner James W. Lea was a captain and major for a year before being discharged with a disabling hand wound. But the National Archives has no Confederate military record for any Gabriel Lea: I requested a search in 1995. A huge, ten-volume list of North Carolina CW troops (which I consulted at the NC State Library and the Burlington public library) doesn't list him either. If he really had been a senior officer in the Sixth or any other regiment, he would certainly have shown up: there were only a handful of men who held the rank of Lt. Colonel or Colonel in that regiment during the war, and Gabriel wasn't one of them. Nor did he mention anything about military service in his own accounts of his life. Yet in a deed from the NCRR to another of its employees, the lot conveyed was described in part as "adjoining Col. Lea's lot." So apparently someone thought in 1871 that Gabriel had been a senior officer, unless "Colonel" at that time, in that region, was a purely honorary title having nothing to do with a military rank of record. I've increasingly gotten the impression from reading Southern documents and genealogies that it has always been considered barbaric down South to seek proof of anyone's claim to military rank, no matter how improbable the claim may be. This tacit code of honor seems to require that hearers assume all such claims to be true, but it seems not to require that those making the claims tell the truth. Thus we have "Captain" Gabriel Lea, Gabriel M.'s grandfather, though there's no shred of evidence that he ever performed military service; his father James, who is laughably credited by the DAR with five years of Revolutionary War service (as a private) despite the fact that he was over 60 years old for more than half of that time and there were three or four much younger James Leas then living in his neighborhood who may well have served; and "Colonel" Gabriel M. Lea, who likewise left no military record anywhere. Finally, G. M. Lea's son Edwin was called "my old friend Capt. Lea" in a 1929 letter from Virginia SAR Registrar William MacFarlane Jones to Edwin's widow Sarah -- but without proof, I wouldn't bet two cents on Edwin's ever having done military service.
Gabriel M. and Phoebe Holmes Lea had four children in 1897: Edwin Holmes Lea (who later wrote that he had been born "in the old Gabriel B. Lea homestead at Pleasant Grove"); Minerva Carlisle Lea, born there just before the family's move to McCrays; Charles McCauley Lea, born at McCrays (he m. Hattie L. Moore at Richmond, VA, and both were buried there in a plot that he and Edwin bought to bury their parents in); and Frederick Alfred Lea, born in Burlington. Fred moved to California, reportedly after his father's death in 1908, and did not return to the East.
In the 1870 federal census (Alamance 068 Graham Twp.) Gabriel, 45, and "Peggie" [sic] Lea, 32, appeared with children Edwin, 13, Minnie, 10, Charles, 5, Frederick, 1/12, and Josephine, 12 — listed in that order. I don't know who Josephine was: an orphaned or visiting cousin? A sister who died young? (But if the latter, why was she not buried with or near any other members of the family? Why didn't she show up in the 1860 census, when she was 2 years old? And why didn't Gabriel, Edwin, or Minerva ever mention her in any of their writings?) Also in the household were black servants Pattie Ligon, 25, and Lucy Harbor, 30, and Lucy's son Thomas, 2. Gabriel was listed as "Treasurer, NCRR", the position he held from 1866 until 1873, except parts of 1867 and 1868. His personal property was valued at $2000 (equal to his railroad salary for the census year), but he owned no real estate. He was then living in a house built and owned by the railroad, and apparently he had sold all the real estate he had owned before — perhaps only the 138-acre McCray's Store farm. I haven't had a chance to investigate his holdings in the land records. The next year (1871) the NCRR — which up to then had been so tight with its property that even the company's president wasn't allowed to buy a houselot from it — relaxed that policy under heavy financial strain and began selling lots in Company Shops at auction. Gabriel paid $250 for a prime 2.5-acre lot on the north side of East Davis Street, between Spring Street and Lexington Avenue. The site is now a municipal parking lot beside the Burlington Public Library.
Graham Township in 1870 included Company Shops, which afterward became Burlington. So there is no disparity between the census locality and Gabriel's 1897 notation that he was in Burlington in 1870.
Gabriel is reported to have "participated in several commercial ventures while employed by the railroad." Among these was a store the railroad authorized him to build and operate at Company Shops in 1869. In the same year Phebe Lea was the secretary for an association of leading citizens' wives who solicited and received a donation from the railroad in support of the new Union Church, then under construction.
The most important cause of the railroad's financial problems about this time was the well-publicized intent of a larger and better-capitalized road to inaugurate a new service from Richmond to Atlanta. Part of this route would directly compete with the NCRR's, unless the lines joined forces. So on January 11, 1871 the NCRR's directors leased its track, rolling stock and buildings to the Richmond & Danville RR for 30 years. The decisionmaking control over its operations gradually shifted from Burlington to Richmond, leaving a few upper-level NCRR employees out of work and others, including Gabriel Lea, employed but "out of the loop." Turning down the R&DRR's offer of a similar job in Richmond, he resigned from the company on Jan. 31, 1873, sold his home later in the year, and on May 5 gave a power of attorney to his lawyer cousin John W. McCauley to dispose of the share of his father's real estate he had recently inherited. Then he moved north to NJ. What business he pursued after that, I don't know, but I presume it drew on his three decades of mercantile experience, and he may have stayed involved with railroading in some capacity.
!n 1880 the census showed Gabriel, 55, retired merchant, living at 1085 Elizabeth Avenue, Elizabeth, NJ with wife Phoebe S., 47; dau. Minerva C., 20; sons Charles M., 15 and Frederick A., 10; "aunt-in-law" Mary Weed, 84; and servant Hanah Broderick, 22. The three children had all been born in NC.
The census of 1900 found Gabriel and Phebe at 1506 Kenesaw Avenue in Washington, DC (E.D. 12, sheet 18). Living with them was servant Bessie E. Shanks, 23, born in DC.
Gabriel McCauley Lea was born at Pleasant Grove, Orange (now Alamance) Co., NC and died in Washington, DC. He married Phebe Smith Holmes at the home of her father's half-sister Mary Smith (Mrs. Nathaniel) Weed in Darien, CT, two months after the sudden, early death of Phebe's mother.
The couple must have met while Gabriel was working in New York City for merchant James Weed. After the wedding the Leas returned to Pleasant Grove, where Gabriel and his brother James ran a store (see notes under James) until 1860. On September 5 of that year Gabriel bought another store from A. G. McCray a few miles away, and his family moved to the adjoining farm. Apparently he ran that store throughout the Civil War. It couldn't have been a very lucrative undertaking, even though Alamance County was far from the theaters of war: there wasn't much money around for people to buy goods with, and the available goods themselves weren't abundant.
Document LFDC-40 in my Lea file is a typescript copy of a short summary of Gabriel's immediate family history, written by himself on June 10, 1897. He wrote (in the third person), "…after leaving school was a merchant at Pleasant Grove for six years. In 1851 went to New York and was employed as a salesman by James M. Weed, hardware merchant at 179 Pearl Street, for three years. In 1854 returned to Pleasant Grove, there engaged in merchandising with his brother James six years, then moved to McCrays seven miles west of Pleasant Grove, there engaged in merchandising until the breaking out of the Civil War in 1861. After the war, in 1865 he moved to Burlington, NC where he was connected with the North Carolina RR Co. as Treasurer until 1873 with the exception of two years…"
Note that his whereabouts during the Civil War are not accounted for above. Later in the same memorandum he wrote, "After marriage lived four years at Pleasant Grove, six years at McCrays, eight years at Burlington [then called Company Shops], one year at Bergen Point, NJ, nine years at Elizabeth, NJ, ten years at Brooklyn, NY, three years at Elizabeth, NJ, and in Feb. 1896 moved to Washington, DC." He lived at 1506 Kenesaw Avenue NW in Washington when he wrote this account. The two chronologies of his moves don't match perfectly, but they're close. From the second version and other sources, it appears that his home throughout the Civil War was at McCrays. He was then in Graham Twp. (Burlington) 1866-73; Bergen Point, NJ 1873-4; Elizabeth 1874-83; Brooklyn 1883-93 (he was "of Brooklyn, NY" when he sold 50 acres in Pleasant Grove to his brother James on 9/14/1883, and still living there when his father-in-law died in 1886), Elizabeth again 1893-96, and in DC from early 1896 until his death.
Gabriel M. Lea and family appeared in the 1880 census at 1025 Elizabeth Avenue, Elizabeth, NJ (Vol. 21, E.D. 169, Sheet 12, Line 39). Phoebe's widowed aunt Mary Weed, 84, b. NY, was living with Gabriel, Phoebe, Minerva, Charles M., and Frederick A. Lea. Gabriel's occupation was given as "retired merchant."
McCray, aka McCray's Store, is a rural crossroad about nine miles SW of the NE corner of Alamance County, six miles from the Lea farm in Pleasant Grove, 20 crow-flight miles SSW of Leasburg, and six miles NNE of Burlington center. There is still a little general store there, but the building isn't old enough to have existed in Gabriel's time. I walked in and introduced myself to five or six older ladies gossiping there over coffee, and explained that my great-great grandfather had kept a store there through the Civil War. That didn't elicit as much interest as I had hoped for, but when I told them his name, one of them thought she might have heard it before and mentioned that there are still some Leas in the vicinity. There were several dozen Leas within 20 miles as much as 200 years ago, so it was no surprise to me that a few of their descendants should have stuck around; they could be descendants of Gabriel's brother James, or of more distant relatives from up in Caswell County. None of the ladies seemed to have more than a perfunctory acquaintance with the area's history, and that did surprise me quite a bit. I'm used to elderly ladies in New England, many of whom know LOTS of local history (some of which actually happened!)
As a Southerner from slave-owning, tobacco-growing stock who had married a Michigan Yankee (and vice versa), Gabriel and Phoebe must have found themselves in some peculiar, probably uncomfortable situations during the Civil War. I wonder how they coped with that.
Regarding Gabriel's loyalties during the war, early Lea family researcher/raconteur Frances Powell Otken claimed that he had served as "Lt. Col. War 1861-5," but I don't believe her. At one time I thought perhaps he had served with the 6th North Carolina Confederate Infantry, in which his brother and business partner James W. Lea was a captain and major for a year before being discharged with a disabling hand wound. But the National Archives has no Confederate military record for any Gabriel Lea: I requested a search in 1995. A huge, ten-volume list of North Carolina CW troops (which I consulted at the NC State Library and the Burlington public library) doesn't list him either. If he really had been a senior officer in the Sixth or any other regiment, he would certainly have shown up: there were only a handful of men who held the rank of Lt. Colonel or Colonel in that regiment during the war, and Gabriel wasn't one of them. Nor did he mention anything about military service in his own accounts of his life. Yet in a deed from the NCRR to another of its employees, the lot conveyed was described in part as "adjoining Col. Lea's lot." So apparently someone thought in 1871 that Gabriel had been a senior officer, unless "Colonel" at that time, in that region, was a purely honorary title having nothing to do with a military rank of record. I've increasingly gotten the impression from reading Southern documents and genealogies that it has always been considered barbaric down South to seek proof of anyone's claim to military rank, no matter how improbable the claim may be. This tacit code of honor seems to require that hearers assume all such claims to be true, but it seems not to require that those making the claims tell the truth. Thus we have "Captain" Gabriel Lea, Gabriel M.'s grandfather, though there's no shred of evidence that he ever performed military service; his father James, who is laughably credited by the DAR with five years of Revolutionary War service (as a private) despite the fact that he was over 60 years old for more than half of that time and there were three or four much younger James Leas then living in his neighborhood who may well have served; and "Colonel" Gabriel M. Lea, who likewise left no military record anywhere. Finally, G. M. Lea's son Edwin was called "my old friend Capt. Lea" in a 1929 letter from Virginia SAR Registrar William MacFarlane Jones to Edwin's widow Sarah -- but without proof, I wouldn't bet two cents on Edwin's ever having done military service.
Gabriel M. and Phoebe Holmes Lea had four children in 1897: Edwin Holmes Lea (who later wrote that he had been born "in the old Gabriel B. Lea homestead at Pleasant Grove"); Minerva Carlisle Lea, born there just before the family's move to McCrays; Charles McCauley Lea, born at McCrays (he m. Hattie L. Moore at Richmond, VA, and both were buried there in a plot that he and Edwin bought to bury their parents in); and Frederick Alfred Lea, born in Burlington. Fred moved to California, reportedly after his father's death in 1908, and did not return to the East.
In the 1870 federal census (Alamance 068 Graham Twp.) Gabriel, 45, and "Peggie" [sic] Lea, 32, appeared with children Edwin, 13, Minnie, 10, Charles, 5, Frederick, 1/12, and Josephine, 12 — listed in that order. I don't know who Josephine was: an orphaned or visiting cousin? A sister who died young? (But if the latter, why was she not buried with or near any other members of the family? Why didn't she show up in the 1860 census, when she was 2 years old? And why didn't Gabriel, Edwin, or Minerva ever mention her in any of their writings?) Also in the household were black servants Pattie Ligon, 25, and Lucy Harbor, 30, and Lucy's son Thomas, 2. Gabriel was listed as "Treasurer, NCRR", the position he held from 1866 until 1873, except parts of 1867 and 1868. His personal property was valued at $2000 (equal to his railroad salary for the census year), but he owned no real estate. He was then living in a house built and owned by the railroad, and apparently he had sold all the real estate he had owned before — perhaps only the 138-acre McCray's Store farm. I haven't had a chance to investigate his holdings in the land records. The next year (1871) the NCRR — which up to then had been so tight with its property that even the company's president wasn't allowed to buy a houselot from it — relaxed that policy under heavy financial strain and began selling lots in Company Shops at auction. Gabriel paid $250 for a prime 2.5-acre lot on the north side of East Davis Street, between Spring Street and Lexington Avenue. The site is now a municipal parking lot beside the Burlington Public Library.
Graham Township in 1870 included Company Shops, which afterward became Burlington. So there is no disparity between the census locality and Gabriel's 1897 notation that he was in Burlington in 1870.
Gabriel is reported to have "participated in several commercial ventures while employed by the railroad." Among these was a store the railroad authorized him to build and operate at Company Shops in 1869. In the same year Phebe Lea was the secretary for an association of leading citizens' wives who solicited and received a donation from the railroad in support of the new Union Church, then under construction.
The most important cause of the railroad's financial problems about this time was the well-publicized intent of a larger and better-capitalized road to inaugurate a new service from Richmond to Atlanta. Part of this route would directly compete with the NCRR's, unless the lines joined forces. So on January 11, 1871 the NCRR's directors leased its track, rolling stock and buildings to the Richmond & Danville RR for 30 years. The decisionmaking control over its operations gradually shifted from Burlington to Richmond, leaving a few upper-level NCRR employees out of work and others, including Gabriel Lea, employed but "out of the loop." Turning down the R&DRR's offer of a similar job in Richmond, he resigned from the company on Jan. 31, 1873, sold his home later in the year, and on May 5 gave a power of attorney to his lawyer cousin John W. McCauley to dispose of the share of his father's real estate he had recently inherited. Then he moved north to NJ. What business he pursued after that, I don't know, but I presume it drew on his three decades of mercantile experience, and he may have stayed involved with railroading in some capacity.
!n 1880 the census showed Gabriel, 55, retired merchant, living at 1085 Elizabeth Avenue, Elizabeth, NJ with wife Phoebe S., 47; dau. Minerva C., 20; sons Charles M., 15 and Frederick A., 10; "aunt-in-law" Mary Weed, 84; and servant Hanah Broderick, 22. The three children had all been born in NC.
The census of 1900 found Gabriel and Phebe at 1506 Kenesaw Avenue in Washington, DC (E.D. 12, sheet 18). Living with them was servant Bessie E. Shanks, 23, born in DC.
The couple must have met while Gabriel was working in New York City for merchant James Weed. After the wedding the Leas returned to Pleasant Grove, where Gabriel and his brother James ran a store (see notes under James) until 1860. On September 5 of that year Gabriel bought another store from A. G. McCray a few miles away, and his family moved to the adjoining farm. Apparently he ran that store throughout the Civil War. It couldn't have been a very lucrative undertaking, even though Alamance County was far from the theaters of war: there wasn't much money around for people to buy goods with, and the available goods themselves weren't abundant.
Document LFDC-40 in my Lea file is a typescript copy of a short summary of Gabriel's immediate family history, written by himself on June 10, 1897. He wrote (in the third person), "…after leaving school was a merchant at Pleasant Grove for six years. In 1851 went to New York and was employed as a salesman by James M. Weed, hardware merchant at 179 Pearl Street, for three years. In 1854 returned to Pleasant Grove, there engaged in merchandising with his brother James six years, then moved to McCrays seven miles west of Pleasant Grove, there engaged in merchandising until the breaking out of the Civil War in 1861. After the war, in 1865 he moved to Burlington, NC where he was connected with the North Carolina RR Co. as Treasurer until 1873 with the exception of two years…"
Note that his whereabouts during the Civil War are not accounted for above. Later in the same memorandum he wrote, "After marriage lived four years at Pleasant Grove, six years at McCrays, eight years at Burlington [then called Company Shops], one year at Bergen Point, NJ, nine years at Elizabeth, NJ, ten years at Brooklyn, NY, three years at Elizabeth, NJ, and in Feb. 1896 moved to Washington, DC." He lived at 1506 Kenesaw Avenue NW in Washington when he wrote this account. The two chronologies of his moves don't match perfectly, but they're close. From the second version and other sources, it appears that his home throughout the Civil War was at McCrays. He was then in Graham Twp. (Burlington) 1866-73; Bergen Point, NJ 1873-4; Elizabeth 1874-83; Brooklyn 1883-93 (he was "of Brooklyn, NY" when he sold 50 acres in Pleasant Grove to his brother James on 9/14/1883, and still living there when his father-in-law died in 1886), Elizabeth again 1893-96, and in DC from early 1896 until his death.
Gabriel M. Lea and family appeared in the 1880 census at 1025 Elizabeth Avenue, Elizabeth, NJ (Vol. 21, E.D. 169, Sheet 12, Line 39). Phoebe's widowed aunt Mary Weed, 84, b. NY, was living with Gabriel, Phoebe, Minerva, Charles M., and Frederick A. Lea. Gabriel's occupation was given as "retired merchant."
McCray, aka McCray's Store, is a rural crossroad about nine miles SW of the NE corner of Alamance County, six miles from the Lea farm in Pleasant Grove, 20 crow-flight miles SSW of Leasburg, and six miles NNE of Burlington center. There is still a little general store there, but the building isn't old enough to have existed in Gabriel's time. I walked in and introduced myself to five or six older ladies gossiping there over coffee, and explained that my great-great grandfather had kept a store there through the Civil War. That didn't elicit as much interest as I had hoped for, but when I told them his name, one of them thought she might have heard it before and mentioned that there are still some Leas in the vicinity. There were several dozen Leas within 20 miles as much as 200 years ago, so it was no surprise to me that a few of their descendants should have stuck around; they could be descendants of Gabriel's brother James, or of more distant relatives from up in Caswell County. None of the ladies seemed to have more than a perfunctory acquaintance with the area's history, and that did surprise me quite a bit. I'm used to elderly ladies in New England, many of whom know LOTS of local history (some of which actually happened!)
As a Southerner from slave-owning, tobacco-growing stock who had married a Michigan Yankee (and vice versa), Gabriel and Phoebe must have found themselves in some peculiar, probably uncomfortable situations during the Civil War. I wonder how they coped with that.
Regarding Gabriel's loyalties during the war, early Lea family researcher/raconteur Frances Powell Otken claimed that he had served as "Lt. Col. War 1861-5," but I don't believe her. At one time I thought perhaps he had served with the 6th North Carolina Confederate Infantry, in which his brother and business partner James W. Lea was a captain and major for a year before being discharged with a disabling hand wound. But the National Archives has no Confederate military record for any Gabriel Lea: I requested a search in 1995. A huge, ten-volume list of North Carolina CW troops (which I consulted at the NC State Library and the Burlington public library) doesn't list him either. If he really had been a senior officer in the Sixth or any other regiment, he would certainly have shown up: there were only a handful of men who held the rank of Lt. Colonel or Colonel in that regiment during the war, and Gabriel wasn't one of them. Nor did he mention anything about military service in his own accounts of his life. Yet in a deed from the NCRR to another of its employees, the lot conveyed was described in part as "adjoining Col. Lea's lot." So apparently someone thought in 1871 that Gabriel had been a senior officer, unless "Colonel" at that time, in that region, was a purely honorary title having nothing to do with a military rank of record. I've increasingly gotten the impression from reading Southern documents and genealogies that it has always been considered barbaric down South to seek proof of anyone's claim to military rank, no matter how improbable the claim may be. This tacit code of honor seems to require that hearers assume all such claims to be true, but it seems not to require that those making the claims tell the truth. Thus we have "Captain" Gabriel Lea, Gabriel M.'s grandfather, though there's no shred of evidence that he ever performed military service; his father James, who is laughably credited by the DAR with five years of Revolutionary War service (as a private) despite the fact that he was over 60 years old for more than half of that time and there were three or four much younger James Leas then living in his neighborhood who may well have served; and "Colonel" Gabriel M. Lea, who likewise left no military record anywhere. Finally, G. M. Lea's son Edwin was called "my old friend Capt. Lea" in a 1929 letter from Virginia SAR Registrar William MacFarlane Jones to Edwin's widow Sarah -- but without proof, I wouldn't bet two cents on Edwin's ever having done military service.
Gabriel M. and Phoebe Holmes Lea had four children in 1897: Edwin Holmes Lea (who later wrote that he had been born "in the old Gabriel B. Lea homestead at Pleasant Grove"); Minerva Carlisle Lea, born there just before the family's move to McCrays; Charles McCauley Lea, born at McCrays (he m. Hattie L. Moore at Richmond, VA, and both were buried there in a plot that he and Edwin bought to bury their parents in); and Frederick Alfred Lea, born in Burlington. Fred moved to California, reportedly after his father's death in 1908, and did not return to the East.
In the 1870 federal census (Alamance 068 Graham Twp.) Gabriel, 45, and "Peggie" [sic] Lea, 32, appeared with children Edwin, 13, Minnie, 10, Charles, 5, Frederick, 1/12, and Josephine, 12 — listed in that order. I don't know who Josephine was: an orphaned or visiting cousin? A sister who died young? (But if the latter, why was she not buried with or near any other members of the family? Why didn't she show up in the 1860 census, when she was 2 years old? And why didn't Gabriel, Edwin, or Minerva ever mention her in any of their writings?) Also in the household were black servants Pattie Ligon, 25, and Lucy Harbor, 30, and Lucy's son Thomas, 2. Gabriel was listed as "Treasurer, NCRR", the position he held from 1866 until 1873, except parts of 1867 and 1868. His personal property was valued at $2000 (equal to his railroad salary for the census year), but he owned no real estate. He was then living in a house built and owned by the railroad, and apparently he had sold all the real estate he had owned before — perhaps only the 138-acre McCray's Store farm. I haven't had a chance to investigate his holdings in the land records. The next year (1871) the NCRR — which up to then had been so tight with its property that even the company's president wasn't allowed to buy a houselot from it — relaxed that policy under heavy financial strain and began selling lots in Company Shops at auction. Gabriel paid $250 for a prime 2.5-acre lot on the north side of East Davis Street, between Spring Street and Lexington Avenue. The site is now a municipal parking lot beside the Burlington Public Library.
Graham Township in 1870 included Company Shops, which afterward became Burlington. So there is no disparity between the census locality and Gabriel's 1897 notation that he was in Burlington in 1870.
Gabriel is reported to have "participated in several commercial ventures while employed by the railroad." Among these was a store the railroad authorized him to build and operate at Company Shops in 1869. In the same year Phebe Lea was the secretary for an association of leading citizens' wives who solicited and received a donation from the railroad in support of the new Union Church, then under construction.
The most important cause of the railroad's financial problems about this time was the well-publicized intent of a larger and better-capitalized road to inaugurate a new service from Richmond to Atlanta. Part of this route would directly compete with the NCRR's, unless the lines joined forces. So on January 11, 1871 the NCRR's directors leased its track, rolling stock and buildings to the Richmond & Danville RR for 30 years. The decisionmaking control over its operations gradually shifted from Burlington to Richmond, leaving a few upper-level NCRR employees out of work and others, including Gabriel Lea, employed but "out of the loop." Turning down the R&DRR's offer of a similar job in Richmond, he resigned from the company on Jan. 31, 1873, sold his home later in the year, and on May 5 gave a power of attorney to his lawyer cousin John W. McCauley to dispose of the share of his father's real estate he had recently inherited. Then he moved north to NJ. What business he pursued after that, I don't know, but I presume it drew on his three decades of mercantile experience, and he may have stayed involved with railroading in some capacity.
!n 1880 the census showed Gabriel, 55, retired merchant, living at 1085 Elizabeth Avenue, Elizabeth, NJ with wife Phoebe S., 47; dau. Minerva C., 20; sons Charles M., 15 and Frederick A., 10; "aunt-in-law" Mary Weed, 84; and servant Hanah Broderick, 22. The three children had all been born in NC.
The census of 1900 found Gabriel and Phebe at 1506 Kenesaw Avenue in Washington, DC (E.D. 12, sheet 18). Living with them was servant Bessie E. Shanks, 23, born in DC.
Gravesite Details
, Date Of Burial : 01/04/1908, , Ref: Cemetery Records
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