James RigbySchoolmaster, and clerk of St Martin’s Church, Marcus Hook  ·  died 9 March 1801

For thirty-one years James Rigby led the responses and set the psalm at a small brick chapel on the Delaware, eight to ten miles from where he lived. He taught school in at least three townships and rented every house he lived in. The parish recorded his pew rent to the penny for four years running, and recorded neither his marriage, his children’s baptisms, nor his burial. Claims below that rest on tradition rather than record are marked, as are the things that are simply unknown.

Two published genealogies, working from family informants a century after his death, say he was born in England — Smedley’s Genealogy of the Sharpless Family (1901), compiled by Gilbert Cope, says he “immigrated from England”; the Harlan genealogy (1914) calls him “James Rigby (teacher), b. in England.” Online trees and FamilySearch say Pennsylvania. The year is given variously as 1731 or 16 April 1737.

None of it is documented. There is no naturalisation, no passenger entry that can be tied to him, no baptism that can be tied to him. Two Upholland, Lancashire baptisms have been looked at and neither can be connected. A single 1750 arrival indexed as “James Rigbey” traces back to a printed list of emigrants sailing from Irish ports, not English ones — and may itself be the source of the family’s “came over in 1750” tradition rather than evidence for it.

He appears in the American record, fully formed and already trusted with parish office, in June 1760.

He married Hannah Brown, daughter of Daniel Brown of Upper Chichester. There is no marriage record — but there is something almost as good: the record of her being punished for it.

Hannah was a Quaker. On 3 April 1758 Concord Monthly Meeting disowned her for marrying out of unity, “by the Assistance of A Priest” — which is how a Friends minute describes a wedding performed by a clergyman. The phrase is itself evidence about him: he was Anglican. On 6 November 1758 she offered an acknowledgment and was restored, and she died a member sixty-six years later.

Her father’s will, made in 1767 and proved that December, names “Hannah, wife of James Rigby.” It is the earliest document in which the two of them appear together, and it disposes of a claim in the old county history that his wife was “probably Rachel” — Rachel was Daniel Brown’s granddaughter, who married John Dutton.

Hannah outlived him by twenty-three years. She died 8 June 1824, aged 88, and was buried at Chichester Friends burying ground, where the meeting’s own register records her. Their household straddled two communions for the whole of the marriage: he served an Anglican altar; she was buried among Friends.

The ground the church stands on was a gift. Walter Martin of Upper Chichester, by a deed of 18 December 1699, gave Lower Chichester one acre “for a Church & Burying Ground.” The congregation was poor; for years it had no building, then bought an old wooden frame house for about five pounds — “a great Sum in those Days” — hauled it onto Martin’s acre and fitted it up for worship. A brick church was subscribed for from 1745.

On 9 June 1760 the vestry and congregation met with the Rev. George Craig, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel’s missionary, present. They audited the sexton’s accounts, chose churchwardens, and named twelve vestrymen. Then two things happened in the same sitting.

First, the congregation gave the church its name: Emanuel Grubb Senior moved that it be called St Martin’s Church, in memory of its first benefactor Walter Martin, “which was readily agreed to.” And then, in the very next line of the minute:

James Rigby was made clerk of St Martin’s at the meeting that made it St Martin’s. He was young for it — twenty-three if he was born in 1737, twenty-nine if in 1731.

The vestry recorded the clerkship only when it changed hands, which is why the office appears in the book exactly twice. The next clerk named anywhere in the volume is at the meeting of 26 April 1791: “Rich Lamplugh to Act as Clerk.” Nothing falls between.

So he was clerk of St Martin’s from 9 June 1760 to 26 April 1791 — about thirty-one years. The span is corroborated from outside the parish, in another jurisdiction, halfway through: the Aston township tax rate of 1781 lists him as “James Rigby, Clk,” assessed 7s 4d. Twenty-one years into the term, the church office was attached to his name as an identifier by men collecting county taxes.

St Martin’s rated its pews annually and wrote every shareholder’s name in the book. James Rigby appears in four of those ratings, and each has been read directly against the page image.

At the rating of 3 July 1790 the twelfth line reads “James Rigby ⅓ — 7/6”; the pew’s full rate was £1 2s 6d and the other two thirds are bracketed to Andray McEntere and John Prence. On 26 April 1791 — the same meeting that replaced him as clerk — pew 12 is shared by Samuel Walker, “James Rigbee ⅓” and Thomas Wallace at £1 5s. On 10 April 1792, pew 12: “Thos Wallis ⅓, James Rigby ⅓” at £1 2s 6d. And on 22 April 1794 he has moved to pew 13, at a five-shilling share alongside George Mitchell and Jacob Burns.

Pew rents ran from £1 10s at pew 1 down to about twelve and sixpence at the back, with half a crown for the bench at pew 24. A third of pew 12 at seven and six put him squarely in the middle of the congregation — not among the Grubbs and Marshalls at the front, not on the bench.

He kept his seat about three years after losing the office, then let it go. Pew 12 was re-let; by the ratings of 1801 and 1802, pews 11, 12 and 13 all stood empty. He was alive until 1801, so this is age, money or distance — not death.

The county history says he “taught school in Chichester and Aston townships.” That is now documented on paper, in both Chichesters, in the assessors’ own hand.

An Upper Chichester rate charges him for a tenement at £4 a year — 3s 7d, and then adds a second line: “& Schoolmaster — 2s 6d.” Total six shillings. No acreage, no livestock, no servants: a landless man with a trade charge. A Lower Chichester rate — that is, Marcus Hook, the township where he was parish clerk — has him at a house and lot at £5 10s, plus “Schoolmaster with 1 Cow — 2s 6d.” Total seven and six.

And in the septennial enumeration of Aston taken 1 June 1793 by Joseph Pennell, a state census of taxable inhabitants, his occupation is written out beside his name: schoolmaster. He was then in his late fifties or early sixties and still teaching.

The story comes from Thomas Dutton, who was eight years old that morning. He was born 2 February 1769 and died 12 September 1869, aged one hundred years, seven months and eleven days, and told it for most of that time:

A newspaper feature of 25 July 1899, drawing on local tradition, adds detail: a fog thick enough to shut out the landscape; the master “appeared depressed, and with difficulty could follow the mumbling scholars”; the fog lifting shortly after ten o’clock, when Proctor’s artillery opened on Knyphausen across the creek.

Village Green lies about eight miles east of Chadds Ford.

Two days later Lord Cornwallis quartered at the Seven Stars tavern at Village Green and British and Hessian troops camped from Mount Hope down through the lower village. Young Dutton drove his mother’s cattle off to keep the soldiers from killing them, and an officer walked him home and told the widow to bolt and bar every door, because the camp-followers would plunder the house.

Four Chester County Lieutenancy cards survive for him. Read together they are not a service record. They are an exemption record.

He was enrolled on a company return of 18 April 1777, in the 6th Battalion’s 7th Company — which the county’s own militia map identifies as Aston township’s company. Four months later, on 22 August 1777, a card in Captain James Thompson’s company carries the remark “to be rass’d out” under the authority “appeal.” He had gone to the county and got himself struck off the rolls. Three weeks later the battle came down the road to his schoolhouse.

And then, on 7 June 1779, in the Ashtown company of the 6th Battalion under Colonel Thomas Taylor, fourth class, there is a card whose Remarks column holds a single word and whose Authority column names the book it was taken from:

The parish books record his office. The tax lists record his circumstances.

In not one assessment does he own the farm he lives on. He rents a tenement at £4 a year here; a house and lot at £5 10s there; he is a tenant of Jacob Howell at £4 10s somewhere else. He keeps a cow, sometimes a horse. The only ground he is ever recorded as owning outright is a village lot in Aston — five acres and eighty perches, valued at sixty-six dollars in 1798, with no dwelling house on it.

And in a Concord rate of about 1768–1770 the assessors used their own word for what he was.

“Inmate” is an assessment term, unrelated to the modern sense. In eighteenth-century Pennsylvania it means a married householder who owns no land — a man with a family, renting, charged a flat low rate. The paired category, Freeman, means a single man of taxable age. Every other record leaves his tenancy to be inferred; this one names it.

It is also the only trace of him between the clerkship of 1760 and the Aston tax list of 1774, and it places the family in Concord — the township of Hannah’s own monthly meeting.

No single source lists them and no baptismal register survives. Eight children are named across the compiled genealogies and family trees: Daniel (1757–c.1845/50, who went west to Ohio and whose estate was partitioned in Jay County, Indiana), Judith (married Edward Flounders), John, Rodney, Seth (c.1761–1854, who married Hannah Clark at the First Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia in 1790 and died at New Castle, Lawrence County, aged ninety-three), Eli (1771–1859), Sydney and Rachel.

Only Eli, Seth, Daniel and Hannah’s parentage rest on documents. The rest is compiled genealogy and should be treated as a working list rather than a finished one.

He died on 9 March 1801. The date comes from a private family memorandum book kept in the Dutton household, copied out by Gilbert Cope in 1872 and later printed. Two Rigby entries appear in its seventy-eight pages: James in 1801 and Hannah in 1824.

The vestry of St Martin’s met on 7 April 1801, four weeks after his death, and did not mention him.

Where he is buried is not known. Two things explain why no record of it survives.

There was no register to be entered in

St Martin’s was never an independent parish in his lifetime. It was a chapel of ease; the mother church was St Paul’s, Chester, whose rector rode down to the Hook. A visiting minister entered his baptisms, marriages and burials in his own church’s book — which is why a vestry book running from 1724 records pews, fences and lotteries for eighty years and not one baptism.

But St Paul’s was not keeping those registers either. Its book contains a leaf ruled and headed “Marriages for ye year 1740” and left entirely blank, and another headed “Burials for ye year 1738” and left entirely blank. The established runs are: burials 1704–1708, then nothing until 1853; marriages 1705/6–1714 and 1728–1730, then nothing until 1818; christenings 1704–13 and 1728–43, a fragment at 1780–91, then 1817. No baptism, marriage or burial entry of any kind survives there between 1745 and 1800.

So his marriage in about 1756 and his burial in 1801 were never entered, because for half a century the parish was not keeping these registers at all.

And a member’s grave cost nothing

The parish did charge for burials, and named receipts survive: five shillings silver for breaking the ground for a stranger — “for the body of Henerey Rice,” 12 August 1782. But on 18 April 1797 the vestry resolved “that no Member of this Church Shall pay anny thing for brakeing Ground,” strangers to pay seven and six. After that a member’s grave produced no receipt, and the burial money was entered in lump sums — ten dollars from Zachariah Derrick covering four years at once. There is no ground-breaking entry of any kind in 1801. The absence of a receipt is therefore not evidence that he lies elsewhere.

One book has not been found

On 11 February 1831 the Rev. R. U. Morgan, rector of St Paul’s Chester in connection with St Martin’s Marcus Hook, wrote on the index leaf of his register:

That volume has not been located. If any record of James Rigby’s marriage, his children’s baptisms or his burial survives anywhere, it is in that book.

Chosen clerk of St Martin’s on 9 June 1760, at the meeting that named the church, and replaced on 26 April 1791 — about thirty-one years, travelling eight or ten miles each way. Assessed as a schoolmaster in Upper and Lower Chichester and enumerated as one in Aston in 1793. Listed among the Inmates at Concord in about 1768. Struck off the militia roll on appeal in August 1777; recorded as poor in the county appeal book in June 1779. Held a third of pew 12 from 1790 to 1792 and a share of pew 13 in 1794. Died 9 March 1801.