Enoch Abraham

       Excerpt from "Down the River, The Ohio Pioneers, Enoch Abraham's Six Children Who went West 1786-1810 And Some of Their Descendants" Part I, Researched and Written by Evelyn Abraham Benson, Copyright 1974 by Evelyn A. Benson, Lancaster, PA.  Also  in LDS #1597930, items 2 & 3, Microfilm:

       Enoch Abraham, son of Noah Abraham and Mary Wynne Abraham, was born in 1738 at Radnor on the farm of his grandmother Sarah Abraham, now the town of Wayne, Delaware County, Pennsylvania.  He was brought up on a farm in Nantmel Township, Chester County, Pa. patented to his father in 1752 but secured to the family by his mother's grandfather's (Thomas Wynne's) purchase of 5,000 Pennsylvania acres from William Penn in 1681 and her 1738 sale of a Wynne lot in Philadelphia.

        When near the age of 21 in 1759 Enoch joined the Pennsylvania Militia, Capt. Samuel Grubb's company, a part of Col. James Burd's contingent which helped to cut the road to Redstone as part of Gen. Forbes' campaign to capture Fort Duquesne (the Forks of the Ohio now Pittsburgh) from the French.  During the Indian wars from 1755 onward Enoch, his brothers Benjamin and Noah, and his brothers-in-law explored the valleys west of Susquehanna River looking for land.  Before 1770 they took up and settled land in these valleys of central Pennsylvania.

         January 20, 1764 Enoch Abraham married Jean Hamilton, born and brought up in Chester County not far from his own childhood home.  Three years later, the Indian threat being totally allayed for the time being, he applied for 300 acres of Sherman's Creek,a western branch of susquehanna riverland joining Mahony Mountains in Rye Township, Cumberland County (now Perry County): in 1772 and 1773 he is assessed in this locality for land and live stock.

          At the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775 Enoch secured a warrant to survey 150 acres in the western Allegheny Mountains, at Turkey foot on the Youghiogheny River, an upper bracnch of the Ohio, then Bedford County, now somerset County, Pennsylvania. There he lived for three years and there served as a member of the Pennsylvania Revolutionary Militia.  By his move to the Youghiogheny Enoch became a Man of the Western waters, a phrase by which the men of the Mississippi watershed often described themselves when sending petitions and reports eastward.

          During the American Revolution Enoch and his growing family descended the western slope if the Allegheny Mountains into the Monongahela valley and there, in 1778, on the edge of the geat west, he purchased a Virginia claim to 300 acres for which he received a patent from the Cjommonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1791.  On this farm, Vegetability, in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, he remained for the rest of his life, and from this farm seven of his eleven children struck out to seek more land down the river in the opening west.  All ofhis eleven children grew to adulthood, ten of them sturdy, robust pioneers; nine of them married and produced largefamilies with numerous descendants living today, the tenth was killed by an Indianin 1786 at the age of 22. 

Born in Radnor Township, Pennsylvania, USA on 1738 to Noah Abraham and Mary Wynne. Enoch married Jean Hamilton and had 11 children. He passed away on 1823 in Fayette, Pennsylvania, USA.