Edward Herndon Piper and his descendants, part 3

For information about the parents, Edward Herndon Piper and Ann Blackburn, click this link.


Ann Eliza Piper

Ann Eliza was the third child and first daughter of Edward and Ann Piper. She was born in Crawford County, Illinois, on 15 October 1824. After her father’s death, her mother moved the family to LaPorte, LaPorte County, Indiana, and that is most likely where Ann Eliza met and married John Sutherland in 1844.

Ann and John had two children in LaPorte: Alice J Sutherland, born 5 October 1851 and died 30 April 1878 at age 26 (she married William T Anderson); and William H Sutherland, born in August 1854 and died 2 January 1879 at age 24 and 5 months.

A third child was reported to have been born to Ann and John as actually their first child, Mary M, born in 1846. The source for this is the appearance of a 14-year-old girl named Mary M Sutherland on the 1860 Census with the other two children below her and the parents above, looking like a complete family listing. But an obituary for John says that he and Ann had only two children. If this Mary had lived to adulthood, surely she would have been remembered. Perhaps she died right after the 1860 census, and with her two siblings dying young in the 1870s, they didn’t talk about her. But would John have neglected to tell his second wife about his eldest daughter? It’s possible. And without records, this is all pure speculation.

Ann died 3 September 1874, age 50, and her widowed husband remarried and died many years later.


John B Piper

John B (for Blackburn?) Piper was born 4 November 1827 in Illinois and died 29 December 1850 in La Porte County, Indiana, where he is buried. He was 23 years old. Nothing further is known about him.


Edward Herndon Piper

Edward Jr was born near Palestine, Crawford County, Illinois at his parents’ home on 16 February 1831. He was the fifth child and fourth son of Edward and Ann Piper. When he was 21, he left Illinois and traveled across the Great Plains along the Oregon Trail with a Presbyterian colony, arriving in Oregon in the fall of 1852. He lived in the Willamette Valley near Salem, and as a young, single man, he fought in the wars against the Native Americans of that place in 1855 and 1856. But at the end of 1856 he married Sarah Elmira Grubbs, who was originally from Pittsburgh, then living in Benton County, next door to Lane County where Edward had been living. The couple lived in Butte, Benton County in 1860 where Edward was farming. In 1870 they had a farm in the Lincoln precinct of Marion County. They moved in 1874 to South Salem where they lived for 25 years and where Edward worked as a gardener. Edward doesn’t seem to have stayed with the Presbyterians, as his obituary says he was a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Edward died in late January 1899.

The number of their children is unclear. One record says they had four: Mary Piper (1859-1874); May F. Piper (1860-1876); Florence M Piper (b 1862); and Edward Cloud Piper (1874-1955).

The truth is borne out in the surviving records. In 1860 the couple had no children listed on the census, so any surviving children had to have been born later. It is curious that Elmira was enumerated with her husband on this census, but she was also listed in her father’s family on the same census, with her maiden name. Maybe Edward had to be away and she stayed with her folks in the meantime, and the census taker didn’t realize she had a different surname from all those other Grubbs (she was the 4th of 13 children, and even though three had died young, there were still 10 of them).

In 1870 Edward and Elmira had an 8-year-old daughter, Florence M, living with them. In 1880 the daughter is not there, but they have a 5-year old son, E. (Ernest Cloud) living with them. The 1900 census shows Sarah E Piper living alone in South Salem, reporting that she had borne two children and one was living. That clinches it. The gravestone for Edward Herndon Piper and Sarah Elmira Piper has a third face with the name of their daughter, “May F” on it. Obviously Florence May or May Florence had used both names as a main name. She must have died between 1870 and 1880, but no record survives. The grave marker itself was ordered in 1936; the information on it therefore relied on the memories of people who were either infants or not even there when the girl was alive, and such memories cannot be completely reliable, although certainly close.


James A Piper

James A (Asa?) was the sixth child and fifth son of Edward H and Ann Blackburn Piper. He was born 1 March 1833 near Palestine, Crawford County, Illinois, on his parents’ farm. It seems likely that he would have served during the U.S. Civil War, being 28 or 29 and unmarried when the war was just getting going. But he was also a minister, so perhaps he was a chaplain. I haven’t found his military records; there are too many with the same name.

But in 1861 over in Indiana along the Ohio River in Jefferson County, he married Martha Matthews, who was about 21 years old. Their daughter Anna was born the next year, and the year after that a son, Samuel. Their daughter Mary came three years after Samuel. And then Martha died; I wish I could have found the family in 1870, but I haven’t been successful. In 1880 James was a widower with three teenage children.

In November 1882 he married again, to Mary Gray, in McLean County, Illinois. Her parents were from Tennessee, but she had been born and reared in Coles County, Illinois. Mary was about 40 at the time of this marriage, and the couple did not have any children.


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This is all of the story of Edward Herndon Piper and Anna Blackburn Piper and their children. It is a story of an ordinary couple of the nineteenth century and of their ordinary descendants; nothing thrilling, but somehow I still find myself interested in their stories, in looking beyond the bare facts of their lives to figure out the mysteries and something of who they really were. People are endlessly interesting.