Edwin Gray Sr.

Born in what soon became Southampton County, Virginia (but was then Isle of Wight County), the son of burgess Joseph Gray and his wife Sarah, Gray had a younger brother James (who died circa 1787), as well as three sisters who survived to adulthood. He received a private education suitable to his class before traveling across the James River to Williamsburg to attend the College of William & Mary in 1753.^[2][3] His brother James served as a captain during the Revolutionary War, was wounded at the Battle of Germantown, and married Elizabeth Grizzie Cowper.^[4]

His father, Joseph Gray, who had been a prominent force in Southampton County for decades, died in 1769, and the following year the local court named Edwin and his brother as executors per the will which Joseph had signed in August 1769. Edwin received 1060 acres and named enslaved people, as well as an additional 640 acres on the south side of the Nottoway River, which the will acknowledged were subject to heavy debts, so he might not receive them. The will named his married sisters, and stated each had already received their inheritance (presumably as dowries), while his widow received a life estate (including a 790-acre plantation and named enslaved persons), which James would then inherit after her death.^[5]

Southampton County voters elected Gray and Henry Taylor (1737-1781) as their representatives to the House of Burgesses for both sessions of the House of Burgesses which began in 1769, and re-elected the pair each term until Virginia's last colonial governor, Lord Dunmore, suspended the legislature and Virginia declared its independence in 1776.^[6] Gary may have chaired the county's Committee of Safety, as well as served with Henry Taylor, Benjamin Ruffin Jr., Thomas Edmunds and Rev. George Gurley.^[7] Voters also elected Gray and Taylor as their representative to all five Revolutionary Conventions, and the first session of the Virginia House of Delegates in 1776.^[8] Longtime Southampton County clerk Richard Kello replaced Gray as a delegate in 1777 because Gray won election to the Virginia Senate, representing Southampton and nearby Dinwiddie and Sussex Counties, and he served until the 1779, session, when both he and George Brooke of relatively distant Essex County were both disqualified (possibly because he was also elected to the House of Delegates in that session, but more likely for election improprieties since David Mason was elected as that district's senator).^[9]

Both Edwin Gray and his brother James operated plantations using enslaved labor. In the 1787 Virginia tax census, Gray owned a dozen enslaved adult Blacks, ten between sixteen and twenty years old, eleven horses, and fifty cattle, as well as both a four-wheeled chaise and a two-wheeled chair, whereas James' estate owned only two enslaved Blacks, two horses, and nineteen cattle.^[10]