Greenbrier County, West Virginia         Biography of A. B. C. BRAY

This biography was submitted by Sandy Spradling,
E-mail address:  <SSpradling@aol.com>

This file may be freely copied by individuals and non-profit
organizations for their private use. All other rights reserved.

Any other use, including publication, storage in a retrieval
system, or transmission by electronic, mechanical, or other
means requires the written approval of the file's author.

This file is part of the WVGenWeb Archives. If you arrived here inside
a frame or from a link from somewhere else, our front door is at

http://www.usgwarchives.org/wv/wvfiles.htm

History of Greenbrier County 
J. R. Cole 
Lewisburg, WV 1917 
p. 120-123

A. B. C. BRAY.

A connection with the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Company of twenty-four years, 
and one of eleven years since that time as cashier of the First National Bank 
of Ronceverte, is an introduction we make of A. B. C. Bray to the readers of 
this work.
Thomas Bray, son of Jacob Peele Bray, a native of Suffolk county, England, 
and the father of the subject of this sketch, was born in that county in the 
year 1826. Having English parents of wealth, ease and refinement, more than 
an ordinary equipment for life's work was bestowed upon their son, who, at 
the age of twenty-two, graduated from Oxford College, in 1848. He then came 
to America and located at Princeton, Mercer county, West Virginia. His name 
will be found in Judge Miller's history of Summers county as one of the more 
distinguished surveyors of large estates, and as an engineer of large 
corporate interests. There is on record a survey he made of an enormous 
acreage of coal lands, one of the greatest, probably, in the State of West 
Virginia.
Thomas Bray married Martha L. Brown, of Mercer county. She was a daughter of 
George Paris Brown, and bore her husband nine children, only two of whom are 
now living-Mrs. Frank Cox, of Hinton, W. Va., whose husband is a train 
dispatcher for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Company.
Thomas Bray was a Confederate soldier and a member of Company C, Second 
Virginia Infantry. He was in active service over two years, then assigned to 
hospital duties, where he remained until the close of the war. After the war 
he practiced medicine in Mercer and Monroe counties until his death, in 1875.
A. B. C. Bray was born in Mercer county on April 2, 1865. His early life was 
spent in pursuit of an education in the public schools, after which he went 
to work as a telegraph Operator for the Chesa-peake & Ohio Railroad Company 
at Big Bend Tunnel, W. Va., in 1881. He worked for the company in various 
capacities, finally becoming depot agent at Ronceverte, where he remained 
fourteen years as one of their most trusted officials. In 1905 he was offered 
the position he now holds as cashier of the First National Bank of 
Ronceverte, and where he has remained ever since.
On May 15, 1889, Mr. Bray was married to Miss Emma M. Huddleston, of Fort 
Spring, this county. Her parents are both dead. To this union were born seven 
children, namely, Grace, Alice, Eleanor, Edward, Albert, Peyton; and one son, 
Burton, who died in 1911, at the age of twenty years.
Mr. Bray is a member of the Masonic fraternity, being a Knight Templar in the 
York rite and of the eighteenth degree in the Scottish rite. He is High 
Priest of the grand Royal Arch chapter of the State, elected to that office 
in November, 1915. He is a member of the Episcopal church and is a vestryman 
in that organiza-tion; is president of the Bankers' Association of West 
Virginia. Besides numerous other positions he has filled in political life 
Mr. Bray is delegate to the lower house of the State legislature.