Cross family

This collection consists of papers of the Cross, Dickey, and Miller families of Chester County, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Baltimore, Maryland.

John Miller and his wife, Margaret, emigrated from Scotland to Pennsylvania with their young daughter, Jane, in 1786. Miller, who was trained as a stone cutter in Scotland, developed a thriving marble business in Philadelphia; he also owned a farm in Great Valley, Pennsylvania. John was active in the Philadelphia community; he was an early member of the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society, and a supporter of the Magdalene and Missionary Societies. John Miller was an elder of the Scots (Associate Reformed) Presbyterian Church; it is probably through the Miller family’s association with the Church that they encountered the young Reverend Ebenezer Dickey. Dickey, and Miller's daughter, Jane, were married in 1805. Jane’s sisters, Helen, Margaret and Julia, eventually all married Presbyterian ministers: Helen married William Finney, Julia married George Junkin, and Margaret married Charles McLean.

Ebenezer and Jane Miller Dickey settled in Oxford, Pennsylvania and had six children: John Miller, Mary Jackson (later Cross), Margaret Irvine (later Cross), Helen, Samuel (4th), and Ebenezer Verner. Ebenezer and Jane Miller Dickey were passionate supporters of the Chester County Bible Society, which placed bibles in the county prison and poor house in the hopes of converting the recipients. As pastor of the Oxford Presbyterian Church, Reverend Dickey rose to prominence in the area. He published several essays on the importance of educating children and the temperance movement. Dickey, a former slave owner, also was a charter member of the local colonization society. Plagued with a chronic stomach ailment, Dickey went to Europe in search of a cure. Although he achieved a modicum of relief at a spa in the Pyrenees, Dickey was uncomfortable with the Catholicism in southern Europe and returned home after eleven months. The letters he wrote to his family and congregation were later published as Travels in Europe for Health, in 1820, by an American Clergyman, in the Christian Advocate, a Philadelphia periodical. In addition to his service as pastor, Dickey owned and operated a two hundred acre farm, and served as a silent partner in his brother Samuel’s cotton factory in Hopewell. After Dickey’s death in 1831, his wife, Jane, was left to raise their five minor children, and care for her mother, Margaret Irvine Miller.

Jane Dickey oversaw the formidable operation of the Oxford farm, as well as the Philadelphia property she had inherited after her father’s death. Dickey also continued to support various civic organizations including the Oxford Sewing Society and the Poor Widows’ Society of Baltimore. In 1832, her daughter Mary married Richard I. Cross, a Baltimore lumber merchant, and in 1836, her daughter Margaret married Reverend Andrew B. Cross, a Presbyterian minister, author and publisher. Helen, the youngest daughter, did not marry and lived at home with her mother. After training first at Dickinson, then at Princeton Theological Seminary, John Miller Dickey the eldest son of Ebenezer and Jane took his father’s place as pastor of Oxford Presbyterian Church. He established a private school for girls, the Oxford Female Seminary, and later helped found the Ashmun Institute which became Lincoln University after the Civil War. He married Sarah Emlen Cresson and had four children. Samuel Dickey, the second son of Ebenezer and Jane Miller Dickey became a Presbyterian minister after first attending Lafayette College then enrolling in Princeton Theological Seminary. He later served as the President of the Octoraro Bank. The third Dickey son, Ebenezer Verner, attended Lafayette College and medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. Unable to get by on the proceeds of his medical practice, Ebenezer also owned a large dairy farm, was a member of the faculty of the Oxford Female Seminary and was the president of the Philadelphia and Baltimore Central Railroad and the Octoraro Bank until his early death in 1857.

Bibliography:

Bradley, John. The Dickey Family and the Growth of Oxford and Hopewell, 1990.

Carr, George B. John Miller Dickey, His Life and Times .

Miller-Dickey family papers, Chester County Historical Society Clipping Files.