Ramsay, J. G. (James Graham)

James Graham Ramsay (1823-1903) attended Davidson College, 1823- 1841, and Jefferson Medcical College in Philadelphia, 1844-1848, and practiced medicine in Iredell and Rowan counties, N.C. He was a Whig state senator, 1856-1864, and served in the Confederate Congress. After the war, he was active in the state Republican Party and served again in the legislature in 1883. His children included James Hill Ramsay (1855-1930), longtime postmaster of Salisbury, N.C., and delegate to the 1896 national Republican Convention, and Claudius C. Ramsay (1865-1930), a prominent citizen of Seattle, Wash.

James Graham Ramsay was born on 1 March 1823 on his father's small plantation in Iredell County, N.C. His parents David (d. 1857) and Margaret Foster Graham Ramsay (d. 1855?) were both of Scotch-Irish descent. The Ramsays had emigrated in 1695 to Pennsylvania, and John Graham Ramsay's grandfather had moved to Iredell's Coddle Creek community in 1766.

Ramsay entered Davidson College in 1838 and was graduated three years later. He taught school for a year, then studied medicine with his brother-in-law before entering the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, from which he was graduated in 1848.

In 1846, he married Sarah Foster of Davie County, N.C. Their children were Margaret Foster (d. 1909), Florence May, David W., James Hill (1855-1930), Edgar B. (d. 1917), William G., Robert L., and Claudius C. (1865-1930).

After graduation, James Graham Ramsay opened an office at Palermo, his home near Cleveland, Rowan County, N.C., where he practiced for the next 51 years. In 1849, he helped organize the first medical society in Rowan. He also farmed; the 1860 census valued his holdings at $10,000 in real estate and reported that he owned five slaves.

Ramsay was an active Whig, campaigning vigorously for various candidates and serving in the state Senate from 1856 to 1864, where he was a peace advocate until Lincoln's 1861 call for volunteers to quell the Southern rebellion. In 1863, Ramsay won a seat in the Confederate Congress, promising to work for an honorable peace. In the Confederate Congress, he was a strong supporter of states' rights over the needs of the Confederacy. By April 1865, he was working to hold a convention to return North Carolina to the Union.

After the war, Ramsay became active in the state Republican Party. In 1872, he was a presidential elector and, in 1882, was returned to the North Carolina Senate for one term. He declined a diplomatic post in South America that President Rutherford B. Hayes offered him.

Ramsay spent his last years in Salisbury, N.C., with his son James Hill Ramsay. He died on 10 January 1903 and was buried in the cemetery of the Third Creek Presbyterian Church near Cleveland, where he had been a ruling elder for 49 years.

[Based on a note by Buck Yearns in the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, Volume 5, P-S, ed. William B. Powell (1994).]