John McClellan Murrell

"Uncle" John McClellan Murrell (1861-1941) was brother to my g-g-grandmother Annie E. (Murrell) Jones. Born during the advent of the Civil War, he leaves no doubt as to the political leanings of his parents Alexander Murrell and Sally (Price) Murrell as he is named after one of the lead generals on the Union side, George B. McClellan. That would have been very controversial in those years as the family was running the large water mill in Allen, MD (then Upper Trappe) in a very pro-Southern area.
My g-g-grandmother Annie Murrell Jones' husband George Henry Jones (1855-1893) died when she was only 33 years old in 1893 and she lived on for another 53 years. Once my great-grandparents Hitch moved to the new farmhouse on St. Lukes Road in 1905, "Grandmother Jones" moved in with her daughter and son in law and died in the farmhouse one evening after dinner in August 1946 - she told the family that she was going to go lay down and die and SHE DID. John Murrell here was her one year younger brother and they kept in close contact through the years and he gave her this picture of his dapper self in the 1880s.
However John Murrell was not content living the farm life on the eastern shore and ventured up to Philadelphia by 1888. He married Sadie Killingsworth Prettyman from Delaware on Mar 18 1886 in Camden, NJ, a young lady he had met in Mt. Vernon, Somerset Co., MD in the early 1880s when her family was living there. Her father, Henry Prettyman (1821-1901) was a house carpenter and traveled around in MD, DE, NJ and PA. The 1890 census was destroyed by fire but, we know in 1900, John Murrell is listed in Ward 26 as a real estate agent with his wife and son Percy and daughter Helen Murrell. It seems by then that John's brother-in-law Charles Prettyman was building houses in Philadelphia and John was the agent to sell those houses and they had a great business going!
By 1910, the family had moved to nearby Delaware Co., PA and Uncle John is listed as a lumber merchant with son, Percy (Pierce) shown as a clerk in the same business. Daughter Helen had married Mr. Felton Grove about 9 months earlier so was not living with the family. From the 1910 census, we can glean that Sadie Murrell had bore another child between 1900 and 1910 but it did not survive and, we know that wife Sadie also died, in July 1910, of a severe urinary tract infection that spread into her kidneys.
In 1920, John Murrell was living as a boarder in Ward 30 in Philly and back to being a real estate agent. By 1930, John is age 67 and still in the same occupation but living with his daughter's family in Swarthmore, PA. Uncle John died in Philly in 1941, just shy of his 80th birthday...

John married Sadie Kilingsworth Prettyman, daughter of Henry R. Prettyman and Sarah Pauline Anderson, on 18 Mar 1886 in Camden Co., NJ.¹ (Sadie Kilingsworth Prettyman was born on 22 Feb 1861 in NJ,^{9 10 11 12 13 14} died on 27 Jul 1910 in PA and was buried on 30 Jul 1910 in West Laurel Hill Cemetery, Bala Cynwyd, Montgomery Co., PA.)