Veteran of the Revolution

Our ancestor John Pipes Jr. was born in 1739 in Rockaway, New Jersey, approximately 40 miles west of New York. His father, John Pipes Sr., and mother Susan Hathaway, moved to Rockaway from Bristol, Massachusetts, in 1736, one year after they were married. John Pipes Sr. was a founding member of the original Presbyterian Church in Morris County, New Jersey.

When his father and several siblings moved to North Carolina, John Pipes Jr. continued living in Morris County, New Jersey. By August 1777, he was a 38-year-old widower with five children of his own, and an Infantry Officer in the New Jersey Line of the Continental Army. It is not known how he met his second wife, Mary Morris, but she had an uncle Joseph Morris who was also an officer in the New Jersey Line, so it is possible that he played a part in helping the two of them meet. While encamped at Elizabethtown, NJ, John requested a short leave and he and Mary were married at the Presbyterian Church in Morristown on Aug 23, 1777.

John Pipes Jr. was a 2nd Lieutenant and then a 1st Lieutenant during the Revolutionary War, serving in Colonel Ephraim Martin’s 2nd Regiment, 4th Battalion, from Jun 1776 to Oct 1777. As Mary Morris’s pension application confirms, he fought in 16 battles including the Siege of Fort Ticonderoga (July 1777). After resigning his commission in the Continental army, he served as Captain in the New Jersey militia, and later, as a minute man when he moved his family to North Carolina to be closer to his father.

John Pipes Jr. and Mary Morris had eleven children from 1778 to 1803 and at least 64 grandchildren. After relocating his family (along with some of his siblings) to Mercer County, Kentucky, in 1796, John and Mary lived the rest of their lives on the family’s farm, and both are buried in the Old Union Cemetery near Perryville, Kentucky. John Pipes Jr. died on Aug 6, 1821.