Hughes, James

The James Hughes who appears in the Mason family manuscript account book likely descended from Thomas Hughes, a wealthy colonial immigrant who left Ireland to settle in northern Virginia. Thomas’s son Felix married Cinthia Kaighn and had eight to ten children in Loudoun County, including James Hughes, born in 1750.

In the summer of 1767, Thomas and fifty members of his extended family, including his son Felix and his grandson James, ventured out of Virginia to become some of the first white settlers in Green County, Pennsylvania. This area became open to white settlers from the English-speaking colonies after British victory in the French and Indian War in 1763. In 1771, while on a hunting expedition with his brother Thomas, James identified land in the Pennsylvania wilderness to build his Green County home.

Members of the Hughes family traveled between Virginia and Pennsylvania as they settled the land. On one of his trips to Loudoun County in 1772, James Hughes married Casandra Dunn. In 1773, Hughes’s wife and child joined him in Pennsylvania, where they lived the rest of their lives.

On 13 November 1776, Hughes enlisted to fight in the American Revolution; he reenlisted on 27 December 1781. After the war, he had business in Loudoun County until at least 1798. Hughes became the first commissioner of Green County, Pennsylvania, and was appointed sheriff in 1821. He died in 1836 in Waynesburg County, Pennsylvania.

By Rachel Hughes