This family recently held a reunion at Hickory Hill church, near here. They will meet next year at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Williams, who own the orginal Harris home place. That portion of the Harris family that settled in the Southern colonies had its orgin in Wales. From there they went to France and became allied to the great family of Vendosine, prior to the Norman Conquest. Menbers opf the family returned to Great Britain, and became prominent after the Conquest; and from the armorial bearing of the various branches, particularly the three Herrions, we are assured of a common orgin for the Wiltshire and Ayshire Harrises. From the Yourkshire branch came the settlers who founded Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Our ancestors, John Harris, pioneer settler of the State of Pennsylvania, was born in Yorkshire, England in the year 1673. He came to America with several brothers previous to 1698. He entered this then lucrative field the Indian trade, at the suggestion of his friend, Edward Shippen, who was a member of the Provincila Council. He and two of his brothers became Indian Traders, with their base of operation at Philadelphia, but in January, 1705, John Harris received a license from the Commissioners of Property, authorizing and allowing him to seat himself on the Susquehanna River and to improve such quantities of land as he shall think Fit. At once he set about building a long house near the Ganawere settlement (so called by the indians) - Conway (by the English) - but the Indians made complaint to the govermant that it made them uneasie, desiring to know if they encouraged it. He brough letters to Edward Shippen, first Mayor of Philadephia, at whose house he med a cousin of the Shipens. She was Esther Say and he married her in 1719. Together they came out to the wilderness, the first white man who really stayed in this region. About this time, a marauding band of drunken Indians made an attempt to burn him. The savages bound him to a tree and dooomed him to a death of torture, but he was providentially delived. He was attacked by the the Indians a second time by coming to his cabin, ans while his wife loaded the guns he shot them down through the cracks in the wall, and by the time rescuers arrived, thirty-two dead Indians lay on the ground around the house. Again the Indians, to avenge themselves for their imaginary wrong, made the thrid attemp to kill him and his family. They came at night and finding that they could not gain an entrace to his cabin, they quietly climbed to the roof and prepared to come down the chimney when he placed a straw bed in the fire place, set it on fire, anile he and his family made their great escape, but he lost his home. Eight Indians perished in the flames, bringing the number that he had killed to forty. It is said that he had hidden ourt all of his important ppapers and collected them after the fire, and was never more molested by the Indians.
 It was during one of the expeditions that Harris first beheld the beauty and advantages of the location of Paxtang (Peshtank) Indian village (Pextang), then in the Lancaster, now Dauphin county. It was the best fording place on the Susquehanna, and then , as now, in these later days, on the great highway between the North and South, the East and the West. He located at Paxtang, which later became Harris Ferry. Here he had one white man for a neighbor. Meckle was his name.

John Harris owned large tracts of land, as he had bought a large amount of Pen Grant - the grant to William Penn by Charles II, --and by virture of a warrent form the Proprietaries of Pennsylvania, bearing date, January 1, 1725-1726, five hundred acres of land were granted John Harris, father of the founder of Harrisburg, and subsequently on the 17th of December, 1733, by patent granted three hundred acres of allowance land, upon which he had commenced a settlement on the present site of the city in 1725. He had a family of sixteen or seventeen children and died at Harris Ferry in 1748. At his own request, he was buried at the foot of the remains of the the tree to which the Indians had tied him. This tree is in Harris Park, which is directly opposite the old stone mansion built by his son, John Harris, the founder. John Harris, the founder, was the oldest son of John Harris, the pioneer, and inherited his father's landed estate, and its is through him that Harrisburg, the capital of the "Keystone State" bears the family name. Our branch of the family comes through James Harris, who was a younger son of John Harris, the pioneer. He married Hannah Stapleton, and lived in Pennsylvania where two sons were born to them, John and James. James Harris and his wife came to Rowan county, N.C. and settled near Third Creek church and Salisbury. He was a Revolutionary soldier and died on his plantation in North Carolina in the year 1810 or 1811.

James Harris II was born in Pensylvania on Feburary 10, 1777, and removed with is parents to Rowan County N.C. and was a lad of about fourteen years when he saw General Washington as he passed through Salisbury in April, 1791, on the return of his tour of the Southern States. He married his wife, Nancy Thompson, on June 26, 1797, in Union County S.C. she being a daughter of Captain John Thompson (Thomson), of Revolutionary fame.

James Harris and his wife Nancy Thompson, lived in Rowan County, N.C. until 1807, when they came to Tennesee in ox carts and crossed Tennesee River at Ross Landing, when it was only an Indian village. They settled on Duck River at Thompson's Ford, near Shelbyville, Tennessee. He located and surveyed seven hundred and thirty-two acres of land lying between Duck River and FallCreek, which was worth seventeen cents per acre, it then being a canebrake and roamed by wild animals. Their nearest neighbor was ten miles away, where Midland now is.
Eight children blessed this union. James Harris served under General Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812. Captain James Harris, on June 15, 1814 , raised a full company and walked to New Orleans and participated in this famous battle under Colonel Richard Warner of the regiment of which James Harris company was merged. He died November 3, 1863, during the Civil War, and his beloved wife followed nearly six years later on October 1, 1869, they having lived happily together for sixty-six years.