Price, Ellis

Price, Ellis

Master builder Ellis Price was elected to The Carpenters' Company prior to the date of the earliest surviving records from the 1760s. In 1756 he married Sarah Osborne at Christ Church and was disowned by the Friends the following year. At the time of his death in 1766 he styled himself an innholder. Ellis Price was the son of Reese Price, a yeoman who died in 1760. Ellis was included in Reese Price’s will along with his siblings John, Edward, Mary Harry, Margaret Paschall, Jane and Ellias. Ellis was also an executor of Rebecca Rees’s will and listed as a “Friend” along with siblings John and Jane as well as a Elizabeth Price whose relation to Ellis is unclear. Rebecca Rees was Ellis Price’s step-grandmother. She married his grandfather Edward Reese, the father of Reese Price, and outlived him without issue. Reese Price is called Reese Rees in his father’s will. Reese Price married three times. His second wife was Elizabeth Ellis, the daughter of Ellis Ellis, whom he married in 1718. This is most likely the source of Ellis Price’s first name. Rees Price was the second landlord of the Blue Anchor Tavern on Dock Creek (now Dock street), the site where William Penn first landed in Pennsylvania. While Ellis Price was also an innholder, his inn is unknown and was assuredly not the Blue Anchor. Ellis’s surname, Price, most likely comes from the Welsh tradition of males putting “Ap” in front of their father’s name, thus Rees became Aprees and eventually anglicized to Price. Both Rebecca Rees’s and Reese Price’s will list Merion as their residence. Merion belonged to the Welsh Tract. Many Welsh Quakers settled this area and their families, such as the Prices and the Ellis’s, kept close ties. Ellis Price had already been disowned by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting due to his marriage outside of the religion at the time of his father’s death. At the time of his own death, Ellis Price had an inventory worth three hundred and eleven pounds after administration. His will included “some old tools and lumber in the Garrets”, valued at one pound and five shillings. Evidently, he still practiced, or had recently practiced, carpentry at the end of his life.

Biography from Philadelphia Architects and Buildings, a project of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia. Written by Roger W. Moss and Thomas Stokes.

33*

Price

Ellis

1/1/1719

8/3/1766

Sarah Osborne

Reese Price

Ann

*Tatman & Moss Biographical Dictionary Phila. Architects page 624. Master builder Ellis Price was elected to The Carpenters' Company prior to the date of the earliest surviving records from the 1760s. In 1756 he married Sarah Osborne at Christ Church and was disowned by the Friends the following year. At the time of his death in 1766 he styled himself an innholder. See Selected Bibliography in Tatman & Moss Bio Dictionary Phila. Architects. See piece in Pennsylvania Archives.

*Ellis Price, letters of admin. granted to Sarah Price 26 August 1766: (Adm. Book H, 28 #81:1766). Died 8.3.1766, age 47 (Hinshaw, II, 409)

*Grantor File Data from the City of Philadelphia Archives:
(Date; Book; No.; Page; Grantee)
1683/1777; H; 20; 270; Fuller, John

a

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