Town House, Country House
by “My Father’s Son”
On October 17, 1928, Dr. James King Gray and wife purchased the Thurmont home at 502 East Main Street from Levin M. and Cecilia Irving who had relocated from Chicago Illinois in 1923 when Irving, also a Doctor, purchased the medical practice of Dr. Elmer Clay Kefauver. E. C. Kefauver was one of three Kefauver children from the Middletown Valley west of Fredericktowne. Out of 132 students, Elmer was one of twenty-four seniors selected in 1890 to begin clinical studies at the University Hospital in Baltimore where his medical career would begin. Elmer’s brother Noah Kefauver was a Frederick dentist and his sister Julia Olive Kefauver, Mrs. Lloyd Clayton Culler; wife of the popular Frederick City Mayor which Culler Lake in Baker Park was dedicated.
Elmer Kefauver and wife Mary Atlee purchased Lot 3 of “Firor’s Addition to Thurmont” on the corner of East Main Street and Summit Avenue in 1914 where they built the white frame house remaining since. The house, a “four-square” layout on the first floor is entered at the left where a foyer and “L”-shaped stair welcome guests. From the entry a right-hand opening accesses a window-filled living room placed in front of the kitchen located in the rear, right “square” with another stairway climbing west to east between the two rooms. The top of this narrow, sudden, secondary service-stair reaches the second floor in close-proximity to the front stair termination leading down to the front door. Adjacent to the kitchen, accessed through the foyer by a passage beneath the turned portion of the main staircase, is the dining room featuring a full-height bay window on the home’s east façade complimented by a cantilevered bay of similar construct on the western elevation.
Elmer Kefauver upheld his private practice in the Thurmont Masonic Building at 12 East Main Street for thirty-two years before being appointed the Frederick City and County Health Officer, a post he began on January 1, 1924. Days before, on December 27, 1923, Kefauver sold his practice to Dr. Levin M. Irving, Kefauver’s nine year-old home was sold to Irving as well. The Irvings’ time in Thurmont lasted only five years, welcoming James K. and M. Dalene Gray by 1930.
James King Gray was born to Robert Hartsell Gray and Macijah Watkins King in 1895 at the couple’s “Highland Cottage” built on Robert Gray’s father’s Virginia farm at the meeting of the middle and south branches of the Holston River. Financially able, the family moved to Shelburne Glebe, a large country estate outside of Leesburg in 1901. Here, Robert (called “Robin” by his wife Macijah who went by “Watty”) farmed, and raised and trained horses. Shelburne Parish, named for the British Earl of Shelburne, was a colonial property built in the custom of the Anglican Church where a large estate was used to support a congregation, or “parish”. This parish, like others, was to be complete with a manor or “glebe-house” which was begun at Shelburne in 1772 for the parson and his family to reside. After the Revolutionary War, Virginia, and other new states, banned these traditionally-British church-governed properties and required that all parishes be sold to profit the poor and needy. Shelburne Parish resisted disestablishment for nearly thirty years and did not reach private ownership until the 1840s. Interrupted by the Revolution, the Shelburne Glebe-house was left incomplete and stood as a shell for several decades explaining how the colonial exterior came to be paired with a mismatched mid-19th century Greek revival trimmed interior. Completion of Shelburne Glebe was likely executed by the Aldridge family who bought the property after its church dissolution sixty years prior to the Grays inhabitance.
At Shelburne Glebe, James King Gray, the three-times great-grandson of the famous southern Reverend James King, was raised and homeschooled until 1912. James then moved to his Uncle John B. King’s residence in the District of Columbia to attend Western High School where he graduated in 1914 allowing him to continue and graduate from the University of Virginia.
Aged 31 years, James Gray wed Dalene Rogers from Delton, Virginia in November of 1926 and in 1928 moved to Thurmont where he bought “a nice, large home at 502 East Main Street which he owned for the rest of his life” as described by B.N. Phillips’s The Book of Kings, The King Family’s Contribution to the History of Bristol, Tennessee/ Virginia. Though the Grays never sold the home, they did briefly depart our Maryland municipality during the Great Depression. Between the years of 1932 and 1934 James Gray accepted a more fiscally stable position at Southwestern State Hospital in Marion, Virginia, until his return to his office above the Thurmont Post Office in the Masonic building.
Beginning with a daughter born in 1931, Dr. and Mrs. Gray had three children. Nancy Ann, of Baltimore, attended Towson State College and got her Masters at the University of Maryland. James King, Jr. of Kensington, Maryland, was born in 1934 and graduated from Shenandoah College. James Jr. retired from Pan Am Airlines and was then associated with Mercedes Benz in Bethesda. Lastly, born 1941, was Sarah Watkins of York, Pennsylvania, who wed Hagop Tateosian at College Park, Maryland, where she graduated college. The Grays were also caregivers to Dr. Gray’s Aunt, Margaret Elizabeth King, his mother Watty’s sister. Mrs. King came to live at her nephew’s 502 East Main Street address in 1934 where he had arranged an apartment for her in a converted portion of the home’s garage at the rear of the lot. In the apartment was a large northern skylight put in for the delight of the doctor’s artistic Aunt. Mrs. King taught art to many Thurmont children in her studio. Margaret E. King had her first stroke in December of 1941 and passed in 1943 of her ailing health.
Dr. Gray was the best man in his son James Jr.’s 1959 wedding to Florida’s Shirley Ann Vinkle after which an elegant reception was held at the Francis Scott Key Hotel in Frederick. Come 1961, Dr. Gray was nominated by Thurmont residents as a mayoral candidate, but immediately declined the nomination. Gray was also in his life President of the Frederick County Medical Association, Thurmont Lions Club, and the Thurmont Bank, of which he was an active board member for forty-three years. Dr. Gray retired in 1971 at seventy-six years old, but continued to make house calls and welcome visits at his home until he let his medical license expire at age eighty-nine and a half. James King Gray died in 1987 at ninety-two and is buried in Union Cemetery at Leesburg, Virginia. Dalene Gray, devoted wife and assistant to the Doctor, survived her husband by nearly one year before she passed away on July 23, 1988, aged ninety-one.
Four months after Dalene Gray’s death, the Gray’s handsome home was sold to Norman D. and Monique P. Otis, the three Gray children saying goodbye to the house their parents called home for sixty years. The Otis’, who remain at the residence twenty-eight years later, maintain the home with immaculate detail and care and continue to manicure the surrounding hedges recalled in Thurmont residents’ memories dating as far back as the 1940s. The Otis’ have, too, constructed a handsome addition to the home’s rear façade lined with windows overlooking gracious gardens that accommodated Mrs. Otis’s mother for a time.
Elmer C. Kefauver, 502’s originator, died in 1950 and his wife, Mary, in 1957. They were survived by their daughter, Lillian, who was celebrated by the Frederick News Post in March of 1998, when turning one hundred years old. She passed away in the year 2000. Dr. Kefauver was eighty-two at the time of his death, his wife two
