Hugh McGary

Hugh McGary (1744–1806) was an American pioneer, a slave owner, a large land owner, and founder of McGary Station, in present-day Oregon, Kentucky.

Hugh McGary was born in 1744 to John McGary and his wife Sarah in Ireland. The McGary family came to the British colonies in present-day America as indentured servants in 1750.

In 1772, Hugh McGary, Samuel Tate, Benjamin Cutbeard, Daniel Boone, and two North Carolinians scout out land in Kentucky.

In August 1775, Hugh McGary, along with his new wife, the widow Mary Buntin Ray, and her sons William, James, and John Ray Jr., move to Kentucky with the twenty or thirty families that came with Daniel Boone on his second expedition to Boonesborough through the Cumberland Gap. Mary Buntin brought the first Bible into Kentucky. Hugh McGary was known for his fierce temper, which was an asset in battle, but being "void of humane and gentle qualities", McGary was "a quarrelsome and unpleasant man in civil life". Mary Buntin, however, was an equally strong-minded woman who "could manage McGary where a whole army couldn't."

While traveling north into the heartland of Kentucky, Daniel Boone's party traveled to Broadhead on the Dix River. While at Broadhead, Boone's party “bore a more northerly direction for Boonesboro while the McGary party when down to Dick's River. The party, consisting of the families of Hugh McGary, Richard Hogan, and Thomas Denton became hopelessly lost after leaving Boone's group.”

Hugh McGary finally settles himself and his new family permanently around Fort Harrod in September 1775.

On March 6, 1777, while working in a field at Boonesborough, an African-American slave was murdered by Native Americans, and his owner was wounded. On the same day, near Harrodsburg, while William and James Ray, Thomas Shores, and William Coomes were clearing land and making maple sugar, they were attacked at Shawnee Springs in present-day Mercer County, Kentucky. 14 year old William Ray, McGary's stepson, was killed, but James Ray, the swiftest runner in the settlement, after killing the Shawnee native who killed his brother, ran to Fort Harrod for help. Coomes saved himself by hiding underneath a log. Hugh McGary was one of the members of a search party for the maple sugar makers, and he came across the mutilated body of William Ray, which was scalped by the Shawnee. Later, when Shawnee warriors were burning the cabins outside the Harrodsburg stockade, McGary rushed outside to drive them off. After a fierce fight, McGary and another man was wounded, but when McGary saw that one of the Shawnee natives was wearing the same hunting shirt his stepson owned, McGary killed that warrior, cut the Shawnee's body up, and then fed the bloody pieces to his dogs.

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