page_title: Mary Draper Ingles
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Mary Draper Ingles / Biography / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: View of the log cabin near the New River belonging to William and Mary Draper Ingles. Cabin was located near the site of present-day Radford, Virginia. Photograph courtesy of the New River Gorge National River site, National Park Service, United States Government.
context_page_description: Mary Draper Ingles, also known in records as Mary Inglis or Mary English, was an American pioneer and early settler of western Virginia. In the summer of 1755, she and her two young sons were among several captives taken by Shawnee after the Draper's Meadow Massacre during the French and Indian War. They were taken to Lower Shawneetown at the Ohio and Scioto rivers. Ingles escaped with another woman after two and a half months and trekked 500 to 600 miles, crossing numerous rivers, creeks, and the Appalachian Mountains to return home.
  Two somewhat different accounts of Mary Draper Ingles' capture and escape, one written by her son John Ingles, and the other by Letitia Preston Floyd, an acquaintance, are the two primary sources from which the story is known.
  The story became well-known following the 1855 publication of William Henry Foote's account in Sketches of Virginia: Historical and Biographical, based on Mary's son's manuscript. It was further publicized in 1886 with the publication of an embellished version in John P. Hale's Trans-Allegheny pioneers: historical sketches of the first white settlements west of the Alleghenies.
context_section_description: Mary Draper Ingles was born in 1732 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to George and Elenor (Hardin) Draper, who had immigrated to America from Donegal, Ireland in 1729. Between 1740 and 1744, the Draper family moved to the western frontier of Virginia, settling in Pattonsburg on the James River. Around 1744, George Draper went on an exploratory trip into what is now West Virginia, and never returned. In 1748 or 1750 his family established Draper's Meadow, a pioneer settlement on the banks of Stroubles Creek near modern-day Blacksburg, Virginia.
  In 1750, Mary married fellow settler William Ingles (1729-1782). They had two sons together: Thomas, born in 1751, and George, in 1753.
caption: Log cabin next to the New River, near present-day Radford, Virginia, where Mary Draper Ingles and her husband William lived out their lives. Photo c.1890
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