In 1929, Mary Adeline Norris Gray took to the sky over Phoenix at the invitation of local aviators. It was the 83-year-old’s first plane flight, but she wasn’t intimidated — “It was better than bein’ amongst all these reckless auto drivers,” she told the Arizona Daily Star.
The city, Gray said, had “all changed since I first saw it.” And that was truer for her than for just about anyone, because more than six decades earlier, Gray had become one of the first white women — and possibly the first — to settle in the Salt River Valley.
She was born in Union County, Arkansas, in 1846, and married Columbus “Lum” Gray there in 1865. Three years later, the two entered Arizona Territory by mule wagon en route to California, but they found unexpected green grass along the Salt River, where they stopped for what was meant to be a brief rest.
Instead, the two put down roots in the tiny agricultural community. On the southwest corner of present-day Seventh and Mohave streets, Lum built one of the first permanent homes in Phoenix, an adobe farmhouse that soon was replaced by a brick structure. The couple’s former slave, Mary Green, remained with the couple and is believed to have been the first Black woman to settle in the area.
“The first farmers were called ‘punkin eaters,’ because for the first five years or so, about all we raised was punkins, watermelons and vegetables,” Gray recalled. Later, they added barley, corn and cotton. Among their neighbors was city founder Jack Swilling, who Gray remembered as a handsome man with a twinkle in his eye — and a fondness for liquor and morphine.
The Grays had no children, but their Phoenix residence served as the region’s social hub, hosting births, weddings, funerals and dinner parties. And Gray rose to prominence as a civic leader and was instrumental in the building of Phoenix’s first school and church.
Lum died in 1905. In 1929, when the Daily Star interviewed Gray, she said she was hoping to make it to 100, but she died in 1936 at age 90. She’s buried in Tempe’s Double Butte Cemetery, about 5 miles southeast of the site of her former home in Phoenix.