John Marshall (1803-1889) was the third son of John and Catharina Truby Rohrer Marshall.  He was born in the Rohrer-Marshall Tavern in Greensburg, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania.  After the death of John's parents in 1806, Joseph Marshall and John Patterson of St. Clairsville,  Ohio, were appointed guardians for him and his brothers, Andrew and Samuel. John disappears for two decades from the written records we’ve located, surfacing again with his 1827 marriage to Charlotte Kelker (1800-1854) in Butler, Pennsylvania.  Their first child, Mary Ann Marshall Turk, was born in Butler nine months and ten days after their marriage.

     John and his wife Charlotte owned property in Connoquenessing Township, just west of Butler, in the late 1820s.  He appears in the 1828 Tax Lists of the town, along with his brother Andrew and his father-in-law, Jacob Kelker.  He was a carpenter, and his great-granddaughter Laura Heffner Wilson recalled the family story that the Marshalls were in Butler (where her grandfather William Kelker Marshall was born in 1829) because John was a carpenter who was building a new, large hotel there.  By March 1832, when their third child John Truby Marshall was born, they were living in Lawrenceburg (now Parker)—a few miles downriver from John’s Aunt Hovey, a few miles upriver from his Truby uncles, Christopher and Jacob, and near his siblings Samuel Marshall and Mary Ann Marshall Bailey and his half-sister Betsy Rohrer Robinson. 

     He remained in Lawrenceburg the rest of his long life--through the oil boom and through seeing his village above Parker’s Landing become the Second Ward of Parker City.  In fact, he plotted this Ward and sold much of the land.  In the census records of 1850 and 1860, he is by occupation a carpenter; but he’s an oil producer in the 1870 census.  He saw the growth of the small Ebenezer Presbyterian Church and has left for us his Psalter and hymnal, with his name plate on the front end page.  John lived in Parker City in the Marshall homestead with his unmarried son, John Truby Marshall, for 35 years after the death of his wife and young son Freddie in 1854.  From this farm (now running along Marshall Street) on the bluff above the Allegheny, he sent his son Henry off to war; and there he learned of his capture in Tennessee and subsequent death at Andersonville Prison.  And in that home, John died at the extreme age of 87 years, in the late summer of 1889.  Of his five siblings, only his baby sister Mary Ann Marshall Bailey outlived him. 

     He had become the patriarch of the Marshall Clan in this region.  He lies buried in the Marshall Plot of his churchyard with his wife and five of his seven children and their families.  As well, his grave is a stone’s throw from his Aunt Hovey and her husband and from his sister Betsy Robinson; and it's just across the street from the grave of his sister Mary Ann Marshall Bailey.  In 2007, his family had his grave marker relettered so that his burial place and that of his wife and young son will be apparent for another few hundred years.

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