François GRUEBER ¹

  General Notes:

http://www.faversham.org/history/people/whos_who_f-g
Francis Grueber (c1657– 1730) was born in France into a Huguenot family that came to England in about 1680. His father, Daniel, settled in London and by 1687 had rented leather and gunpowder mills in Faversham, Ospringe and Preston, and was in coastal trade, sending groceries to Faversham and carrying back powder and skins from his mills. After his father's death, Grueber ran the mills, and by the mid-1690s was the largest of five Faversham suppliers of powder to the Government. He also dabbled in the grain trade that dominated the port of Faversham. After 1700, Grueber seems to have focused on gunpowder, his mills employing other Huguenot refugees living in Faversham. In 1703, a blast at one of his Faversham mills "shattered the whole town", as Daniel Defoe put it, and killed one of Grueber's sons, also Francis. After Grueber's death, the business stayed in the family, but the State bought Faversham's main powder mill in 1759.
Reference Icon Details: Dictionary of National Biography; Faversham Gunpowder Personnel Register 1573-1840
(Faversham Society's Faversham Papers)

https://londonimmigrants.wordpress.com/tag/huguenots/
Gunpowder manufacturer Francis Grueber was born in Lyons, probably in December 1658, into a Huguenot family. The family settled in London about 1680. His father Daniel Grueber remained domiciled in the London parish of St Swithin, and a member of the capital's French Walloon community, until his death in 1692. Francis continued his father's gunpowder mills along Faversham Creek in Kent.

Faversham was the cradle of Britain's explosives industry, becoming one of its main centres of production. The first gunpowder plant was established there in the sixteenth century. By the mid-1690s Francis had emerged as the largest of five Faversham merchants supplying gunpowder to the Ordnance Office. After 1700 his mills provided employment for the small community of Huguenot refugees who had settled in Faversham by the turn of the century. The family lived in Preston Street in the town, but Grueber remained very much an urban gent.

Between 1691 and 1693 he was a deacon of the French church in Threadneedle Street and was an elder between 1705 and 1708 and after 1713. Gruber died in April 1730. Faversham'es principal gunpowder mill was eventually purchased by the Ordnance Board in 1759.

François married.