The neighborhood's namesake Schuylkill-crossing ferry originally belonged to a Benjamin Chambers in the 17th century.  Gray came later.  In the encyclopedic history of Philadelphia place names, Mermaids, Monasteries, Cherokees and Custer, author Robert Alotta describes how by 1747 George Gray had taken over the ferry, and established the nearby Gray's Inn and Grays's Garden, which were popular in the 1790s.  The garden was described back then as "romantic and delightful beyond description with every kind of flower one could think that nature had ever produced."  In 1778 the ferry was replaced by a cool floating bridge, which artist Joshua Rowley Watson depicted in several paintings, including "The Lower Bridge on Schuylkill at Gray's Ferry," which he completed in 1816.  Although Schuylkill boatman complained for years about the delay the snazzy but inconvenient floating bridge caused, it wasn't replaced with a real one until the railroad came along in the 1830s.  Grays Ferry was parceled out to Center City landowners, "so anyone signing on to Penn's scheme of a downtown lot also got 100 acres in the suburbs, which this area was.  Country houses were built here."

Although the former resort area has been called Grays Ferry colloquially since before George Washington set foot there (and on the ferry) in the 1770s, the name wasn't formalized until the 1970's, according to the Philadelphia Almanac and Citizen's Manual.