Due to the importance of the B&O Railroad for the movement of troops and supplies, Grafton was a strategic point during the early stages of the Civil War and both sides tried to control it.

The settlement of Grafton was part of a rapid movement west to the new frontier in the early to mid-1700's. The Current family, one of Grafton's first residents, were late seventeenth-century Irish immigrants who entered the continent by the way of Maryland.