USA > Ohio > Adams County > A history of Adams County, Ohio, from its earliest settlement to the present time, including character sketches of the prominent persons identified with the first century of the country's growth > Part 77
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Thomas Campbell Wasson
was a grandson of John Wasson, a native of Ireland, and with his wife emigrated to Rockbridge County, Virginia, rearing a large family there. Among his children was a son, Thomas, who married Rebecca Cowen and moved to Ohio in 1804. He located within four miles of Winchester in what was then Wayne Township. He lived there a year or more and then moved onto the farm near Cherry Fork occupied by our subject during his lifetime. Thomas Wasson and wife connected with the U. P. Church at Cherry Fork soon after its organization in 1805 and remained members thereof during their lives.
Thomas Wasson's wife died August 5, 1838, and he survived until December 3, 1851, when he departed this life in his seventy-fourth year. They reared a family of three sons and three daughters, all of whom lived to maturity and married.
Mr. Thomas Wasson contracted a second marriage with Elkiah Spencer, by whom he had one son, William F., born August 29, 1845, and who died in the military service of the United States in the War of 1861.
The subject of our sketch was born May 20, 1812, and was reared on his father's farm in Wayne Township. He married Martha Patton Campbell. February 9, 1832. Of this marriage there were eight children, five of whom, three sons and two daughters, grew to maturity and married. His eldest son, Thomas Stewart Wasson, is a retired farmer living at Seaman, Ohio. His second son, James P., now deceased, has a sketch in this book. His third son, Samuel Y., also has a sketch in this book. His daughter, Matilda J., widow of B. F. Pittinger, now resides at Min-
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neapolis, Kansas. His youngest daughter, Martha, married to Steele Glasgow, resides at North Liberty. Thomas Campbell Wasson was a man of the strictest integrity and of remarkable energy and industry. He was of strong prejudices every way. If he loved one, there was nothing too much he could do for him. If he hated one, he did it with all the powers of his soul. Once his friend, he was attracted to you by hooks of steel; once your enemy, he was likely to remain so. He believed in the religion taught in the doctrines and practice of the United Presbyterian Church, and all the powers of Hell could not have moved him from his faith. When the right and wrongfulness of human slavery began to be discussed, he became convinced that that institution was a monstrous sin against both God and man, and from that hour until the war destroyed it, he was its most inveterate enemy. He would tolerate no political party which would excuse or apologize for it, and by word and deed, he did all he could to destroy it. No poor hunted fugitive ever applied to him in vain, and his home was a well-known station on the Underground Railroad.
He was an excellent farmer and by great industry and economy, with the best of management, he acquired a competence and spent his latter years in ease and comfort. He did eeverything in life most ernestly. He was not one of the meek and lowly Christians but one of the fighting kind who believed in taking the Kingdom of Heaven by storm. He be- lieved in struggling and fighting for the right, both in Church and State. His life is best illustrated in the character of his three sons, two of whom are men of influence and importance in their respective communities, and a third son, now deceased, held a like position in the State of Kansas where he died recently. These three sons, like their father, have been able to manage their own affairs successfully and to accumulate com- petencies.
Campbell Wasson, the name by which he was best known, never sought or held public office, but he always believed in taking an active part in the counsels of his own party and did so. He was a Whig first and a Republican afterwards, but all the time he was anti-slavery and believed in the abolition of that institution. He believed in making his views on all subjects felt, and as a consequence he was a man of positive influence both in Church and State. He was never the one to drift with the current, or follow the lead of others, but sought to make all men within his in- fluence feel and think as he did. His influence was always on the side of good order, religion, right and justice. That part of the world which he knew and which knew him was better that he had lived.
The wife of this subject died May 13, 1871, and in 1872, he contracted a second marriage with Mrs. Eliza J. McNeil, who survived him. He died the eighth day of January, 1888.
The Rev. William Williamson.
Sometimes a man's career can be judged by his ancestors and some- times by his posterity, and sometimes we can look to both, to give a fair estimate of him after his life work has been done. The subject of this sketch will bear favorable investigation in both ways.
The Rev. William Williamson was born September 23, 1762, near Greenville, N. C. He was the eldest of six children. His father, Thomas. was born in 1736 and his mother, Anne Newton, related to the family of
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Sir Isaac Newton and Rev. John Newton, was born in March, 1738. Her father emigrated from England with his wife and family. He and they were thirteen weeks crossing the ocean, contending with storms and sick- ness, and buried two children at sea. Anne and Elizabeth survived and married brothers. Thomas and Anne settled at Greenville, N. C., where all of their children were born.
During the Revolutionary War, William entered the Revolutionary army and served under General Gates in the hard campaign in the summer of 1780. His command saw very severe service and he has often related of forced marches in the great heat, when the soldiers were not allowed even to stop and drink at the roadside, and that often the soldiers were half starved.
Young Williamson was small for his age and not strong, and he and two hundred of his command were captured at the battle of Camden, S. C .. August 10, 1780. During young Williamson's service, his mother would would often stay up all night, and, assisted by her servants, cook food for the soldiers, which his father would carry to them in his wagon the day following. When the war was over, Thomas Williamson, with his family, moved to the Spartansburg District, S. C. He purchased a cotton planta- tion there, on which the county seat was afterwards located. After this event, he sought a place a few miles distant from the courthouse, on which he lived until his death in 1813.
Young William Williamson, after the Revolutionary War, was sent to Hampden Sidney College in Virginia, where he received a liberal education and was graduated. He studied theology and was installed as pastor of the Fair Forest Presbyterian Church in April, 1793.
The Rev. William Williamson believed in the married state. His first wife was a Miss Catherine Buford, of Abbeville, S. C. By her, he had four daughters, Anne Newton, who married Dr. William B. Willson in 1818; Mary married James Ellison; Elizabeth married Robinson Baird, and Esther married William Kirker.
His second wife was Jane Simth, of North Carolina, by whom he had two children, the Rev. Thomas Smith Williamson, missionary to the Dakotahs, and Jane Smith Williamson, who never married, but has always been known as Aunt Jane. He also had a third wife in his old age, Hannah Johnson, a widow.
The Rev. William Williamson had a brother, Thomas, sixteen years younger than himself. They were devotedly attached to each other and both espoused strong anti-slavery notions. Thomas became an accom- plished physician.
William Williamson and his second wife regarded slavery as a great evil. While they owned slaves, they believed it wrong to sell them. Mrs. Williamson felt the condition of the slaves so strongly that she undertook to teach them to read. This, of course, came to the ears of her slave- holding neighbors and she was remonstrated with time and again to no purpose. Finally the patrol visited her and told her if she did not stop, she would be prosecuted under the stringent laws of South Carolina, for- bidding slaves to be taught to read. Mrs. Williamson had high notions of right and wrong and was a Southern woman of great spirit. Her husband warmly sympathized with her and both thought they might do as they chose with their own property. The authorities, however, were as firm
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as Mrs. Williamson, and she and her husband resolved to take their slaves to a state where they could teach them to read without let or hinderance. They took their slaves and emigrated to Ohio in 1805. His father dying in 1813, by his will gave his slaves to his son William, but with directions to set them free. To accomplish this, his mother left South Carolina soon after the death of his father and brought her slaves to Ohio and set them free. She continued to live with her sons in Adams. County till her death in 1820.
Our subject's mother was a superior woman, a sincere Christian and a philanthropist. She gave a liberal education to two of her slaves-Rev. Benjamin Templeton, who became a Presbyterian minister in Philadelphia, and John N. Templeton, who graduated at the Ohio University and became a successful teacher in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.
William Williamson took up lands not far from Manchester and made a home there during his life. His lands were near those of his brother- in-law, Col. John Means, who married his sister Anne, born August 17, 1760. This sister had been married to Col. Means in South Carolina, April 10, 1778. Col. Means, however, did not move to Ohio till 1819.
The home of Rev. William Williamson in Adams County was called "The Beeches." It is now the property of John Meek Leedom. Our sub- ject accepted a church at Cabin Creek, Kentucky, on the Ohio River, and about four miles from his home, on the sixteenth of May, 1805, and con- tinued to minister to that church until 1820. His record there was that the church grew and prospered and he was esteemed one of the most devoted, pious and popular ministers of his day. He was also minister to the Presbyterian Church in West Union, Ohio, from May, 1805, till 1819, when he was succeeded by the Rev. Dyer Burgess. His religion must have seen sincere and deep, for in 1809, when the stone church was to be built at West Union, he subscribed one-half of his salary towards it. He was re- ceived into the Chillicothe Presbytery from the Second Presbytery of South Carolina, on August 28, 1805, along with the Rev. Robert G. Wilson and the Rev. Gilliland. They became the fathers of Presbyterianism in southern Ohio, and to him and his associates is due the strength and power of the Presbyterian Church in southern Ohio to-day. They laid the foundations upon which others built. Rev. Williamson was many times Moderator and often Clerk of the Chillicothe Presbytery. He was in- fluential, active and useful in the church and as a citizen. When the Rev. Dyer Burgess took charge of the West Union Church in 1829, Rev. Williamson thereafter devoted his labors to the Manchester Church, so long as he was able to perform ministeral duties.
He died at "The Beeches," near Manchester, Ohio, November 29, 1839, aged seventy-seven years.
If, before becoming acquainted with his history, we had learned that of his patriotic father and heroic mother, and had learned that of his son, Rev. Thomas S. Williamson, and his daughter, Jane Williamson, we could outline his character and point out his place and power, just as the astron- omer can find a new star and state its magnitude and give its orbit from those which surround it. We reason forward from Thomas Williamson and Anne Newton, his wife, that persons of such noble character must produce a like son. From the daughters and son reared by the Rev. William Williamson, we see the characters he has molded and sent forth to
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bless the world. No hero ever did nobler or better work than the Rev. Thomas Smith Williamson, the missionary to the Dakotas. No woman showed a greater spirit of devotion to the church and to humanity, than his sister, Jane Williamson, coadjutor in the work of evangelizing the Red Men. If they were Thomas Williamson's children, what must have been the father, to whom they owed the missionary spirit? His four daughters, by his first wife, were godly, pious mothers, who reared large families of sons and daughters and taught them the love of God and the devotion to right and justice, which characterized their father and mother before them.
The descendants of Rev. William Williamson were wonderfully numerous. They, in their several generations obeyed the eleventh com- mandment to multiply and replenish the earth, and they to-day, wherever found, are the same God-fearing, God-loving people-pious and devoted to the right as they understand the right, as their progenitor was before them.
The memory of these pioneers in the Church of God should be care- fully preserved and treasured. This generation should know every detail of their labors and sacrifices.
Where a man could break up a pleasant home, bid adieu to all he had ever known and travel eight hundred miles through a wilderness that he might live in a free State and might give the blacks he owned, the bless- ings of freedom-such a man was a hero and he deserves to be remembered by posterity.
This generation should be proud of such a man and revere his memory, and regret that it has no such opportunity to demonstrate its devotion to right and principle.
Jane Smith Williamson.
This lady, eminent for her piety, her good works and her missionary labors among the Dakota Indians, was born at Fair Forest, South Carolina, March 8, 1803. Her father, the Rev. Williamson, a Presbyterian minister and a Revolutionary patriot, and her mother, Jane Smith Williamson, brought her to Ohio, an infant, in 1804. Her father and mother believed slaves had souls, and brought their twenty-seven slaves to Ohio, and set them free. Her mother had been fined in South Carolina for teaching her own slaves to read the Bible, and she and her husband removed to Ohio to free their slaves, and to be able to teach them to read and write. She was brought up in an atmosphere of sincere and deep piety and of devotion to Christian teachings. For early educational advantages in a new country were necessarily limited, but she made the most of them. She studied grammar and syntax practically, and mastered all the branches open to her study while she was a girl.
She was accurate in the use of language, both spoken and written. She wrote a hand like copper-plate, and was thorough in everything she studied. She read all the good and useful books which were accessible to her. She had an excellent memory and a lively imagination, and with a wide reading, she early acquired the art of writing most interesting letters.
From her parents and grandparents, she inherited that marked sympathy for the colored race which was an eminent characteristic of her entire life. At all times and on all occasions, she stood up for the colored people. In her young and mature womanhood, when there were no public
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schools in her county-or none worth the name-she taught subscription schools both in West Union and Manchester. In West Union, the ven- erable David Dunbar, now of Manchester, was one of her pupils, and in Manchester, Mrs. David Dunbar and Mrs. D. B. Hempstead, of Hanging Rock, were among her pupils. She never excluded a pupil because his or her parents or friends were unable to pay tuition. She sought out the poor and invited them to attend her school. She accepted colored pupils as well as whites.
Her teaching the colored people aroused bitter feeling in the com- munity, but she was such an excellent teacher that it did not decrease the number of her white pupils, and her control of her pupils was so perfect that the bringing of the colored pupils into the school did not affect the government of her school. The progress made by her pupils was rapid. and her teaching so thorough that the presence of the colored pupils did not drive the white ones away. There were many threats of violence to her school, but she was not alarmed. On more than one occasion, friends of hers, dreading the attempt to forcibly break up her school, took their rifles and went to her schoolhouse to defend her. Some of these men were rough characters, and hard drinkers, and some of them were pro-slavery, but they were determined her school should not be disturbed. They re- garded her as a fanatic in her views, but, as they regarded her as an efficient teacher, they did not propose that her work should be interfered with.
She was always a volunteer in houses where there was sickness. At the age of twenty-six, she went to General Darlinton's and nursed the mother of Mrs. Rev. E. P. Pratt through a spell of sickness. Mrs. Urmston was then a young married woman, just come to Ohio from Connecticut.
On June 8, 1835, she was teaching near "The Beeches," in Adams County. The next day she learned of the death of Dr. William M. Vorhis, of cholera, at Cincinnati, and it became her painful duty to inform her cousin (his wife) of the fact. At first, she told her that Dr. Vorhis had been very sick in Cincinnati. As cholera was prevalent there, the wife at once divined the truth, and swooned away. She went from one swoon into another, and Miss Williamson, in order to terminate her swoons, went out and brought in her two little girls, one seven and the other three years of age, and, leading one by each hand, asked her if there were not two good reasons for her to live and to work for.
Her love for children was a distinguishing trait of her character. She won their affections entirely, and thus ruled them without any apparent effort.
The missionary spirit was a part of her life, born with her, and a heritage from several generations. When her brother, Thomas S. Williamson, went as a missionary to the Dakota Indians in 1835, she wanted to go with him, but felt that she must remain at home and care for her aged father, who survived until 1839, and died at the age of seventy-seven; but she did not get to go to her brother until 1843, when she had reached the age of forty. Her life, prior to this, had been a preparation for missionary work. For years she had been an active worker in Sunday Schools, prayer meetings and missionary societies. In her day school, she had made public religious worship a prominent feature.
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When she reached Minnesota, she went to work directly and worked with great energy, and with an untiring industry greatly beyond her strength. She had an unusual familiarity with the Bible. She taught several hundred Indians to read the Word of God, and, the greater part of them, to write well enough to write letters. She ministered to all the sick within her reach, and devoted a great deal of time to instructing Indian women in domestic duties. She led the women in prayer meetings, and spent much time conversing with the women as to their souls. The privations of the missionaries, at that time, were great. White bread was then as much of a luxury as cake would now be considered.
Lac-que-Parle, her first missionary home, was two hundred miles west of St. Paul. It was more than a year from the time she left Adams County before a single letter could reach her. She was out in the Indian village when the first mail reached there. She heard of its arrival, and was so eager for news from her old home that she ran to her brother's house as swiftly as a young girl. She saw no signs of the mail, and asked where it was. They told her it was in the stove-oven. The mail carrier had brought it through the ice, and it had to be thawed out. The mail contained over fifty letters for her, and the postage on them was over five dollars. This in 1844.
She moved to Kaposia, now South St. Paul, in 1846, and to Pajutazee, thirty-two miles below Lac-que-Parle, in 1852. The Dakotas called her "Dowan Dootanin," which means "Red Song Woman."
She gathered the young Indians together, and taught them, as op- portunity offered.
In the great outbreak of 1862, when it seemed as though the work of the missionaries had failed, she never lost hope or faith.
In the Fall of 1894, when nearly two thousand converted Dakota Indians were gathered together, to plan for religious work among their people, she was the only survivor of the first missionaries.
In the Fall of 1881, she saw a poor Indian woman suffering with the cold. She took off her own warm skirt and gave it to the woman, and from this she took a cold and a spell of sickness followed, resulting in her total blindness.
After the Indian outbreak of 1862, the way never opened for her to resume her residence among the Dakotas, but she was given health and strength for nineteen years' more labor for the Master. Her home con- tinued to be with her brother, at or near St. Peter, until her death in 1879, and in his old home two years longer. In that time she did much for the Indians who lived with her brother, toward their education. She kept up an extensive and helpful correspondence with native Christian workers.
As a Sunday School teacher, she labored with untiring patience for the conversion of her pupils, and to train them as Christian workers. She was active in female prayer meetings and missionary societies. She lost most of her patrimony in lending to those most needing money, instead of to those most certain to pay. Her friends, however, were liberal in their donations to her work, and she was able to relieve most of those under her observation in serious want.
Here is the story of a modest, unassuming heroine. Without husband or children, alone in the world, she did not repine but made herself useful. wherever she was, in teaching secular learning and religious truth, and
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in ministering to the sick and afflicted, the downtrodden and oppressed. She never sought to do any great or wonderful thing, but only to do good as the opportunity offered. It has been thirty-two years since she left Ohio, and most of her friends there are dead, but those living, who re- member her, recall her with great love. So long as she can reflect on the record of her life, she cannot recall any opportunity slighted, any duty left undone.
She died March 24, 1895, at the home of her brother, Rev. John P. Williamson, at Greenwood, South Dakota.
Rev. Thomas Smith Williamson, M. D.
He was the only son of Rev. William Williamson and Mary Webb Smith, his second wife; was born in Union District, South Carolina, March 6, 1800, and removed with his parents to Mason County, Kentucky, in the Fall of 1802, and to "The Beeches," two miles from Manchester, Adams County, Ohio, probably in the Spring of 1805.
He prepared for college at home, went on horseback to Jefferson Col- lege, Cannonsburg, Pennsylvania, where he received the degree of A. B. in 1819. He read medicine with his brother-in-law, Dr. William B. Willson, of West Union, Ohio, and was for two years principal of an academy at Ripley, Ohio, where he prepared a large number of young men for col- lege. He studied medicine in Philadelphia and New Haven, and received the degree of M. D. from Yale College in 1824.
He settled in Ripley, Ohio, and built up a large practice. He married Margaret Poage, daughter of the town proprietor, a lady of high Christian character, and most admirably adapted in all respects to be his helpmeet. Settled in a pleasant town, surrounded by warm friends, in the house he regarded the most pleasant in the place, he had everything he could desire to make life happy. But he felt a voice within him, which, to his death, he never for one moment doubted, was the voice of God calling him to leave all these comforts, and endure hardships in bringing to Christ the wanderers of our Western wilderness. His wife was in full accord with him. In the spring of 1832, he placed himself under the care of the Chilli- cothe Presbytery. August 21, he left his pleasant home, removed with his family to Walnut Hills, and entered Lane Theological Seminary. In April, he was licensed to preach, and May 2, he left Cincinnati to make a tour of the West, and to select a suitable field of labor under the care of the A. B. C. F. M. He decided to begin work at Fort Snelling. Return- ing, he was ordained by the same Presbytery that licensed him, September 18.
Early in the spring of 1835, he started with his family, and reached Fort Snelling May 16. Here, June 11, he organized the first Presbyterian Church within the present limits of Minnesota-the first Presbyterian Church of Minneapolis. Finding other laborers at Fort Snelling and be- lieving that more could be accomplished by a division of the forces, he pushed on to Lac-qui-Parle, two hundred miles farther west; this last journey then requiring over three weeks.
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