USA > Pennsylvania > Beaver County > History of Beaver County, Pennsylvania, and Its Centennial Celebration, Volume II > Part 44
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54 | Part 55 | Part 56 | Part 57 | Part 58 | Part 59 | Part 60 | Part 61 | Part 62 | Part 63 | Part 64 | Part 65 | Part 66 | Part 67 | Part 68 | Part 69 | Part 70
For a century and a quarter our nation has enjoyed her independent existence. In these years she has met her foes and conquered them; she has cleared away the forests, and prepared the fertile soil for cultivation; she has dotted the broad expanse of her territory with populous cities, and thriving towns; she has improved her water-courses, and woven her net-work of railways; she has multiplied her factories, and opened up her natural resources; she has stretched out her arms, and gathered the oppressed of the nations to her bosom; but best of all, she has devel- oped a nation of intelligent freemen, who love their liberties and dare maintain them. In this, the closing year of the nineteenth century, America sits a queen among the civilized nations of the earth, envious of none, and fearing none.
A popular selection by Duss's Band followed, after which Rev. W. S. Plumer Bryan, D.D., pastor of the Church of the VOL. 11 .- 30.
Himy of Beaver County
Cucconic Fermes of Scach birh
Thủ Cemenni bes & significance br beyond the confines of your own
Soner homes, they would crowd this town. me the way county it Beaver Commey occupies a perder porckor. nmdny var ner thus
Controland County, is ston. His med w Coop Fort wo die for tele de
at Lewisburg W. Ya, wound bis college odertiaz ac Washington College. Va. and N's
Mary'med. Penney rasca send buch Carina and is covered the vacied incies of evangelist www www .winterspelen al sector Er fred and the shining socles which save .warner vilka Pneumatica Can't and be endeavored : Suchange his duties to
and if servis is the Cinstinc ministry, and among the people of it's county, where be was im. I reyine thas day to do reverrone to bis mem.y. and is tack God for his in- Buenve vuon mra It sa a oxincidence. perhaps worthy of me tha: = y free American answer in. the Bryan side is ais, named George Bryan. George Bryan was a native at bulion friend. Work is 1931, who came to America and in after years was a delegate Vithe Congress of 17's, which remonstrated against the Scamp Are Having been ap- Printed Vice-President of the Supreme Executive Comi of the Commonwealth, be, by the death of President Wharton in 170' was placed at the head of the government ature what he was apgranted a judge of the Supreme Court of the State, which ofice be held until the death, and during which he was elected one of the Council of Censors under the first Constitution. He is named in history as the author of the preamble to the Act of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for the gradual abolition of slavery. which was andrigated in 17%, an Art which reflects credit upon the great State which adopted it, as well as ujem ham wiv, Anfted it.
For these family reasons. I feel at home among the people of Beaver, though I have never wat first in the county until to-day, and I rejoice to find myself within that large circle gathered to celebrate the Centennial of the county.
1079
History of Beaver County
was once the gateway of the West. That gateway, strictly speaking, was on the crests of the Allegheny Mountains. Into Westmoreland County there came and settled those pioneers who gave form and char- acter to western Pennsylvania and gradually spread out over Westmore- land, into the adjoining counties of Allegheny, Washington, and Beaver, whence with the restlessness characteristic of new settlers and with the ambition that was born within them, they reached the wilderness of Ohio, and thence Indiana and Illinois and across the Father of Waters into the great States of Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska. And the value of an occa- sion like this is, that it causes one to pause in the routine of daily life and to look back with gratitude and with pride upon that ancestry from which he has received his inheritance, not of lands and fortune only, but of character and of reputation.
No one who studies the one hundred years which have just closed can restrain a sense of amazement at the transformation which they have wrought. Your fathers and mine who settled this and the adjoining counties, lived in log cabins which were rude and rough, and compared with which the humblest home in your county to-day might be called a mansion. Our fathers wore buck-skins and our mothers linsey-woolsey, while their sons wear broadcloth and their daughters silks and satins. Their food consisted of the game of the forest and of the coarse products of their farms, "hog and hominy" as they called it, while we their sons bring our meats from the far West and our fruits and vegetables from the far South. They traveled upon trails so narrow that two horses could not walk abreast and through mud so deep that at times it was impossible to make headway at all, while we travel in luxurious palace cars on double-track railroads, with less discomfort on a trip from San Francisco to New York than our fathers endured on a trip from one county to the next. They lived in "clearings" and settlements with the virgin forest all around them and the cry of the wild beast sounding in their ears, while in our day the forest has disappeared along with the wild beast and the beautiful farming communities which they formed are giving place to the industrial communities, the smoke of whose chimneys darkens the heavens and the congestion of whose population starts problems for our social reformers to solve. Their schools and their churches were like their homes, log cabins, few and far apart, while ours have become stately edifices, admirable in their arrangement, imposing in appearance, and easy of access to all.
It is well to ask then who were the people who turned the wilderness into the civilized community and started that career of progress, the benefits of which we are reaping to-day? Whence came they and what were their characteristics? The answer to this question shows that wonderful amalgamation by which men of different races have been fused into a new race for which there can be no other name than that of Americans. No one people of the old country can rightly claim us as their descendants, for we as a people have come from different lands. Thus in Beaver County the French came down from Montreal, am- bitious to establish themselves in the western country. They were
History of Beaver County
represented by Joncmwr and by Celeror who claimed this whole region in the name of the King of France and engaged in trade with the Indians. They Affected a settlement at Gallipolis. but they were traders rather than settlers and by the treaty of 17bc they surrendered their claims to the rawcy of the Mississippi to Great Britain. Next came the pious Moravians. who in sixteen canoes floated down the Ohio River and then poled up the Beaver River to Moravia, where they founded a mission to the Indian tribes and established under wise and Christian rules a congregation of Indian converts, but as the French were traders so the Moravians were missionaries: and the real settlers of the county were of another stamp. In 1948 George Croghan opened his trading house here on the site of Beaver, which was then known as Shingoe's Town, and through all the claims of the French he maintained his loyalty to the British Crown; but even Croghan was a trader, rather than a settler. The first settler was Levi Dungan, who in 1772 came from his home near Philadelphia and settled upon a thousand acres at King's Creek on the south side of this county. His grandson, the Lieutenant-Governor of Iowa, is present with us in this celebration to-day. Levi Dungan was a pioneer and in his steps there quickly followed the advance guard of that new race which gave character to this county in its early days, and which we must, for lack of a better name, call the Scotch-Irish. I am not unmindful of the peaceful influence which the Friends or Quakers settled at New Brighton exercised, or of the industrial development which the Germans at Economy in 1825 began; but speaking broadly and in a way in which the true historian, of whatever nationality, must approve, the race which gave form and shape to the early life of this county was this Scotch-Irish race; so-called because they came from the north of Ireland. It is a race close of kin to the people who in England were Puritans, in France were Huguenots, in Holland were Calvinists, in Scotland were Burghers, and Anti-Burghers. Coming to America at different times from 1630, they settled in the East and in 1760 began that march to the West which is likened only to the march of Israel through the wilderness. Starting as one mighty column, they divided. One division took its way northwestward to Westmoreland County and beyond, while the other wended its way southwestward through the Valley of Virginia and thence to Kentucky and Missouri. The same people, sometimes the same families, which settled Westmoreland, Allegheny, and Beaver counties settled also Augusta and Rockbridge counties, Virginia, the same people with the same traits of character, the same ancestry and the same general temperament. Forty years ago these people were separated from one another by civil war and men of the same blood stood on opposing sides, each one contending for what he held to be the true interpretation of American liberty; and then when by the arbitrament of force that question was settled forever, they laid down their arms and returned to their homes to cultivate under new conditions that sense of racial and national unity which binds our people into one and makes them one among the nations of the world.
I have myself had experience of this kinship. Born on the banks of
1081
History of Beaver County
the Ohio in Allegheny City, in the midst of the Scotch-Irish atmosphere, my first ministry was two hundred miles south of Allegheny at the head- waters of the Ohio River, in the region drained by the Cheat River and the Tygart's Valley River, in the mountains of West Virginia, in the midst of a farming people, and far away from the city life in which I had been bred. In some strange way I was at once at home. I readily fell in with the customs of the people and was received by them as one of their number and for nine years I labored in that most congenial work. I know now why I was so much at home among them. It was a case of what our scientists call atavism, and my people in Randolph County, West Virginia, were of one blood with me through our ancestors, theirs in Virginia, mine in Westmoreland and Beaver counties, Pennsylvania.
It is not for me to describe to-day the characteristics of the Scotch- Irish race. Others have said of us that our race is characterized "by a fervid temperament, quick intellect, ready speech, self control, caution, firmness of conviction, thriftiness, and independence." I believe that this statement will be verified by any one who studies our early history and realizes the privations which our fathers and mothers endured when they entered this western wilderness and began to make homes for them- selves and for their children. Fifty years ago Judge Wilkeson of Buffalo, N. Y., described the mode of travel by which his father's family in a company of twenty others emigrated from Carlisle to western Pennsyl- vania in the spring of 1784. The experience of this caravan was the same as that of all the others and it shows what these our ancestors endured. The family consisted of the father and mother and three children, the oldest one five years and the youngest less than a year old. They had with them also a bound boy of fourteen. Pack horses were the only means of transportation and the family of Wilkeson were provided with three. On one of these Mrs. Wilkeson rode, carrying her infant in her arms with all the table furniture and cooking utensils packed on; on the second horse were packed the stores of provisions, the plow irons, and other agricultural tools; on the third horse was a pack-saddle with two large creels of hickory withes made like a crate, one hanging from each side in which were stowed the beds and bedding and the wearing apparel of the family. In the center of these creels there was an opening made for the two elder children, and the top was secured by lacing to keep them in their places so that only their heads appeared above. Thus they traveled from day to day, sometimes along the edge of a precipice, sometimes across mountain streams, swollen by the melting snows and the spring rains, sometimes ascending steep hillsides when the creels would give way and the children and the goods roll down the mountain- side. The men of these caravans had been soldiers in the Revolutionary War and were inured to hardship, but it was the mothers who suffered, who after the weariness of travel throughout the day must work far into the night to provide the meals for their children. Is it any wonder that the sons and the daughters of this race are proud to own their ancestors and to do reverence to the fathers and especially to the mothers who gave them a home and a country!
1082
History of Beaver County
I must pass from these general characteristics to a particular char- acteristic, the religion of these people. You will not be surprised that I have chosen this as my theme to day. My own life work makes it natural for me to speak of the religious life of my ancestors; and when I tell you that our original ancestor in America, Jonathan Plumer and all of I's four cons were elders in the Presbyterian Church, that my great micke, Jonathan, who died in &Bob was licensed to preach and that my grand- father, William S. Plumer, preached the gospel till his death at the age of seventy-eight, you will not wonder at my theme.
It may be said of the Scotch-Irish, as a learned critic once said of the Hebrew race, that they have a genius for religion, and for a religion of a very definite type. The earliest settlements of this county were marked by churches. No sooner had cabins been built to shelter the wives sad little ones than our forefathers banded together to build another cabe which was dedicated to the worship of Almighty God. The first house of worship of this kind was built at Mill Creek in 1785, just thirteen years after Levi Dungan had settled nearby. Mount Pleasant Church at Dar- lington of which my great grandfather was one of the first elders was established in 1798. These early churches held the same creed and used the same type of worship and maintained the same standard of morality, but they differed in minor points, such points as to-day separate the Pres- byterians from the United Presbyterians. Besides these there were repre- tentatives of other branches of the Church of Christ, such as the Rev. Mr. Reno of the Episcopal Church, who came to the county in 1799 and devoted himself to the self-denying work of preaching the gospel. Other bodies followed from time to time, a Catholic church having been organised in 1835 and the various denominations of Christians gradually establishing themselves in the county. To-day the descendants of Scotch-Irish ancestors are found in the various branches of the Christian church and their churches are ready to own that they are none the worse for their Presbyterian ancestry.
The religion of the Scotch-Irish is not difficult to describe. It was a religion of deep conviction and of strong faith. They believed in an all-seeing, just, and holy God, whose Word is supreme, whose saving grace is made known in the gospel, and whose judgment upon men is just and sure. It was the religion of conscience, of conscience fortified and guarded by the revealed Word of God and supreme in life; and as such it begot a strong sense of duty and made men of iron purpose and women of heroic mold. They were not saints, if by saint one means a perfect character. To witness their worship with its deep conviction of sin and its humble supplication for divine forgiveness was proof enough that they realized that they were sinners. They were not universally religious and there were among them many who neglected the divine ordinances, but even among these there was a reverence for holy things which made itself felt for good in the life of the community. It was a type of religion which to some seems out of place in these days of luxury and of prosperity, but it was a type fitted to sustain men and women in the perils of the wilder- ness and amid the privations of the new settlements, the same type that
1083
History of Beaver County
appears and reappears in human history under different names whenever heroic work is to be done for human liberty and human progress, by moral and religious means.
The particular characteristics of this religion of our forefathers may be described as :-
First .- A free approach to God .- The attitude of the Scotch-Irish worshiper was reverent, yet confident. He trembled because of a real sense of the presence of God and yet with his trembling he approached that presence boldly and gladly. His confidence was based upon the profound assurance that an infinite God had become reconciled unto him through the death of his son, Jesus Christ, whose blood, shed on the cross of Calvary, had washed his sins away and whose righteousness imputed unto him and received by faith alone, justified him in the divine presence. Conscious, therefore, of his sins and shortcomings as he was, he came boldly to the throne of the Heavenly Grace, sustained by the faith that, sinner as he was, he might approach his God and deal directly with him. His religion, therefore, was a personal religion, a matter between him, the finite man, and the infinite God in the Heavens, the distance between them being covered by that Mediator who was both God and man and through whom he found his peace with God. So it came that his religion went with him wherever he went and sustained him when he was deprived of the usual means of grace. He revered the ministry and was ready to sustain it; but the minister to him was not a mediator to make peace with God, nor a priest to offer intercession on his behalf, but a messenger to expound the divine will and to serve in the ordinances of God's house. And when in his lonely cabin in the depths of the wilderness he was beyond the reach of the minister, he would himself " tak the buk " and out of it read a portion of Scripture and then kneel with his family in prayer for God's blessing upon the home, confident that his prayer was heard, in that it was offered in the name of Christ. He loved the church and would travel for miles to attend it; but for him the Church of God was wherever two or three of God's people were gathered together in obedience to his command and in reliance upon the presence of the Holy Spirit. My grandfather relates that when in 1798 the Mount Pleasant Church was organized, the worship was conducted for sometime by the elders without the assistance of any minister and that during this time the church was visited with a gracious revival and an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. God's blessing was as graciously bestowed in the rude log-cabin church as in some stately pile of ornate architecture, consecrated with ecclesiastical pomp; and many are living to-day who will bear testimony to the gracious presence of God amid rude and simple surroundings rather than in the midst of modern sacerdotal magnificence. His religion too made him loyal to the civil government of the land, so that he was ready to render unto Cæsar the things that were Cæsar's; but with his sense of free approach to God he would never permit the civil government to enter the church or dictate to him the forms and the doctrines of divine worship. It was this sense of religious freedom and personal responsibility which brought our fore- fathers to western Pennsylvania. They turned away from New England
1GB4
History of Beaver County
chief wat to the zullen was Ist far behand Those men who per- formed the casks of giants in feling the forests and opening the fields and building themselves brookes and charlies whose braces were toughened by their 'atax and even brokken before the time had minds which were quick is perceive and icken to understand. The preaching to which they listened deals with the deep mysteries of divine truth and cared the intellect to follow it: but they were able to follow it, and no sooner was the preaching viss than the keen shrewd reverent listeners gathered whether in konces 's, discuss the message as they had received it So eager were they is hear that it was common in those early congregations to met a man rise up and stand in his place during the worship for ten or five minutes at a time. This was done to throw of the drowsiness which a laborious life brought with it and in order tha: he might give full attention to the sermon. This preaching has been characterized as severely doctrinal and judged by the standards of to-day. it was so; but if doutrinal, it was also practical. It is related of Dr. McMillan, who standa can as the leading preacher of his day, that when the Western Insurrection was being fomented by David Bradford, he took occasion at a sacramental wason to warn the communicants against taking part in this uprising and he plied them with all the arguments drawn from their high standing an servants of God. Then, as well as now. practical preach- ing laid hold of the deep verities of the eternal truth and out of them un folded the lessons for daily life.
Not only in the preaching, but also in the reading of our forefathers was ther intelligence manifest. Their books were few. just as their household conveniences were few, but they mastered those books and an amilated their contents as but few books are mastered to-day. They hast the Bible and the Catechisms and the Psalm Book and such treatises as Thomas Boston's Fourfold State. Fisher's Marrow of Modern Divinity, Kir hard Baxter's Saint's Rest, and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. They are laid upon the shelf to-day as heavy and dull. but they were neither heavy nor dull to the deep Christian experience and the well- trained minds of our forefathers who out of them drew strength and wis- dom for daily life and found in them a solace for their lonely hours and a stay in their times of tribulations. It ill becomes us, their descendants, who live in the midst of a literary plethora and of the distractions of a complex civilization to look with patronizing air upon them. for we might well sit at their feet and learn wisdom from them.
1085
History of Beaver County
With such intellectual alertness it is no wonder that schools were quickly founded for the education of the young people. The academy at Greersburg, now Darlington, was one of the first institutions of the sort opened up in the western country, and for many years it provided for the young men of that section the beginnings of an education which was after- wards completed in the college at Canonsburg. It is said that the three townships of Beaver County south of the Ohio River which are not noted for wealth or fertile soil have given no less than one hundred and twenty young men to the three professions of the ministry, medicine, and the law. Among the first theological schools west of the mountains was that one established by the Rev. Joseph Smith at Upper Buffalo, in 1785. The need of such a school pressed heavily on his mind for from all quarters came up the call for Christian ministers. There was, however, one diffi- culty in his way-he had no suitable place. He had, however, recently erected a house to serve as a kitchen and an outhouse for his wife. If his wife would be willing to surrender her kitchen and fall back upon her former domestic system, inconvenient as it was, the new school could be started, but otherwise not. To the credit of this noble woman, burdened as she was with domestic cares it is to be said that she readily gave up her kitchen and thus enabled her husband to found a school of theological learning in which such men as Messrs M'Gready, Porter, Patterson, James Hughes, and Brice studied. And in these days of munificent gifts of money for education, I fancy there has not been one that cost more, nor yet one which will yield richer results than Mrs. Smith's gift of her brand new kitchen.
Third .- Their religion was a self-denying one .- It had its price and the price was a high one, but they paid it gladly. The churches were at long distances from one another. My grandfather relates that at the revival at Mount Pleasant in 1798, three boys were present every night who tramped through the snow twelve miles to be there. It was the custom in those days, both for men and women to walk to the churches mile after mile carrying their shoes in their hands that these might not be worn out by the long distances. The churches were architecturally bare, being log cabins of the simplest form, but what mattered it, if God was present and his Word was proclaimed? In temperature the churches were cold for no fire was ever built within them, but what mattered it, if their hearts were all aglow with love to God? The very self-denial which they suffered made the gospel more precious to them. Their religion involved its dangers, too. The meeting houses soon became known to the hostile Indians and a favorite time for the sounding of the warwhoop was in the midst of the worship of God, so that it was necessary to that worship to have, not only the preacher in the pulpit, but the pickets stationed on the outside, rifle in hand ready to give the alarm upon the approach of the savage enemy.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.