History of Cumberland and Adams counties, Pennsylvania. Containing history of the counties, their townships, towns, villages, schools, churches, industries, etc.; portraits of early settlers and prominent men; biographies; history of Pennsylvania, statistical and miscellaneous matter, etc., etc, Part 111

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Publisher: W. Taylor
Number of Pages: 1280

USA > Pennsylvania > Adams County > History of Cumberland and Adams counties, Pennsylvania. Containing history of the counties, their townships, towns, villages, schools, churches, industries, etc.; portraits of early settlers and prominent men; biographies; history of Pennsylvania, statistical and miscellaneous matter, etc., etc > Part 111
USA > Pennsylvania > Cumberland County > History of Cumberland and Adams counties, Pennsylvania. Containing history of the counties, their townships, towns, villages, schools, churches, industries, etc.; portraits of early settlers and prominent men; biographies; history of Pennsylvania, statistical and miscellaneous matter, etc., etc > Part 111

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RICHEY WOODS, the first of this name to locate in this neighborhood. came from Scotland. more than a century ago. and took up the lands on which the family still resides. Richey Woods remained a bachelor; his nephew, Nathan Woods, married Jean Means and reared five children: Nathan J. Ramsey, Richard C., Joseph McCord. Martha J. and Margaret R. Of these Nathan J. Ramsey married Charlotte H., daughter of Jonathan and Eliza Holmes, of this county, and granddaughter of Commodore Richard O Brien, a man, the merits of whose public services were acknowledged by four successive Presidents. He died February 16, 1824. Nathan J. Ramsey Woods engaged in teaching school at Huntingdon, Penn., but after his marriage came to the ancestral home of his father and engaged in farming. On the manor farm have been four generations of the Woods, the last being the children of our subject: Nathan, Holmes. Elizabeth, Jennie, James, O'Brien and Lottie, of whom James, O'Brien and Lottie survive. Nathan J. Ramsey Woods was an ardent Democrat, a Presbyterian by faith, and a practical business mau. He died January 28, 1866. The massive stone structure in which the family reside was compl .ted in 1813, and in all possibility will remain a landmark and as a monument to uncle Richey for a cen- tury to come.

ANDREW YOUNG, farmer, P. O. Plainfield, is a native of York County, where he resided until 1852. His father, Abraham Young, who resided in York County during the war of 1813, married Miss Elizabeth Glessing and reared six children, tive of whom are living : Mrs. Lydia Yinger, John. Joshna, Andrew and Mrs. Catherine Ward. Mr. and Mrs. Young located in West Pennsborough Township, this county, in 1852, and here resided until their death. the former dving in 1871, and the latter in June. 1878, each about eighty years of age. Our subject remained on the family homestead. taking care of his aged parents. In the fall of 1867 he was united in marriage with Miss Matilda Warner, of this county, who died February 14, 187], leaving three children: Charles Edwin (deceased). an infint son and Addie Justina. Mr. Young was again married. March 19, 1878, this time to Miss Eliza Jane, daughter of George C. Carothers. The children born to this union are Pearlie Catharine and an infant, latter deceased. Mr. Young owns the homestead farm consisting of seventy acres of well improved land. He is a life-long Republican. Mrs. Young is a member of the Evangelical Association.

PART III.

HISTORY OF ADAMS COUNTY.

HISTORY OF ADAMS COUNTY

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

TI HE interest excited among the good people of Adams County in the year of the Nation's Centennial, by the action of Congress and the President of the United States, was most timely fortunate in arousing the attention of those citizens who could rescue from a fast coming total oblivion many of the im- portant facts and dates of the early settlement and times of this portion of the State. The history harvest had grown over-ripe, and already the golden grains had begun to fall to the ground and waste, before the Centennial reaper and gleaner came. Nearly a century and a half had been reeled off into Time's swift flying shuttle. Generations had been born, grew to lusty, struggling life, and then joined the silent multitude. The busy, ceaseless loom of the universe had beaten and interlaced as one the webb and woof of history, the record of living man, that strange eventful story that historians are always telling and that is never told.

But for this action of the Centennial year, the best efforts now of the histo- rians would have been but shreds and patches of history of the eventful times of the earliest settlers; an incoherent story, mostly, "without form, and void," so swiftly does Time cover with impenetrable oblivion the flitting ages.

Innumerable details of the first half century had already been irretrievably lost; details that the annalist of a hundred years ago would have deemed tedious or trifling, and probably passed by in silence; but the very abun- dance of these details now would be the richest materials to the hands of the his- torian, of absorbing interest, and laden with instruction to the people of this generation. Among others the Hon. Edward MePherson. H. J. Stable, D. S. Buehler, John A. Renshaw (of Pittsburgh). Hon. John K. Longwell, of Westminster, Md., Rev. J. K. Demarest, Rev. W. S. Van Cleve and J. S. Gitt have gathered and at times have had published in the Gettysburg Compiler, and in the Star and Sentinel, many valuable facts, from ancient family papers, documents and the oldest records in this county, and in York County, and the recollections of themselves and the many descendants of the early pioneers, now

HISTORY OF ADAMS COUNTY.

growing to be tremulous, venerable and white haired men. Their publications in the local papers created a wide-spread interest among all classes of people, and ancient Bibles, old account books and yellowed manuscripts, that had lain in darkness and untouched for generations, were eagerly overhauled, and valuable facts brought to light: old grave yards were visited and the fast fading inscrip- tions upon the crumbling stones above the dead were closly scanned and many dates and facts here secured for the historian, that the rust of a decade more of years would have blotted out forever. There are many others than those named above to whose intelligent researches and recollections of the olden times these pages are deeply indebted, and to whom we here return generous thanks: many of these the reader will find in the credits given to them on the pages where facts furnished are given. To the leading citizens of the county every- where are due lasting obligations for the valuable and willing aid and the cor- clial reception given the corps of laborers engaged in the preparation of the work.

II.

We have attempted in this work to do more than to merely give in the order the annals of the people, commencing with the earliest settlers and bringing the account to the present time-we present the varied pictures of that pan- orama of the generations, and then assign events and their results, and draw truthful deductions, and trace actions to that large and broad field that adds something to real history, the molding and influencing the human mind, that subtle power that has slowly but surely laid the foundations and built thereon the present and the coming civilization that is sun-lit with man's best future hopes and aspirations, and whose distant murmurs are music to the true phi- losopher's soul, like unto the " multitudinous laughter of the sea waves."

The difficulties in the pathway of the annalist, or the historian, are great and varied. He should be a stranger to all the prejudices, passions, loves and hates, idols and the despised of those of whom he writes. He must accept no conclusions of the greatness or meanness of the contemporaries, as the interested and prejudiced judgments of men of the times of which he writes. He must hear all sides patiently and then form his conclusions without a trace of the bias of those who bring him the account. He must keenly distinguish between real greatness and noisy notoriety, and, hence, he must not be a man-worshiper. He must absorb all the facts and reject the coloring that comes of precon- ceived prejudices.

To these he must add the power to picture to his readers the people as they actually lived, dressed, worked, played, loved and hated, moved and acted, publicly and privately, and this picture should be like the impression of the picture upon your mind of the friend from whom you have just parted on the street.

When this has been done, there then comes the most difficult part of all; namely, to apply effects to causes, and trace these subtle and far-reaching in- fluences and correctly join them together, interpret them to demonstrations about which there can be no more future field for argument and disputation than there is about a demonstration in a problem in mathematics.

The historian cannot stop with the relation of the mere facts as he finds them in tradition and in the annals as written by eye witnesses of occurring events. He must interpret all afresh. and properly divine causes and tenden-

HISTORY OF ADAMS COUNTY.

cies. So immeasurably large is the field before him that he cannot institute new inquiries as to facts, but must accept these as they come to him, though he may well know how uncertain the most of them are. He sits in the high court of last appeal, recasting the characters of the men and women who lived and acted in the periods of which he investigates, condemning and praising, and telling why they acted as they did, and what has come to their fellow-man as the results of their existence here upon the earth.

1II

It is impossible to form a just judgment of those men if we confine our investigations and circumscribe our view to the day they are found in this new, wild country. Such a study would fill us with error, and we would rise from the perusal of such a history with grotesque and irrelevant conclusions, and that would be unjust to the memories of our forefathers and a wrong to our- selvos and future generations.

There must be some general comprehension of that age-the bont of the world's controlling peoples, and the mighty religious struggles that were at that time enlminating in drama, tragedy. blood and revolutions, and in the end liberty for all mankind. When William Penn was traveling through the Old World hunting for recruits for his province, it must be remembered that the " flaming sword" was uplifted high; a religious frenzy had seized the people; the soldiers marched the public streets and drove the people to attendance upon divine worship: turmoil and frenzy reigned supreme, and the wildest insanity was turned loose. There was no separation between theory and practice, between private and public life, between the spiritual and temporal. Inspired corporals in the army clambered into the pulpits and launched the thunders of God's wrath at the heads of their superior officers. The historian Neal, in speaking of England, says: "They wished to apply Scripture to establish the kingdom of heaven upon earth; to institute not only a Christian Church, but a Christian society; to change the law into a guardian of morals, to compel men to piety and virtue; and for a while they succeeded in it." Then the discipline of the church was at an end. There was nevertheless an uncommon spirit of devotion among all people; the Lord's Day was observed with re- markable strictness; the churches were crowded three and four times a day; there was no traveling on the roads or walking in the fields.

Religious exercises were set up in private families; family prayers, repeat- ing sermons, reading the Scriptures and singing psahns were so universal that these were the only sounds you could hear in the city on the Lord's Day. Theaters were razed and actors whipped at the cart's tail. Parliament set apart one day of each week to the consideration of the progress of religion, and the species of speeches delivered the moment this subject was entered upon were wild, incoherent, ranting and savage denunciations of real and imaginary sins against subtle and curious dogmas; and bills of attainder and the penalties of the stocks, whipping post, burning holes in the tongue with hot irons, slitting the ear and nose, throwing into dungeons, and banishment and death for the most trivial offenses of speech or acts were the daily and hourly transactions everywhere. In order to reach crime more surely they punished pleasure. Human ingenuity was exhausted in the hunt for victims to consign to the most shocking punishments.

But they were unlike all other religious fanatics who had yet appeared, for

HISTORY OF ADAMS COUNTY.

while they were austere against others, they were equally so against them- selves, and they practiced the virtues they exacted. Two thousand ministers, after the Restoration, resigned their cures and faced certain starvation for themselves and families rather than conform to the new liturgy. In turn the persecutions heaped upon them were shocking and cruel. And from here came the people to this country, of whom Taine, the historian of "English Lit- erature " says: "But others, exiles in America, pushed to the extreme this great religious and stoic spirit, with its weakness and its power, with its vices and its virtues. Their determination, intensified by a fervent faith, employed in political and practical pursuits, invented the science of emigration, made exile tolerable, drove back the Indians, fertilized the desert, raised a rigid morality into a civil law, founded and armed a church, and on the Bible as a basis built up a new State."

The English, the Dutch, the Scotch-Irish, the Germans, the Welsh, Swiss, Danes and French came together here to be welded by the logic of fate into one people. The Anglo-Saxon, most fortunately, dominated all and shaped the ideas that controlled and influenced this heterogeneous mixture of opposites. All brought with them their variety of religious sects, their hates and jealous- ies of each, their intense prejudices of races and religions, their gloomy fanati- cism and severe morals. But the supreme force in welding into one this mass was the love of liberty among all, and the vivid recollection of the persecutions that had exiled them to this new world.

Here were some of the controling conditions antecedent that have resulted in the glories of this great age. This was the alembic which distilled the new spiritual life, the new race, the new civilization, the epoch and age that, like the genial rays of the spring sun, has circled the globe and made vocal with joy where all was icy despair and dreariness. Bearing these great antecedent facts in mind, we can proceed with the story.

HISTORY OF ADAMS COUNTY.

CHAPTER II.

THE INDIANS-FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR-MARY JAMISON, THE INDIAN QUEEN -HANCE HAMILTON-MCCORD'S FORT-ASSOCIATED COMPANIES IN YORK COUNTY IN 175G.

"THE discoverers of America found the Indians in possession, in the Indian's way, of this Continent, or to that portion of it that was known to them. Their ideas of possession of the land, personally, were nearly as vague as that of the wild animals that would use certain districts, when unmolested, for breed- ing purposes, and other portions as feeding grounds, to which they would mi- grato with the seasons. In their natures they were wild and roving, and their round of life was simply one of ignorant savages breeding ignorant savages. Hunt for something to eat and war for fun and glory was the measure of his type and race. They seemed to possess nothing that could advance them even toward the light of civilized beings. They were lazy, cowardly, filthy and densely ignorant. and every evidence we now possess of them leaves the iner- itable conclusion that, had this country remained unknown and unoccupied by the white man through all ages, the Indians would have continued stationary, and persistently non-progressive.

The French and Indian war upon the English settlements commenced in 1755. The particulars of that bloody struggle and much of the story of the terrible sufferings of the border settlements are given in the preceding part of this work, in the history of Cumberland County. The people of what is now the territory of Adams County were fortunately spared the terrible ex- periences of all the other border settlements. The invaders came from the north, and the South Mountains seemed to have placed bounds to a great ox- tent to their savage visitations, and there were but few of the roving bands, in small squads, that made stealthy raids upon the helpless people. We, there- fore, content ourselves with a short account of what transpired here, so far as can now be gleaned from the different historians of those days.

Hazzard. in Vol. V, Penn. Reg. says: "In 1775, the country, wost of the Susquehanna, possessed three thousand men fit to bear arms, and in 1756, ex- clusive of the provincial forces, there were not one hundred; fear having driv- en the greater part into the interior." This plainly indicates how the terror- stricken people were compelled to abandon their homes and everything. and flee for their lives.

Louden's Narrative, after reciting a long list of captures and massacres, says: "May 29. 1759, one Dinwiddie and Crawford, shot by two Indians, in Carroll's tract, York County." These were Adams County men, whose names figure prominently in the records of the first settlers here. How briefly is the murderous story told! There is something blood curdling in its very brevity. From that we can judge that such reports were flying over the country in ap- palling iteration. On the same page in the same paragraph is this entry: "April 5, 1758, one man killed and ten taken, near Black's Gap on the South Mountain. April 13, (same year) one man killed and nine taken near Arehi- bald Bard's, South Mountain." The chronicler, it seems, was making a fn- tile endeavor to enumerate the killed and captured and scalped, and names of

HISTORY OF ADAMS COUNTY.

the victims were lost in the multitude, something like the glory of a soldier whose grave is marked "unknown."

Again, "July 27, 1757, one MeKisson was wounded, and his son taken from the South Mountain."

"August 17, 1757, William Waugh's barn burnt in the Tract (the Manor), York (Adams) County, by the Indians."

April 13, 1758, the house of Richard Baird (Bard), who owned a farm and resided on the southeast side of South Mountain, near the mill now known as Myer's mill, on Middle Creek, about one and one half miles from Fairfield, was surrounded by nineteen Delaware Indians, and the occupants of the house made prisoners, as follows: Richard Bard, his wife and babe six months old; a bound boy; a little girl named Hannah McBride; Thomas Potter, nephew of Bard's; together with Samuel Hunter and Daniel McManimy, who were at the time working in a field; and also a lad, William White, who was coming to the mill. Having secured their prisoners the savages plundered the house and fired it and the mill.

July 3, 1754, a battle was fought at Ft. Necessity, or Great Meadows, about fifty miles west of Camberton, Md. The French and Indians won a sig- nal victory over the English.

Immediately after this battle the situation became very alarming to the set- tlers. The borderers in what is now Adams County erected a block-house near the present village of Arendtsville.

Mary Jamison-The Indian Queen. - The strange story of Mary Jamison is a tragedy and romance in strong colors and remarkable contrasts. It could only have happened upon the borders in the early times.

One of the earliest settlers in the southwest of Adams County, near the source of Marsh Creek, was Thomas Jamison (his wife was Jane Erwin). The first of the Scotch-Irish in that part of the county came in 1735-36, while Jami- son and wife came in 1742 or 1743. When they sailed from Ireland they had three children-two sons and a daughter. During the voyage on the ship an- other danghter, whom they named Mary, was born, and whose birth upon the storm-tossed ocean foreshadowed the terrible and sad experiences of her life.

Thomas Jamison was a thrifty, industrious man and an excellent and greatly respected citizen, and he soon had a fine large farm and was com- fortable in this world's goods. Two more sons were born to the family after reaching this country. In 1754 he moved his residence upon another part of his land and this brought him into the Buchanan Valley. One of his closest neighbors was James Bleakney, who survived and lived until 1821, and died at the age of ninety-eight years. And it was Bleakney's granddaughter, Mrs. Robert Bleakney, who lived to a great age, from whom was learned by the present generation the important facts of the Jamison family. She gave the facts to Mr. H. J. Stahle and informed him that she had heard her grand- father often tell all the details, and the year the terrible tragedy was visited upon them. She pointed out the farm and the place where the Jamisons had lived, and the two trees under which the man murdered by the Indians had been buried.

Of her capture Mary Jamison said: "Our family as usual, was busily em- ployed about their common business. Father was shaving an axe-helve at the side of the house: mother was making preparations for breakfast; my two eld- est brothers were at work near the barn; the little ones, with myself, and the woman with her three children, were in the house. Breakfast was not yet ready when we were alarmed by the discharge of a number of guns that seemed to be near. Mother and the woman before mentioned almost fainted

N'T

Clerk HOMS. /

HISTORY OF ADAMS COUNTY.

at the report, and every one trembled with fear. On opening the door the man and horse lay dead near the house, having just been shot by the Indians. They first secured my father, then rushed into the house and made prisoners of my mother, my two younger brothers, my sister, the woman and her three children, and myself, and then commeneed plundering the house. The party that took us consisted of four Frenchmen and six Shawanee Indians. They took what they considered most valuable, consisting principaliy of bread, meal and meat. Having taken as much provision as they could carry, they set out with their prisoners in great haste, for fear of detection, and soon entered the woods. " The two eldest boys, Thomas and John, fortunately escaped. They were at the barn when the band attacked, and hid in a hollow log and were not discovered. Eventually they went to Virginia, to their maternal grand. father.

The captors with their ten captives rapidly traveled westward. They would lash the children cruelly to make them keep up, and all day and all night they gave them no water or food. Toward noon of the next day they passed a fort, now Chambersburg, and the evening of the second day reached the border of a " dark and dismal swamp, " into which they were conducted a short distance to camp.

In some way the savages ascertained that they were pursued. A deter- mined band of Jamison's neighbors, headed by a Mr. Fields, had started in pur- suit and were gaining on the fugitives. Fearing to be overtaken if they continued to encumber themselves with so many prisoners, the savages (white and red) massacred and sealped eight of them, viz. : Thomas Jamison, his wife, their daughter Betsey, their two sons, Robert and Matthew, Mrs. Buek and two of her children. Mary Jamison and the little son of Mrs. Buck were spared. The naked and mangled bodies of the slaughtered victims were found in that dismal swamp by the parties that had gone in pursuit.

Mary was taken by the two Indian squaws in a small canoe down the Ohio River to a small Seneea Indian town called "She-nan-jee." There she was ar- rayed in a suit of Indian clothing, was formally adopted as a member of the family, and received the name of " Diek-e-wa-mis," which, being interpreted, means "a pretty girl."

The Six Nations gave to Mary Jamison a large tract of land, known as the Garden Tract, and this grant was confirmed afterward by the Legislature of New York.

On the 19th day of September, 1833, life's long nightmare dream was over, and Mary Jamison peacefully sank into that dreamless and eternal sleep. She was buried in the grave-yard of the Seneca Mission Church, and a marble slab erected over her grave.

While these aets were being perpetrated by the Indians, the white men of now Adams County were not mere idle spectators, or terror-stricken fugitives from their homes. During this French and Indian war Capt. Hance Hamilton raised and commanded in person 200 men, who were his neighbors, and many of whose descendants are now here.

On the 4th of March, 1756, MeCord's fort, on the Conococheague, was burned by the Indians, and twenty seven persons were killed and captured. Pursuit was made and the enemy overtaken at Sideling Hill where a stubborn battle was fought. The losses in Capt. Hamilton's command were-killed Daniel McCoy. James Robinson. James Peace, John Blair, Henry Jones, John McCarty, John Kelly and James Lowder, and five others (names not given) were wounded.

In the Penn, Archives is given by Richard Peters. then Secretary of the col- ony, a "list of the associated companies in York County in 1756." In all

HISTORY OF ADAMS COUNTY.

there were at that time eight companies, and four of these were Adams County men, certainly commanded by Adams County men who had recruited the com- panies, and at that time men were cautious to enlist, only under men they per- sonally knew. The following were the companies: One, Hugh Dunwoody, captain; Charles McMullen. Lieutenant; James Smith, ensign; 66 privates. Two, James Agnew, captain; John Miller, lieutenant; Sam Withrow, ensign; 60 privates. Three, David Hunter, captain; John Correy, lieutenant; John Barnes, ensign; 100 privates. Four. Samuel Gordon, captain; William Smiley, lieutenant; John Little, ensign; 100 privates. Thus there were at that early time 326 men from what was this sparsely settled territory.

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Author: Publication date: Publisher: W. Taylor Number of Pages: 1280

Author:
Publication date:
Publisher: W. Taylor
Number of Pages: 1280