USA > Pennsylvania > Perry County > History of Perry County, Pennsylvania, including descriptions of Indians and pioneer life from the time of earliest settlement, sketches of its noted men and women and many professional men > Part 57
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Privates:
Applegate, Hezekiah.
Allison, Joseph.
Roller, Samuel.
*Bistline, George.
Rodgers, Robert.
Blain, William.
Stump, David.
Baker, Fred'k.
Sweger, Henry.
Brown, Alexander.
Sweger, Samuel.
Bolmer, Jacob.
Simmons, Samuel.
Barnhart, Martin.
Snyder, John.
Baskins, Daniel.
Shull, William.
Black, David M.
Scholl, George K.
Coheck, Daniel.
*Sipe, Samuel B. Shoch, John.
Charles, Henry.
Sullenberger, Joseph.
Dayton, Hezekiah.
Simons, John.
*Evinger, Peter.
*Titzell, William H.
Etter, Bayard H.
Tagg, Wilson.
Ernest,
Tweed, Jesse.
Frank, Hiram.
Trotter, William.
Geysinger, Saml.
Varnes,
Hipple, William.
Wiseman, Andrew.
Hatter, George.
White, David.
Huggins, Samuel, Jr.
Williams, John.
Horting,
Woodmansel, W.
Wolf, Samuel.
*Holland, John. Johns,
Whitsel, Daniel.
Miller, Marshall.
Willis, William.
Miller, Dr. G. A.
Samuel Simons, a blacksmith from Perry County, also served in the Mexican War, but enlisted with the Cameron Guards, of Dauphin County.
One of these soldiers, Samuel Roller, captured a Mexican flag at the gates of the City of Mexico. Mr. Roller had this flag in his possession until his death. With it he appeared in several parades at the soldiers' reunions of over a score of years ago. After his death Samuel B. Sheller, of Duncannon, a former mem- ber of Assembly, purchased the flag and presented it to the state.
PART OF PROPOSED COUNTY OF DEKALB.
Physically the lands which comprise Perry County make it log- ically a separate political division, as the western part is in reality *Died or lost.
Sweger, Levi.
Boyer, John.
Shatto, Isaac H.
*Boden, Hugh.
Cornyn, Barnard.
Shuman, J. Stroop.
Elliott, James.
*Peck, Samuel. Rosley, Charles.
532
HISTORY OF PERRY COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
a great cove, and the eastern end is practically an extension of that cove along the northern side. Notwithstanding that fact, how- ever, there was once an effort made to have the extreme western part form a part of a new county, to be named DeKalb. From the Perry Freeman of March 13, 1846, comes the information that on March 13, 1836, Representative Means introduced into the legislature a bill to make a new cotmnty, to be called DeKalb, out of parts of Cumberland, Franklin and Perry. The division line was to have been as follows :
"All those parts of Cumberland, Franklin and Perry lying and being within the following boundaries, to wit: Beginning at a point on the Adams County line, near, but southwest of Southampton furnace (includ- ing said furnace within the new county), thence east by said line to the line between Newton and Dickinson Townships in Cumberland County, thence north by said line and the West Pennsborough Township line, cross- ing the turnpike east of Stoughstown, to a point immediately east of the town of Springfield, thence by a straight line to the ford in the big spring below McFarland's mill, thence by a straight line to the bridge over the Conodoguinet Creek northeast of Newville, thence by the state road to McCormick's mill, thence to the eastern line of Toboyne Township in Perry County, thence by said line to the summit of Conococheague Ridge, thence by said ridge to the road leading from Shippensburg to Waterford, thence by said road to the crossing of the Perry and Juniata County lines, thence by said line to the corner of Huntingdon and Franklin Counties, thence by the Huntingdon County line to the corner of Metal and Fannett Townships in Franklin County, thence by the line of said townships to their corner on the North Mountain, thence by a line running immediately west of Orrstown, to a point on the Adams County line, the place of beginning."
Naturally the bill was reported umfavorably. It was illogical and a wild scheme. What its purport was is probably unknown to the present generation, butt Shippensburg seems to have been the most logical place for the county seat, and probably therein lies the secret. The size of the new county would have been approximately that of Snyder County, judging by a look at the map.
THE RUSH FOR GOLD.
Perry Countians and native Perry Countians who had located elsewhere, joined in the rush for gold in '49 and the following years, and, from among their number, furnished to the Golden State a governor. John Bigler was the man, and he was the third governor of California, while at the same time his brother, William Bigler, was governor of Pennsylvania, the only instance in America where brothers were governors of different common- wealths at the same time. While John Bigler failed to find gold, he did find a place in the hearts of California's pioneers. The biography of these two prominent Perry Countians is of such im- portance that it is covered in another chapter.
533
COUNTY' EARLY YEARS
Henry Ulsh came from Germany and settled in what is now Liverpool Township, where his son Joseph was born in 1804. When the quest for gold lured the adventurous to California, Joseph Ulsh and his three sons, Reuben, Leonard K., and John W. Ulsh, were among the number, going in 1851. To-day the trip is possible in considerable less than a week, but then no rail- ways spanned the continent and they went, via New York, sailing on the United States mail steamship, Ohio. They arrived at Aspin- wall and proceeded up the Jaguar River to Archipelago. There Joseph Ulsh was made captain of the mule team which trans- ported the baggage of over six hundred passengers to Panama. The three sons made the journey on foot, traveling from the first dawn of day, until the shades of night were falling. At Havana, a small town on their route, they were ordered to stop by native soldiers, but the order was disregarded, when they were fired upon, but luckily not hit. At Panama they took the ship, "Isthmus of Panama," and reached San Francisco forty-two days after leaving New York. Joseph Ulsh returned the following year, but his sons remained and worked in the mines four years, earning sufficient to purchase several farms. Upon their return from San Fran- cisco, in 1855, the Panama Railroad had been completed, which re- duced the time of the trip over the isthmus from four weeks to four days. Their return trip occupied only twenty four days, or little more than half the time consumed in going.
Jacob Shearer, who came from Frederick, Maryland, and lo- cated in Tyrone Township, in 1843, was another whom the lure of gold drew to California. He had learned tanning and was in the business here, but left for California, where he located at Park's Bar, Yuba County, remaining there almost eight years. While there he was elected to represent Yuba County in the California Legislature for two years. He returned to Perry County in 1857. He was the father of the late H. C. Shearer, once sheriff of Perry County.
Abraham Vandling, of Liverpool, was another emigrant in '49, and remained in California, where he died in 1877. Others who went, in 1855, were Joseph McClure, James McClure (son of James), Peter Bernheisel and a Mr. Robinson, of Tyrone Town- ship, and Samuel McClure, William McCardle and William Rhine- smith, of Jackson Township.
Another who went via the Isthmus of Panama was Abram Clouser of near Newport, who long remained in that state, but later returned to Perry County, where he spent the last five years of his life, dying in 1907. In later years when the Klondike fever drew thousands to Alaska among the number were Mr. and Mrs. . W. Scott Toomey and Harvey Wilson, a brother of Mrs. Toomey's.
534
HISTORY OF PERRY COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
SLAVES OWNED IN PERRY COUNTY.
Slavery in America dates to the early period of the English colonies, when negroes were imported into them and sold as slaves. With the sanction of no law, save that of common con- sent, the traffic became an awful and debasing system. The intro- ducing of slave labor was not confined to any particular section or colony, and both Cavalier and Puritan were owners of slaves. However, it was in the Southland, with its broad plantations, where slave labor could be most profitably employed, that it grew to its greatest magnitude and sunk its fangs the deepest. The original list of offenses in the protest against the Mother Country, in 1776, when freedom and liberty were sought, first brought for- ward prominently the question of slavery-for how could liberty be asked by a people which themselves held other men in bondage? There, even before the colonies became a nation, already appeared that great question, which, eventually, almost wrecked the Union. The protest against King George in that original list follows:
"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty, in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep a market where men should be bought and sold, he has at length prostituted his negative for suppressing any legislative attempt to prohibit and re- strain this execrable commerce."
The paragraph was objected to by the Georgia delegation in the Congress of the Colonies and was expunged from the document for the sake of unanimity, and almost a century later in many states men weltered in blood to settle for all time that which for unanimity was passed over. Just as studiously did the Articles of Confederation of 1781 avoid mentioning the subject, either by endorsement or censure, yet there are evidences that the leading men of both North and South at that time looked with disfavor upon it. In 1789 the Constitution of the United States was adopted, and at that early day a threat of disunion appeared, thereby again compromising the matter. While the word slavery was not mentioned in that great document, yet in deciding the basis of representation in Congress and the proportion of taxation to be borne by each state, the apportionment among the respective states was made by adding to the whole number of free popula- tion, "three-fiiths of all other persons," a stipulation which gave the slave-holding states a predominant position in the national government ; and yet it was probably the only way out, as any direct action against slavery precluded the formation of our great republic.
535
COUNTY'S EARLY YEARS
Strangely enough, one of the very first acts of the new Congress under the Constitution was to prohibit the introduction of slavery in that great and extensive domain then known as the Northwest Territory, comprising the present states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Thomas Jefferson wrote the measure and the entire South supported it. Even at that time the better opinion of the South recognized slavery as a great moral evil. With the addition of the Louisiana purchase of 1803 and the opening of the great Mississippi valley to settlement the breeding of slaves became a profitable business, and from a financial stand- point an asset of many of the Southern states with the result that, instead of having an apology for the traffic, they began to endorse it, and by the time Perry County was organized, in 1820-in that very year-Missouri was admitted as a slave state.
The Province of Pennsylvania early had an experience on the matter of slavery. Benjamin Furly, a Rotterdam merchant born in 1636, to whom William Penn submitted his famous Frame of Government for advice and criticism, wrote the first protest against slavery on this side of the Atlantic, in these words: "Let no blacks be brought in directly, and if any come out of Virginia, Maryland, or elsewhere, in families that have formerly bought them elsewhere, let them be declared (as in ye West Jersey Con- stitutions) free at eight years' end." Mr. Furly was largely inter- ested in the founding of the Frankford Company, and Francis Daniel Pastorious, the agent of that company and a German Quaker, in 1688, wrote the first protest against slavery ever adopted in America. In 1790 Pennsylvania had 3,737 slaves, and by 1820, when Perry County was organized, the number had dwindled to 211. The census of 1830 still showed four slaves owned in Perry County, but the next census, 1840, showed none. The mother county-Cumberland-had 223 slaves in 1790; 228 in 1800; 307 in 1810, and 17 in 1820.
In speaking of the great slavery question, which eventually led to the War Between the States, and which is forever settled in so far as the United States is concerned, the average reader locates the slave states south of the Mason and Dixon line, and such, in fact, is the case. However, slavery was originally not confined to the South, alone, but existed throughout the North, including Penn- sylvania and even our own native Perry County, but not on so extensive a scale. There were several slaves still owned in Perry County after its organization, as the following advertisement taken from an issue of the Perry Forester of 1826 and other facts will show :
"For sale, a healthy, stout mulatto man, aged about 22 years. .To be sold as the property of Rev. John Linn, deceased."
536
HISTORY OF PERRY COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
In the issue of the same paper, dated December 2, 1920, an ad- vertisement of sale of some of the effects of Rev. John B. Linn includes "the unexpired time of a Mulatti Boy, aged 15 years." Whether this boy was not theu sold and is the one appearing in the advertisement of 1826 we have no way of determining, yet be- lieve such to be the case.
The slave was not only owned, but was to be sold, and further- more was the property of a minister of the Gospel and a very pious one. Had this same minister lived a quarter of a century later he would likely have been thundering from his pulpit against the very system of which he had been a beneficiary. On August 17, 1822, Cassanda Campbell, of Landisburg, registered "a male child named Jeremiah, born March 7. 1822, of negro woman Junian, the property of Cassanda Campbell."
From an early issue of the Forester the following advertise- ment is copied, which shows that Northern slaves sometimes ran away, but also shows that not much excitement was created, as the huge reward of six cents would indicate :
Six Cents' Reward.
Ran away from the subscriber, living in Toboyne Township Perry County, on the second of June inst., an indented
Mulatto Man,
aged about 22 years; who calls himself James Diven, but is better known by the name of Pad. He had on, when he ran off, a brown underjacket, low check pantaloons, and half-worn roram hat. Whoever takes up said runaway and returns him to the subscriber, shall have the above reward, but no other charges will be allowed. ANDREW LINN.
Toboyne Township, June 22d, 1826.
John Shuman died at Millerstown, March 7, 1807, and the fol- lowing interesting story told by his granddaughter, Caroline, of Iowa, in 1913, when she was in her seventy-seventh year, recorded in the "Genealogy of the George Shuman Family," page 112, re- lates to another slave owned on soil which is now comprised within the borders of Perry County :
"My grandparents had a slave named Sam. My grandmother gave him his freedom and he went West. At the burial of my grandfather (prior to his emancipation), Sam carried my father to the grave ; and while standing at the grave, one of my father's shoes fell off his foot, down into the grave and was covered up."
Her father, Michael Shuman, was then a little child in his fourth year. Another slave and his wife, also a slave, were baptized and admitted into membership in a Perry County church, St. Michael's Lutheran Church, in Pfoutz Valley, according to the "Churches Between the Mountains," by Rev. D. H. Focht. The negro's name was "Bob." and the date of their admission, according to the church record, was July 5. 1776.
537
COUNTY'S EARLY YEARS
But of all the slave owners within the borders of what is now Perry County, Francis West, the grandfather of Chief Justice Gibson, Rev. William West, and the wife of Rev. David Elliott D.D., was the chief, having had six at one time. Mr. West came to this country from "Westover," the ancestral home in England, in 1754, and first settled in Carlisle, where he was an carly justice of the peace and for many years the presiding justice. While he is credited with living in Carlisle by some authorities and dying there, his will, dated September 6, 1781, and probated December 31, 1783, refutes that statement, as he speaks of the lands in 'Ty- rone Township "where I live" ( Book D. p. 193, Register of Wills, Carlisle). In this will he gives his Northumberland County lands and his "mulatto boy, Chamont," to his son William; to his son Edward, a tract of land in Tyrone Township, called "Clover Hill," excepting sixty acres at the east end, and adjoining the survey of William West, Sr., a tract on Sherman's Creek called "Upper Bottom," and a tract of land adjoining Alexander Diven's, reserv- ing all the walnut and pine trees fit for sawing; to his sons, Wil- liam and Edward, and his brother-in-law, Alexander Lowry, the tract of land where he lived, with the mills, and the sixty acres from the "Clover Hill" tract, including the afore-mentioned timber re- served and his "negro wench called Poll," to rent or lease and apply the one-half "to the maintenance and support of his daughter Ann, the wife of George Gibson, during her natural life, and the other half to the maintenance and support of Francis Gibson, son of the said Ann and the other lawful issue of the said Ann (she to have preference in leasing), at her death to be sold and divided among the issue, share and share alike." To Ann he gave also his stills, with vessels and utensils. To Edward West he be- queathed his negro man, named "Sligo," his mulatto man named "Jacob," and his mulatto child named "Lewis," also 250 acres of land in Fermanagh Township, and the residue not otherwise de- vised. To his granddaughter, Mary Mitchell, he gave a tract of land in Tyrone Township, together with a mulatto child named "Nila," but in case she die without heirs then it was to go to the three named executors for the use of Ann West Gibson and her heirs. A codicil dated April 24, 1782, revoked the disposition of the "negro wench Poll" to the executors and gave her to his son Edward, and another codicil, dated July 12, 1783, took from his son, William West, the Northumberland County lands and his mulatto boy "Chamont," and devised them to John Donnelson, of Philadelphia, merchant, "in trust for sole use and benefit of said son, William West," but with the stipulation that "at the request of said William West they be sold to said William West, or any other persons, and the benefits accrue to William West."
538
HISTORY OF PERRY COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
It will be noted that the will disposes of six slaves. There is 10 available record known to the writer of the final disposition of these slaves.
In 1778 James Blain (the father of Ephraim Blain, Commissary General of the United States, and ancestor of James G. Blaine, the statesman), was assessed in Toboyne Township (then Cumber- land County, now Perry, with "a gristmill, a still, and a negro."
Another man to be assessed with a slave in 1820, the year of the county's creation, was William Anderson, after whom the village of Andersonburg was named, and who represented Cumberland County in the legislature before the formation of Perry. He had married Isabelle Blaine, of the famous Blaine family, and his own daughter Isabelle became the wife of Alexander McClure and the mother of the noted journalist, Alexander K. McClure, long editor of the Philadelphia Times. The last man to own a slave in Perry County was William Anderson, whose son, A. B. Anderson, was an attorney at New Bloomfield; that was about 1827, the negro's name being "Bob," according to the late Alexander Blaine Grosh, a descendant, who gave the information to the writer in 1919.
The escape of slaves was not altogether foreign to Perry County, either, as an advertisement of February 6, 1818, signed by John B. Gibson, advertises for a lost slave. While the advertisement does not state which John B. Gibson it was, yet there is no doubt that it was he who later became the celebrated chief justice, as the will of Francis West, his grandfather, gave several slaves to trustees for his daughter Ann, which at her death was to descend to her issue, one of whom was the future chief justice.
Even that unspeakable crime, which fosters lynching in the South and occasionally in the North, was not unknown to Pennsyl- vania at the early day of Perry County's formation. An early issue of the Perry Forester tells of the attack of a negro, the victim being a ten-year-old girl, near Carlisle-within six miles of the Perry County line.
On November 6, 1858, Mary Barton (colored) died in Buffalo Township, aged about sixteen years, the newspaper account of her death stating that "she was formerly employed in the family of Dr. Grosh as a bound girl."
The Quakers who at first controlled the provincial affairs were not opposed to slavery, and even William Penn, with all his reli- gious scruples, owned slaves. As early as 1688 the Friends or Quakers had agitated the subject, and in 1758 further traffic in slaves was abolished by them. In 1776 they decided that all slaves held by them must be set free. As early as 1778 an effort was made to abolish slavery in the province, but was unsuccessful. On March 1, 1780, by a vote of thirty-four to twenty-one, Pennsyl- vania, then a colony instead of a province, enacted a law to gradu-
539
COUNTY'S EARLY YEARS
ally free the slaves, being the first in the Union to do so, nothwith- standing that Massachusetts was the abolition centre. While the law was enforced yet the census of 1840 still showed sixty-four slaves in Pennsylvania. When this act of 1780 passed in order to prevent slave owners evading the law it was made mandatory to register the births of all children born to slaves after that date, and a heavy penalty was attached for failure so to do.
ANTI-ABOLITION FEELING IN COUNTY.
That there was, even as late as "the thirties" of last century an anti-abolition feeling in the North, in Pennsylvania, and even in Perry County, may be a surprise to many, yet such is the truth and the facts came down the generations through old newspaper files. On January 17, 1837, an abolitionist was to speak in New Bloom- field, the county seat, in the basement of the Presbyterian Church. When he appeared, with a band, a riot was threatened, and upon the intervention of wiser heads, and more prudent friends, he was conducted to his lodgings, amid the hoots and jeers of the crowd. But, even that occurrence pales into insignificance when it is known that there was actually held in the Perry County court- house an anti-abolitionist meeting, at which resolutions were passed protesting against the freeing of the slaves. The resolutions which appear a little farther on, while adopted in Perry County, might easily be mistaken for a series adopted in any South Carolina county, or, in fact, in any of the slave-holding states. The second resolution classes slavery as "repugnant to no precept of the Chris- tian religion." While the resolutions uphold slavery, yet the sev- enth one shows that slavery was really repugnant to the very men who passed them, as the seventh one admits that they would "not submit for one moment" to slavery in the North. Those very men, in the following years, themselves became abolitionists, and their sons marched away under the flag of their country in "the sixties." Captain Tressler, the son of a member of the resolution committee, organized a company composed principally of his pupils at the Loysville Academy, and joined the Union forces at the front.
On April 4, 1837, according to the Perry County Democrat of April 6 of that year, a largely attended anti-abolition meeting was held in the Perry County courthouse, and that the attendants were men of prominence is evidenced by the names of those among the list of officers and upon the resolution committee. Many of their descendants of to-day are likewise prominent in county affairs. The verbatim account of the meeting from the old files follows :
"In pursuance of public notice a meeting of the friends of the integrity of the Union, and opposed to the wily schemes of modern abolitionism, convened in the courthouse, in the borough of Bloomfield, Perry County, on Tuesday evening, the 4th of April, instant, and organized by appointing
540
HISTORY OF PERRY COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
Mr. Jacob Shearer, president ; Martin Stambaugh, Esq., Solomon Bower, Esq., Cornelius Baskins and Samuel MeKenzie, vice-presidents, and Dr. James H. Case and Francis English, secretaries.
"On motion Dr. Joseph Speck, James Wilson, Col. S. Loy, Dr. J. Foster, E. Dromgold, Edward Miller, Esq., and C. Jones, Esq., were appointed a committee to draft a preamble and resolutions expressive of the sense of the meeting, who retired some time and reported the following which was agreed to:
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