USA > Virginia > Augusta County > Augusta County > Annals of Augusta county, Virginia, with reminiscences illustrative of the vicissitudes of its pioneer settlers > Part 1
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21518591,72
SIGILL
9
CHRISTO
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FROM THE BRIGHT LEGACY.
Receir 2 May, 1887
Descendants of Henry Bright, jr., who died at Watertown, Mass., in 1686, are entitled to hold scholarships in Harvard College, estab- lished in 18So under the will of
JONATHAN BROWN BRIGHT
of Waltham, Mass., with one half the income of this Legacy. Such descendants failing, other persons are eligible to the scholarships. The will requires that this announcement shall be made in every book added to the Library under its provisions.
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By Jed. Hotchkiss
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.
ANNALS
OF Augusta County, Virginia,
WITH REMINISCENCES
ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE VICISSITUDES OF ITS PIONEER SETTLERS;
Biographical Sketches
OF CITIZENS LOCALLY PROMINENT, AND OF THOSE WHO HAVE FOUNDED FAMILIES IN THE SOUTHERN AND WESTERN STATES;
A Diary of the War, 1861-'5,
AND A CHAPTER ON RECONSTRUCTION, BY JOS. A. WADDELL, Member of the Virginia Historical Society.
RUN
D
AUGUSTA
PRISCUM
RI
[COUNTY SEAL.]
C RICHMOND: WM. ELLIS JONES, BOOK AND JOB PRINTER. 1886.
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12366, 3. WS 18591.72
:
Bregi- und.
COPYRIGHT, 1886, BY JOS. A. WADDELL.
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PREFACE.
The basis of these Annals was prepared as a contribution to. the " Historical and Geographical Atlas of Augusta County," is- sued by Messrs. Waterman, Watkins & Co., of Chicago. That sketch was executed very hurriedly, and the space allotted to it in the Atlas was limited. Therefore some errors appear in the work, and much matter then on hand was necessarily omitted. Moreover, the work was hardly in press before I found new mat- ter, not known or not accessible to me previously. My interest in the subject having been quickened, information in regard to the history of the county came to me almost unsought, and often from unexpected sources. This augmented result is intended as well to correct former errors, as to relate the history more fully from the first settlement of the county, in 1732, to the year 1871.
The county of Augusta originally extended from the Blue Ridge to the Mississippi river, east and west, and from the great lakes on the north to the northern boundary of the present State of Tennessee on the south. The history of this vast region pro- perly belongs to our Annals until the year 1769, when Botetourt county was formed. As the limits of Augusta were reduced by the formation of other counties out of her territory, from time to time, the scope of the history is simultaneously and correspond- ingly contracted.
I have taken the utmost pains to secure perfect accuracy. The errors in details of most writers who have alluded to our county affairs and people, are remarkable. The writers referred to have not only copied from one another without investigation, and thereby repeated erroneous statements, but some of them have contradicted themselves in the same volume. Even the statements of the public records, especially in respect to dates, often require to be verified. From the order book of the County
iv
PREFACE.
Court of Augusta, it would appear that the second term of the court was held in February, 1745, instead of February, 1746. Similar errors occur in the volumes of complete records of chan- cery causes, preserved in the clerk's office of the Circuit Court.
But while I have aspired to perfect accuracy, I do not flatter myself that the following pages are entirely free from error. I have stated nothing as a fact, of the truth of which I am doubt- ful. Many statements which I do not regard as certainly correct, are given on the authority of other writers, prefaced by the words, "It is said," or "It is related."
It has been my intention to give full credit to every writer whom I have quoted, and I think this has been done in the body of the work. I am indebted to the files of the Staunton Specta- tor, edited by Richard Mauzy, Esq., for most of the facts em- braced in the last chapter, on "Reconstruction." To forestall any charge of plagiarism, I state that having at different times published in the columns of Staunton newspapers communica- tions relating to the history of the county, I have copied from these without credit whenever it suited my purpose to do so. Through the kindness of Judge William McLaughlin I have had the opportunity of making extracts from the " History of Wash- ington College," by the Rev. Dr. Ruffner; and "Sketches of the Early Trustees of Washington College," by Hugh Blair Grigsby, Esq. Both these interesting works are still in manuscript, and neither was completed by its author. To the following gentle- men I am indebted for assistance: John McD. Alexander and Wm. A. Anderson, Esqs., of Lexington; Hon. W. C. P. Breck- enridge, of Kentucky; R. A. Brock, Esq., of Richmond ; G. F. Compton, Esq., of Harrisonburg; Dr. Cary B. Gamble, of Balti- more; Armistead C. Gordon, Esq., of Staunton ; Dr. Andrew Simonds, of Charleston, S. C., and John W. Stephenson, Esq., of the Warm Springs: I am also under obligations to Mrs. S. C. P. Miller, of Princeton, N. J.
I have not attempted to write a stately history, but merely to relate all interesting facts concerning the county, in a lucid style and in chronological order. Hence the title " Annals," has been adopted deliberately. Many trivial incidents have been men- tioned, because they seem to illustrate the history of the times and the manners and customs of the people.
The present work was undertaken with no expectation of pe- cuniary reward. It has been to me a labor of love. From my
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PREFACE.
V
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early childhood I have cherished a warm affection for my native county-her people, and her very soil. I have sought to rescue from oblivion and hand down to posterity, at least the names of many citizens, who, although not great in the ordinary sense, lived well in their day and are worthy of commemoration.
A representation of the seal of the County Court of Augusta, commonly called the County Seal, is given on the title page. When and by whom the seal was designed is not known. Pos- sibly it was by a member of the faculty of William and Mary College, at the request of one of our colonial governors, who were required by law to provide seals for courts.
The motto is an accommodation of a passage in Horace, Book IV, Ode 2. This Ode expresses delight in the peace and prosperity which came after the long civil wars of Rome. Re ferring to Augustus, the poet says the heavenly powers ne'er gave the earth a nobler son-
"Nor e'er will give, though backward time should run To its first golden hours."
The Latin words are: Nec dabunt quamvis redeant in aurum Tempora priscum.
The motto may be translated thus: "Let the ages return to the first golden period." The allusion is, of course, to the fabu- lous "Golden Age" of primal simplicity and enjoyment; and the Roman poets held out the hope that this happy state of things would one day return.
It would seem that the seal was devised during the fearful Indian wars, when every one was longing for the safety and rest of former times. Full of such aspirations, the designer, in addi- tion to the motto, delineated in the centre of the seal a tranquil pastoral scene, as emblematic of the wished for times. Such a scene would not ordinarily have been depicted in a time of peace, but during, or immediately after, the havoc of war. In peace, the minds of men gloat over the achievements of war, and in war they dwell upon "the piping times of peace."
The name of the county, however, was suggestive of the motto and emblem, as the poet Virgil celebrated the Emperor Augustus as
"Restorer of the age of gold."
J. A. W.
STAUNTON, November 1, 1886.
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CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION.
The Scotch-Irish
I
CHAPTER I.
From the First Settlement to the First County Court
6
CHAPTER II.
From the First Court to the First Indian War
....
26
CHAPTER III.
Indian Wars, etc., from 1753 to 1756.
54
CHAPTER IV.
Indian Wars, etc., from 1756 to 1758
. .
79
CHAPTER V.
Indian Wars, etc., from 1758 to 1764.
IO2
CHAPTER VI.
Indian Wars, etc., from 1764 to 1775.
119
CHAPTER VII.
The War of the Revolution, etc., from 1774 to 1783.
. .
144
CHAPTER VIII.
From the close of the Revolution to the year 1800.
195
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CONTENTS.
vii
CHAPTER IX.
From 1800 to 1812.
. ...
212
CHAPTER X.
From the year 1812 to the year 1833.
226
CHAPTER XI.
From 1833 to 1844
252
CHAPTER XII.
From 1844 to 1860.
271
CHAPTER XIII.
Augusta County and the War of Secession-1860-'2.
......
280
CHAPTER XIV.
Second Year of the War-1862-'3
296
CHAPTER XV.
Third Year of the War-1863-'4.
.....
308
CHAPTER XVI.
Fourth Year of the War-1864-'5.
316
CHAPTER XVII.
After the War-1865.
. .
335
CHAPTER XVIII.
Reconstruction-1865 to 1871 .
344
APPENDIX.
Bessy Bell and Mary Gray
... 361
1
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ANNALS
OF
Augusta County, Virginia.
INTRODUCTION.
THE SCOTCH-IRISH.
At different periods subsequent to the Reformation, many lowland Scotch people emigrated to the province of Ulster, north Ireland. There they prospered greatly, and maintained unimpaired the manners and customs and the religious faith of the country from which they came. They and their posterity regarded themselves-and were regarded by the Irish of Celtic blood-as Scotch in all essential particulars. Some of these settlers, before leaving their native land, goaded by persecution under the Stuart Kings, had borne arms against the British government, and were among the prisoners captured at Both- well Bridge, in 1679. When the Revolution of 1688 occurred, the Scotch-Irish sided with William of Orange. The siege of Londonderry, in 1689, is one of the most remarkable events in history. Upon the march northward of the army of James II, says Macaulay, " All Lisburn fled to Antrim, and, as the foes drew nearer, all Lisburn and Antrim together came pouring into Londonderry. * Thirty thousand Protestants, of both sexes and of every age, were crowded behind the bulwarks of the City of Refuge." The ordinary population of the town and
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2
ANNALS OF AUGUSTA COUNTY.
suburbs furnished only about six hundred fighting men; but when the siege began there were 7,300 men armed for defence. Dissenters having been excluded from offices in the army, none of that class were fitted by previous military experience for command. Therefore a majority of the higher officers were of the Church of England. A majority of the inferior officers, captains and others, were Presbyterians; and of the soldiers and people generally, the Dissenters outnumbered the others by fifteen to one.
"Now," says Froude, in his History of Ireland, " was again witnessed what Calvinism-though its fires were waning-could do in making common men into heroes. Deserted by the English regiments, betrayed by their own commander, without stores and half armed, the shopkeepers and apprentices of a commercial town prepared to defend an unfortified city against a disciplined army of 25,000 men, led by trained officers, and amply provided with artillery. They were cut off from the sea by a boom across the river. Fever, cholera and famine came to the aid of the besiegers. Rats came to be dainties, and hides and shoe leather were the ordinary fare. They saw their children pine away and die-they were wasted themselves, till they could scarce handle their firelocks on their ramparts." Still they held on through more than three miserable months. Finally a frigate and two provision ships came in, and Derry was saved after a siege of eight months. The garrison had been reduced to about three thousand men. The Rev. Mr. Walker, a minister of the Church of England, was one of the prominent leaders. Enniskillen was successfully defended in like manner.
Yet, notwithstanding their loyalty to the Crown, as settled by the Revolution, and their heroic services, the Scotch Irish re- ceived no favors from the British government, except a miser- able pittance doled out to their clergy after a time. They were proscribed because of their religion, being excluded from the army, the militia, the civil service, and seats in municipal cor- porations. Dissenters from the Irish Episcopal church were not allowed to teach school. Presbyterian marriages were de- clared illegal. The laws against Catholics were even more severe than those against Protestant dissenters-so severe, indeed, that they were not generally executed, public officers
3
ANNALS OF AUGUSTA COUNTY.
revolting at their harshness. Presbyterians, however, were pur- sued unrelentingly to the extent of the law. The Presbyterian magistrates in Ulster, says Froude, were cleared out. Men having nothing to recommend them but their going to church, were appointed in their places. The power being now in their hands, the bishops fell upon the grievance of the Presbyterian marriages. Catholic marriages did not trouble them; but, in their view, a marriage ceremony by a Protestant dissenting minister was only a license to sin. It was announced that the children of all Protestants not married in a church should be treated as bastards, and in 1704 many persons of undoubted reputation were prosecuted in the bishop's courts as fornica- tors for cohabiting with their own wives. Ministers, for the offence of preaching the gospel outside of certain bounds, were arrested and held for trial, while their hearers were threatened with the stocks.
Yet the loyalty of the people to the Crown was unshaken, doubtless owing to the fact that the sovereigns generally were opposed to measures of persecution. William III had opposed them, and George I in vain urged the repeal of the obnoxious laws. Therefore when, in 1715, the rebellion in behalf of the Pretender, son of James II, began in Scotland, and an insurrec- tion in Ireland was looked for, the Irish Presbyterians tendered their services to the government. In the emergency military commissions were distributed to them, although contrary to law, and many regiments were speedily raised. After the danger was over they were threatened with prosecution for even that service.
The chief agents of persecution were the bishops of the estab- lished church. Some of these prelates, during the earlier part of the eighteenth century, were not only High Churchmen of the most ultra sort, but at heart it was believed partisans of the Stuart dynasty. Dean Swift, no friend to Dissenters, sarcasti- cally described the nominees to the Episcopal bench of Ireland, "as waylaid and murdered by highwaymen on Hounslow Heath, who stole their letters patent, came to Dublin, and were conse- crated in their places." All the Irish prelates, however, did not deserve Swift's wholesale denunciation, notably Bishop Berke- ley; and many of the parish clergy were worthy of all honor.
Every effort of enlightened statesmen to obtain a relaxation
4
ANNALS OF AUGUSTA COUNTY.
of the stringent laws against Dissenters failed, and in 1719 the Protestant emigration to America recommenced. In addition to the restrictions on religion, Irish industry and commerce had been systematically repressed. Twenty thousand people left Ulster on the destruction of the woollen trade in 1698. Many more were driven away by the first passage of the Test Act. The stream had slackened in the hope of some relief. When this hope expired, men of spirit and energy refused to remain in the country. Thenceforward, for . more than fifty years, annual shiploads of families poured themselves out from Bel- fast and Londonderry. England paid dearly for her Irish policy. The fiercest enemies she had, in 1776, were the de- scendants of the Scotch-Irish who had held Ulster against James II. The earlier emigrants were nearly all Protestants. The emigration of Catholics from Ireland to America, in large numbers, did not begin till the nineteenth century. Previously, when the Irish people of this class emigrated it was to France, Spain, or other European Catholic country. "There was," says Froude, " first a Protestant exodus to America, and then a Catholic, each emigrant carrying away a sense of intolerable wrong."
The people of Ulster had heard of Pennsylvania, and the reli gious liberty there enjoyed and promised to all comers, and to that province they came in large numbers. They were mainly farmers, tradesmen and artisans. But jealousies arose in the minds of the original settlers of Pennsylvania, and restrictive measures were adopted by the proprietary government against the Scotch-Irish and German immigrants. Hence many of both these races were the more disposed, in 1732 and after- wards, to seek homes within the limits of Virginia, and run the risk of the church establishment existing there. The Scotch- Irish drifted on in the wake of John Lewis to the present county of Augusta ; the German people generally located in the region now known as Shenandoah, Page, and Rockingham. The two races did not keep entirely apart, and there was some comming- ling of them in the various settlements, and in a short time a few people distinct from either came into the Valley from lower Virginia.
Many of our people are descendants of the defenders of Derry. And to go back a little further, the list of prisoners captured at
5
ANNALS OF AUGUSTA COUNTY.
Bothwell Bridge and herded like cattle for months in Grayfriars' Churchyard, Edinburgh, is like a muster-roll of Augusta people. 1
1 An Appendix to the old Scotch book called "A Cloud of Witnes- ses," says : "Anno, 1679, of the prisoners taken at Bothwell, were banished to America 250, who were taken away by - Paterson, merchant at Leith, who transacted for them with Provost Milns, Laird of Barnton, the man that first burnt the covenant, whereof 200 were drowned by shipwreck at a place called the Mulehead of Darness, near Orkney, being shut up by the said Paterson's order beneath the hatches; 50 escaped." The following were a part of the 250, the names of those who escaped being printed in italics: James Clark and John Clark, of the parish of Kilbride; John Thomson and Alex- ander Walker, of Shots; William Waddel, William Miller, James Wad- del and John Gardner, of Monkland; John Cochran, John Watson and Thomas Brownlee, of Evandale; Thomas Wilson, of Cathkin: John Miller and John Craig, of Glassford; David Currie, Robert Tod, John White and Robert Wallace, of Fenwick; Hugh Cameron, of Dalnul- hington ; William Reid, of Mauchline; John Campbell and Alexander Paterson, of Muirkirk; James Young and George Campbell, of Gal- ston ; Thomas Finlay, William Brown, Robert Anderson and James Anderson, of Kilmarnock; William Caldwell, of Girvan; Mungo Eccles, of Maybole; Alexander Lamb and George Hutcheson, of Straiton; Robert Ramsey and John Douglas, of Kirkmichael ; John White, of Kirkeswald; Thomas Miller, of Largo; Thomas Miller, Thomas Brown and James Buchanan, of Gargrennock; Thomas Thomson and Andrew Thomson, of St. Ninians; Andrew Young, John Morison and Hugh Montgomery, of Airlt; Thomas Ingles, Pat- rick Hamilton, John Bell, Patrick Wilson and William Henderson, of Dalmannie ; James Steel and John Brown, of Calder; William Reid, of Musselburgh ; James Tod, of Dunbar; James Houston, of Balmag- hie; Robert Brown and Samuel Beck, of Kilmackbrick , John Martin, of Borque; Andrew Clark, of Luckrictan; John Scott, of Ettrick ; John Glascow, William Glascow, Richard Young and James Young, of Cavers; Walter Waddel, of Sprouston ; William Scott and Alexander Waddel, of Castletown. The fifty men who escaped from the ship- wreck made their way to the north of Ireland, and were not further troubled.
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CHAPTER I.
FROM THE FIRST SETTLEMENT TO THE FIRST COUNTY COURT.
As far as known, the country now embraced in Augusta county was never entered by white men until the year 1716. Six years earlier, however, some portion of the Valley of Vir- ginia had been seen from the top of the Blue Ridge by Euro- peans. Governor Spotswood, writing to the Council of Trade, London, December 15, 1710, says that a company of adventu- rers found the mountains " not above a hundred miles from our upper inhabitants, and went up to the top of the highest moun- tain with their horses, tho' they had hitherto been thought to be unpassable, and they assured me that ye descent on the other side seemed to be as easy as that they had passed on this, and that they could have passed over the whole ledge (which is not large), if the season of the year had not been too far advanced before they set out on that expedition."-[Spotswood Letters, Vol. I, page 40.] It would seem that the adventurers referred to looked into the Valley from the mountain in the neighbor- hood of Balcony Falls, but no description of the country seen by them is given.
This portion of the Valley was then entirely uninhabited. The Shawnee Indians had a settlement in the lower valley, at or near Winchester, and parties of that tribe frequently traversed this section on hunting excursions, or on warlike expeditions against Southern tribes, but there was no Indian village or wigwam within the present limits of the county. At an early day, In dians, or people of some other race, had doubtless resided here, as would appear from several ancient mounds, or burial places, still existing in the county.
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ANNALS OF AUGUSTA COUNTY.
7
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The face of the country between the Blue Ridge and the North Mountain was, of course, diversified by hill and dale, as it is now, but forest trees were less numerous than at the present time, the growth of timber being prevented by the frequent fires kin- dled by hunting parties of Indians. Old men living within the writer's recollection, described this region as known by them in their boyhood. Many acres, now stately forests, were then covered by mere brushwood, which did not conceal the startled deer flying from pursuit.
At the time of which we speak, wild animals abounded in this section. The buffalo roamed at will over these hills and valleys, and in their migrations made a well-defined trail between Rock- fish Gap, in the Blue Ridge, and Buffalo Gap, in the North Mountain, passing by the present site of Staunton. Other deni- zens of the region at that day were the bear, wolf, panther, wild- cat, deer, fox, hare, etc. It would appear that wolves were very numerous There were no crows, blackbirds, nor song birds, and no rats, nor honey bees till the coming of the white people.'
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