Randolph County, Indiana - Biographical sketches (2 of 3 so headed), 1882 (part 4 of 4)

French and Indian war respectively. His father was one of twins who were the youngest of nineteen children by one mar-. riage, many of whom were born in the State of Vermont. Being married at sixteen, the mother bore nineteen children by one husband, and lived to be ninety-three years old, dying in Cherry Valley, N. Y., in 1840. They were married at Roxbury, Mass. ; kept house several years in Keene, N. H.; moved into Vermont, hauling their goods with oxen, and the married couple riding on the same horse 20() miles into the Green Mountain land. In about 1790, they set out for what was then called New Connecticut, and now Western Reserve, in the winter, upon a sled, with two horses, the group consisting of husband and wife and nine children, two being twins a year old. They crossed the Green Mountains; the snow left them, and they left the sled and kept on with the two horses. One horse died, and they still pressed forward with the other. They pawned their things as they went on, the last thing disposed of thus being the woman's shawl, seventeen miles from where they finally stopped. They quit traveling, because - because - well, because they could get no farther, ending their wearisome journey in Montgomery County, N. Y., removing shortly to Otsego County, N. Y., about fifty-five miles west of Albany. There they settled, and there they resided till they left the scenes of mortality, the husband in about 1822, and the wife in 1840, at the great age of ninety-three. Poor and 'destitute, they reached that hard and rugged region, and poor for forty or fifty years longer they continued to be, during their whole sojourn in this sublunary sphere; that poverty and destitution' made deeper and more desperate by the sad fact that twice in that country their house was burned to the ground, the last time escaping barely in their night clothes, losing everything in their dwelling. Thus did emigration take place, and thus did emigrants live in those olden times in that Eastern land: Such a group as the one described - aman, wife, nine children, one poor, woe-begone horse, wandering, strangers in a strange land - would be a sight to behold! Yet of the great crowd of descendants of these poor emigrants, scattered east and west, Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigun, Indiana, Tilinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, the great body have always been, and are to this day, upright, thriving, respectable, industrious, intelligent, and by far the larger portion of the whole number God-fearing people. The tree was good, and the fruit has been good for many generations, God bless and prosper the poor, but hardy and virtuous, emigrant, and let all the people say, Amen! I.et no man despise the poor and the lowly, but let all conspire to favor and to entourage the humble and desolate, for out of such shall come, in the following years, through successive ages and generations, those who shall become the strength and substance of the nation, and the pride and glory of the land! The region of New York to which they came is famous in the annals of the Eastern land. Cherry Valley was settled in 1740, 142 years ago, by intelligent and pious people from Scotland. The winter after their establishment of the colony, the.snow lay in immense depth for months upon the ground, and they came near starvation. A friendly Indian discovered their condition, and kept them alive by successive trips to the settlements on the Mohawk River, some fifteen miles distant, traveling upon snow-shoes and carrying provisions upon his back for their sustenance, persevering in his friendly work till the return of spring enabled them to obtain their own supply. In the Revolutionary war, the town was burned, and the inhabitants were either killed or carried captive to Canada. One person, who was then an infant in his mother's arms, became afterward the distinguished Judge Alfred E. Campbell, of Cooperstown, N. Y., who became the author of the work entitled "Annals of Tryon County," embraciag the whole of New York west of Albany County, a most valuable and interesting treatise, and crowded with information concerning those olden times. Cherry Valley was burned near the same time with the massacre of Wyoming, in Pennsylvania, both being in the Susquehanna Valley, the former town being at the head of Cherry Valley Creek, one of the sources of that river, and Cooperstown being the residence of Judge Fennimore Cooper, the famous novelist, who immortalized that whole region by the productions of his vigorous and fertile brain. . Some of the families of the original settlers 142 years ago still occupy the homesteads of their ancestors. The Campbell family in particular still remain where their progenitor established his home in 1740, after crossing the stormy ocean-wave from the rocks and mountains of his native Scotland. One of his sons was a Colonel in the Revolutionary army. Gen. Washington, in his Presidential tour through New York and New England, was a guest at the Campbell mansion, and one little boy, a lad of some ten years, who saw President Washington at his father's residence at that early time, lived to be more than ninety years old, and had the honor, in Gen. Grant's administration, to be able to say that he had seen the first President and the last. When President Grant visited Troy, in the State of New York, to attend the funeral ceremonies of Gen. Wool, Mr. Campbell, then above ninety years of age, made a journey from his home to Troy on purpose to have it to say that he had seen the first President and the last. He saw and was glad, and in a short time he lay down to take his last earthly sleep, and was gathered to the sepulchers of his fathers. The ancestral graveyard in that village is, indeed, a most interesting spot, containing, as it does, the tombs of several generations. In the fall of 1880, a centennial celebration was held, attended by perhaps twenty thousand people, and addresses were delivered by Gov. Horatio Seymour and other distingulshed personages of the State and region, commemorating the capture and burning of the town by the Indians under the famous Mohawk chief, Thayandanega, or Brant, and the cruel Tory partisan, Col. Walter Butler, who, in merciless ferocity, exceeded the savages themselves, and who was himself shot and tomahawked on the banks of Oneida Creek by an Indian, who cried, in answer to Butler's appeals for mercy as the avenging savage took his scalp, "Remember Sherry Valley! Remember Sherry Valley!" The subject of this sketch was an early Abolitionist, joining that much abused and maligned group of men and women in his early youth, in 1835. He attended the Oneida Institute at Whitesboro (near Utica, N. Y.), the first collegiate school inthe United States which opened its doors to colored youth. While there and at Oberlin, he became acquainted with many of the young men of color who have since become famous in the country. Among them were Messrs. Freeman, Sidney, Loguen, Whitehorne, Day, Garnett, Crunmell, Rogers, Vashon, Allen, and others not now recollected. He graduated with the class of 1840, a member of which class was Rev. Highland Garnet, then and ever since - till his death in Liberia, in 1882, whither he had gone by Presidential appointment as Consul to that African commonwealth - an energetic, talented, influential and greatly successful clergyman, being, from his youth, remarkable for his oratorical ability. It is an interesting fact that Mr. Garnet was the first colored person who wus permitted to speak in the United States Hall of Representatives, which he did, to a crowded assembly, on the 12th of February, 1865. He was Pastor of a church in Washington City at the time, and their choir also officiuted upon the occasion. The spacious hall was crammed, both upon the floor and in the galleries, and the vast audience hung spell-bound upon his lips. One who heard the memorable discourse concludes an account of the remarkable scene as follows: ''It is needless to say more. Men who went to the house to hear a colored man, came away having heard a man in the highest and fullest sense. Many who went there with feelings simply of curiosity came away wrapped in astonishment. Not only a man, buta great representative man, had spoken, and they were amazed. In fact, Mr. Garnet was the finest colored orator in the land - far superior, not, indeed, in reasoning power, yet, in dignity and impressiveness of personal presence, in the graces of finished oratory, and in the grandeur of natural and cultured eloquence, to the far-famed Fred Douglass, for so many years a prominent personage before the American public.'' As stated, Ebenezer 'Tucker graduated in 1840 from Oneida Institute, the class numbering eleven, most of whom are still living, after a lapse of forty-two years, but not one of whom he has ever seen in the flesh since the morning after the commencement, when that band of earnest young men took the parting hand and separated to their life-work for Christ and for the welfare of the human race. His business has been chiefly teaching, and, during the larger portion of the more than forty years spent in that employment, his work has been in institutions fully and warmly open to the youth who have been guilty of the heinous crime of possessing a "skin not colored like our own;"' fifteen years Principal at Union Literary Institute; nine years President of Liber College; and nearly four years in Straight University, New Orleans, and at Tougaloo University, Mississippi, bringing him thus in connection with some thousands of young persons of color, many of whom have since become prominent among their people and before the country. And, though still poor in purse, he feels rich in the reward of the esteem and affection of his pupils now of the olden time, and the conviction that his hands have been enabled to scatter seed upon the furrows of the great world-tield, which is even now yielding, and shall, in the growing future, continue still more largely to yield an abundant harvest for the garner of eternal life.

Central Building

the Holy Spirit, a pocket Bible, a hymn book, a horse, a pair of saddle-bags and a large cape overcoat to keep warm in winter and to shed rain in summer, tied on behind the saddle when not needed. He took no umbrella, because it could not be used riding through the thick woods."

Mr. T. began to serve in the ministry in 1830. He preached first at Lebanon, Warren Co., Ohio, traveling to Cincinnati and Kentucky, crossing the river again at. Aurora, Dearborn Co., Ind., and going thence to Wayne County, preaching and also working at his trade as a cooper.

In 1830, he first preached in Randolph County. He says: '*A smal! settlement had been formed on the Little Mississinewa, four miles north of where Union City now is. My old schoolteacher and other friends had moved up there into the woods. James Wickersham, James Skinner and Thomas Wiley were among them. I preached there to twenty persons, which was all there were in the neighborhood." Returning home through Newburg (Spartansburg), he left an appointment to preach there, in June, which he fulfilled. Some of the Friends had moved to Fort Wayne, and he was invited to visit that place, which he accomplished in August, making a three days' horseback ride through the wilderness, and thence six miles down the river, where the meeting was held in a cabin on the banks of the stream. He says: "On Sunday morning, large canoes came sailing on the river, loaded with people, and landed near, filling the cabin. One woman asked for immersion. Her request was granted, which was supposed to be the first baptism in the waters of the beautiful Maumee." Returning, scarce of money, he fed on blackberries and baited his horse on the wild grass, and, at other times, he ate black haws, thinking of John the Baptist and his ''locusts and wild honey."

He continued his visits to the settlement north of Union City, in 1837, accompanied by the two Harlans, and, in 1838, began to baptize into the faith of Jesus. Thesettlement had increased and a cabin would not hold the people, and the men made a booth of bushes at the cabin door, with fence rails for seats, while the preachers' horses stood tied to the trees, eating corn brought in their saddle-bags. We quote again, in substance: '"The first week in January, 1840, the meeting was held in Thomas Wiley's hewed-log house before his large log-heap fire. Brother Wiley cut the ice a foot thick, and, in a heavy snow storm, we baptized James Wickersham and his wife and some others, and, at night, several more by the light of hickory bark torches, thus getting both my suits of clothes wet, but Sister Wiley had them well dried by morning. In the spring of 1842, we ordained Thomas Wiley and Charles Smith Elders of the church there by the laying on of hands."" In 1840, he was called by Jonathan Thomas to preach at his new saw-mill, on Clear Creek, east of Deerfield, at which place he continued to preach for three years with much success. He preached also at Brook's Creek, in Jay County, and at Petersburg and Walnut Corner, Randolph County.

South Salem, Springboro (north of Lynn), etc., were begun about thesametime. Hestates: "We were called to Joel Howe's cabin, in the edge of the big woods west of Spartansburg, in the summer of 1839. An acre was cleared, a loose plank floor was in the cabin. but the cracks were not stopped. A large sycamore gum stood near, with a hole cut in one side for a smoke-house. The first two meetings, not more than eight persons were present, but in the early winter, at the third or fourth appointment, the house was so full of people that we could scarce get in. They had come from the settlements south out of curiosity. But the Lord was there in the power of the Spirit, and tears flowed freely. At night, we preached at Davis' Schoolhouse, south of Spartansburg, to a crowded house."

Shortly afterward, at the same house, end at Brother Silas Davis' dwelling, two meetings were held at the same hour by Brothers Valentine Harlan and Tillson, and two brethren, John Starling and Nathan Hedgepeth, were baptized at Davis' Spring. "Soon after that, Bethpage Meeting-House was built and a great work spread through all that region. * * * Jam the last one of the pioneer preachers left on the shores of time in these parts, and 1 am 'only waiting till the shadows are a little longer grown.'" Mr. T. baptized many believers, some years more than 200. He says in his paper: "The old horse was dead long ago. The old saddle was torn up in 1843 (when I was out with Brother Franklin), but here is the old saddle-bags and Father Harlan's old hymn-book, like the one I had, and here is the old cape overcoat; and last, and best of all, here is the old backwoods preacher in good health and with as warm a heart for the prosperity of Zion as he had fifty years ago."

Mr. Tillson's description of the bluff pioneers, who were the agents in God's hand for causing the beginning of the Gospel of the Kingdom in those wildernesses is very quaint and striking:

" Joel Howe, taking his little sorrel mare with rope-rein bridle and sheep-skin saddle, and going to Bethel (eight miles) one Sunday morning dressed in home-spun clothes of flax aud tow, with straw hat and feet all bare, was the angel of mercy appointed to be the herald of salvation that should open the gates of the New Jerusalem to that infant community. James Wickersham and James Skinner, two poor brethren coming down to Whitewater to buy breadstuff, urged me to come up on the Little Mississinewa and break to their famishing souls the bread of eternal life. Sister Nancy Leabo, at Walnut Corner, whose husband died, leaving her to struggle on in poverty and want, called me there to preach his funeral. Jonathan Thomas, in his shanty built of rough plank, urged me to come and spe.k the words of heavenly consolation to himseif and his neighbors, east of Deerfield. The meetings there were held, first in a Methodist brother's cabin, then at the saw-mill, the men seated on the logs in the mill-yard like pigoons in the trees. When preaching on Bear Creek, northwest of Winchester, Brother James Level and wife came on horseback nine miles to meeting on Sunday morning, returning at evening. Souls were 'hungry for the Word' in those times and would endure hardships to reach the spots of blessing, where stood the servants of Christ to feed the eager, waiting crowds with the bread furnished from the Master's hand." Mr. T. is now (1882) about seventy-eight years old.