%. ' • ' * *° "V, ♦ . . o • ^ O • . , , • . o -v V ,<-* \, F V '° • * i* ..••- ^ vt-o^ ;« ^cS vP^ *0* >™-\*° V'^'V %*♦-•' ^ ^j Or c ° ■ • * THE PERSONAL AND FAMILY HISTORY K~? OF- Charles Hooks and Margaret Monk Harris BY JAMES COFFEE HARRIS +- > *- e « "From scenes like tkese old Scotia's grandeur springs Tkat makes ker loved at koine, revered abroad; Princes and lords are kut tke kreatk or king*. An konest man s tke noblest Tvork or God. Copyrighted 1911 by J. C. Harris. CONTENTS Photogravures of immediate family of Charles H. Harris 1 Children of Charles H. and Margaret A. Harris 5 Foreword 7 Diagram of Four Generations 10 The family and personal history of C. H. and M. A. Harris 11 Photogravures of Ancestors 20 The AA^edding Party Picture 33 Letter on Family Affairs Written in 1840 36 Ancestors and Education 39 The Harris Family 41 Ancestry of Charles H. Harris 53 Harris- Alston 57 Coffee 59 Coffee-Cooper 61 Coffee-Heard 62 Hooks 64 Hunter 66 Diagram of Hooks-Hunter 68 Hooks-Hunter 70 Hooks-Fitzpatrick 71 Hooks-Molton 72 Hooks-Forrest 79 Items in Bible of Ann Hooks 80 Mary Slocumb, nee Hooks, Ride to Battlefield 82 Battle of Moore 's Creek 88 Life of Mary Slocumb, nee Hooks 92 Duplin County, North Carolina, in 1908 94 Maxwell 98 Monk 98 Marriages 102 Births 1° 3 Deaths • • 1° 7 Record of Family of Ellen Simmons 108 Record of Family of Kate Robeson 110 A FOREWORD. Applying the known principles of heredity to the human family we may now safely say that we inherit ourselves. Our bodies and our powers of mind, our form, color, temper- ament, capabilities — all that make our natural endowment — are but resurrections of the qualities of our ancestors. For instance, when both parents have blue eyes all their children invariably have blue eyes ; when both parents have brown eyes, three-fourths of their children will have brown eyes ; when one parent has blue eyes and the other has brown eyes half the children will have blue eyes and half will have brown eyes ; but if in both or either one of the parents the brown iris is from parents both of whom are brown eyed, the children will all be brown eyed, even though one of the parents be blue eyed. As with the eyes so with every feature of body and mind. Our forefathers endow us with what was inborn to them, and in our infancy and childhood they nurture us into the acquirement of the language, ideas, and arts of their time and country. A man is a product of his nature and his nurture ; whatever he says or does or thinks is deter- mined wholly by these ; and as his nature comes en- tirely from his ancestors and his nurture almost entirely from them, a knowledge of these ancestors will give a close approximation to what the man himself is. One-half of the characteristics of a man is seen in his parents. The grandparents furnish qualities that do not appear in one's parents and yet in him they are numerous enough to make up one-fourth of all his characteristics. The remaining one-fourth are qualities that do not appear in either parents or grandparents, but are drawn from ances- tors before them. It seems also to be true that full brothers and sisters hav narly one-half of all their characteristics precisely the same, while they may, and often do, differ vastly in their other characteristics, the determinants of which are drawn from different ancestors. In 1800, a hundred and ten years ago, there were living eight persons whose natures were to be commingled by heredity, and in three generations were to become the writer and his brothers and sisters. In 1800 these eight persons were in the full vigor of young manhood. They were four pairs, mated as follows: William Harris and Sarah Coffee, Charles Hooks and Ann Hunter, Jacob Monk and Sallie Wilkinson, Henry Maxwell and Margaret Hunter. At that time they all lived in the eastern part of North Carolina, except William Harris, born in New Bern, N. C, and Sarah Coffee, born in Prince Edward county, Va., who were then living in Middle Georgia. These eight per- sons, who are the great-grandparents of the writer, produced four persons, two pairs mated as follows: Peter Coffee Harris and Narcissa Ann Hooks, James B. B. Monk and Ann Maxwell, who are his grandparents. These two pairs pro- duced two persons, Charles Hooks Harris and Margaret Ann Hooks, who are his parents. Thus eight persons living a hundred years ago, Harris, Coffee, Hooks, Hunter, Monk, Wilkinson, Maxwell, Hunter, contained the natures now living in the writer and his brothers and sisters. The na- tues of these eight were commingled in the four grand- parents, whose natures entered into the person, who be- came the parents of the writer and his brothers and sisters. If the natures of the fourteen individuals who make the three generations of ancestors to be described in these pages could be delineated clearly, all the principles of heredity would be found in application, and they would explain the personal features and the personal characters of all their descendants. It is the writer's purpose to portray by words and photographs the result of his studies of these fourteen ancestors and their descendants. It is not possible that he will avoid errors and omissions in this undertaking, which has been to him a labor of love, especially of love for his mother and father, of whom he writes most. Rome, Ga., January, 1911. THE FOURTEEN ANCESTORS: THE THREE PRECEDING GENERATIONS. 1S00— William Harris Sarah Coffee Charles Hook-; Ann Hunter Henry Maxwell Margaret Hunter Jacob Monk Sallie Wilkinson 1830— Peter Coffee Harris Narcissa Ann Hooks James B. Monk Ann Maxwell Charles Hooks Harris Margaret Ann Monk James Coffee Harris Narcissa Ann Harris Margaret Prairie Harris Peter Charles Harris William Julius Harris Seale Harris Mary Adella Harris Sallie Harris Hunter Harris Elizabeth Beck Harris CHARLES HOOKS HARRIS. While Sophomore at University • f Alabama. (Reproduced from Daguerreotype in ^hich front of collar was scratched.) MARGARET ANN MONK. At eighteen years of age. WEDDING PARTY, MAGNOLIA, N. C, 1857. Charles H. and Margaret Monk Harris, James B. and Max- well Monk, Mrs. Sallie Wood (sister of Charles H. Harris), Miss Mary Moore, bridesmaid. ■;• r:-^*; ' w* !»»TK '. ; ** >:? ^tjp JAMES COFFEE HARRIS. * if A 3d 5 I.VS s Jus, 1 * I I * f f V j /I ^&jB» ] 4 < \ LA I. jbS PETER CHARLES HARRIS. WILLIAM JULIUS HARRIS. SEALE HARRIS. HUNTER HARRIS. Children of Dr. Charles H. and Margaret Harris and their residence, November, 1910. James Coffee Harris, Master of Arts, Honorary, (University of Georgia), Superintendent of Public Schools, of Cedartown 1890-1892, and of Rome, Ga., 1892-1911, Principal of Marietta Male Academy 1885-1890; residence, Rome, Ga. Narcissa Ann Harris, wife of Judge Charles G J-uies, resi- dence, Cedartown, Ga. Margaret Prairie Harris; residence, Cedartown, Ga. Peter Charles Harris, graduate United States Military Academy, class 1888; Honor graduate of U. S. Infantry and Cavalry School (post graduate college for officers) at Fort Leavenworth, Kan- sas, class 1895 ; nominated for brevet for gal- lant and meritorious conduct in battle of San Juan Hill, 1898; Director War Department Exhibit Pan American Exposition in 1901; Captain on General Staff since 1907; graduate of Army War College, 1908; residence, Wash- ington, D. C. William Julius Harris, attended University of Georgia 1888- 1890; entered Insurance business 1891; Secre- tary to United States Senator A. S. Clay; President of Georgia Fire Insurance Company, President of Farmers and Mechanics Bank at Cedartown, Ga. ; State Senator from 38th District of Georgia for term 1911-1913; Lieu- tenant Colonel on staff of Governo" Atkinson of Georgia; President National Home Fire Insurance Co.; residence, Cedartown, Ga. 6 • CHILDREN OF CHARGES H. HARRIS. Seale Harris, attended University of Georgia 1891-1892, graduated M. D., University of Virginia, 1894, post-graduate course in New York Polyclinic 1901, in Chicago 1903, Johns Hopkins 1905, University ol! Vienna, Austria 1906, member American Medical Association and chairman section of Medicine, Southern Medical Asso- ciation 1907-1908, editor-in-chief of Gulf States Journal of Medicine and Surgery and Southern Medical Journal, professor of Prac- tice of Medicine in University of Alabama, practice limited to internal diseases ; residence, Mobile, Alabama. Mary Adela Harris, wife of Prof. W. T. Garret, Griffin, Ga. Hunter Harris, 1st lieutenant 9th United States Infantry; residence, Manila, Philippine Islands. Elizabeth Beck Harris ; residence, Griffin, Ga. PART I. THE FAMILY AND PERSONAL HISTORY OF CHARLES H. AND MARGARET A. HARRIS. By James Coffee Harris. The Family and Personal History of Charles Hooks and Margaret Monk Harris. John Harris, who lived in New Bern, N. C, died there October 31, 1801, at the age of 71 years. His son, William Harris, born June 2, 1774, moved to Hancock county, Geor- gia, where he married Sarah Coffee. There their son, Peter Coffee Harris was born May 21, 1807, and on October 18, 1827, he married Narcissa Ann Hooks, the daughter of Charles Hooks, who had been a member of congress from North Carolina before his removal from there with his family to a plantation near Montgomery, where the mar- riage of his daughter took place. William Harris had moved from Georgia to Alabama in 1817 and cleared the land and built his home on the plantation that contained the springs near Montgomery, now known as Pickett Springs. Charles Hooks with his family settled on a plan- tation near there in 1826. In 1827 the Hooks-Harris mar- riage occurred. To Peter Coffee Harris and Narcissa Ann Hooks thus united were born four children, Sarah, William, Charles and Peter. One of these, Charles Hooks, married Margaret Ann Monk, of Magnolia, Duplin County, North Carolina, to whom were born ten children, as follows : James Coffee Harris, April 28, 1858, at Magnolia, N. C. Narcissa Ann Harris, February 11, 1860, at Magnolia, N. C. Margaret Prairie Harris, September 15, 1862, near Tus- kegee, Ala, 12 FAMILY AND PERSONAL HISTORY. Peter Charles Harris, November 10, 1865, near King- ston, Ga. William Julius Harris, February 3, 1868, in Cedartown, Ga. Seale Harris, March 13 ,1870, in Cedartown, Ga. Sallie Hooks Harris, February 1, 1872, in Cedartown, Georgia. Mary Adela Harris, July 21, 1874, in Cedartown, Ga. Hunter Harris, April 21, 1877, in Cedartown, Ga. Ga. Elizabeth Beck Harris, May 18, 1882, in Cedartown, Ga. Before presenting the genealogical data of the families converging in Charles Hooks Harris and Margaret Ann Monk, for whose descendants these lines are written, it would be well to make record of a short biography of the pair to whom these descendants owe their lives and training. They both came from the same social stratum, the olcl slave holding planters of the South, whose ancestors had set- tled the colonies and made the laws by which they were gov T erned. The pair were cousins four times removed from first cousins, the Hunters of North Carolina being ancestors to both. The Hunters of North Carolina were kinspeople of R. M. T. Hunter of Virginia, a very distinguished senator from his State. Charles Hooks, who was a member of congress from North Carolina, married Miss Ann Hunter and was the grandfather of Charles Hooks Harris on his mother's side. On his father's side his grandmother, Sarah Coffee, was sis- ter of General John E. Coffee, from whom Coffee County, Georgia, is named as a tribute to his services in the wars against the Indians. He was a member of congress in 1833 and 1835, dying the day he was elected to a new term. The other lines converging in the Harris family were Maxwells and Monks who like the Harrises, Hunters, Hooks and Cof- fees were entirely from Scotch-Irish- Welsh settlers of Vir- ginia and North Carolina, there not being any evidence of an English or other Teutonic strain in their ancestry. From the mere statement of these facts it is clear that the FAMILY AND PERSONAL HISTORY. 1 3 family stock of Charles Hooks Harris and Margaret Monk was representative of that which made the old South. It is a typical American family whose language, whose manners, whose methods of dress, whose forms of cookery, whose tra- ditions and views of every kind, were bred in the South. Every man of fighting age in 1861, so far as the writer has ever heard, known to be connected by blood with this Har- ris family, did actual field service in the Confederate army during the Civil War. Charles Hooks Harris was himself a surgeon in this war, from which he returned in 1865 uni- formed as a Confederate officer to his family which was then at Tuskegee, Ala., the very center of the South. Charles Hooks Harris was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, February 22, 1835, and there he attended school till prepared for the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, which he en- tered in 1853. He had, however, spent some time at a pre- paratory school at Chunnenuggee Ridge, where he had ro- mances and escapades which featured more largely in his reminiscences than the lessons he learned from books. At least, he often referred to these former, but rarely to the Greek and Latin and other studies which made the raison d'etre of his stay at the academy. To him, as to most boys, love and fighting seem at sixteen years of age to be quite human propensities while the Latin and Greek, which are called "The Humanities," seem to be quite artificial and far away from his interests. One incident at this academy was a fight with his room- mate at the dormitory, and his suspension from school as a consequence. When Charles returned to his father and told him the insulting language which his roommate had used, his father excitedly asked, "Didn't you knock him down?" Thus an ex parte statement had as usual obtained the verdict from the father in favor of the child, even though he was suspended for breaking the good order of the school. In 1853 Charles went from his home to the State Uni- versity at Tuscaloosa, where he had a classmate, Hillary A. Herbert, who became the distinguished secretary of navy. 14 FAMILY AND PERSONAL HISTORY. His own account of his career there shows it to have been marred ay an excess of merry making on certain occasions when the youths on the campus made the welkin ring over certain practical jokes which the professors thought beyond the limit of tolerance. They were incidents quite normal to college boys, but it was the conduct of a classmate that in- terfered with his hope of graduating at the University of Alabama. The incidents which led to his withdrawal from the University are known in the history of that institution as the "Doby Rebellion." Young Doby was disciplined by the faculty wrongfully, so the students thought, and the whole sophomore class declared that they would leave col- lege if Doby was not reinstated. The faculty declined to do this, and over forty boys, among them Herbert and other distinguished men of a later day, left at one time. One of these boys was Charles Hooks Harris. Returning to Tuskegee our youth took up seriously the study of medicine with Dr. Egbert Johnson, a practicing physician there, as his tutor. In the autumn of 1855 we find him wending his way to New York City bent on getting a diploma from the University of New York state, whose medi- cal department was then considered the best in America. His brother William, just four years his senior, had gradu- ated as a physician from this university two years before Charles went to take his course there. Letters from his father show that Charles spent $1,000 a year during his stay in New York, a fact which makes it clear that he lived prudently and economically. The further fact that in addi- tion to the usual diploma at graduation, cum summa laude, he was given a certificate of special proficiency and was made assistant demonstrator of anatomy by Dr. Aylett proves that the years in New York City taking his course in medicine, when he was from twenty to twenty-two years of age, were altogether ennobling and honorable. They were years of earnest enthusiastic study which laid the founda- tion of a long and useful career as surgeon and physician and became the means by which he supported a home which FAMILY AND PERSONAL HISTORY. 1 5 nurtured and nourished ten children whose standard of liv- ing was on the best social plane. Two things in addition to college influences should be mentioned as important factors in his life during the years in New York, years which show steady work and clean life by a youth a thousand miles from parental oversight. These two things were his attenion to music, in which he took an elementary course, and his correspondence during all his time there with Margaret Ann Monk, his fourth cousin, at Magnolia, N. C, where, at the instance of his mother, he had stopped on his route to New York. He was twenty and she eighteen when they first met ,and his letters show that her expressive dark eyes, her raven black hair, her soulful voice, and the varied charms of a personality in which loyalty to all that was right was a matter-of-course took full posses- sion of him. His letters and conduct after this show that to win the heart of Margaret Monk and to be worthy of her love was the most powerful and constant motive of his life. His letters during those years also show that her heart was won, was nobly won, and a month before he graduated in April, 1857, she had consented to become his wife and the marriage date fixed for June 18th thereafter. The last year of his college life in New York was cloud- ed by a grief due to the death of his father whom he had left in the full vigor of manhood and constructive work as a citizen of forty-nine years old. His father had built a really handsome home for his family in Tuskegee, a house that later went into the possession of the Thompsons. There his family lived and, though they affected no splendor, they en- joyed all the social amenities of Southern life, while he con- ducted the plantation nine miles away which sustained this home, its carriages and horses and servants, and paid the ex- penses at college of the children, each one of whom was sent off to school. This father to whom he bade good-bye in Sep- tember, 1856, he had left in the full play of his powers. He was a dark-eyed, light-weight, high-browed man of below medium stature. He had as a youth in 1825 attended the 1 6 FAMILY AND PERSON AI, HISTORY University of Georgia, and was all his life fond of reading. His industry was such that most days of the year he would go in the early dawn of the morning horseback to his farm nine miles away and return the same day, riding in a gallop most of the distance. Exposure of himself in the care of his plantation and his slaves to some severe weather in the early days of November brought on an attack of pneumonia to which he succumbed November 18th, 1856, being forty-nine years and six months old. His death occurred at his home nine miles from Tuske- gee. His body was carried to Montgomery and laid by the side of his father, William Harris, in the family burial ground, which is on a hilltop near Pickett Springs. Mono- liths of white marble mark the graves there of both William and Peter Coffee Harris. The farm there had been settled by William Harris; there Peter Coffee and Julia, children by his third wife, Sarah Coffee, and Sarah, Mary and Steph- en W., children by his fourth wife, Mary Alston, lived until their marriages. After the death of William Harris the plantation passed into the hands of his daughter, Sarah, who married Albert Pickett. The Pickett Springs, which now make a popular resort, reached by the street cars of Mont- gomery, are on this plantation and are near the home of William Harris. Peter Coffee Harris was the only son of William Harris and Sarah Coffee. He was given an education that included the years 1825-1826 at the University of Georgia. At twenty years of age he married Narcissa, the daughter of Charles Hooks, a very intelligent and wealthy man, who had removed from North Carolina to Montgomery county, Alabama, for the purpose of acquiring some of the rich alluvial lands then recently made available for settlement by purchase from the Indians. After their marriage Peter and Narcissa moved to a plantation near Tallahassee, Florida, and a few years later to Tuskegee, and there they built one of the most beautiful homes in the State of Alabama. There they lived till their removal in 1853 to their plantation nine miles from Tuskegee, where they FAMILY AND PERSONAL HISTORY 17 built another home which, though not elegant, was in every way comfortable. It was in this latter home that Peter Coffee Harris died in 1856. At home with him at the time of his death were his wife and all his children, except Charles, who was in New York city. Peter Coffee Harris was a man, as has been stated, be- low medium stature, weighed about one hundred and twen- ty-five pounds, was very careful as to neatness and good form in dress, and possessed a bearing that evinced cour- tesy and firmness as qualities plainly prominent in his char- acter. He never wore mustache or whiskers. His forehead was unusually high, his hair coal black, his eyes dark brown and piercing,his voice deeptoned, hs movements of body easy and dignified. He was utterly free from ostentation, and all who knew him trusted him implicitly as a faithful and considerate man. In a letter written by his mother-in- law in 1840, 13 years after his marriage, is the sentence : 1 'Peter is a safe man. He and Narcissa are getting along well." His sister-in-law named her son Marshall Harris Molton, Harris being in his honor and an unmistakable evi- dence of the high esteem in which his wife's family held him. An unusually intelligent negro man who had been his slave said of him to the writer : ' ' Marse Peter was a good, kind man, and he was the finest man I ever saw in my life. ' ' From whatever source it comes, all the evidence supports the view that he was a just and kind and lovable man. His supreme motive in life seems to have been devotion to his family with whom he spent a large part of his time. His love for his sister Julia was such that he rode on horseback through hundreds of miles of pathless forest tenanted by Indians in order to visit her at her home in Mississippi in 1832. His love for his child was such that when his daughter became a widow with five children as her burden he brought her back from her Texas home and made her burden his own. When Charles Hooks Harris returned to his home in Tuskegee in April, 1857, with his diploma earned and the promise of Margaret Monk to be his bride, his elation must 1 8 FAMILY AND PERSONAL HISTOBY 1'Df have been mingled with sorrow, for he was to find his mother a widow sighing for the arm on which her life had leaned in a confidence that was never betrayed ; and he was to find many other evidences of the need of the vanished form of him whom he had loved above all men. His mother told him of her great happiness over his achievements at college and made plain to him her real delight that Margaret Monk was to be his bride. Margaret Monk's mother was her second cousin, the grandmother of them both being a Miss Hunter, and they, the two mothers of the bride and groom to be, had been girlhood friends when her father Charles Hooks lived in North Carolina. Indeed, so close and dear were they per- sonally, these two mothers of the bride and groom to be, that on the occasion of the marriage at Montgomery of Nar- cissa Ann Hooks to Peter Coffee Harris in 1827, her cousin, then Ann Copeland Maxwell, traveled by carriage from Wil- mington, North Carolina, across three states in order to ber her first bridesmaid. Thus we see these two cousins, who were of the same age, both being born in 1803, and being by consequence twenty-four years of age at this marriage, must have loved each other very fondly. They were bosom friends and up to the twenty-third year of their ages, in 1826, the date of the removal of the Hooks family from North Caro- lina, they were constant companions. "Cousin Nancy" Maxwell, Margaret Monk's mother, had, because of this in- timacy, been present at her marriage, and now, just thirty years after that event, her own son, Charles, was to marry Margaret, the only child of this loved "Cousin Nancy, " It is interesting to relate that this "Cousin Nancy," who was red-haired and freckled-faced, and of such brilliancy as a talker that her sayings were widely quoted in her com- munity, did not marry till seven years after this marriage at Montgomery, to which she had traveled such a long dis- tance, and when she did marry she was thirty-one years old and she chose for her mate a man of twenty-three, James B. Monk, who was, therefore, eight years younger than herself. It is highly probable that Shakespeare, who was eight years FAMILY AND PERSONAL HISTORY 1 9 younger than Ann Hathaway, spoke from his own expe- rience when he said : "Let still the woman take An elder than herself ; so wears she to him, So sways she level in her husband's heart." Our Ann Maxwell disobeyed this advice, but she proved herself to be a devoted wife and outlived her husband by a few weeks. As indicated above, Charles Hooks Harris on his return from college found his widowed mother quite pleased with the prospect of his marriage to Margaret Monk, who was herself lovely as the loveliest on earth, and the only child of her loved "Cousin Nancy," who owned land and slaves in plenty in dear old North Carolina. The marriage date had been fixed for June 18th, thus giving Charles two months at home where were his mother, his sister Sallie and her three children, his brother William, four years his senior, and then practicing medicine in the adjoining county, and his brother Peter, two years his junior. To them all, to mother, both brothers and sister, it was clear that Charles had drawn a great prize in the lottery of marriage. Margaret Monk's beauty of person and character were too manifest to be gainsaid and, a thing not usual in those days for a woman, she too had taken a diploma, her alma mater being the Clinton Female College. Only this marred the happiness to grow out of this marriage to the family at Tuskegee — that as Margaret Monk was the only child of parents the fondest possible it would be the duty of Charles to live in North Carolina, so that she might minister to them in their declining years. In this way it was recog- nized that when Charles went to Magnolia, N. C, to marry he also went there to live. However, at his time the railroad trains, which were unknown in the United States in 1827 when "Cousin Nancy" had taken thirty days to travel by carriage the five hundred miles which separated Magnolia, 20 FAMILY AND PERSONAL HISTORY N. C., from Montgomery, Ala., were now traversing this distance in less than two days. The first locomotive rail- way in America, the South Carolina Railway, was built in 1830, and by 1857, the date at which Charles was leaving his mother's home, all the leading towns in the South had been connected by level roadbeds and steel rails. Not only so, but the telegraph which had frequently been used for immediate communication between Tuskegee and Magnolia seemed to wipe out the distance heretofore felt to be so vast between North Carolina and Alabama, so vast that when dear ones had once been parted by it it was extremely uncer- tain if "evermore should meet their mutual eyes." Indeed, before the days when the railways connected them, the chances had been against their meeting. But in 1857 what a difference, when a fond mother could with happy heart send her son to live 500 miles away, sure that steam and electricity could and would keep her in fre- quent touch with him. It was happening, indeed, to this mother that two of her sons were about to marry in another state, for her son, Peter, then twenty years old, was en- aged to be married to Mollie Woolley, who lived in Kings- ton, Georgia, two hundred miles away. It was, however, Peter's purpose to bring his bride in the near future to live in the home of his mother. We can readily see the main features of the horu" near Tuskegee during April and May, 1857. The family had sev- eral years before given up the elegant home planned and built by the father who had died November previous, and they were living on the plantation nine miles from Tuske- gee in a not pretentious, but entirely comfortable and com- modious home. A heavy loss sustained by his peine on the bond of the sheriff of his county had forced Peter Coffee Harris to sell his town residence and to live on a less ex- pensive scale. At home on the plantation were now his widow and their three children, Sallie, Charles, and Peter, and three grandchildren, Elizabeth, Harris and Powell Wood. Sallie, the oldest child, was 29 years old and after her If PETER COFFEE HARRIS. This picture is reproduced from, a daguarreotype made about 1850, and now so faded that it is very defective, especially the lower part of the face. H £ k— I r^ £ 02 1— 1 03 CD 03 02 f>a ?H (72 1 — 1 03 c8 CD >> *H 08 tf # CD 03 CD oo CD 08 CD 08 7—1 CD bo '£ CD «s 08 o 03 HH be c8 of 03 "Eh c8 02 OJ 'Eh w c8 £ "o *H 08 KJ « O 1— 1 Eh C CD O PI CD <1 CD 13 o O § S P3 J-i 02 CD £ W o 03 CD CD bf) tM o gj 08 o CD *H CD tf p Q •-3 o O o HH MRS. PETER COFFEE HARRIS, Born 1803 Mother of Charles H. Harris. ANN MAXWELL MONK, Born 1803. Mother of Margaret Monk, wife of Charles Hooks Harris. MARY GATLIX HARRIS. 'Wife of John Gindrat. A Sister of the father of Charles H. Harris. MRS. CATHERINE HOOKS MOLTOX. A sister of the mother of Charles H. Harris. ANN HUNTER HOOKS, Born 1775. Mother of Mrs. Thomas Molton, Mrs. Peter Coffee Hariis, Mrs. George James Forrest, Marshall H. Hooks, David I. Hooks. MARSHALL H. HOOKS. A Brother of the mother of Charles H. Harris. FAMILY AND PERSONAL HISTORY 21 husband's death she with her children had returned to her father's care. William, then 26 years old, was practicing medicine in the prairies twenty miles away, but was a fre- quent visitor to the home in which he was as the oldest son chief counselor. The slaves that attended the house — always the most trustworthy on the plantation — were Jackson and his wife Catherine, Elias and his wife, Anson and his wife and daughters, Ellen and Massey, Ananias and his wife, and Lottie, the cook. Peter, aged 20, was, by the help of a white overseer, managing the farm and slaves. Charles, age 22, had just returned from college where he had spent most of his time for several years. Both of these brothers were now making preparations for marriage, one for June 18, the other July 14, after which dates they were both to go with their brides to Catoosa and Montvale Springs, Ga., then fashionable sum- mer resorts for the people of the South, and there spend the weeks of their honeymoon. Their brides met for the first time at Kingston, Ga., where Peter was married. Peter and Charles were then, as through every day of all the years afterwards, devoted to each other with a love rarely matched by brothers. Their mother gave their every plan in these marriage preparations her sympathy, but in a spe- cial sense her heart went out to Charles, because matrimony was separating him from her. She could not keep down the feeling due to the near approach of his permanent with- drawal from her fireside. June 18, 1857, found Charles with his sister, Sallie, in Magnolia, N. C, where he and Margaret Monk were married at the home of her parents. In 1858 a son, James, was born to them and the year was also made happy for them by the completion of a beautiful house which they entered as their home. There Narcissa Ann, their daughter, was born in 1860. All the conditions necessary for happiness in this world seemed to be in the possession of the young couple. Charles devoted himself to his profession, doing a good general prac- 22 FJLMIId orbed itself into a star which was to guide their course in life. The little white clock that so sweetly rang the hours of their childhood there and the simple furnishings of the bed- room where the mother and father slept are fixed features in 32 FAMILY AND PKRSONAL^HISTORY the many home scenes over which their memories will often fondly brood. The faces and the voices of loved ones there, the lessons of life learned there — these are the things deep- est set in the souls of those who were children there. The home of Charles Hooks Harris does not now exist except as a memory. Christmas, 1897, the nine sons and daughters with their own families gathered around the old hearthstone and ,all unknown to them that it was to be their last, all gave themselves up to the joys of a family reunion at which every member was present. The pair in Magnolia in 1857 had by 1897 grown to have in its circle twenty in- dividuals, each one held in thrall by his love for the two to whom they owed so much. Three years later, March 4, 1901, she whose loyalty and love had made this home what is was died. The children gathered at the home, but its light had gone out, its joy had forever fled. It was home no more. There had passed from it the soul of their mother and to her children it was "The sweetest soul that ever looked through human eyes. ,, Her dear dead form was buried at Cedartown. A mes- sage was received there from her friends in Duplin county, North Carolina, who had been notified of her death, that citizens there treasured many memories of her early years and that the church bell would toll in Magnolia at the hour of her funeral in Cedartown. Her nine children, then all adults, paid love's last possible office to their mother and then repaired to their several homes, some of them in states far away. Their father has been cared for by these children in the years since. Owing to feeble health he had given up his work as a physician, to which he had devoted nearly fifty years. As these lines are written (Nov., 1910) he still lives, but his nearly four score years have brought their inevitable infirmity, and now he awaits the time when the river of his life will also wind its way safe to the Eternal Sea. This is a world in which no individuality endures. All things that come must go, and the human heart is balanced THE WEDDING PARTY PICTURE 33 between the gladness due to things coming and the sadness due to their going, between the warmth of the births and the chill of the deaths, between the sun and the frost. The home of Charles Hooks and Margaret Ann Harris had its day and ceased to be. It came through the sunshine of love ; it went through the frost of death. And yet there is nothing on earth destroyed, except the form of the individual, for that which makes the hearts and the homes of men lives after them. That which made this home to be what it was, the embodiment of love and loyalty, may be found now in the expressions of the faces and the tones of the voices, in the words and the works of those now men and women who once were children there. That which they are now is but seed and fruit of that which was in the home that was in Cedartown. The Wedding Party Picture. Of those whose faces appear in the daguereotype of the wedding party of Charles H. Harris and Margaret Monk in 1857, only two are living in 1910, fifty-three years later. Thus "Time rolls his ceasless course. The race of yore Who danced our infancy upon their knee, And told our marveling boyhood legend's store Of their strange ventures happ 'd by land and sea, How are they blotted from the things that be ! How few, all weak and withered of their force, Wait on the edge of dark eternity, Like stranded wrecks, the tide returning hoarse, To sweep them from our sight. Time rolls his ceasless course ! ' ' The two now living whose faces and forms appear in this picture are the bridegroom of the occasion, Dr. C. H, 34 THE WEDDING PARTY PICTURE Harris, and Mrs. Sarah Eliza Johnstone, nee Herring, now of Wilmington, N. C, who was then a twelve year old child, the dim outline of her form to be seen on the right hand side of the group. In reply to the writer's request to give him the names of the parties in the picture she writes : ' ' In the picture besides the bridegroom and the bride and the bride's parents are Mary Ellen Moore, daughter of Daniel Moore, who married Dr. Faison, Mr. Tommie Moore, Mr. Ben Carroll, (he is the one who induced the citizens of Strickland to name that village Magnolia for Miss Mag Monk), Dr. Devane, Mr. Chestnut, and Mrs. Willis Wood, a sister of the bridegroom, who was considered quite pretty, and myself. ' ' ' ' I cannot see why so few were taken in the picture as it was a large party. It must have been several days after the marriage. I am the only one living that attended the mar- riage. I asked several old people in Duplin on my recent visit there. They said they remembered the event, but did not attend. ' ' "It all seems like a beautiful dream to me when I sit and recall all the things that happened at the marriage fifty- three years ago. It was one of the largest marriages that I ever attended. Everybody loved Miss Mag, as we called her. I love to look at the picture and I wish it could have had the whole wedding party." The bridegroom, now in his 76th year, is the only other one of the group now living.. In reply to the writer's request for some reminiscences of the occasion of his marriage he wrote as follows : "We were married by Rev. Thomas Tate who was a great uncle of mine and an uncle of your mother. He was in his nineties. His second sight had come to him. I saw him in a religious service at his home where the neighbors had congregated, and he read from a small Testament and without glasses and at focal distance. It strikes me that Uncle Tate moved from Mecklenburg county early after his marriage with Miss Hunter. He was a strong Presbyterian. He had officiated at the marriage of your grandparents, Mr. THK WEDDING PARTY PICTURE 35 and Mrs. Monk. Your grandmother, your mother and I went to see the Tates before our marriage and I told Uncle Tate that it was settled that he should officiate ; but as I had heard that he usually consumed two hours in his marriage ceremony, I said to him, "Now, Uncle Tate, you must be short." "All right," he said, and when the service was over the first thing he said was, ' ' Charles, was that short enough ? ' ' I said, "Yes." Uncle Tate presided at the banquet which was in a long room in the hotel. Mr. Wash Lamb made the music for the dances that were held. In North Carolina then wedding festivities were three days and nights going. Everybody fared sumptuously." 1 ' In the group you will see as brave and fine a lot of men as you can get in one picture. Behind, leaning on the paling, is my unsuccessful rival, Dr. Faison, who afterwards married Miss Moore whose merry face you see in the group. Your grandmother Monk who stands next to me in the group is the strongest character I ever saw, with more grit and energy than you may meet with in a life-time. Your grand- father Monk was a strong personality, but he made some errors which he persisted in after he knew better — as some of his grandchildren have also done. (Perhaps, my son, you had better look in a mirror to find such a one). Cousin William Houston was also there. He was captain in Kansom's First North Carolina Cavalry and was killed in a charge in Virginia. "Your mother was as beautiful as a peri from Paradise/ 36 A LETTER ON FAMILY AFFAIRS A LETTER ON FAMILY AFFAIRS. Written in 1840 by Ann Hunter Hooks, Grandmother of Charles Hooks Harris to Nancy Maxwell Monk, Mother of Margaret Monk. Ann Hunter, the daughter of Isaac and Priscilla Hun- ter, of Goshen, Duplin county, North Carolina, who was the third wife of Charles Hooks, was a grandmother of Charles Hooks Harris. She was also an aunt of "Nancy" Maxwell, the mother of Mrs. Charles Hooks Harris, the Hunters being ancestors of both Charles Hooks Harris and his wife, Mar- garet Ann Monk. Ann Hunter was born September 9, 1775, in Duplin county, where she lived till the removal of her husband to Montgomery, Ala., in 1826, in her 51st year. In the year 1840, fourteen years after her removal from North Caro- lina, she wrote a letter still extant to her niece, "Nancy" Maxwell, who was a young lady of 23 years of age, when she (Ann Hunter) in her 51st year had left her in Duplin county, North Carolina. The letter was in reply to one from Nancy Maxwell, who was then Mrs. J. B. Monk and the proud mother of a daughter, Margaret, then three years old. The letter is entirely on family affairs, but it is re- markable, as showing not only great love for her niece, but as giving the status of her family at that time. She trusts to her niece her intimate views of the family life. The letter contains four closely written pages, was folded and sealed with wax, as was the custom, and without envelope it was addressed to Mrs. Ann Monk, Kenansville, Duplin county, North Carolina. It was dated May 1, 1840. This letter will prove of interest to the family and a part of it will be inserted here for preservation. Ann Hunter lived fourteen years after this letter was written. She died on the 11th day of May, 1854, at the home of her granddaugh- ter, Mrs. W. K. Harris, nee Betsy Jane Hooks, the daughter of Marshall Hooks. At the time the letter was written A LETTER ON FAMILY AFFAIRS 37 (1840) her husband, Charles Hooks, was living, his death not having occurred till 1843, his 76th year. Thus she sur- vived her husband eleven years, dying when she was 78 years old. She was buried in Tuskegee City Cemetery. Alabama, Montgomery, May 1, 1840. Dear Nancy: I received yours a few days after its being mailed. I was very glad to get a letter from you and to hear all about you and yours. As long as I live I shall be glad for you to write to me, and I thought to have written you soon after but some way or other I do not what I would. Sarah moved to New Orleans. * * * I like her hus- band. You say you do not know him. * * * Tabby is very large. Marshall says he thinks they would go to see you all if Tabby was not so fat ; but he is a very home man. Tabby stirs him up. They get along very safe and well. Mr. Molton and Kitty are both large. Kitty is larger than I am and I am thirty pounds heavier than when you saw me. You know they get along as safe as a rock and Kitty is a devoted Christian and an active one. I think she is very much beloved in her neighborhood. Tommy is a still one. Their children seem promising. Narcissa maried and has a very good smart child 5 months old. We all like her hus- band very well. He is a safe man. Peter and Narcissa get along very well. Sarah Ann, their oldest child, is very well grown and begins to look like a woman. David, I know you heard, wasted a great deal, but you know a mother can find a great many excuses, and I do. He now is mar- ried. I can't find out how he is doing. He lives a good way off. I have not seen him in 15 months. ***** Sarah's husband is a very active, industrious man and they are well off. His business is cramped ,but I don't fear he will come out, live or die. He is a manager and a good husband. * * * You may have heard we were broke (the panic of 1839 was then on), but I feel better off than ever I did. Our children have what was ours and we have 38 A LETTER ON FAMILY AFFAIRS enough — as much as I want to plague with. I don't feel capable to manage what I have, though I am healthy. * * & We have had good revivals in Montgomery. A great many joined all the churches here about, and people seem more devoted to serve God than I ever saw them. * * * What shall I tell you to tell my sisters? They don't write. I should be glad to see them. I wish they would come to see us. Sister Kitty has a child here. I think she ought to come. Sister Betsy has stayed at home all her life, and they could come if they only thought they could. Traveling is pleasant. Dickson Hooks is doing well and has his third wife and two young children. * * * We now live so still to what we ever did. Our nearest child lives fourteen miles off — that is Kitty, but we nearly all the time have some one of our grandchildren with us. Two claim this for their home. It is very seldom more than two weeks that some of them don't come to see us. I feel that there could not be children who pay more attention to parents than ours. It is a pleasure to me — I may say a melancholy pleasure — to write to my loved ones in North Carolina. I have felt that I never expect to see them. It is a pity to transplant old people. It is as hard for them to bear as it is for trees to bear being transplanted. * * * Your uncle's health has been bad, but not so as to keep him in- doors. He is now gone to Marshall's, 32 miles away. In a few days I expect Sarah to spend the summer. Mr. For- rest won't come till last of June. He lives 41 miles from us. Tell Polly Wilkerson I have heard of her offer. Well, well, well. This world turns and turns. Your friend and well wisher and affectionate aunt, ANN HOOKS. SOME REFLECTIONS ON ANCESTORS AND EDUCATION 39 SOME REFLECTIONS ON ANCESTORS AND EDUCATION. It is now the judgment of specialists that qualities ac- quired by training, by education, are not inherited by off- spring. Characteristics due to experience, to teaching, to social habits, to the pressure of public opinion and other in- fluences that shape the individual and give opportunities for the development of his powers have no effect on the inborn powers of the child of that individual. No amount of train- ing of a man, in music for instance, will give his child added tendency or power in music. It is the natural powers, those received by the parent at his birth, that are transmitted to his children, his nature and not his education. The educa- tion is but a veneer due to rubbing against social and phy- sical conditions and does not change the quality of the structure beneath. It comes and goes with the individual, and has no effect on the inborn powers of his children. Nevertheless, it seems hard to decide whether heredity or training, nature or discipline, have more weight in determin- ing the achievements of a man. Education, the sum total of the social pressures on the receptive mind and the plastic body of the child, gives to the individual every word and every idea that ever comes to him — all his beliefs, all his methods of getting along in the world, all the arts that he uses at his home or at his shop. He takes all his ideas from the family and the times and the country in which he lives just as surely as he gets his color- ing of skin and temperament of mind and other inborn features from his ancestors. Education by the home and state and school and church will make the normal mind be- lieve any doctrine whatever and do any deed whatever, pro- vided all those about him think and act in like ways. Edu- cation can make the normal child an expert in any art what- ever. A man's ideas and modes of conduct are a product of the social influences that have held him every hour since his birth. A given set of social influences will educate the normal child into a successful and happy manhood ; a given 40 SOME REFLECTIONS ON ANCESTORS AND EDUCATION set of social influences will educate the normal child into the shallows and miseries of ignorance and crime. White children taken as babies by Indians and trained wholly by them invariably formed the manners, ideas, arts, and reli- gion of the tribe that reared them ; and per contra we have seen full-blood Indians educated into the learning and arts and ideas and behavior of the white race. The average child will invariably learn superstitious and dogmatic habits of thinking and acting if reared in a family habitual- ly superstitious and dogmatic; he will just as invariably learn rational habits of thinking and acting if reared in a family in which careful criticism is freely and habitually made on all subjects. The home, the school, the church, the companions, the laws and the customs of the community, the literature and the music met by the eyes and the ears, of the youth determine the whole life of the man. Experience guides him up or down. It seems, however, to th« writer that a man's power to achieve anything is due funda- mentally to the quality of his brain and muscles which are entirely an inheritance from his ancestors. What their fathers have done they will have the ability and tendency to do ; what their fathers were, they will tend to become. The points of heredity in a family are, like the spots of a leopard, fixed to be the same from generation to generation. They are often older than the hills on which the families live. Though education, the training in its entirety, may be made to add great good to the individual, the really funda- mental thing is the inherited brain whose processes are the mind. No amount of training can make a naturally stupid child into a bright man. If a man has a good mind it is be- cause he has a good brain, the substrate of mind. As the brain, its size and quality, is the inborn mechanism of thought, it would seem that success or failure in life would be due to this more than to circumstances. Just as the qual- ity of the steel in a razor determines the fineness and per- manence of the edge, so the quality of the brain structure de- termines the power of the mind. This being true, the very THE HARRIS tfAMltY 4 1 best possession of any man, a possession to which any earthly fortune is small by comparison, is ancestors that have lived prudently and honorably and usefully. And yet the most that the best human stock can do for the individual is to give him the ability to become excellent by dint of hard work. There can never be in any man any skill or merit of any kind that has not been earned by labor, any real worth that is apart from honest work. This, how- ever, does not diminish the value of natural endowment or dispute the manifest fact that some strains are better er dowed than others. In this matter of family lineage two things have been often observed, towit:" Birth from best families is never dis- paraged except by those who have it not, and it is never boasted of except by those who have nothing else to be proud of. ' ' PART II. The Harris Family. Widely scattered throughout the United States are the Harrises. The census returns show that they are surpassed numerically only by the Joneses, Smiths, Browns, and John- sons. And yet all the Harrises in the United States seem to be sprung from a family originally from Wales, some of whom moved into the northern part of Ireland, and there by intermarriage, blended with Scotch, who had been in- duced by James I about 1615 to settle the area which the generals of Queen Elizabeth had devastated and depopu- lated in their efforts to subjugate the island to English rule. It is at least true that all the Harris families in the United States, known to the writer, trace their lineal descent to fore fathers who were originally from Wales and most of them lived in the part of Northeast Ireland, just across the Irish Sea from Wales. It is, however, also true that this Harris V 42 THE HARRIS FAMILY family in Ireland became so united, soul and body, with the Scotch who predominated there, that the Harrises in Amer- ica, who are offshoots of these blended strains, are in reality far more Scotch than Welsh. The people of Wales and the people of Scotland were all Protestants and they were, therefore, like minded religiously. This condition in the year 1600 accounts for the fact that the area in the United States, south of the Potomac river, is now made up almost entirely of Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians and other Protestants. The early settlers of that area came by thou- sands from the northern part of Ireland and Scotland and Wales about the year 1700. The relation of the Harris fam- ily to this historic fact may be seen in the deeds of land made to them by the states of Virginia and North Carolina in the various counties in which they settled. - It is also a fact significant of the characteristics of this family at that time that Howel Harris, born in Trevecca, Wales, in 1714, was the founder of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church and a close companion of John Wesley and George White- field, who with him stood for what seemed to them a progres- sive movement. In Glamorgan and Carnarvon counties, Wales, are the homes of the original Harris family. Though the name Harris seems to be Welsh and though most of the families by this name known to the writer in the United States came from the northern part of Ireland, Har- rises are to be found both in England and Scotland, where perhaps a thousand years ago they migrated from Wales. In English history we find that James Harris, born in 1709 in Salisbury, an eminent classical scholar, took an ac- tive part in politics, and in 1763 was made a lord of the Admiralty and a lord of the Treasury. His son, James Harris, was the first Lord Malmesbury and was a distin- guished diplomat. The third Earl of Malmesbury, James Howard Harris, was Foreign Secretary of England in 1858. John Harris, an English dissenting minister of note, was born in Ugborough, England in 1804. Robert Harris, born in Gloucestershire, which is near Wales, in 1578, was presj- THE HARRIS FAMILY 43 dent of Trinity College, Oxford, and a man of excellent gifts and graces. William Snow Harris, born at Plymouth in 1792 was an English surgeon of eminence and was also dis- tinguished by his researches in the physical sciences, espe- cially in electricity. These facts show the presence of the Harris family in various shires of England and their achievements there. Their presence in Scotland at an early date in her history is manifested by the fact that the largest of the Hebrides Islands, which are separated from the main- land of Scotland by the Little Minch, has its lower part di- vided into two peninsulas, North Harris and South Harris. These families in England and Scotland may have been, probably were, descendants from a family in Wales, where the name seems to have had its origin. However, the Harris family in the United States has now only a small admixture of Welsh blood, for the Harrises in North Ireland and Virginia married for generations into families from Scotland, the Scotch-Irish, whose blood and traits are by that fact made predominant in them. They are now far more Scotch than either Irish or Welsh. As is well known, Scotland was settled nearly two thou- sand years ago by the Scots, who lived in Ireland and who spoke the Gaelic language, a language which differentiated into Scotch Gaelic and Irish Gaelic after the North Channel separated the people into two branches. The folk lore and the hero tales and old poetry are largely the same. Thus those people who moved to Ireland from Scotland about 1620 were backtracking to the land occupied by their own ancestors many centuries before, but these intervening centuries of life in the High- lands of Scotland had developed the Scots into the hardiest, bravest, shrewdest, most far-seeing type of the human race. Among the differences that apppeared was that the Scotch had become Protestants while their cousins in Ireland re- mained steadfastly loyal to the Catholic church. Thus the northern part of Ireland which was settled in King James* reign by emigrants from Scotland or England contained only Presbyterians or Episcopalians. It was with these North 44 THE HARRIS FAMILY Ireland Scotch immigrants that the Harrises in the United States came, settling in the interval between 1660 and 1760 mainly in Virginia and North Carolina. Thus is explained the fact that the Harrises are of the same Celtic type as the Irish but have the Protestant religion and the mental char- acteristics of the Scotch. The intermarriage of the Scotch and Welsh in north Ireland with their Irish neighbors brought to this Harris family as to many other settlers there some admixture of the Irish stock which, though small, was sufficient to manifest itself, its peculiar aptness and humor of expression, its improvidence and its tendency to a happy- go-lucky philosophy. The home life of these Scotch-Irish pre- sents a blend of the characteristics and customs of both countries from which their ancestors came, and in its best forms it has social qualities that are the admira- tion of the world, a charm and courtesy and grace of man- ner unequaled on earth. Perhaps the happiest, loveliest family life today is found in homes in the United States whose occupants are descendants of the Scotch-Irish. It is a fact, too, that in these homes have been bred the men who have given our government its distinctive features. It was Patrick Henry whose eloquence so stirred the souls of the English colonists as to make them fight for their liber- ties ; it was Alexander Hamilton who was the father of the Constitution of the United States. These were both of Scotch parentage. It is also true that the soldiers who fought the battles of the Revolutionary War and the men who have made our government since those battles were won have been predominantly Scotch-Irish. Mainly from the Scotch-Irish, as stated above, came all the Harrises to be found in the United States. William T. Har- ris, who was for twenty years Commissioner of Education of the United States, was from a family who settled in Con- necticut, but almost all the Harrises settled in Virginia and North Carolina. One family that settled in Albemarle Coun- ty, Virginia, produced Elizabeth Harris, the mother of Wil- liam Harris Crawford of Georgia, who was recognized as the ablest man in the U. S. Senate during his term there in THE HARRIS FAMILY 45 1807-13, who was ambassador to France, and a candidate for the presidency of the U. S. in 1825, when the election was thrown into the hands of congress which elected Tack- son. From another Harris family in Virginia came Isham G. Harris, who was governor of Tennessee three terms, officer in Confederate army, and member of the U. S. Senate for twenty years. William A. Harris, who represented Kansas in the U. S. Senate, was born in Virginia, as was the father of Andrew L. Harris, recently governor of Ohio. Iverson L. Harris of Georgia, for quite a while a supreme court judge, was a member of a family of perhaps greater influ- ence than any other in his State. His family was also from Virginia. Samuel Harris, Bishop of Michigan, was from Alabama. Other Harrises in the United States distinguished by their achievements are: Samuel Harris (1814-1899), born in East Machias, Maine ; was president of Bowdoin College from 1867-1871, and then became professor of systematic theology in the Yale Divinity School. He was the author of works on theology and philosophy. Thaddeus William Harris (1795-1856), born at Dorchester, Mass., was the founder of the Harvard Natural History Society and the author of a valuable work on insects. Townsend Harris (1804-1878), born at Sandy Hill, N. Y., educated at home, moved to New York city, became president of its Board of Education and established the Free Academy, which is now the College of the City of New York. He was appointed by President Pierce to be the first Consul-General to Japan in 1855. He secured the signature of the Japanese premier to a treaty which became the model for twenty subsequent treaties between Japan and other nations. He became Minister Resident to Japan. Robert Harris, born in Carnar- vonshire, Wales, in 1849, has spent most of his life in Amer- ica. He is a great painter, was elected in 1893 president of the Royal Canadian Academy of Fine Arts and in 1904 was awarded a gold medal at the Louisiana Purchase Ex- position. William Victor Harris, born in New York in 1869, 46 THE HARRIS FAMILY has an established reputation as a musician, publishing com- positions for piano, organ and chorus. Joel Chandler Har- ris, of Georgia, born 1848, died 1908, was a journalist and a writer of fiction. His Uncle Remus, a study in Afro-Amer- ican folklore, is a volume of world-wide popularity. These facts show the truthfulness of the initial state- ment that the Harrises are widely distributed over the United States, but they are, as stated, relatively far more numerous in the South than in any other section. It is with these that our sketch is specially interested. As stated above, there is a certain Harris family in Georgia which has probably produced more citizens of com- manding influence than any other family in the borders of the state. The following is an account of the lineage of that family and the names of some of its distinguished sons : In 1691 Henry Harris, a Baptist preacher from Glamor- gan in Wales, with others, obtained from William and Mary, King and Queen of England, a grant of ten miles square of crown lands on the south bank of James river, some miles above Richmond. This Henry Harris had one son, Edward. This Edward had thirteen children, eight sons and five daughters. The tenth child, Nathan, was born in 1716, and married Catherine Walton, of Brunswick county, Virginia, in 1737, and had fourteen children, viz. : Walton, Nathan, Isaac, David, ( Elias, Rowland, Herbert, Gideon, Howell, John, Henry, Cathrine, Martha, Elizabeth and Ann. Walton, first child of Nathan Harris, who married Catherine Walton, was born in Brunswick county, Virginia, in 1739. He married Rebecca Lanier, a granddaughter of Elizabeth Washington, a descendant of John Washington; George Washington was her cousin. They had eleven children, Buckner, Sampson, Joel, Augustine, Edward, Nathan, Sim- eon, Walton, Elizabeth, Littleton and Jephtha V. Augustine Harris, the fourth child of Walton and Re- becca Harris, was the father of Judge Iverson L. Harris, one of the Supreme Court of Georgia. Edward Harris, the fifth child of Walton and Rebecca Harris, had a large family of children. His twelfth child, THE HARRIS FAMILY 47 West, born in 1782, married Mary Turner and they had eleven children. One of these, Isham, was the grandfather of Isham G. Harris, Senator from Tennessee, born Febru- ary 10, 1818, died July 8, 1897. Walton Harris, the grandsire and great-grand sire of the Harris family most influential in Georgia, lived in Greene county, where he died. He was a soldier in the Revolution and was made prisoner at the battle of Augusta, where his brother David was killed. Young L. G. Harris, of Athens, was a grandson of Wal- ton Harris. Judge Stephen Willis Harris, who lived and died in Eatonton, was another grandson. Judge Thomas W. Harris, brother of the preceding, was also on the bench of Georgia. Judge William L. Harris, another grandson (son of Jephtha V., named above, who died in Marietta, Ga.), moved to Mississippi and was on the Supreme bench of that state up to the close of the war. Judge Sampson W. Har- ris, on the Superior Court bench of Georgia, is a great- grandson of Walton Harris and Rebecca Lanier. The father of this Sampson W. Harris represented the Wetumpka dis- trict of Alabama in Congress. General Jephtha Harris, of Georgia, was his uncle. The secretary of the health board of Georgia, Dr. H. F. Harris, is the son of Judge Sampson W. Harris. General Buckner Harris, who was engaged with Governor John Clark, of Georgia, in fighting Tories and Indians was a son of Walton and Rebecca Lanier Har- ris. He was at the siege of Augusta when the fort was held by the British. He spent the latter part of his life in Jack- son, Mississippi. His grandson, Judge Wiley Pope Harris, of Jackson, Miss., acquired a very high reputation as a judge and was a member of the first congress of Confeder- ate States held at Montgomery, Ala. At one time in the Georgia legislature, in 1803, when Louisville was the capi- tal of the State, four of the sons of Walton Harris, of Greene county, were serving as representatives from the four counties in which they lived. This is a fact unparal- leled in any State or family so far as the writer has ever heard. 48 THE HARRIS FAMILY The family of Judge Richard R. Harris, of Rome, Ga., are also descendants of Nathan Harris, born 1716, in Bruns- wick county, Virginia. Another family of Harrises in Geor- gia is descended from Captain John Harris, who received from King George II a grant of land in Mcintosh county, Georgia, called Harris Neck. The writer knows no ties of blood that connect this Harris line with descendants of Nathan Harris, of Virginia. oYet another Harris family of distinction in Georgia is that V>fi Henry Harris, of Hancock county, who married Rebecca Sassnett, moved to Merri- wether county, and was the father of two sons, Henry R. Harris, who represented his distinct two terms in Congress, and Colonel William T. Harris, who was killed leading his regiment at the battle of Gettysburg. If this family is de- scended from Nathan Harris, of Virgina, the fact is un- known to the writer. The records of Albemarle County in Virginia show that in 1739, William Harris possessed more than two thousand acres of land and was magistrate of the county the first year it was organized. He had ten children and from them have grown perhaps a greater number of families in the U. S. than from any other stem. His descendants are all strong citizens, his son, John, who died in 1832, being then the wealthiest citizen in Albemarle County. Robert Harris also settled in this same county and possessed nearly three thou- sand acres of its land, his first entry of land being made in 1750. This Robert Harris was the grandfather of William Harris Crawford, who was the son of his daughter, Eliza- beth. These Albermarle county Harrises are descendants from the same ancestors as was Nathan Harris, whose fam- ily is sketched above. It is probable that there is but one State in the United States in which there is a family name numerically greater than that of Smith or Jones. The State is North Carolina and the name is Harris. Two Harrises, James and Robert, are signed to the Mecklenburg Declaration of which North Carolina is so justly proud as declaring our independence of Great Britain more than a year before congress acted July THE HARRIS FAMILY 49 4, 1776. These, James and Robert, were the sons of John and Eleanor Harris, who were born in Ballybay, Ireland, who moved to America in 1756, and who settled permanently in Mecklenburg County, N. C, in 1768. There was another John Harris, who settled about the same time near New Bern in Craven County. His wife's name was Mary. The John Harris who came over in 1756 and settled in Mecklen- burg, near Charlotte, N. C, died there in 1808; the other John Harris at New Bern in Craven County is an ancestor of Charles Hooks Harris, of Cedartown, Ga., and died near New Bern in 1801. He was probably from Virginia. Both the John Harrises were Presbyterians, a church whose members in Ireland had been much harassed by being made to take the "Oath of Abjuration," which recognized the king as the head of the church. They were fined and im- prisoned on their refusal to take this oath, a fact which help- ed the members of that church to make up their minds to emigrate to America. It is interesting to note that John and Eleanor Harris mentioned above were married in the jail of Moneghan County, Ireland, where their pastor, Dr. Thomas Clark was in prison. With three hundred souls of his own congregation at Ballybay, Ireland, he came to Amer- ica in 1764. Many of them settled in the Carolinas. Dr. Clark died at Abbeville, S. C, where he was pastor of the Presbyterian Church. North Carolina was a province granted by the King of England in 1663 to George Monk and seven others as pro- prietors or owners. It was at once opened for settlement by its owners and by 1670 there were flour thousand white people in the province, many of them from Virginia, which had been in process of settlement for the half century pre- vious. Very many of the original settlers of North Caro- lina after 1670 came from Virginia, where the records of land grants show that many Harris families were living. Henry Harris, of Glamorgan, Wales, had received a grant of land from King William and Queen Mary on the James River, just above Richmond, to which they moved in 1691, and other Harris families from Wales and 50 THE HARRIS FAMILY England and Ireland both before and after 1691 settled in Virginia. Descendants of these families moved to North Carolina and from these stocks in Virginia and North Carolina almost all the Harrises now in the United States are derived. There are probably not less than fifty thou- sands of them, and in the judgment of the writer they are, all, those in England as well as those in the United States, sprung from one family in Wales. It is also the judgment of the writer that no family in the United States has fur- nished more citizens prominent for the part taken by them in founding and building the "New World." The Harrises who settled in Virginia have been men- tioned, and in order to show that this family were also among the very first settlers of North Carolina I will quote from the "Colonial Records" of that state. On page 312 alid 313, Vol. 1, we find a copy of an indictment against a man charged with using "traitorous and rebellious" lan- guage at the house of Thomas Harris, who lived in what was then Albermarle county, bordering on Virginia, in 1673. The exact language of the indictment is : " Not having the feare of God before thine eise, but being stirred and moved by ye instigation of the devell, and out of rancor and malice of thine heart forethought ani didst in a rebellious and trayterous manner at the house of Thomas Harris, sometime about the month of November, 1673, say that it was never good times in England since the King came in, nor never would so long as there was a King in England." On page 381 of the same volume John Harris, on November 8, 1691, with several other citizens is charged with "insinuating that the late Governor did sett up martial law, thereby the better to ingross the Indian trade to himself. ' ' On page 402 appears the name of Susannah Harris and her daughter, Sarah, as parties to a suit before a court which was assembled Novem- ber 6, 1693. Iverson L. Harris, who was born in Clark County, Georgia, in 1805, graduated at the University of Georgia in 1823, elected judge of the Ocmulgee Circuit in 1859, and THE HARRIS FAMILY 5 1 elected judge of the Supreme Court in 1865, and a man of the very best personal character, made a written statement of his researches as to the Harris family. From his manu- script I obtain the following : "We are of Welsh origin, as our name implies. The word Harris means in the Celtic language * ' an heir or son. ' ' Our original seat was in Wales, in the town of Harriston. "During the religious troubles growing out of the dis- sensions between the Puritans and Presbyterians and the Established Church in the reign of James I and Charles I, the Harrises and a number of Welsh Baptists fled from Glamorgan county, Wales, to Brittany and Navarre. There they united with the Huguenots and remained until the reign of Charles II, when they returned. 1 ' They remained in England till after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in October, 1685, by Louis XIV. "The Welsh Baptists cast about after their return to England as to what course they should pursue. To remain in England was impracticable, for James II was their secret enemy and a Catholic at heart. They turned their eyes to America. ' ' "1691 William and Mary granted to Henry Harris and John Jourdan ten miles square of crown lands in the county of Powhattan, Virginia, on the James River — and to their heirs forever." "Between that period and 1716 the Huguenots emi- grated to Virginia. The Harrises brought over with them the Chastains, the Bondurants, the Glovers, the Ritchies, Fouches, Maxcey, Laniers, Pettegrews, and others, and all settled within the grant and called their town 'Manakin Town.' " It is from this town we all spring. It was the original seat of the Harrises on this continent. Benjamin Watkins Leigh, of Virginia, told me in 1844 that he had in his posses- sion this original grant or patent to our ancestors." "From Manakin Town one branch of the Harrises set- tled in Albermarle County, Virginia, and some went to 52 THK HARRIS FAMILY Brunswick City, Virginia. We were distinguished thus: — "The Manakin Town Harrises. "The Albemarle Harrises. "The Brunswick Harrises. "But the Manakin Town is the hive from which we all spring. A portion of the family moved to North Carolina. From the Albemarle branch there are a great many of the family in Kentucky and Missouri." "I feel gratified to know that so many of us, however scattered, have risen above the groundlings and the common level and have occupied prominent positions wherever they have lived. This is, I think, the result of the surroundings and a family pride more than intellectual endowments, and though their apparent hauteur has been the means of many a withholding, still it has been the secret of our success. Was there ever such a number of judges, lawyers, etc., in a family? Never, I believe, on earth." "John J. Crittenden, late United States Senator from Kentucky, is the grandson of John Harris. Senator Isham G. Harris, of Tennessee, was a cousin. William Harris Crawford descended from the Albemarle branch." "The Harrises are descended from the ancient Britons and are of pure Celtic blood. ' ' "The family crest of the Welsh Harrises, as given by Mr. Elven in his collection, is — A hedgehog or porcupine charged with a key on which is inscribed "A — Z." "Ubique patriam reminisci." It has also "an arm grasping a dart." See plate 58, No. 22. "In Bishop Meade's work, "Old Churches and Families of Virginia, Vol. 1, p. 468, in chapter on Manakin Town, the Huguenot settlement on James River, he mentions the names of the settlers, among them the Harrises, and speaks of tin Welsh descent of some of the settlers." ADDENDA. There is a twilled woolen goods of soft and durable quality made in Scotland that has for centuries been called the "Harris tweed,"' probably named for the man that first wove it. The residence of a branch of the family in Scot- land whose descendants are noiv in the United States is also made clear by the following quotation from MeCall's History of Georgia, page 7 : '"The McCall, Harris, and Calhoun families passed over from Scotland in the same ship to the northeast of Ireland, where they settled and remained two entire generations, when the three families moved to Pennsylvania. (This was about 1730 >. From Pennsylvania the three families moved to New River in the western part of Virginia. There James Harris died. James Harris, the son of the latter, moved to Mecklenburg county. North Carolina. Patrick Calhoun, the father of John C. Calhoun, moved from New River. Virginia, to Little River. South Carolina. In Brown's *" Genesis of America" it is recorded that in the second charter of Virginia, granted in 1609, are the names of John Harris. Thomas Harris, Christopher Harris, Arthur Harris and Anthony Hunter, the latter a physician. With this charter nine vessels with 500 emigrants sailed for Jamestown in June, 1609. Thus there were four Harrises at the first white settlement made in the United States. GENEALOGICAL DATA 53 PART III. Genealogical Data. ANCESTRY OF DR. CHARLES H. HARRIS. . Dr. C. H. Harris, born 1835, is the son of Peter Coffee Harris, born 1807, and Narcissa Ann Hooks born 1803. His father was the son of "William Harris, born 1774, and of Sarah Coffee, born 1784. This grandfather, William Harris, was the son of John Harris, born in 1730, who lived at New Bern, N. C, dying there in 1801. His mother, Narcissa Ann Hooks, was born 1803, in Duplin county North Carolina. Her mother was Ann Hun- ter, and her father was Charles Hooks, member of legisla- ture from Duplin County, N. C, inl802-3-4, in the senate in 1810-11, and member of Congress 1816-17 and from 1819 to 1825. Charles Hooks moved to Montgomery in 1826, where his daughter married Peter Coffee Harris in 1827. The mother of the Peter Coffee Harris just named was Sarah Coffee, born in 1784. She was the sister of John E. Coffee, who was a general in charge of the Georgia milit'a in the war against the Creek Indians, 1812-14. He was elect- ed to congress from Georgia in 1833-35. He died on the day in which he was elected to the second term in congress. Cof- fee County, Georgia, is named for him. He was the first cousin of John Coffee, who was colonel of Tennessee volun- teers under Andrew Jackson, was with him in all the wars against the Creek Indians and the Seminole Indians, and with him at the battle of New Orleans. His wife, Mary Donelson, was a niece of Andrew Jackson. General John .£. Coffee of Georgia and General John Coffee of Tennessee, first cousins, were the sons respectively of Peter Coffee and Joshua Coffee, brothers, who came from Ireland in 1750 and settled in Prince Edwards County, Virginia. Both were sol- diers in the Eevolutionary War, Joshua being a "captain 54 GENEALOGICAL DATA of mounted gunners" (artillery). The children of Peter Coffee moved to Georgia, Hancock county, in 1781. Wheeler's History of North Carolina gives this trust- worthy information: 1. Edward Harris represented the borough of New Bern in the House of Commons in 1802-3, and Craven County in the House in 1807. 3. Stephen Harris was a Craven Senator in 1802, and a Commoner in 1808. 3. Edward Harris, one of the judges of the Superior Court, died in Lumberton in 1813. 4. Charles Hooks represented Duplin county in the House of Commons in 1802-3-4, and in the Senate in ] S 10-11 ; and served in Congress in 1816, 1817, and 1819-25. The part of Duplin in which he lived was near the Wayne line. '«» removed to Alabama and died there in 1843. Two Harrises, James and Robert, signed the Mecklen- burg Declaration, but nothing is said of their lives. All over North Carolina the name is common. There is a long list in the University of North Carolina catalogue, among them, 1 ' Stephen Harris, Craven county, 1835-36. Born 1816. ' ' The following is the family record of John Harris, of New Bern, N. C. : (a) Mary Harris, wife of John Harris, died March 11, 1792, aged 47 years, at New Bern, N. C. (b) John Harris died October 31, 1801, aged 71 years, at New Bern, N. C. Children of John and Mary. (c) Stephen Harris, born May 31, 1763, died March 10, 1813. (d) Mary, born October 22, 1769, died March 11, 1792. (e) Enoch Harris, born August 23, 1771, died October 20, 1806. (f ) William Harris, born June 2, 1774, died October 12, 1825. GBHEiXOGICAI, DATi 55 (g) John Harris, born April 23, 1782, died March 8, 1843. (h) John Harris married Mary B. Lane, June 20, 1814. (i) Stephen, son of (h), born 1817, died 1846; married Mary White in 1843. Enoch Harris (e) left two children Julia — who married Lane, died in 1850, mother of W. B. Lane, and Mary Gatlin, who married Wm. B. Wadsworth, the parents of Enoch Wadsworth, who now lives in New Bern. Enoch Harris Lane and W. B. Lane were living in 1902, the children of Julia, grandchildren of Enoch (e) . Of Enoch Harris Lane two children now live in Florida, and two sons and two daughters now live in New Berne. Of W. B. Lane four chil- dren are living: Harris, Wm. G., Richard B., Harriet (mar- ried Thos. G. Hyman, now a merchant in New Berne.) Family Record of William Harris. William Harris and Julia Fulcher, married August 18, 1799. William Harris and Julia Morse, married Julia Morse, wife of William Harris, died March 3, 1801, born in 1754. William Harris and Sarah Coffee married August 25, 1803. Julia Swepston Harris, born January 2, 1805. Child of William and Sarah Harris. Peter Coffee Harris, born May 21, 1807, child of William and Sarah Harris. Sarah Coffee Harris, born October 20, 1784, died Novem- ber 23, 1807. Stephen Alston Harris, born December 13, 1813, died November 16, 1836, son of William and Mary Harris. Mary Drew Alston, born January 12, 1784, died Sep- tember 21, 1841. William Harris and Mary Drew Alston married Decem- ber, 1811, 56 GENEALOGICAL DATA Mary Drew Alston, fourth wife of William Harris, died September 21, 1841, aged 57. Mary, daughter of William and Mary, married John Gindrat; died . Sarah, daughter of Wm. and Mary, married Albert Pickett, died . Julia S. Field died, age 44 years, in Columbus, Miss., April 17, 1849. Julia S. Harris and Joseph W. Field married Jnuiury 9, 1823. Sarah Smith Harris, born February 7, 1816, child of William and Mary Harris. Sarah Smith Harris and Albert James Pickett married March 20, 1832. Stephen A. W. Harris and Elizabeth Fitzpatrick mar- ried May 24, 1835. Mary Gatlin Harris, born January 6, 1820, child of William and Mary Harris. Mary G. Harris and John H. Gindrat married Novem- ber 7, 1837. Peter Coffee Harris and Narcissa Ann Hooks married October 18, 1827. Elden Chalmers Field, born March 30, 1830. Mary Pickett, born December 22, 1834. Harris Field, born , 1835. William Harris married Sarah Coffee, the daughter of Peter Coffee, and sister of Gen. John B. Coffee of War of 1812, on August 25th, 1803. She died in 1807. Their only son, Peter Coffee Harris, born May 21, 1807, in Hancock county, Georgia, attended the University of Georgia 1825-6, married Narcissa A. Hooks, of Montgomery, Alabama, in October, 1827, the daughter of Charles Hooks, who had been member of Congress from Wilmington district, North Carolina. William Harris purchased 2,000 acres of LaFayette Grant in Florida, near Tallahassee, and gave it to Peter and Julia. Peter lived there a few years and moved to Tuskegee, Ala. GBNKAtOGlCAI, DATA $7 Peter Coffee Harris, Mrs. Julia Field, wife of Judge Joseph W. Field, of Mississippi, Mrs. Sarah Pickett and Mrs. Gindrat, and Stephen W. Harris, who died when twenty-three years old, were children of William Har- ris, who was born in or near New Bern, Craven county, N. C. William Harris moved to Georgia about 1 oOO, married Sarah Coffee in Hancock County, moved thence to Montgomery, Ala., about 1817. His son, Peter Coffee, was born in 1807. William Harris had three brothers. Enoch, whose daughter married a Mr. Lane (the father of W. B. Lane, Perfection, N. C, living in 1897) ; John, who married Mary Lane, and Stephen, who married Mrs. Bryan. He also had one sister, Mary Gatlin. John Harris traveled on horseback with his nephew, Lane, from New Berne, N. C, to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit his brother, William, in 1823. Stephen Harris died without children, and willed the large estate he owned to various relatives. The residence built by Stephen Harris in 1810 at Perfection, N. C, is now occupied by W. B. Lane, his grand-nephew. Except the descendants of his son William, none of the descendants of John Harris, of New Berne, N. C, who died in 1801, are named Harris, and these are the children and grandchildren of Peter Coffee Harris and Narcissa Ann Hooks. William Harris and his sons, Peter Coffee Harris and Stephen W. Harris, were buried on the plantation near Montgomery, Ala., settled by William Harris in 1817. Each of their graves is marked by marble tombstones, and they are on an eminence not far from the Pickett Springs. Harris-Alston. William Harris married Mary Alston, his fourth wife, December, 1811, and by her he had one son, Stephen, and two daughters, Sarah and Mary. The son, Stephen Alston Harris, born in 1813, married Elizabeth Fitzpatrick in 1835, and died in 1836, without issue. The youngest daughter of William Harris and Mary Alston, Mary Gatlin Harris, married John Gindrat and died in Montgomery, Ala., when 58 GENEALOGICAL DATA. nearly seventy years of age. She, too, died without issue. The oldest daughter of William Harris by his wife Mary Alston, Sarah Smith Harris, married March 20, 1832, Albert Pickett, author of a very valuable history of Alabama. To her were born twelve children, nine living to adult age. Mary Pickett, the granddaughter of William Harris, mar- ried Samuel Smith Harris, who as a minister in the Episco- pal Church became Bishop of Michigan in 1879, residing thereafter in Detroit, where he and his wife Mary are now buried. To Bishop Harris and Mary Pickett were born Sallie P., now wife of Professor Charles Mills Gayley of the University of California, and Samuel, now a lawyer practi- cing in Detroit, and William, a civil engineer, living in Detroit. Martha Pickett, granddaughter of William Harris, married Michael L. Woods. She is dead. Her daughters, Oorinne and Mattie, now reside with their father in Mont- gomery, Ala. Alston Harris Pickett, grandson of William Harris, married Elizabeth Jackson, and now lives in Montgomery, Ala. He has children, William Raiford Pickett, grandson of William Harris, married Laura Holt. He is dead. His widow and children now reside in Montgomery. Corinne Pickett, granddaughter of William Harris, married Edward Brett Randolph. She died without issue. Her husband lives in Montgomery. Eliza W. Pickett, granddaughter of William Harris, married Edwin A Banks. She and her husband are dead. Their children reside in Montgomery. Sarah Julia Pickett, granddaughter of William Harris, married Robert Carter Randolph. Her husband is dead, and she is living with her children in Montgomery. Albert James Pickett, grandson of William Harris, married Eugenia Durden. He is dead. His widow and children live near Autaugaville. John Gindrat Pickett, grandson of William Harris, un- married, and lives at Autaugaville. GENEALOGICAL DATA 59 COFFEE. Peter and Joshua Coffee, brothers, came from Ireland and settled in Prince Edward Co., Va., in 1750. Peter and Joshua each had a son named John, and both John Coffees became generals in the wars against the Indians and the English in 1812-15. One John Coffee lived in Tennessee, the other in Georgia. The two elder Coffees, Peter and Joshua, entered the Revolutionary War, Joshua being a captain of mounted gunners. John Coffee, son of Joshua, moved to Tennessee, and bcame a comrade of Andrew Jackson, whose niece, Mary Donelson, he married. He was colonel of Ten- nessee volunteers, the famous "Hunting Shirt Brigade," and he was with Andrew Jackson in the Creek War, was with him in his incursions into Florida, which led to international trouble, for Florida was then Spanish territory, and was with Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. In order to reach New Orleans in December, 1814, he made with his troops a forced march of seventy miles a day for several con- secutive days. It was the sure, steady aim of these trained riflemen in Coffee's brigade that made the greatest factor in the battle of New Orleans, in which Jackson with a loss of eight men killed and thirteen men wounded, caused a loss in killed, wounded and prisoners of 2,600 British regulars, a result unparalleled in warfare for disparity of numbers and made all the more remarkable when it is remembered that Jackson's total forces included only 5,000 men, while the British had 8,000. This John Coffee, the comrade of Jackson, died in Flor- ence, Ala., in 1831, his descendants, some of them, now liv- ing there. His son, Andrew Jackson Coffee, was breveted lieutenant-colonel for bravery exhibited at the battle of Buena Vista in 1847. He died in 1891. John T. Coffee, of this same family, had moved from Tennessee to Missouri be- fore 1861 ,but in the Civil War he was colonel of the 6th Missouri Cavalry that fought on the Confederate side. John T. Coffee of Missouri died in 1890. Edward O'Neal, of 6o GENEALOGICAL DATA Florence, Ala., nephew of Governor O'Neal, is a son of the granddaughter of John Coffee. The John Coffee who was uncle of Peter Coffee Harris was general of the State troops of Georgia. It was in ap- preciation of his service against the Creek Indians that a county in Georgia was named for him. He was also in the Legislature and was elected to congress twice — in 1833 and in 1835, dying on the day on which he was elected the sec- ond time . He was the son of Peter Coffee of Virginia, all o± whose children, two sons and seven daughters, moved to Georgia in 1781. They were us follows : Elizabeth, born December 26, 1775, married (1) C. Dan- iel, (2) T. Ligon. Nancy, born August 23, 1778, married (1) Abram Heard (ancestors of Mrs. Foster, of Union Springs, second child of Thos. and Elizabeth Heard), (2) Jas. Kennedy. Susannah, born August 30, 1780, married T. Randal (parents Mrs. Mark Cooper.) John (general in 1812) born December 3, 1782, married Miss Bryan, of Telfair County, member of congress, re- elected on day of death. Sarah, born October 21, 1784, married William Harris. Joshua, born December 27, 1786, bachelor, lived and died at Darien, Ga. Mary, born March 5, 1789, married H. Gibson. Cynthia, born February 5, 1791, married Thos. Stocks. Patsy (Martha), born May 9, 1793, married George Heard (9th child of Thomas and Eliza), born 1785, died 1858). George Heard and Martha Coffee lived and died at La- Grange, Ga. Their daughter, Martha Falkner, married CoL Beall, of Troup Co. They have three children — Martha Catherine, Julia and Egbert. Peter Abram Heard married Mary Alford, ot LaGrange. Thomas H. Heard married P. Alford. Abram Heard and Nancy Coffee had nine children — Franklin Coffee (Mobile) with seven children,- Julia Smith GEN. JOHN COFFEE A brother of the mother of Peter Coffee Harris, this picture is reproduced from oil painting made while a member of Congress in 1S33. GENEALOGICAL DATA 6 1 Saffold (Madison) five children; Thomas Peter (unmar- ked) ; Abram Augustus (Union Springs) one child, Mrs. Foster; Minerva Ann (Goliad, Texas) four children; John Joseph (Wilkes county) nine children; George Felix (Texas) ; Joshua, born 1817 (Mississippi), five children. The following is a copy of statements dictated by Mark A. Cooper to his nephew, Judge Joel Branham : "The Coffee family and the Randall family came about the same time the Coopers came from Virginia (about 1780), and settled in Hancock county, Georgia. The Coffee family consisted of two brothers and seven sisters, John and Joshua. John was for many years general of militia in Geor- gia, and a prominent member of the legislature for many years. Joshua lived and died a bachelor in Darien. The sis- ters were Susan, who married Randall and was the mother of Mrs. Mark A. Cooper and Lackington and John S. Randall. John S. Randall married the sister of Judge Lucius Q. C. Lamar and Mirabeau Lamar. Elizabeth Coffee married Daniel, mother of Dr. W^i. C. Daniel. Mary Coffee married Gibson. Cynthia married Thomas Stocks of Green county, for many years senator from Green and president of senate from Georgia. Sallie Coffee married William Harris. Martha Coffee married George Heard. Nancy Coffee married Abram Heard. Susan Coffee died leaving four young children — Lack- ington, Jno. S., Sophronia and Rosanna Randall. Soph- ronia had Abram Heard for guardian, who raised her, and she was married to Mark A. Cooper. Coffee — Cooper. Sophronia Coffee Randall, who married Mark A. Cooper, a man of extraordinary ability, and of noble char- acter, was the mother of Thomas L., John Frederick, Eu- 62 GENEALOGICAL DATA gene, Volumina, Antonia, Rosa and Susie. Ot these Thomas L. Cooper bcame a lawyer of unusual power, was solicitor- general of the Atlanta judicial circuit, was elected colonel of a Georgia regiment that entered the Confederate Army in the early days of 1861 and was killed by being thrown from his horse on one of the battlefields of Virginia in 1862. Thomas L. Cooper married Mary Pope and was the father of Dr. Hunter, P. Cooper, of Atlanta, and of Thomas L. Cooper and of Sallie Cooper, who married J. H. Sanders, of Washington, Ga. John Frederick Cooper lived in Rome, Ga., married Harriet Smith, was made captain of a company organized in Floyd county early in 1861, and died as a result of a wound received in the first Battle of Manassas. John Frederick Cooper was the father of John Paul Cooper, born in 1858, of Walter G. Cooper, and of Frederick C. Cooper. John Paul Cooper married Alice Allgood. Walter G. Cooper married Belle Bacon. Frederick C. Cooper married Tennie B. Lanius. Volumnia Cooper, daughter of Sophronia Randall and Mark A. Cooper, married Thomas P. Stovall, of Augusta, and was the mother of Effie, who married T. F. Branch and of Sophie. Susie Cooper, daughter of Sophronia Randall and Mark A. Cooper, married William A. Pope, of Wilkes County, Ga., and was the mother of Mark Cooper Pope. Mary Lou Pope, who married John J. Hill, of Effie Pope who maried Minter Wimberly, of Macon, and Marion Pem- broke Pope, who married Elizabeth Barnett. Coffee — Heard. Stephen Heard, born in Ireland, of English ancestry, married Mary Falkner and lived in Virginia. Thomas Heard, son of Stephen and Mary, born in 1742 in Virginia, moved in 1784 to Green County, Georgia. His wife was Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, of Virginia. Abram Heard, son of Thomas and Elizabeth, born 1769, died 1822, married Nancy Coffee, of Hancock County. They GENEALOGICAL DATA 63 lived in Morgan County, Georgia and had children: Frank- lin Coffee Heard, Julia Smith Heard, Abram Augustus Heard, Minerva Ann Heard, John Joseph Heard. George Heard, son of Thomas and Elizabeth, born 1785, married Martha Coffee and died in LaGrange, Ga. Their children were Antionette, George Coffee, Martha Falkner, Cynthia Ann, Peter Abram and Henry Thomas. Peter Abram Heard's family are in LaGrange, Ga. Franklin Coffee Heard, son of Abram and Nancy, mar- ried Matilda Bozeman, of Milledgeville, Ga. Their children were Julia, who married James Elder ; Eliza, who married Douglas Vass; Ann Bozeman, who married Cary Butt, of Mobile, whose daughter Mary married Thomas Lyon. Julia Smith Heard, daughter of Abram and Nancy, mar- ried Seaborn Saffold, of Madison, Ga. Their children were Ann Heard, who married Nathaniel Foster; Thomas, who married, first, Mary Thomas, of Athens, Ga., and second, Sallie Reed, of Eatonton, Ga. ; William Abram and Isham. Abram Augustus Heard, son of Abram Heard and Nancy Coffee, married Harriet McGruder, of Columbia County, Georgia, and their children were Virginia, who married Dr. Foster, of Union Springs, Ala., and had children: George Felix, who married Emily Smith Nailor, and had children; Joshua Thomas, who married Martha Koger, and had chil- dren. Franklin Coffee Heard, of Mobile, Ala., is a descendant of Abram Heard and Nancy Coffee. He married Ann C. Hunter and had children: Franklin, James, Martha, Al- tona, Thompson and Ann Eliza. Minerva Ann Heard, daughter of Abram and Nancy, married Pryor Lee, of Texas, and had children: Abram Heard Lee; Nannie Coffee Lee, who married Alfred Winfield, and Cynthia Ellen Lee. John Joseph Heard, son of Abram Heard and Nancy Coffee, born in 1809 in Green County, married, first, Cynthia Beatty, and second, Ann T. Wilkins, of Eatonton in 1851. His children : Susan Ann, who married Dr. Hunter in 1857 ; Julia, William, Abram, Cynthia, Nancy Coffee, Sarah, Franklin, Lucy Harmon. The children of Susan Ann Heard 64 GBN«AIf Mary Ann Hunter Hooks. Mary Ann Hunter, who married Charles Hook^ was the granddaughter of Isaac Hunter, of Chowan County, North Carolina, who died there in 1752. The town of Edenton in this county was originally settled in 1655 by a group of Presbyterians of Scotch-Irish descent who, suffering some religious persecution from the Episcopalians in Jamestown, Virginia, were allowed by the Governor of Virginia, Wil- liam Berkeley, to form a separate colony in what is now the northeast corner of North Carolina. The land set apart for their occupancy was organized into a government of their own under William Drummond, a Scotch Presbyterian, and was then called Albermarle Colony. It is now divided into several counties. This Presbyterian colony named their town Edenton, and later when the province of North Carolina was formed into counties the name of their county was changed from Albermarle to Chowan. Into this county some of the Hunt- ers, who were Scotch-Irish, moved from Virginia. In this way the Hunters of Virginia and North Carolina are from the same family, a family which had in the very early days of the Virginia colony emigrated from Ireland. R. M. T. Hunter, Senator of the United States and Secretary of GENEALOGICAL DATA 67 State in the Confederate States, is of the Virginia Hunters. The prominence of this Hunter family in their section of North Carolina is manifested by the fact that Jacob and William Hunter represented the district in which Edenton is located at the Provincial Congress which met at Halifax April 4 — May 4, 1776 — and that Alexander Hunter was in command of a North Carolina regiment during the Revolu- tionary War. It is also true that Thomas Hunter, of Mar- tin, N. C, was a member of the Provincial Congress, which met November 12, 1776. Jacob Hunter, mentioned above as a member of the Provincial Congress, was a son of Isaac Hunter, and, there- fore, an uncle of Ann Hunter, who married Charles Hooks. William Hunter and Colonel Thomas Hunter were no doubt her near relatives also. The Hunters were residents and large land owners in Bertie County, which lay next to Chowan County, North Carolina, and it was in Bertie County that the Hooks lived before their removal to Duplin County. Several of the Hunter families also moved from Bertie County to Duplin, among them being Nicholas Hunter and Isaac Hunter, the latter being the father of Ann Hunter, who was the grandmother of Charles Hooks Harris. Isaac Hunter was also an ancestor of Margaret Monk, the wife of Charles Hooks Harris. The lineal descent to the writer and his brothers and sisters may be seen in the fol- lowing diagram: 68 GENEALOGICAL DATA Mrs. J. C. Slocumb, *Thomas Hooks Anna, (Is wife). (2d wife.) 1 1785 1777 co 3h * td Si °l I si Em 22 tt Q g? H^ cd £ ►tffcj 23 CD g t^K <1 S* P ° £ B cd' •-* 2. Oco • P o o ?o sx §"'M E?w 3 !* CD CO r+ CO o o s ° r^ o 3 3. CO K'K CD CO wse o o P o c 5* 8? cd 3 CO g_ p tig ftps CD ogo M QCD £bL 1 CO* 3 *1 *b£ ?§3 Sarah Harris Peter C. Harris Charles H. Harris William S. Harris Willis Wood. Mollie Wooley. Margaret Monk. Victoria Vann. S SB ^ p s# £3 ^ E? &S \£ £ && &3 g^ | ^S .^p £ £^ 5? qp g 3. s a » P- if|. 3f p e-i i^Otd 3 o tr» 3i tfp'< P 3 ►£» 3 ££& CD CD t^p 3 4 co 3- CD S'B^ M ff&2" p 3 WW 2 3.p p M. O CD so CD =-4 p B CD a p co" 1 " ngcc S3 P ^+ M s CD 3 M O M B e-i«H CO § CO P P CD CD 13. co' 2. CO en CO CO 3£ S « N 3 w§ § £5 i 3 CO 3« w ROBERT H. MOLTON . First Consin of Charles H. Harris. MRS. CATHERINE MOLTON GLOVER First Cousin of Charles H. Harris. GENEALOGICAL DATA 6 9 Katherine- Betsy Jane- Sarah— Narcissa J- Robert- I Charles- William— Kate— I Marshall— 1 Thos- John— Katherine- Sarah— So. Thos. zs O Ann Kate — Charles R— © g MP Molton H— 3* w 9 2 s-i P 3 a go s CO 5 I O Q O O 1 CO ■ i © H 2 hri e 9 3 3 4 1 K 2_ BB T 4 ? 3 ■ E Sallie— William- Peter a— ►* g, I* K SB 5*OW 3 ^ ^3* §WgS 8 ! i o* gel ►o o,p S O >-3 3l© 0*0,0. o o_ 3* 3 £ o S o ? 70 GENEALOGICAL DATA Hooks — Hunter. Thomas and Anna Hooks of N. C. had three children. 1. Charles married Ann Hnnter. Charles, born Feb- ruary 20, 1768 ,died October 18, 1843 ; served four terms in congress from N. C. 2. Mary, born 1760, died March 6, 1836, married Col. Ezekiel Slocumb (of Revolutionary) ; Mary had two chil- dren, Mrs. Harriet Battle and Hon. Jesse Slocumb from Wayne county, N. C, member of 15th and 16th congress. 3. Lavinia married Major Williams as her first hus- band, Slocumb, her second husband. Charles Hooks, son of Thomas and Anna Hooks, was born in North Carolina, February 20, 1768, died October 18, 1843, and is buried in the private cemetery of the Molton family on Laurel Hill, 14 miles from Montgomery. He was married three times, first to Betsie Williams, January 1, 1789 ; second to Kitty Dickson, March 29, 1795, and third to Anne Hunter, daughter of Isaac and Priscilla Hunter, of North Carolina, on November 15, 1796. By his first marriage it seems from the records that he had children as follows : James, born March 2, 1799 ; Thomas on November 16, 1791, and Charles A. September 18, 1793. By his second marriage it appears that he had but one child — a son named Dickson, born January 20, 1796. By his third wife he had children as follows : Marshall H. Hooks, born December, 1797, married Tabbie Fitzpatrick. They lived in Tuskegee, Alabama, where they died at a ripe old age. Eliza Jane, born December 9, 1799, married a Mr. Hatch, died October 9, 1820, and was buried on her father's plantation in Duplin county, North Carolina, in the same grave with an anfant. The grave is covered with a large marble slab and was in good condition in 1908. Catherine Anne, born October 31, 1801, married Thomas Molton, died September 27, 1872. Her remains were interr- ed in a vault in the Montgomery City Cemetery. Narcissa A., born May 22, 1803, married Peter Coffee GENEALOGICAL DATA Jt Harris, died May 27, 1864, at her home in Tuskegee, Ala. She is buried in the Tuskegee City Cemetery. Amanda Anne, born April 16, 1807, died in childhood. David I., born November 10, 1812, married and lived on his plantation near Shreveport, La., % mile east of Green- wood, La., till 1859. He then moved twenty miles below Shreveport on Red River, where he died soon after the Civil War. He had three daughters, one a Mrs. Meriwether. The latter lived on Red River twenty miles below Shreveport. Mrs. Meriwether had one son. He moved from that section in 1884, and his present address is unknown to the writer. One daughter of David Hooks was Mrs. Kate Renison. She had a son, James, who was living in New Jersey inl885. David I. Hooks died in the year 1865, leaving the two children Ann Hooks and Kate Hooks. Ann who married Merriwether, first — Bush second, died in 1887. Kate married Renison as her first husband and Jordan as her second husband. Jordan after the death of his wife, Kate Hooks, married his wife's niece, Mary Merri- wether, and moved to Montgomery, Ala. Ann Hooks' second husband was Bush and by him she had one son who is living in Texas. Sarah Amanda, born April 30, 1817, married George James Forrest ; she died in the city of New York, January 24, 1854. She had children as follows : Anne Kate Forrest, who married Rev. George Zabriskie Gray, both now dead; Charles Robert Forrest, married Harriet Chanler, both liv- ing in Hartford, Conn. ; Molton Hooks Forrest, married Emma Louise Safford. He is dead, his wife still living, in Philadelphia; Sarah Florena Forrest, died while quite young. Hooks-Fitzpatrick. Marshall H. Hooks, son of Charles and Anne Hooks, born December 18, 1797, married Tabbie Fitzpatrick, sister of Gov. Fitzpatrick, one of Alabama's Governors before the Civil War, They had three daughters: Catherine, who 72 GENEALOGICAL DATA married John Campbell, who had born to them five children, as follows : Dick, Kate, Lizzie, Sallie and James. Next child to Marshall H, and Tabbie Hooks, was Betsy Jane, who mar- ried Judge William K. Harris, of Tuskegee, Alabama, and by this marriage had children as follows : Willie K., married A. B. Vandergrift, of Birmingham. Betsy Jane, who mar- ried, first, Frank L. Wadsworth, second, Charles H. Molton, and now live in Birmingham. Next child, Mary, who mar- ried Robert Y. Ware, Jr., and resides with her husband in Autauga county, Alabama. Other children who died young were born to this couple. Betsy Jane married, second, E. W. Story, by whom she had no children. Sarah, the next child of Marshall Hooks, married David Graves Fitzpatrick and they had two sons, Marshall and Charles, who live in Bessemer, Alabama, and several children who died when young. Hooks-Molton. Catherine Ann Hooks, daughter of Charles and Anne Hooks, born October 31, 1801, died September 27, 1872. She married Maj. Thomas Molton in Duplin county, N. C, from which place they moved to Montgomery county, Ala- bama, in 1826. Her husband died November 1, 1845, leav- ing her with a large family, five sons and four daughters, all of them except one being under age, and the responsi- bility of raising and educating so large a family rested upon her. She proved equal to the occasion and conditions sur- rounding her in every way, surviving her husband 27 years. Major Thomas Molton was born in North Carolina, August 1, 1786, and died November 1, 1845, on his planta- tion in Montgomery (now Elmore) county, Alabama. He was married twice ; first, to Miss Julia Ward, daughter of Gen. Charles Ward, of Duplin county, North Carolina, by which marriage he had two daughters, Sarah and Eliza, both of whom married Templeton Reed, of Montgomery, Alabama. His second wife was Miss Catherine, daughter of Charles and Anne Hooks, a niece of his first wife, GENEALOGICAL DATA 73 By his second marriage, Thomas Molton had nine chil- dren, as follows: Narcissa Jane, born December 3, 1821, died April 3, 1900 ; Charles Hooks, born August 18, 1825, died October 3, 1871; William Peacock, twin brother of Charles Hooks, born August 18, 1825, died October 9, 1902 ; Thomas James, born December 12, 1827, died March 3, 1896 ; Julia Amanda, born November 24, 1829, died October 5, 1873; Robert Hogan, born August, 1831, died August 8, 1895 ; Catherine Anne, born in 1833, died in 1873 ; Marshall Harris, born December 13, 1835, still living in Birmingham, Alabama ; Sarah Eliza, born July 26, 1838, died June 29, 1861. Narcissa Jane Molton, daughter of Thomas and Cath- erine Anne Molton, born December 3, 1821, in Duplin county, North Carolina. She moved with her parents to Montgomery county, Alabama, in 1826; married, first, John Henley, and by this marriage she bore the following children : Thomas Molton, born in Montgomery county, Alabama, December 3, 1839, died in Bibb county, Alabama,April 4, 1888. Catherine, born February 22, 1841, died September 9, 1842. John Charles, born in Montgomery county, Alabama, September 29, 1842, died in Birmingham, Alabama, May 15, 1909. Michael H., born March 18, 1844, died May 19, 1854. Narcissa Jane, born July 28, 1846, died November 12, 1848. Annie Julia, born March 8, 1848, died July 6, 1849. Robert Walter, born August 11, 1850, died January 9, 1864. John Henley, the first husband of Narcissa Jane Molton was a native of Ireland, born December 12, 1809, died Octo- ber 10, 1853. The second husband of Narcissa Jane Molton was Judge Hugh W. Watson, of Montgomery, Alabama ; by this marriage there were no children. 74 GENEALOGICAL DATA Col. Charles Hooks Molton was born in Duplincounty, North Carolina, August 18, 1825. He died at the old Molton homestead in Montgomery (now Elmore) county, Alabama, on October 3, 1871, and was buried in the cemetery in the city of Montgomery. He married Julia Anne Hunter in 1846. To this couple there were born nine children, as follows: Son, died in infancy, in 1847; Lizzie Whitfield, born in Montgomery county, Alabama, July 20, 1849, died in Jefferson county, Alabama, December 31, 1905; Sallie Collier, born in Montgomery county, Alabama, April 24, 1851, died in Birmingham, Alabama, October 21, 1878; Thomas Hunter, born in Montgomery county, Alabama, November 15, 1853, living in Birmingham, Alabama; Julia, born in Montgomery county, Alabama, March 24, 1856, died May 24, 1857; Charles Hooks, born in Montgomery county, Alabama, August 9, 1858, living in Birmingham, Alabama; Annie Julia, born in City of Montgomery, Alabama, March 2, 1861, living in Birmingham, Alabama; William Forrest, born in City of Montgomery, Alabama, June 3, 1863, living in Birmingham, Alabama; Robert Marshall, born at old Molton place, Elmore county, Alabama, on January 20, 1866, living in Birmingham, Alabama. William Peacock Molton was born August 18, 1825, a twin brother of Charles H. Molton, with whom he resided until the death of his brother Charles. He never married and the latter years of his life, lived with his brother Robert. He died October 9, 1902, and his remains were interred in the vault with his mother in the City Cemetery at Montgomery, Alabama. Thomas James Molton was born in Montgomery county, Alabama, December 12, 1827, died in Montgomery county, March 3, 1896, buried in City Cemetery, Montgomery, Ala- bama. He married Mary W., the daughter of Dr. Robert J. Ware, of Montgomery county, Alabama. To this marriage there were born three children as follows: Zennie Ware, born October 17, 1853, died October 3, 1859 ; Robert Ware, born in 1855, living in Macon county, Alabama ; Thomas James, born about 1870, died about 1888. GENEALOGICAL DATA 75 Julia Amanda Molton, daughter of Thomas and Cath- erine Anne Molton, born November 24, 1829, died of yellow fever at Tuskegee, Alabama, October 5, 1873. She married Robert Y. Ware, to whom she bore the following children : Ann, born October 16, 1848, died August 10, 1850 ; Kate, born about 1850, died of yellow fever in Montgomery, Ala., in October, 1873 ; Mary, born December 10, 1852, died Feb- ruary 6, 1900 ; Robert James, born August 28, 1853, died January 9, 1854 ; Robert Y., born March 30, 1855, living in Autauga county, Alabama; Julia, born about 1856, died when ten or twelve years old ; Molton, born about 1858, died about 1884; Walter, born about 1860, died when a very small boy. Capt. Robert Hogan Molton, son of Thomas and Cath- erine Anne Molton, was born in Montgomery county, Ala- bama, August, 1831, died August 8, 1895. He married Rachael Haywood Moore. Children born to them were as follows : Mary Lizzie, born February 9, 1850, died June 18, 1863 ; Kate Haywood, born November 17, 1854, died May 19, 1855 ; Lillie Belle, born August 13, 1856, died March 5, 1873. This good man, after losing his own children, took into his home and raised the two youngest orphan boys of his brother Charles, and the orphan son and daughter of his sister, Catherine Glover. Catherine Ann Molton, daughter of Thomas and Cath- erine Anne Molton, was born in Montgomery county, Ala- bama, n 1833, died of yellow fever at Tuskegee, Alabama, October 5, 1873. She married Allen Glover, of Green county, Alabama, to whom the following children were born : Mol- ton; Kate Allena; Allen Walton, born September 3, 1864, died June 10, 1903, never married ; Minnie, born 1867, living in Montgomery, Alabama; Robert, twin brother to Minnie, died in infancy. Marshall Harris Molton, son of Thomas and Catherine Anne Molton, was born in Montgomery county, Alabama, December 13, 1835; married Julia Toombs DuBose. They had but two children. William E., who died at the age of j6 GENEALOGICAL DATA five years, and Kate Julia, wife of Joseph R. Smith, Jr., born about 1858, and died in Birmingham, August 31, 1907. Sarah Eliza Molton, daughter of Thomas and Catherine Anne Molton, born July 26, 1838, died June 29, 1861. She married Dr. B. P. Blount, of Chambers county, Alabama, and to them was born only one child, Sallie, who died when about five years of age. Dr. Blount was a prominent physician, afterwards the proprietor of a large drug store in the city of Montgomery, where he lived for many years. He finally moved to Mem- phis, Term., where he died of yellow fever in 1873. Thomas Molton Henley, son of John and Narcissa Jane Henley, was born in Montgomery county, Alabama, Decem- ber 3, 1839 ; died in Bibb county, Alabama, April 4, 1888. Married Alcesta Smith, and to them were born the follow- ing children: Mary Narcissa, born May 17, 1877 ; living ; Robert Hector, born February 4, 1879; living; Annie Olivia, born May 29, 1881 ; living ; Tettie Jane, born December 27, 1883; living; Thomas Molton, born April 6, 1886 ; living ; Malcolm John, born June 23, 1888 ; died April 29, 1890. John Charles Henley, son of John and Narcissa Jane Henley, born September 29, 1842; died in Birmingham, Alabama, May 15, 1909. He married Annie Linn Matthews, daughter of Charles Linn, and to them were born three sons : Walter E., born January 30, 1877 ; John C, born October 9, 1880; Courtney S., born December 20, 1889; all are now grown and reside in Birmingham, Alabama. Lizzie Whitfield Molton, daughter of Charles H. and Julia A. Molton, born July 20, 1849 ; died December 31, 1905. She married Andrew J. Terrell, who was born in Montgomery county, Alabama, and now resides in Jefferson county, Alabama, No children blessed this union. Sallie Collier Molton, daughter of Charles H. and Julia A. Molton, born April 24, 1851 ; died October 21, 1878. She never married. Thomas Hunter Molton, son of Charles H. and Julia A. GENEALOGICAL DATA 77 Molton, was born November 15, 1853 ; married Lizzie Linn Scott, daughter of Charles Linn, and to them have been born four children: Ellen Linn, born January 25, 1890; Kate, born December 24, 1892, died February 23, 1893 ; Gertrude, born March 20, 1895; Thomas Hunter, Jr., h -i May 20, 1899. Charles Hooks Molton, son of Charles H. and Julia A. Molton, born August 9, 1858 ; married Bessie Harris Wads- worth, daughter of William K. and Betsy Jane Harris. They reside in Birmingham, Ala. They have no children. Annie Julia Molton, daughter of Charles H. and Julia A. Molton, was born March 2, 1861; married Charles J. Smith, of Birmingham, Alabama, where they now reside. They have three living children: Hunter Molton Smith, born November 1, 1883; Leila Jordan Smith, born October 10, 1892 ; Joseph Riley, born June 24, 1898. They lost several children in infancy and young childhood. William Forrest Molton, son of Charles H. and Julia A. Molton, was born June 3, 1863 ; married on November 8, 1887, to Bettie G. Hurt, daughter of H. H. Hurt, of Marion Alabama. To this union there have been born the follow- ing children : Mary England, born January 27, 1889 ; Hay- wood, born August 20, 1891 ; Annie Julia, born July 5, 1899 ; William Forrest, born May 13, 1902, died June 28, 1904. He resides in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. Robert Marshall Molton, son of Charles H. and Julia A. Molton, was born January 20, 1866; married Mary Golson, of Autauga county, Alabama. They have but one child, Amelia. They reside in Birmingham, Alabama. Robert Ware Molton, son of Thomas James and Mary W. Molton, was born in 1855 ; living in Macon county, Ala- bama. He has never married. Kate Ware, daughter of Robert Y. and Julia A. Ware, born about 1850, married Walter E. Sistrunk, of Montgom- ery, Alabama; died of yellow fever in 1873, leaving twin babies ouly a few days old, both dying soon after the mother's death. Mary Ware, daughter of Robert Y. and Julia A. Ware, 78 GENEALOGICAL DATA born December 10, 1852, died February 6, 1900. Married, first, David Whetstone, who died in December, 1873, in montgomery, of yellow fever. She had by this marriage one son, only a few weeks old at the time of his father's death, now a substantial business man of Montgomery, Ala. The widow, Mary Ware Whetstone, married her brother-in- law, Walter E. Sistrunk, and to their union were born six children: Kate, now the wife of Dr. B. J. Baldwin, of Montgomery ; Roberta, the wife of David J. Buhl, of New York City ; Jennie, the wife of William Jordan, of Montgom- ery ; Dr. Walter E. Sistrunk, a practicing physician of Lake Charles, La. ; Robert, a young business man of Montgomery, and Mary Molton, a student in the Sophy Newcomb College in New Orleans. Robert Y. Ware, Jr., son of Robert Y. and Julia A. Ware, born March 30, 1855, married Mary Harris, daughter of William K. and Betsy Jane Harris. To this union, their first born, a boy named Robert, died in his infancy. Other children came to them as follows : Willie Kirk, wife of Murray White, of Birmingham ; Bessie, Mary and Robert Y., the third. Mr. Ware resides with his family on his plantation in Autauga county, Alabama. Minnie Glover Ledyard, daughter of Allen and Cath- erine A. Glover, born in 1867, married William E. Ledyard, of Montgomery, now deceased. To this marriage there were born but one child, a son named Denison, for his grandfather on the paternal side. The widow, and her boy, now fifteen years of age, reside in a comfortable home in the city of Montgomery. Kate Molton Smith, daughter of Marshall H. and Julia DuBose Molton, was born March 4, 1859, died August 31, 1907 ; married to Joseph R. Smith, of Birmingham, Ala. To this union came the following children : Maggie, married Hon. Hugh Morrow, State Senator and prominent lawyer of Birmingham. She has an interesting family of five girls and one boy. Annie, married Calvin Jones, who comes from a prom^ GENEALOGICAL DATA 79 inent family of Selma, Alabama. They have two children, a boy and a girl. Joseph Molton, married to Bessie Murphree. They have one boy and one girl and reside on a splendid farm near Franklin, Tennessee. Henley, a young man not yet married, resides with his father in Birmingham. Hooks — Forrest. George James Forrest, born in New York November 22, 1810, married Sarah Amanda Hooks, born in April 30, 1817, in Duplin County, North Carolina. The marriage occurred at Montgomery, Ala. Sarah A. Hooks died in New York city on January 24, 1854. The children of George J. Forrest and Sarah A. Hooks were: 1. Anne Kate Forrest, born September 16, 1841, married June 19, 1862, to George Zabriskie Gray, who was born July 14, 1838. Their children are Sarah Forrest Gray, born March 22, 1872 ; John Alexander Clinton Gray, born October 11, 1873; Arthur Romeyn Gray, born Oecember 30, 1876. Sarah Forrest Gray married George Zabriskie June 14, 1889, and has the following children: George Gray Zabriskie, born July 30, 1890; Helen Romeyn Zabriskie, born July tember 7, 1892; Reginold Zabriskie, born De- cember 8, 1894; Alexander Clinton Zabriskie, born January 21, 1898; Margaret Forrest Za- briskie, born July 13, 1901. 2. Charles Robert Forrest, born January 28, 1843, married Harriet Chanler, of Connecticut, October, 1868. Their children are George Chanler For- rest, Helen Forrest, Madeleine Forrest, who married Edward F. Burke January 10, 1901 ; Elsie Forrest, Virginia Forrest. Charles Rob- ert Forrest lives (1910) in Hartford, Connecti- cut, as do also his son and four daughters, 80 ITEMS RECORDED IN BIBLE OF ANN HOOKS 3. Molton Hooks Forrest, born January 18, 1849, married Emma Louisa Safford March, 1872. Their chil- dren were Herbert Molton Forrest and Rich- ard Earp Forrest. Molton Hooks Forrest died very suddenly of angina pectoris in 1902. He lived in Philadelphia, where his widow t^nd two sons now reside (1910). George Zabriskie Gray, husband of Anne Kate For- rest died August 5, 1887. Anne Kate Forrest died , 1908. Their son, Arthur Romeyn Gray, married Laura Ferguson, of Alabama March 2, 1898, to whom a child, John Alexander Clinton, was born February 10, 1902. Arthur Romeyn Gray is professor in the University of the South of Episcopal Church at Sewanee, Tenn. Sarah Gray mar- ried her father's cousin, George Zazriskie, who is a lawyer in New York city. One son of Kate Gray, George, attended Columbia University. George died September 12, 1895. Kate Forrest's husband, George Zabriskie Gray, was a clergyman of the Episcopal Church and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he died August 4, 1887. George James Forrest, father of Kate Forrest Gray, died also in 1887 just before the death of her husband. Items Recorded in Bible of Ann Hooks. Births. Charles Hooks, son of Thomas and Anna, born Febru- ary 20, 1768. Betsy Williams, daughter of Joseph and Mary, born March 10, 1769. James Hooks, son of Charles and Betsy, born March 2, 1790. Thomas Hooks, son of Charles and Betsy, born Novem- ber 16, 1791. Charles A. Hooks, son of Charles and Betsy, born Sep- tember 15, 1793. ITEMS RECORDED IN BIBI.E OF ANN HOOKS 8 1 Dickson Hooks, son of Charles and Kitty, born January 20, 1796. Ann Hunter, daughter of Isaac and Prisciila, born Sep- tember 9, 1775. Marshall H. Hooks, son of Charles and Ann, born De- cember 18, 1797. Betsy Jane Hooks, daughter of Charles and Ann, born December 9, 1799. Kitty Hooks, daughter of Charles and Ann, born Oc- tober 31, 1801. Narcissa A. Hooks, daughter of Charles and Ann, born May 22, 1803. Amanda Ann Hooks, daughter of Charles and Ann, born April 16, 1807. David I. Hooks, son of Charles and Ann, born November 10, 1812. Sarah Amanda Hooks, daughter of Charles and Ann, born April 30, 1817. Marriages. Charles Hooks married to Betsy Williams January 1, 1789. Charles Hooks married Kitty Dickson March 29, 1795. Charles Hooks and Ann Hunter married November 15, 1796. Deaths. Charles Hooks died October 18, 1843. Betsy Hooks died October 21, 1794. Kitty Hooks died March 8, 1796. Amanda Hooks died February 14, 1811. Ann Hooks died May 11, 1854. Sarah Amanda Hooks died in New York January 24, 1854. 82 MARY 8I<0CUM — NE3 HOOKS Mary Slocumb— nee Hooks. Wheeler's History of North Carolina, pp. 457 to 459 contains the account of the part taken by the Hooks and Slocumbs in the Revolutionary War, and it is from this that the writer has drawn the foregoing statements. In a work entitled "The Women of the Revolution" by E. F. Elliott, published by Baker and Scribner in 1850, there is in VoL 1, Chapter XXIV an account of the part played by Col Ezekiel Slocumb and his wife Mary Hooks and her brother Charles ilooks in that hard struggle for liberty by the colonists. The part taken by them at the battle of Moore's Creek, North Carolina, was so important that it is noted on the monument erected by the United States to the Revolution- ary soldiers who perished there. More significant than this is the fact that the United States also inscribed on this monu- ment a tribute to the memory of Mary Hooks, wife of Colonel Slocumb. This is, probably, the only monument ever dedi- cated by the United States to a woman, even in part. From the volume alluded to above the following para- graphs are copied : •no; The first expedition into North Carolina projected by Lord Cornwallis, was baffled by the fall of Col. Ferguson at King's Mountain. The disaster at the Cowpens forbade perseverance in the second attempt, and was followed by the memorable retreat of Greene. The battle of Guilford took place in March, 1781 ; and towards the end of April, while Lord Rawdon encountered Greene at Hobkirk's Hill, Corn- wallis set out on his march from Wilmington, bent on his avowed purpose of achieving the conquest of Virginia. On his march towards Halifax, he encamped for several days on the river Neuse, in what is now called Wayne county, North Carolina. His headquarters were at Springbank, while Col. Tarleton, with his renowned legion, encamped on the plantation of Lieut. Slocumb. This consisted of level MARY SLOCUM — NEE HOOKS 83 and extensive fields, which at that season presented a most inviting view of fresh verdure from the mansion-house. Lord Cornwallis himself gave it the name of "Pleasant Green," which it ever afterwards retained. The owner of this fine estate held a subaltern's commission in the State line under Col. Washington, and was in command of a troop of light horse, raised in his own neighborhood, whose general duty it was to act as Rangers, scouring the country for many miles around, watching the movements of the enemy, and punishing the loyalists when detected in their vocation of pillage and murder. These excursions had been frequent for two or three years, and often of several weeks' duration. At the present time Slocumb had returned to the vicinity, and had been sent with twelve or fifteen recruits to act as scouts in the neighborhood of the British general. The morning of the day on which Tarleton took possession of his plantation, he was near Springbank, and reconnoitered the encampment of Cornwallis, which he supposed to be his whole force. He then, with his party, pursued his way slowly along the south bank of the Neuse, in the direction of his own house, little dreaming that his deautiful and peace- ful home, where, sometime before, he had left his wife and child, was then in possession of the terrible Tarleton. During these frequent excursions of the Rangers, and the necessary absence of her husband, the superintendence of the plantation had always devolved upon Mrs. Slocumb, nee Mary Hooks. She depended for protection upon her slaves, whose fidelity she had proved, and upon her own fearless and intrepid spirit. The scene of the occupation of her house, and Tarleton 's residence with her, remained through life indelibly impressed on her memory, and were described by her to one who enjoyed the honor of her inti- mate friendship. I am permitted to give this account, copied almost verbatim from notes taken at the time the occurences were related by Mrs. Slocumb. It was about ten o'clock on a beautiful spring morning, that a splendidly dressed officer, accompanied by two aids, and followed at a short distance by a guard of some twenty 84 MARY SLOCUM — NEB HOOKS troopers, dashed up to the piazza in front of the ancient looking mansion. Mrs. Slocumb was sitting there with her child and a near relative, a young lady, who afterwards be- came the wife of Maj. Williams. A few house servants were also on the piazza. The officer raised his cap, and bowing to his horse's neck, addressed the lady with the question: "Have I the pleasure of seeng the lady of this house and plantation ? ' ' "It belongs to my husband." "Is he at home?" "He is not." "Is he a rebel?" 1 ' No sir He is in the army of his country, and fighting against our invaders ; therefore not a rebel. " It is not a little singular, that although the people of that day gloried in their rebellion, they always took offence at being called rebels. "I fear, madam," said the officer, "we differ in our opinion. "A friend to his country will be the friend of the king, our master." * * Slaves only acknowledge masters in this c mntry, ' ' replied the lady. A deep flush crossed the florid cheeks of Tarlton, for he was the speaker ; and turning to one of his aids, he ordered him pitch the tents and form the encampment in the orchard and field on their right. To the other aid his orders were to detach a quarter ground and station piquets on each road. Then bowing very low, he added : ' ' Madam, the service of his Majesty requires the temporary occupation of your prop- erty ; and if it would not be too great an inconvenience, I will take up my quarters in your house." The tone admitted no controversy. Mrs. Slocumb answered : ' ' My family consists of only myself, my sister and child, and a few negroes. We are your prisoners." From the piazza where he seated himself, Tarleton com- manded a view of the ground on which his troops were ar- ranging their camp. The mansion fronted the east, and an avenue one hundred and fifty feet wide, and about half a mile in length, stretched to the eastern side of the plantation, where was a highway, with open grounds beyoncl it, partly MARY SLOCUM— NBK HOOKS 85 dry meadow and partly sand barren. This avenue was lined on the south side by a high fence, and a thick hedge- row of forest trees. These are now removed, and replaced by the Pride of India and other ornamental trees. On the north side extended the common rail fence seven or eight feet high, such as is usually seen on plantations in the low country. The encampment of the British troops being on that part of the plantation lying south of the avenue, it was completely screened by the fences and hedge-row from the view of any one approaching from down the country. While the men were busied, different officers came up at intervals, making their reports and receiving orders. Among others, a tory captain, whom Mrs. Slocumb immedi- ately recognized — for before joining the royal army he had lived fifteen or twenty miles below — received orders in her hearing to take his troops and scour the country for two or three miles around. In an hour everything was quiet, and the plantation presented the romantic spectacle of a regular encampment of some ten or eleven hundred of the choicest of the British monarch. (Here follows a description of dinner served to the British officers.) At this point the conversation was interrupted by rapid volleys of firearms, appearing to proceed from the wood a short distance to the eastward. One of the aids pronounced it some straggling scout, running from the picket guard ; but the experience of Col. Tarleton could not be easily de- ceived. "There are rifles and muskets," said he, "as well as pistols ; and too many to pass unnoticed. Order boots and saddles, and you, Captain, take your troops in the direction of the firing." The officer rushed to execute his orders, while the Col. walked out on the piazza, whither he was immediately fol- iowed by the anxious ladies. Mrs. Slocumb 's agitation and alarm may be imagined ; for she guessed but too well the 86 MARY SI.OCUM — NKK HOOKS cause of the interruption. On the first arrival of the officers she had been importuned, even with harsh threats — not however, by Tarleton — to tell where her husband, when ab- sent on duty, was likely to be found ; but after her repeated and peremptory refusals, had escaped further molestation on the subject. She feared now that he had returned unex- pectedly, and might fall into the enemy's hands before he was aware ot their presence. Her sole hope was in a precaution she had adopted soon after the coming of the unwelcome guests. Having heard Tarleton give the order to the tory captain as before men- tioned, to patrol the country, she immediately sent for an old negro, and gave him directions to take a bag of corn to the mill about four miles distant, on the road she knew her husband must travel if he returned that day. "Big George" was instructed to warn his master of the danger of ap- proaching his home. With the indolence and curiosity natural to his race, however, the old fellow remained loiter- ing about the premises, and was at this time lurking under the hedge-row, admiring the red coats, dashing plumes, and shining helmets of the British troopers. The Col. and the ladies continued on the lookout from the piazza. "May I be allowed, madam," at length said Tarleton, "without offence, to inquire if any part of Washington's army is in this neighborhood?" "I presume it is known to you, "replied Mrs. Slocumb, "that the Marquis and Greene are in this State. And you would not of course," she added, after a slight pause, "be surprised at a call from Lee or your old friend Col. Wash- ington, who, although a perfect gentleman, it is said shook your hand (pointing to the scar left by Washington's sabre) very rudely when you last met. ' ' (Note. — It is said that in a close encounter between Washington and Tarleton during the battle of Cowpens, the latter was wounded by a sabre cut on the hand. Col. W. as is well known figured in some of the skirmishes in North Carolina.) This spirited answer inspired Tarleton with apprehen- MARY S LOCUM— NEE HOOKS 87 sions that the skirmish in the woods was only the prelude to a concerted attack on his camp. His only reply was a loud order to form the troops on the right ; and springing on his charger, he dashed down the avenue a few hundred feet, to a breach in the hedge-row, leaped the fence, and in a mo- ment was at the head of his regiment, which was already in line. Meantime, Lieut. Slocumb, with John Howell, a pri- vate in his band, Henry Williams, and the brother of Mrs. Slocumb, Charles Hooks, a boy about thirteen years of age, was leading a hot pursuit of the tory captain who had been sent to reconnoitre the country, and some of his routed troops. These were first discerned in the open grounds east and northeast of the plantation, closely pursued by a body of American mounted militia ; while a running fight was kept up with different weapons, in which four or five broad swords gleamed conspicuous. The foremost of the pursuing party appeared too busy with the tories to see anything else ; and they entered the avenue at the same moment with the party pursued. With what horror and consternation did Mrs. Slocumb recognize her husband, her brother, and two of her neighbors, in chase of the tory captain and four of his tory band, already half way down the avenue, and uncon- scious that they were rushing into the enemy's midst. About the middle of the avenue one of the tories fell ; and the course of the brave and impudent young officers was suddenly arrested by ''Big George,' ' who sprang directly in front of their horses, crying "Hold on, massa! de debbil here ! Look you ! " A glance to the left showed the young men their danger : they were within pistol shot of a thous- and men drawn up in order of battle. Wheeling their horses, they discovered a troop already leaping the fence into the avenue in their rear. Quick as thought they wheel- ed their horses, and dashed down the avenue directly to- wards the house, where stood the quarter-guard to receive them. On reaching the garden fence — a rude structure formed of a kind of lath, and called a wattled fence — they leaped that and the next, and amid a shower of balls from the guard, cleared the canal at one tremendous leap, and 8t THE BATTLE OF MOORE'S CREEK scouring across the open field to the northwest, were in the shelter of the wood before their pursuers could clear the fences of the enclosure. The whole ground of this adven- ture may be seen as the traveler passes over the "Wilmngton ralroad, a mile and a half south of Dudley depot. A platoon had commenced the pursuit ; but the trumpets sounded the recall before the flying Americans had crossed the canal. The presence of mind and the lofty language of the heroic wife, had convinced the British colonel that the daring men who so fearlessly dashed into his camp were supported by a formidable force at hand. Had the truth been known, and the fugitives pursued, nothing could have prevented the destruction of the rest of the company on the east side of the plantation. The Battle of Moore's Creek. The united regiments of Colonels Lillington and Caswell encountered McDonald at Moore's Creek, where on the twenty-Seventh, was fought one of the bloodiest battles of the Revolution. Col. Slocumb's recollections of this bravely contested field were too vivid to be dismissed by the lapse of years. He was accustomed to dwell but lightly on the gallant part borne by himself in that memorable action ; but he gave abundant praise to his associates ; he would say — "My wife was there !" She was indeed; but the story is best told in her own words : "The men all left on Sunday morning. More than eighty went from this house with my husband; I looked at them well, and I could see that every man had mischief in him. I know a coward as soon as I set my eyes upon him. The tories more than once tried to frighten me, but they al- ways showed coward at the bare insinuation that our troops were about. "Well, they got off in high spirits; every man stepping high and light. And I slept soundly and quietly that night, and worked hard all the next day ; but I kept thinking where they had got to — how far, where and how many of THE BATTLE OF MOOBE'S CBEEK 89 the regulars and tories they would meet, and I could not keep myself from the study. I went to bed at the usual time, but still continued to study. As I lay — whether waking or sleeping, I know not — I had a dream ; yet it was not all a dream. I saw distinctly a body wrapped in my husband's guard-cloak — bloody — dead; and other dead and wounded on the ground about him. I saw them plainly and distinctly. I uttered a cry, and sprang to my feet on the floor ; and so strong was the impression on my mind that I rushed in the direction the vision appeared, and came up against the side of the house. The fire in the room gave little light, and I gazed in every direction to catch another glimpse of the scene. I raised the light; everything was still andquiet. My child was sleeping, but my woman was awakened by my crying out or jumping on the floor. If ever I felt fear it was at that moment. Seated on the bed, I re- flected a few moments, and said aloud, "I must go to him." I told the woman I could not sleep and would ride down the road. She appeared in great alarm ; but I merely told her to lock the door after me, and look after the child. I went to the stable, saddled my mare — as fleet and easy a nag as ever traveled ; and in one minute we were tearing down the road at full speed. The cool night seemed after a mile or two 's gallop to bring reflection with it ; and I asked myself where I was going and for what purpose. Again and again I was tempted to turn back, but I was soon ten miles from home, and my mind became stronger every mile I rode. I should find my husband dying or dead, was as firmly my presentiment and conviction as any fact in my life. When day broke I was some thirty miles from home. I knew the general route our little army expected to take, and had fol- lowed them without hesitation. About sunrise I came upon a group of women and children standing and sitting by the road-side, each one of them showing the same anxiety of mind I felt. Stopping a few minutes I inquired if the battle had been fought. They knew nothing, but were assembled on the road to catch intelligence. They thought Caswell had taken the right of the Wilmington road and gone to- 90 THR; BATTLE OF MOORE'S CREEK wards the northwest (Cape Fear). Again was I skimming over the ground through a country thinly settled and very poor and swampy ; but neither my own spirits nor my beau- tiful nag's failed in the least. We followed the well marked trail of the troops. My little brother Charles Hooks, ten years of age, was my sole companion. "The sun must have been well up, say eight or nine 'clock, when I heard a sound like thunder, which I knew must be cannon. It was the first time I ever heard a cannon. 1 stopped still ; when presently the cannon thundered again. The battle was then fighting. What a fool! my husband could not be dead last night, and the battle only fighting now ! Still I am so near I will go on and see how they come out. So away we went again, faster than ever, and I soon found by the noise of guns I was near the fight. Again I stopped. I could hear muskets, I could hear rifles, I could hear shouting. I spoke to my mare and dashed on in the direction of the firing and the shouts, now louder than ever. The blind path I had been following brought me into the Wilmngton road leading to Moore's Creek bridge, a few hundred yards below the bridge. A few yards from the road, under a cluster of trees were lying perhaps twenty men. They were the wounded. I knew the spot — the very trees, and the position of the men I knew as if I had seen it a thousand times. I had seen it all night ! I saw it all at once ; but in an instant my whole soul was centered in one spot ; for there, wrapped in his bloody guard-cloak, was my husband's body! How I passed the few yards from my saddle to the place I never knew. I remember uncovering his head and seeing a face clothed with gore from a dreadful wound across the temple. I put my hand on the bloody face ; 'twas warm, and an unknown voice begged for water. A small camp kettle was lying near, and a stream of water was close by. I brought it, poured some in his mouth, washed his face, and behold it was Frank Cogdell ! He soon revived and could speak. I was washing the wountd in his head. Said he, "It is not that; it is that hole in my leg that is killing me." A puddle of blood was standing on THE BATTLR OF MOORE'S CREEK 91 the ground about his feet. I took his knife, cut away his trousers and stocking and found the blood came from a shot hole through the fleshy part of his leg. I looked about and could see nothing that looked as if it would do for dressing wounds but some heart leaves. I gathered a handful and bound them tight to the hole, and the bleeding stopped. I then went to the others — Doctor ! I dressed the wounds of many a brave fellow who did good fighting long after that day ! I had not inquired for my husband, but while I was busy Caswell came up. He appeared very much surprised to see me, and was with his hat in hand about to pay some compliment, but I interrupted him by asking — "Where is my husband ? ' ' "Where he ought to be, madam, in pursuit of the enemy. But, pray," said he, "how came you here!" '0, I thought," replied I, "you would need nurses as well as soldiers. See ! I have already dressed many of these good fellows; and here is one" — going to Frank and lifting him up with my arm under hes head so that he could drink some more water — "would have died before any of you could have helped him." "I believe you," said Frank. Just then I looked up, and my husband, as bloody as a butcher and as muddy as a ditcher, stood before me. Note. — It was his company that forded the creek, and penetrating the swamps, made the furious charge on the British left and rear, which decided the fate of the day.) "Why, Mary!" he exclaimed, "what are you doing there? Hugging Frank Cogdell, the greatest reprobate in the army?" "I don't care," I cried, "Frank is a brave soldier and a true friend to Congress." " True, true ! every word of it !" said Caswell. "You are right, madam ! ' ' with the lowest possible bow. "I would not tell my husband what brought me there, I was so happy ; as were all ! It was a glorious victory ; I came just at the height of the engagement. I knew my hus- band was surprised, but I could see he was not displeased with me. It was night again before our excitement had at 92 A SHORT SKETCH OF LIFE OF MARY HOOKS all subsided. Many prisoners were brought in, and among them some very obnoxious, but the worst of the tories were not taken prisoners. They were, for the most part, left in the woods and swamps wherever they were overtaken. I begged for some of the poor prisoners, and Caswell readily told me none should be hurt but such as had been guilty of murder and house-burning. I, in the middle of the night, again mounted my mare and started for home. Caswell and my husband wanted me to stay till next morning and they could send a party with me ; but no ! I wanted to see my child, and I told them they could send no party who could keep up with me. "What a happy ride I had back ! and with what joy did I embrace my child as he ran to meet me!" A Short Sketch of Life of Mary Hooks. In due time for a ' ' course of love, ' ' Ezekiel Slocumb and Mary Hooks were married, both being about eighteen years of age. The lovely and spirited bride immediately entered upon her duties at her husband's home on the Neuse; but they were not allowed to remain long in untroubled selcuri- ty. To prevent or punish the frequent depredations of the tories, the boy husband joined a troop of light horse, who, acting on their own responsibility, performed the duty of scouts, scouring the country wherever they had notice of any necessity for their presence. In these prolonged ab- sences, Mrs. Slocumb took the entire charge of the planta- tion, being obliged to perform many of the duties which usually fall to the lot of the rougher sex. She used to say, laughingly, that she had done in those perilous times all that a man ever did, except "mauling rails;" and to take away even that exception she went out one day and split a few. She was a graceful and fearless rider ; and Die Vernon her- self never displayed more skillful horsemanship in scamper- ing over the hills of Scotland, than did the subject of this memoir, in her excursions through the wild woods of the Neuse." A SHORT SKETCH OF LIFE OE MARY HOOKS 93 The true dignity of an American matron was shown in Mrs. Slocumb 's reception and entertainment of the British officers, as already related. Her deportment was uniformlly calm and self-possessed ; her lofty spirit gave to her slender and fragile form a majesty that secured the respect of all the officers, and protected her from the slightest approach towards insolent familiarity. She presided at her table with dignity and courtesy, extending open hospitality to all her unbidden guests. Her liberality was acknowledged by strict orders that no depredations should be committed on anything belonging to the house or plantation. These or- ders were in general successfully enforced ; but even military authority could not save the farm yard poultry or stock from a hungry soldiery. Not a feather was left, and many a fine bullock was knocked in the head. But in other things the protection availed her. On the news of the army's ap- proach, she had taken the precaution to bury in the edge of a marsh near at hand her plate and other valuables. The soldiers suspected the place of deposit, and plunged their pike-staffs into the ground about the spot until they dis- covered the treasure. They were compelled to restore it to the rightful owner. Mrs. Slocumb 's little son, at this time two or three years old, became a pet with several of the officers. The little fel- low was permitted to share with them the pleasure and pride of prancing about on their splendid chargers. Per- haps to some of them his childish glee recalled their own domestic circles, and awakened in their stern hearts the holy feelings of home. They seemed delighted when the infant equestrian thus playing dragoon would clap his little hands and shout in his innocent mirth. This child was the Hon. Jesse Slocumb, member of Congress, who died full or honors in early manhood. His remains rest in the Congressional burial-ground at Washington. The brother of Mrs. Slo- cumb already mentioned, was at the same time a member from the Wilmington District. When the British army broke up their encampment at the plantation, a sergeant was ordered by Col. Tarleton to 94 A VISIT TO DUPUN COUNTY, N. C, IN igo8 stand in the door till the last soldier had gone out, to ensure protection to the lady whose noble bearing had inspired them all with the most profound respect. This order was obeyed ; the guard brought up the rear of that army in their march northward. Mrs. Slocumb saw them depart with tears of joy, and on her knees gave thanks, with a full heart, to the Divine Being who had protected her. A day or two afterwards her husband returned to her arms and a happy home. They lived together for sixty years in unbroken harmony, the patriarchs of all that country, and looked up to with unbounded love and respect. She died on the 6th of March, 1836. Her venerable husband survived her about five years. Both now slumber together near the home where they lived and loved so long. Pleasant Green has passed into the hands of other owners ; the noble old oaks that surrounded the mansion and lined the avenue, have been girdled, and seem to lift their bare arms in lamentation for their ancient possessors. But the memory of those who dwelt there is linked with glorious recollections, which time can never efface from American hearts. A Visit to Duplin County, N. C, in 1908. The present conditions in Duplin County, N. C, and the locations of the old homesteads of his ancestors there may be seen from the following letter received by the writer from Thomas H. Molton, of Birmingham, who in 1908 made a visit there : "Isaac Hunter and wife, Priscilla, were the mother and father of John Hunter, the father of my mother. They lived and died at Kenansville. " "I met in Dunn, Dr. Faqua Smith, who is a grandson of my great aunt, Polly (Hooks) Slocumb. He has a daugh- ter who is the wife of C. T. Young, cashier of the bn r:k of Dunn" "At Mt. Olive we secured a buggy and brove 3% inilss A VISIT TO DUPLIN COUNTY, N. C, IN 1908 95 to the graves of Col. Ezekiel Slocumb and Auat "Polly" Slocumb. These graves are side by side, near the road and also near the railroad. They have been badly neglected, but the head and foot pieces in marble are in place and the in- scriptions very plain. On one is the following : In memory of Col. Ezekiel Slocumb A patriot of the Revolution Who departed this life July L ) 840 Aged 80 years and 16 days The headstone of the other grave is marked as follows : In memory of Polly Slocumb Wife of Ezekiel Slocumb Who departed this life March 6, 1836 Aged 86 years and 24 days "The old Slocumb house was located about 200 yards east of the graves and across the railroad. The place is now owned by Mrs. Hattie Hall. It was known as Pleasant Green when owned by the Slocumbs. It was here that they lived during the Revolutionary War. She was sister to great- grandfather, Charles Hooks." "The ground on which the old house stood is now a tobacco patch, and the only part of the old house left that I was able to secure was a brickbat which I brought home with me." "Next day about eleven o'clock we made a start from Faison about six miles to the old home of Col. Charles Hooks, my great-grandfather, father of my grand mother, Kitty Hooks Molton. This place is about ten miles from Kenans- ville, and is now occupied by F. D. Hurst and Robt. D. Hunter as tenants. John H. Hardy is the present owner. ' ' "Isaac and Priscilla Hunter, the parents of my grand father Hunter, also had a daughter named Betsy, who mar- 96 A VISIT TO DUPLIN COUNTY, N. C, IN 1 90S ried Robert Tate. Their grand children live in Pender county, North Carolina. Isaac Hunter resided in Kenans- ville, where he was a very large land owner. His daughter Ann became the wife of Charles Hooks. ' ' "I met at the old Charles Hooks' place William Hogan Hunter, who lives two miles from the Hooks place. ' ' "At the old Hooks place , about a half mile from the house, in a pine thicket, I saw a large slab over a grave with the following inscription: In memory of Eliza Jane Hatch and her infant babe, daughter of Charles and Ann Hooks, was born On 9th day of December, 1799, And departed this life On 9th day of October, 1820, Aged 20 years and 10 months. 1 ' 0, Eliza, Eliza, My heart bleeds afresh at the sound of thy name, And yet, I love to repeat it and dwell upon the sound." "After partaking of a spl ndid dinner at the old Charles Hooks place we started again for the home of grandfather Molton. About three miles from the Hooks place we passed the former home of Andrew and Kitty Hunter Hurst. It is a beautiful place with a two-story house, with large shade trees and very fine farming lands around it." "From the Molton place on "Wednesday morning, July 1, 1908, we left for Kenansville, about three miles distant. In looking through the old original wills, I found the will of Thomas Hooks, dated Nov. 7th, 1801, a copy of which I pro- cured. It mentions the names of his wife, Susan, son David, daughter Susan McGowan, daughter Polly Slocumb, daugh- ter Levina Slocumb, sons Thomas, William, Charles, and Hilary Hooks. I also saw the original will of Isaac Hunter, A VISIT TO DUPLIN COUNTY, N, C, IN I908 97 the second, which mentions the names of his wife Patience, a son Robert John, daughters Priscilla Ann and Mary Eliza. I also saw the original will of Nicholas Hunter, dated 1791, which mentions his sons, Hardie, Nicholas, and Edward, and his daughters Mary and Nancy. ' ' "I neglected to state in the proper place that we passed between the Hooks and Molton places the old home of Robert Hunter and Sarah Dunn Hunter. He was a son of Isaac Hunter, brother of grandfather, John Hunter. The old home has been destroyed by fire." ' 'After a pleasant stay of several hours at Kenansville we started for Warsaw to take the train for Wilmington. On the way to Warsaw we passed the old Middleton home, and saw at Warsaw, Fred G. Middleton." "At Warsaw we caught the train for Wilmington. On the way we passed Magnolia, where Dr. Charles H. Harris married c Mag Monk,' as cousin Rachel Pearsall, my travel- ing companion, called her. Dr. Charles Harris resided there after his marriage till they moved to Alabama (1863). The place where the house stood in which Dr. Charles H. Harris was married was pointed out to me, and I heard the story of how much beloved ' Mag Monk ' was. At the time of her death the bell in her old church was tolled upon the hour of her funeral, which was occuring at Cedartown, Ga., and the people of Magnolia assembled and held services. Cousin Rachel Pearsall says that Cousin Mag Monk Harris was more beloved than any woman who lived in that section of the country." "At Willard, about half way between Warsaw and Wilmington ,was where Aunt Betsy Tate lived. She was a sister of grandfather Hunter and had twoWns, Robert and Tom. Robert moved to Mississippi, and Tom died, leaving several children who still live in Pender county, N. C. " ' ' My entire trip and visit at each and every point where I stopped was most interesting, and I shall never forget the kindness of the relatives whom I was so fortunate as to meet. I shall remember each and all of these relatives with much regard and affection." 98 MAXWSIX MAXWELL. This family came over in a colony from Ireland and set- tled in Dnplin county, N. C, at a place known as "The Grove," near Kenansville. Archibald Maxwell and his nine- year-old brother, Henry, came over with the colony. Archi- bald was the teacher of the colony which came probably about 1780. Henry married Margaret Hunter, and had two children, James and Ann Copeland. James married Re- becca Chastin. Ann Copeland married J. B .B. Monk, and was mother of Margaret. James Maxwell was born January 1, 1800, and died in Duplin county, N. C, April 27, 1873. James and Ann, chil- dren of Henry were orphans and reared by a Mr. Hunter, their uncle. James Maxwell and Rebecca Chastin had the following children: Daughters — Margaret, Mollie Ann, Genoa, Lucy, Sallie, Virginia; sons — Hugh Gillespie, John Henry, James, Van Buren, David . James Richard Maxwell and Dr. H. B. Maxwell, sons of John Henry Maxwell, now, 1910, live in Whiteville, N. C. James Richard is a druggist, H. B. a physician. MONK. Jacob Monk, father of James Brewster Ballotte Monk, came from Bertie county to Duplin when a young man. His ancestors were Irish. His wife, Sallie Wilkinson, came from Ireland. They had four children, viz. ; Sallie, Jacob, John, James B. B. Sallie married a Merritt, against her father's will, and was disinherited. Jacob went to a sailor's life and his future was never known. John W. died in 1846 without children and left his estate to his neice, Margaret child of his brother, James. He is buried on his plantation in Duplin county, near the line of Sampson county. James B. B. Monk married Ann Copeland Maxwell September 4, 1834. In the early part of their married life monk 99 they lived at Kenansville, owning land and slaves. In 1850 they moved to a new town on the Wilmington & Weldon R. R., called Stricklandville, the name afterwards changed to Magnolia. They reared only one child, Margaret, whom they educated in North Carolina, being sent first to the 1 ' Grove, ' ' near Kenansville, then to Graves & Wilcox college at Warrenton, then to Clinton, (N. C.) Female College, where she graduated in 1856, the first graduate of that col- lege. In March 1863, James B. B. Monk, wife and daughter refugeed to Tuskegee, Ala., living there till March, 1866, when with their former slaves they moved to Kingston, Ga. ; thence they moved in 1870 to their old home at Magnolia, N. C. There J. B. B. Monk died in 1878, and his wife who survived him two months then moved to the home of her daughter, Mrs. Charles H. Harris, at Cedartown, where she died. Before the Civil War James B. B. Monk and his wife were in possession of land and slaves sufficient for them to be con- sidered wealthy by comparison with the average. They both had inherited from their parents a nice estate, but a portion of both their lands and slaves came to them in a manner so remarkable that it is worth mentioning in the family records. About the year 1840 an old man named Smith was murdered in the lower part of Duplin County, and on inves- tigation by the court it was found that the murderers were two of Smith's slaves. The wife of Smith believed that these negroes had been hired to commit the murder by her brother, whose motive was to secure possession of the prop- erty, which consisted of thirteen negroes, a farm and some money. Mr. and Mrs. Smith had no children and the brother of the latter would have inherited her property unless she gave it by will or deed to some one else. A few years before the murder of Mr. Smith Mrs. Smith had been attracted by the loveliness of Margaret Monk, then a five-year-old child, who with her mother and father was passing the Smith place and stopped to get a drink of water. Mrs. Smith had never met the Monk fam- IOO DUPLIN COUNIY, N. C, AND THE MONK FAMILY ily before, but she was manifestly interested in the little girl. Afer the murder of her husband Mrs. Smith called on Mr. and Mrs. Monk at their home, told them of her proofs that her brother had had her husband killed and she begged that she might be allowed to live with them and make their little daughter Margaret her sole heir, stating that she "did not wish to leave one cent of her money" to her brother. After considering the matter, Mr. and Mrs. Monk acceded to her wishes and she lived the rest of her life, two years, in the Monk home and devised everything she had to Mar- garet. This rare incident is interesting for many reasons. One thing it certainly proves is that MargaretMonk was a win- some little girl. Duplin County, N. C, and the Monk Family. Duplin, the name of the county in eastern North Caro- lina, in which J. B. B. Monk lived and died, was named for Dublin County and city in Ireland. By a law well known to philologists the consonant (b) in Dublin softened into the (p) in Duplin. In Dublin County, Ireland, is a town, Monk- town, named for the Monk family. This county in Ireland, which sent its quota of emigrants to North Carolina, was the birthplace of the ancestors of Jacob Monk, some of whom came to North Carolina in the early history of the colony and settled in Bertie County on the Albermarle Sound. James B. B Monk, the father of Margaret Ann Monk, was born in Bertie County where r^s ancestors had lived for generations. His mother was Sallie Wilkinson, born in Ireland. George Monk, the first Duke of Albemarle, for whom Albemarle Sound was named, had as general of the English Army restored the Stuarts to the throne of England and was given by Charles II proprietary interest in Carolina in 1663. It was in Bertie County on the Albemarle Sound that the Monk family settled. These Monks may have been kinsmen of the Duke of Albemarle, their settlement during his life on DUPLIN COUNTY, N. C, AND THE MONK FAMILY IOI territory owned by him and on the sound named for him suggesting the likelihood of this. The writer has so far been unable to connect by ties of blood the Monk family who settled in Bertie County with George Monk, the Duke of Albemarle, to whom Charles II in 1663 had granted the land on which the family lived. George Monk as one of eight proprietors owned the entire state of Carolina, and it is certain that the ancestors of Jacob Monk were among the early settlers in Bertie County on Albemarle Sound. There is a tradition of blood relationship to the proprietor and it may rest on a basis of fact, but it is the duty of the writer to confess tuat the family records in his possession are too incomplete to justify a positive assertion that it does. James B. B. Monk, as stated above, moved from Bertie County to Duplin County. The leading families in Duplin then were the Kenans, Dicksons, Gillespies, Hunters, Hooks, Maxwells, Moltons, Sprunts, Middletons, Moores, Nicholsons and others who were the equals in native powers and civic worth of the best yet known to earth. They gave to social life in Duplin County a high standard of intelligence and virtue, and they became the parents of children who took an active part in the development of the Southern States, especially of the Carolinas, Tennessee, Georgia and Ala- bama. A fact which shows the quality of the early settlers of Duplin is found in their attention to education. Many of these settlers were themselves graduates of the universities at Dublin or Edinburg. The "Grove Academy," near Ken- ansville was established by -them and in 1785 it was incorpo- rated by the General Assembly of North Carolina. It was on land purchased from Nicholas Hunter. The Academy came to be considered one of the best in the land. It was there that Margaret Monk was prepared for college. 102 MARRIAGES MARRIAGES. William Harris and Sarah Coffee in Hancock county, Georgia, August 25, 1803. William Harris and Mary Drew Alston, December, 1811. Julia S. Harris, child of William Harris, and Jos. W. Field, January 9, 1823. Sarah Harris, child of William Harris, and Albert Pick- ett, March 20, 1832. Mary Gatlin Harris, child of William Harris, and John Gindrat, November 7, 1837. Jacob Monk, father of James B. B. Monk, and Sallie Wilkinson in Bertie county, N. C, circa, 1800. Henry Maxwell, father of Mrs. J. B. Monk, and Mar- garet Hunter, in Duplin county, N. C, circa, 1800. Peter Coffee Harris and Narcissa Ann Hooks, October 18, 1827, at Montgomery. James B. B. Monk and Ann C. Maxwell, September 4, 1834, near Kenansville, N. C. Charles Hooks Harris and Margaret Ann Monk June 18, 1857, at Magnolia, N. C. Peter Coffee Harris and Mollie A Woolley July 14, 1857, at Kingston, Ga. William S. Harris and Mattie Edwards December , 1859, at Tuskegee, Ala. Willis B. Wood and Sallie A. Harris May 26, 1845, at Tuskegee, Ala. William S. Harris and Victoria L. Vann November 17, 1864, at Chunnenuggie Ridge, Ala. J. C. Harris and Ellen Lloyd Simmons December 2, 1879, at Cave Springs, Ga. Charles G. Janes and Narcissa Ann Harris, September 20, 1885, at Cedartown, Ga. Peter Charles Harris and Mary Guthrie October 6, 1894, at Fort Reno, Oklahoma Territory. J. C. Harris and Kate Robeson February 4, 1897, at Rome, Ga. BIRTHS I63 Seale Harris and Stella Rainer April 28, 1897, at Union Springs, Ala. William Thomas Garrett and Delia Harris June 26, 1907, at Cedartown, Ga. George Simmons Harris and Minnie Teague May 10, 1904, at Lowell, Mass. William Akard Blair and Margaret Monk Harris Octo- ber 12, 1908, at Rome, Ga. Maxwell Hunter Harris and Lula Allen, February 5, 1908, at San Antonio, Texas. William J. Harris and Julia Wheeler, July 28, 1905, at New York City. Talulah G. Harris and Julius A. Peek, December 24, 1887, at Cedartown, Ga. Margaret Harris and John Goldsmith, at Cave Springs, Georgia. Mary Seale Harris and Oscar Cummings Moore, March 22, 1892, at Union Springs, Ala. William Harris and Flora Belle Martin, April 30, 1902, at Union Springs, Ala. Lewis Harris and Lila Cowan Mclver, May 28, 1906. J. H. Robeson and Victoria Ward, September 20, 1864, near Selma, Ala. Births. Sarah Coffee, October 20, 1784, in Virginia. William Harris, June 2, 1774, at New Bern, N. C. Peter Coffee Harris, May 21, 1807. Charles Hooks born February 20, 1768, in Bertie county, North Carolina. Narcissa Ann Hooks, May 22, 1803. William Stephen Harris, February 22, 1831. Sarah Ann Catherine Harris, September 2, 1828. Charles Hooks Harris February 22, 1 835. Petar Coffee Harris July 24, 1837 James Brewster Ballotte Monk June 18, 1811, in Duplin county, N. C, 104 BIRTHS Ann Copeland Maxwell, July 16, 1803, in Duplin Co., N. C. Sarah Ann Monk, January 4, 1837. Margaret Ann Monk, May 19, 1838, in Duplin county, N. C. Victoria Vann, wife of "William Harris, born November 22, 1837. Children of C. H. and M. A. Harris : James Coffee Harris, April 28, 1858. Narcissa Ann Harris, February 11, 1860. Margaret Prairie Harris, September 15, 1862. Peter Charles Harris, November 10, 1865. William Julius Harris, February 3, 1868. Seale Harris, March 13, 1870. Sallie Hooks Harris, February 1, 1872. Mary Adella Harris, July 21, 1874. Maxwell Hunter Harris, April 21, 1877. Elizabeth Harris, May 18, 1882. Children of J. C. and E. L. Harris : George Simmons Harris, January 16, 1881, at Cedar- town, Ga. Agnes Ellen Harris, July 17, 1883, at Cedartown, Ga. Margaret Monk Harris, July 3, 1890, at Marietta, Ga. James Coffee Harris, October 10, 1900, child of J. C. and Kate R. Harris at Rome, Ga. Ellen Lloyd Simmons, June 22, 1859, at Cave Springs, wife of J. C. Harris. Kate Neal Robeson, July 6, 1867, at Selma, Ala., wife of J. C. Harris. LaGrange Robeson, March 20, 1870, at Selma, Ala. John Henry Robeson, March 13, 1838, in North Carolina. William Henry Robeson, October 14, 1872, at Selma, Ala. Mary Thomas Janes, March 22, 1887, child of C. G. Janes. Josephine Harris, child of Seale Harris, February 8th, 1899, BIKTHS IO$ Minnie Crunk Moore, December 30, 1892, child of Oscar Moore. William Harris Moore, February 12, 1894, son of Oscar Moore. Alfred Cummings Moore, October 24, 1896. Oscar Arnold Moore, September 25, 1903, son of Oscar Moore. Lewis McQueen Harris, June 14, 1907, child of Lewis Harris. Clara May Harris, January 24, 1909, child of Lewis Harris. Children of William S. Harris. Arnold S. Harris, January 16, 1866. Mary Seale Harris, February 2, 1867. William S. Harris, November 3, 1869. Louis Isbell Harris, November 2, 1871. Peter Coffee Harris, June 30, 1873. Victoria S. Harris March 12, 1875. Narcissa Ann Hooks, March 5, 1877. Ruby Vann Harris, November 19, 1879. Marguerite Harris, daughter of W. S. Harris, Jr., May 24, 1903. William S. Harris 3, son of W. S. Harris, Jr., January 31, 1904. Victoria Ward, mother of Mrs. J. C. Harris, January 10, 1844, near Selma, Ala. Gertrude Ellen Harris, child of George S. Harris, April 24, 1905. Margaret Simmons Harris, child of George S. Harris, June 20, 1909. Ellen Simmons Blair, child of W. A. Blair, January 4, 1910. James Coffee Harris, Jr., child of J. C. Harris, born Oc- tober 10, 1900. Francis Harris Janes, child of C. G. Janes, March 5, 1894. 106 BIRTHS Bayard Guthrie Harris, child of Peter Charles Harris, October 8, 1895, at Fort Porter, Buffalo, N. Y. Charles Dashiell Harris, child of Peter Charles Harris, January 25, 1897, at Fort Niagara, N. Y. John Guthrie Harris, son of Peter Charles Harris, June 22, 1898, at Fort Porter, Buffalo, N. Y. Mary Guthrie Harris, wife of Peter Charles Harris, daughter of Major John Brandon Guthrie, 15th United States Infantry, and Esther Bayard Guthrie, January 28, 1870, at Fort Shaw, Montana. Julia Wheeler, wife of W. J. Harris, daughter of Gen. Joseph Wheeler and Daniella Jones, who was granddaugh- ter of Gov. Peter Early, of Georgia. Stella Rainer, wife of Seale Harris, daughter of Capt. J. H. Rainer, of Union Springs, Ala. Seale Harris, son of Seale Harris, October 9, 1900. Julia Wheeler Harris, child of W. J. Harris, February 12, 1909. Harris Wood, child of Willis Wood, born Lizzie Ames Wood, child of Willis Wood, born Eliza Stocks Wood, child of Willis Wood, born- Willis Eason Wood, child of Willis Wood, born- Powell Wood, child of Willis Wood, born Children of Peter Coffee Harris (2) : Talulah Gertrude Harris, May, 1858. Andrew Feaster Harris, April 26, 1860. Mattie Harris, April, 1862. Coffee Harris, March, 1864. Julius Augustus Harris, March 22, 1866. Mary Narcissa Harris, March 17, 1868. Charles Davis Harris, October 9, 1870. Sarah Grigsby Harris, November 1, 1872. Eason Harris, 1874. Margaret Harris, May, 1876. Peter Harris, 1878, DEATHS 107 DEATHS. William Harris, October 12, 1825, grandfather of C. H. Harris. Peter Coffee Harris, Sr., November 18, 1856, father of C. H. Harris. Charles Hooks, October 18, 1843, grandfather of C. H. Harris. Narcissa Ann Harris, May 27, 1864, mother of C. H. Harris. Sarah Coffee Harris, wife of William Harris, November 23, 1807, grandmother of C. H. Harris. Mattie E. Harris, December 17, 1861, wife of W. S. Harris. Sallie Ann Wood, October, 1867, widow of Willis E. Wood. James Maxwell, April 27, 1873. James B. B. Monk, October 23, 1878, in Magnolia, N. C, father of Mrs. C. H. Harris. Ann C. Monk December 16, 1878, in Cedartown, Ga., mother of Mrs. C. H. Harris. Sarah Ann Monk, October 28, 1840, sister of Mrs. C. H. Harris. Sallie Hooks Harris, child of C. H. Harris, June 19, 1873. Mollie, wife of Peter C. Harris, June 4, 1889. Willis Eason Wood, January, 1890. Marie Thomas Janes, child of C. G. Janes, May 24, 1890. Ellen Simmons, wife of J. C. Harris, January 8, 1895. Francis Harris Janes, son of C. G. Janes, June, 1896. John Guthrie Harris, son of Peter Charles Harris, Sep- tember 6, 1899. William S. Harris, brother of C. H. Harris, May 3, 1897. Mararget Ann Harris, wife of C. H. Harris, March 4, 1901. Peter C. Harris, brother of C. H. Harris, December, 1905, 108 DEATHS Bayard Guthrie Harris, son of Peter Charles Harris, September 4, 1909. Agnes A. Simmons, mother of first wife of J. C. Harris, May 14, 1872. Joshua E. Simmons, father of first wife of J. C. Harris, July 17, 1861. John Henry Robeson, father of second wife of J. C. Harris, January 24, 1910. Victoria Ward, mother of second wife of J. C. Harris, April 7, 1878. Children of P. C. Harris, Jr. : Talulah Gertrude Harris, wife of Julius A. Peek, child of P. C. Harris, August, 1901. Andrew Feaster Harris, . Mattie Harris, Coffee Harris, Eason Harris, Margaret Harris, wife of John Goldsmith, Ruby Vann Harris, child of William S. Harris, July 24, 1880. William S. Harris, child of William S. Harris, March 8, 1905. Record of Family of Ellen Simmons, Wife of J. C. Harris. Richard Simmons and Frances Smith married in Vir- iniag, 1798. Children of Richard Simmons : Edward Simmons, born May 2, 1799. Dollie Simmons, born August 21, 18011. James Simmons, born April 17, 1803. Sallie Simmons, born March 25, 1807. William Simmons, born May 22, 1809. Joshua R. Simmons, born July 14, 1811, father of Mrs. J. C. Harris. R. Sheldon Simmons, born April 22, 1814. Charles R. Simmons, born March 11, 1816, DEATHS IO$ H. Simmons, born December 4, 1820. J. H. Gill, grandfather of Mrs. J. C. Harris, married in South Carolina Mary Bradford, November 10, 1817. Mary Bradford Gill, Grandmother of Mrs. J. C. Harris, died October 20, 1838. J. H. Gill married in Georgia Sallie Simmons, October, 1839. Sallie Simmons, died August, 1855. Joshua R. Simmons married Agnes A. Gill, January 14, 1836, his sister's stepdaughter. Calvin H. Simmons born November 19, 1836, died April, 1893. Rufus R. Simmons, born April 27, 1838, died April 9, 1878. Mary F. Simmons born June 12, 1840, died April, lrt9i). William R. Simmons, born May 8, 1842, died May 29, 1875. Mattie J. Simmons, born May 6, 1842. Madge A. Simmons, born July 26, 1848. Allie A. Simmons, born June 9, 1856. Ellen Lloyd Simmons, born June 22, 1859. W. P. Rivers married Mary F. Simmons June 12, Hoc. R. R. Simmons married Eliza R. Davis January 16, 1868. Calvin H. Simmons married A. M. Simmons, August ;5, 1860. Mattie J. Simmons married J. S. Davis, 1867. Madge A. Simmons married J. S. Stubbs, September 15, 1867. William R. Simmons married S. A. Carter January 4, 1874, died March, 1875. Ellen L. Simmons married J. C. Harris, December 2, 1879. Allie A. Simmons married J. C. Nichols January 25, 1881. J. H. Gill, died October 10, 1878. no FAMILY RECORD OF KATE ROBESON Agnes A. Simmons, mother of Mrs. J. C. Harris, died May 13, 1877. Joshua R. Simmons, father of Mrs. J. C. Harris, died July 16, 1861. Family Record of Kate Robeson, Second Wife of J. C. Harris Andrew Robeson Mary Spencer Thomas Robeson Sarah Singletary Moved from Scotland 1665. Died in Philadelphia 1719. Graduate Oxford, England; Judge Gloucester County, N. J., in 1688- 1692; member N. Y. Council from 1688-1701. Born 1692 in Philadelphia. Died 1773 in Bladen County, N. to which he moved 17 — . C, Thomas Robeson / Mary Bartram \ Born — . Died 1794. (Brother of Capt. Peter Robeson). Lieut.-Col. of Bladen Co. Militia, Colonial Records, Vol. X, p. 207. In command at Bat- tle of Elizabethtown ; buried Walnut Grove. Mary Bartram, daughter of William Bartram and Elizabeth Loick (Quakers). Wm. Bartram, born 1706 in Philadelphia, son of Wm. Bartram and grandson of John Bart- Bartram, who came with Wm. Penn in 1682 from Derbyshire, Eng. Bar- trams were of Norman origin. Bartram B. Robeson Margaret Raiford Born 1764. Died 1818 in Bladen County, North Carolina, FAMILY RECORD OF KATE ROBESON III William Robeson Ann Coddington Born 178—. Died 1827 in Bladen County, North Carolina. Married 1796. William Bartram Robeson Margaret LaGrange Daniel Born 1806. Died 1847 in Bladen, North Carolina. Married 1827. John Henry Robeson Sophronia Victoria Ward Born March 13, 1838, in Brunswick County, N. C. Lieut. Com. D. in 8th Ala. Regiment C. S. A. Born January 10, 1844. Died April 7, 1878. Buried Dal- las, Texas. Kate Neal Robeson James C. Harris Married Feb'y. 4, 1897, Rome, Ga. Born July 6, 1867, Selma, Ala. Born April 28, 1858 in Magnolia, Duplin County, North Carolina. James Coffee Harris, Jr. I Born October 10, 1900, Rome, ) Georgia. On her mother's side the family record of Kate Robeson may be taken from the letter written to her by her mother 's brother, W. C. Ward, of Birmingham, Ala., as follows: In the latter part of the 17th, or the beginning of the 18th century, more than two hundred years ago, three brothers of the name of Ward came from England and set- tled in Virginia in what was then called "The Roanoke Country/ ' which must have been in the southeast part of Virginia. In Suffolk, which is in Nansimond County, I was told many years ago, that the Wards in that place were so numerous that one might shut his eyes and hit a Ward with a rock. There are Wards living up in the Piedmont 112 FAMILY RECORD OF KATE BOBBSON country and in Richmond. Your great-grandfather's father was named John Ward, and your great-grand father was also named John Ward. Your great-grandfather's wife was a LaNier and a French woman. In the year 1775 father and son left Virginia and moved southward through North Carolna into South Carolina. They were in the battle at the Widow Moore's Bridge in southeastern North Carolina, not far from Wilmington, when McLeod was killed. Both father and son were soldiers in the Revolutionary War, and I think a younger son named David was in the seige of Savannah, say in 1780, where General Lincoln and the French general in command of the French forces were de- feated. Your great-granduncle David died of smallpox in the trenches before Savannah. After the defeat of the combined forces, father and son, with a neighbor, returned to their homes in South Carolina. Before reaching home they had to cross a swollen river, the Edisto, I think. The whole country was overflowed with water, and after cross- ing the stream they found their way blockaded by a band of Tories. The order was given, " Every man take care of himself," and the three separated. Your great-grand- father was the only one to return. His father and the neighbor were never heard of afterwards and were supposed to have been killed by the Tories. Your great-grandfather lost an eye by the explosion of a gun in a night battle. From what I could learn, this was the battle of Eutaw Springs. After the Revolutionary War your great-grandfather, John Ward, was ifaund settled in Edgefield district, or county, near the town of Lexington, South Carolina, and there re- mained until about the year 1819 or 1820, when he and his family removed to Alabama. In the war of 1812 Uncle James Ward was a soldier. Your grandfather, my father, though of age sufficient, was not a soldier and there was not much occasion for volunteers in the South, the prin- cipal attack being along the northern boundary of North Carolina. It was said that when the three brothers came over from England they covenanted that they would main- tain their family names. Your great-great-grandfather had FAMILY RECORD OF KATE ROBESON 1 1 3 a number of sons named John, James, David, Daniel, Solo- mon and Henry. The sons of your great-grandfather were James, John, David, Henry, Daniel and Emanuel, and there were three daughters named Feriba, Nancy and Polly. Henry was killed by lightning when nineteen years of age. Feriba married a man named John Fox and he lived with his family in South Carolina, and there his descendants now live. All the others came to Alabama. The younger sons of the great-great-grandfather drifted around through the Southern part of Georgia. Some of them settled in Colum- bus, Ga., and one of hem, Daniel Ward, died at Benton, Lowndes County, Alabama. Frequently I meet with peo- ple having these old family names, with whom I cannot trace any relationship. All of the Wards south, so far as I can remember, including those that at in Kentucky, are of Virginia origin, and have substantially the same prominent physical features. Your grandfather David Ward in early life settled in Wainsboro, near Augusta, Ga., afterwards re- moving to Centerville, Bibb County, Alabama. In Center- ville he engaged in the shoe and grocery business, at the same time keeping a freight boat on the Cahaba River, run- ning to Centerville and Mobile, Ala. He made some money and bought about 640 acres of land on Six Miles Creek, in Bibb County, where all of his children were born. After locating this farm in 1824 or 1825, he went to North Caro- lina and brought back with him a number of negroes, who constituted the beginning of his negro estate. In 1831 he married your grandmother, Elizabeth C. A. Carleton, al- ways called Adezue. She became the mother, I think of twelve children, seven daughters and five sons. At the time of his death in 1860 there were eight children living. My mother died in June 1859 of consumption, and all her daugh- ters were supposed to have contracted consumption from her, and she contracted it from a case of hasty consumption in the oldest daughter Amanda. The names of the children were Washington LaFayette, Amanda Kathrine, William Columbus, Araminta V., Sarah Ann Celicia, Cynthia D., Yictoria S., Augustus Monroe, Euphrasia Claramond, David 114 FAMILY RECORD OF KATE ROBE30*t Whitfield and Eugene Doke. I omitted the name of an un- named infant girl who died when a month old. I entered the University of Alabama in April, 1856, graduating in 1858 with first honor. I was immediately elected to the chair of pure mathematics in Howard College, remaining there until the latter part of April, 1861, when I volunteered as a private soldier in Company G of the 4th Alabama regi- ment, and with that regiment served in Virginia until after the battle of Getysburg in July, 1863, where I was wounded. ^t-ic^euc in Luc .year ltfoO married Miss Jane Maree, the daughter of W. S. Marie, near Perryville, Perry County, Alabama. He was then merchandising at Centerville. After the war began, he removed from Centerville to the planta- tion to take care of the farm and the negroes on the plan- tation. Our sister, Araminta V., a most beautiful and ac- complished young woman, died in October, 1859. Sarah died in February, 1860, Cynthia in April, 1862, Monroe died 1875. David Whitfield married Miss Fitzpatrick at New- burn, Ala., in the year 1879, and now lives on a farm two miles east of Greensboro. They have three sons and two daughters. I married, as you know, Miss Alice Goodhue in Febru- ary 1868, then living in Selma, where I lived until Decem- ber, 1885. Since December, 1885, I have lived in Birming- ham. I need not attempt to give you the history of the other members of the Ward family. What I have stated is entirely from memory, having personal knowledge of most of the things I have writen. In England the earliest Ward mentioned was during the reign of Charles I. His name was John Ward, and he was a jeweler to Queen Kathrine. Because of his service to his mistress, the Queen, he was ennobled with the title of Earl of Dartmouth. It may be that we are the descendants of a collateral line, as the title became extinct in one generation after the first Earl and revived then a collateral branch of his family. The next information I have was that in the 18th century one John Ward was convicted of plagiarism. Whether the brothers that came to America had any estate I have no means of FAMILY RECORD OF KATK ROBESON 115 knowing. There are certain facial features that distin- guish the race, however. Your great-great-grandfather was tall, large boned, heavy underjaw, prominent cheek bones, with gray eyes. Part of his children took after their mother, the LaNiers, and have dark brown eyes, stout forms and are rather good looking — myself, for instance as a sam- ple, and your mother. You may not know it, but she was called the most beautiful girl in the Judson when she was a student there. You and your sister, particularly your sister, are types of the "Ward family, having the French cast of your features. Now, I have writen you this long letter which gives you perhaps as correct a history of your mother's family as you will get from any source whatever. I have not, how- ever, mentioned your grandmother's family. As men- tioned, she was Miss Carleton. Her father, Henry Carle- ton, died in Monroe County, Ga., about the year 1827. He was born in Elbert or Clarke County, Georgia, north of Augusta. His father's name was Robert Carleton, his grandfather's name was Henry Carleton, and lived between the Pamunkey and Mataponi rivers, King William County, Virginia. Your grandmother's grandfather, with his fam- ily, removed from Virginia to Georgia in 1781. They were of the same family, it is supposed, of Sir Guy Carleton, who was of the same family as the Earle of Dorchester, but we never could trace the genealogy. Sir Guy Carleton went back in descent to the battle of Hastings in 1066. His an- cestors went to England with William the Conquerer. From this ancestor, so far as we know, all of the Carletons were descended. Carleton Hall, in England, was the leading domestic establishment, and there was a (de) before the Carleton. North Georgia, in fact all Georgia, is well sprink- led with Carletons, and their family connections are of the best. The Freemans and the Hillyers are proud of their Carleton descent. I must say that I am prouder of the Carleton stran in my blood than I am of the Ward. The family is not only older, but purer in character and descent. 1 have always thought that the superiority of your grand- FEB 21 mt Il6 FAMILY RECORD OF KATE ROBESON father David Ward's children over the children of other brothers, was due to your grandmother Carleton's connec- tion and blood. I am glad to thus show you that you are of honorable descent on your mother's side, and her family has always been distinguished for rectitude of character, honesty in business matters and for a proper family pride. I trust you may preserve this letter, as you may never again have an opportunity of obtaining these details. 1 J> 59 A LEMy'l HARRIS kSSSi ^. .& ,4 N 4*°* -v ^ *..•• A° V "^ y °^ ^ y ^ -C, OOMS BROS. >°.mar 8r/^.>; '>°W .Hq, ^ FLA. ) V £§^32084 ^ ^ ^ «5°^ H B I