Ancestors (4 page)

As for Henry Maxwell, what seems most likely is that he was an orphan left in the care of his mother’s brother.

The old woman said that if her grandfather had any brothers or sisters, she had never heard them spoken of. She also said that he was highly educated and came of a well-to-do family in Scotland, and brought money with him to this country, which he changed into “Congress money”—that is to say, money issued by the Continental Congress—soon after his arrival, thereby impoverishing himself. Henry Maxwell was eleven or twelve years old when he left Ireland, and I like very much the idea of an erudite boy arriving in America with a trunk full of pound notes. Unfortunately it isn’t true. It can’t be. By 1741 Walter Carson
was already living in what was then Lancaster County and is now York County, Pennsylvania, and the first issue of Continental money was made in 1775. Possibly two different stories got crossed in the old woman’s mind. If that boy wasn’t rich, at least he could read and write, for Scotland, unlike England, had had free public schools since the 16th century.

The known facts about him are: He married his cousin, Agnes Carson, and worked at the weaver’s trade. He had seven sons and no daughters. He fought in the American Revolution; he was a private in the Fifth Regiment of the Pennsylvania Line. He is listed in the tax rolls of 1783 as owning one horse and two horned cattle, for which he paid a tax of five shillings, seven pence; and in the 1790 census, under the name of Harry Maxwell—unless Harry Maxwell is another man, living in the same township, which is unlikely. And he died sometime before January 19, 1792, when his estate was administered.

If Henry Maxwell owned any land, no documentary evidence of this fact has ever been uncovered by any of the family antiquarians. But the land was there, not being used by anybody, and he may just not have bothered about taking title to it. In 1741 Walter Carson acquired from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania one hundred acres on Big Bottom, near Conewago Creek, on the east side of the Susquehanna. In 1743, a hundred and fifty acres at Three Springs. In 1744 two hundred acres on Great Conewago. And that same year he and his wife, Agnes, bought two hundred acres more, on Conewago Creek, from John Steel. This was all cheap land, beyond the Quaker farms that ringed Philadelphia, and his neighbors were mostly Germans from the Palatinate and illiterate but resourceful Scotch-Irish who had given up farming as a bad job and turned to hunting and trapping. With that much land to be dealt with in one way or another, one can say—it is not a question of
having to imagine—that Henry Maxwell as a boy had to clear brush and cut timber, was set to pulling stumps, rounded up the cows and milked them. The look of the sky, which was so very different from the sky at home or in Ireland, and the direction of the wind told him what the next day’s weather would be like. A halo round the moon meant a lengthy slow rain inside of eight hours. Smoke that did not rise meant that a storm was on the way. A heavy dew at night meant a fair day for drying hay. Sometimes he and his uncle went haying at night, by the light of the moon or the stars, because it was cooler. Bats and swallows flying near the ground meant rain, and so did the increased odor of swamps and ditches.

The sound of a bell coming over the woods and fields meant a church service, a funeral, or an Indian attack. In the fall of the year his hands were stained from husking black walnuts. In winter, so they would be warm when he put them on in the morning, he pushed his clothes down to the bottom of the bed with his bare feet, and slept with his head under the covers. While he was waiting his turn at the mill he got into a fight with a boy who was a head taller than he was, and afterward they were friends. They fished and set snares together, and rode one behind the other, bareback, on the same old white horse. Compared with all this, what is a trunk full of pound notes? What, even, is erudition?

It is possible that his uncle asked him to keep the accounts. To make brown ink you boiled walnut shells, vinegar, and salt. For black ink you added indigo or lamp black.

As his uncle had been strict with him, so he was strict with his sons, and taught them how to read and write, how to use a gun, how to set up the loom for him. He inculcated in them (by knocking their heads together if necessary) respect for their father and mother, and a proper devotion to the Almighty God, who ruled their lives. I see them sitting down at a rude table—seven long-legged, shaggy-haired, hungry
boys. What are they having for supper? Fried perch, possibly. Or bear meat. Or hog and hominy. Whatever could be cooked in an iron pot or a long-handled skillet or in the ashes of the huge hearth. Very likely there is a flintlock rifle within reach as they eat. (A trader on Middle Creek, after getting drunk in the company of some Indians, murdered them in their sleep—four men and two women. And in the morning he and his nineteen-year-old servant-boy threw the bodies in the creek and then went upstream to the cabin of one of the Indians and killed another Indian woman and two girls and a child. And now nobody was safe.) If Henry Maxwell heard an owl or a sound like a twig snapping, the inside of his mouth turned dry, for they were totally unprotected. In the fall of the year, he left his family and drove from farm to farm, with his loom in his cart. And the women brought out great masses of carded wool and flax, and he opened his pattern book before them. From time to time he was able to send word where he was, and from this they judged when he would be home.

Though he grew up among Quakers, Henry Maxwell never became one. The proof of this is that he bore arms against the British. So did his oldest son, James. In 1776 Henry Maxwell was in his late forties. Soldiers in that ill-fed, ill-clothed, undisciplined and perpetually dissolving army did not have to be young; only able-bodied. He had just turned sixty when he died, during the first administration of George Washington. I don’t know what he looked like.

As for his seven sons, James married
blank;
Walter married Rachel
blank;
Thomas married Jane Dixon; Samuel, John, and Henry again married
blank;
Robert married Mary Edie. Gone to graveyards every one, but not in any great hurry. They all died in their seventies except the youngest, Robert, who lived to be eighty-one and was my great-great-grandfather.

He was a shoemaker by trade, but it was by no means his only occupation. For a number of years, he and his brother Thomas were Indian scouts in the service of the Federal Government. In a book of reminiscences published in 1837, a certain Thomas R. Crawford states that the earliest visit of white men to what is now Harrison County, Ohio, was in the fall of 1793, and that five men, Indian scouts and spies, were sent out from Fort Thomas (which was built on the site of the present city of Wheeling, West Virginia), and that Robert Maxwell was one of them. They made their way “from the mouth of Wheeling Creek up the dividing ridge and crossed over on the evening of the second day. After they left the river, they proceeded to the headwaters of the Stillwater, venturing rather far into the interior for so small a force.” They were attacked by Indians during a night’s camping, and not all of them managed to return to the fort.

My great-great-grandfather was twenty-six at the time of the expedition from Fort Thomas. Within a year he had moved north, and settled in Brooke County, in what is now the extreme northern part of the state of West Virginia, a little way down the thin wedge that separates southern Pennsylvania from Ohio. Though it was part of Virginia until the Civil War, the reader must think of a hilly country with small farms and few slaves, and of a frontier society very different from that of the great plantations of the Tidewater. Here Robert Maxwell met and married the daughter of a Scotch-Irish frontiersman named Alexander Edie, who was exceedingly given to pulling up stakes and trying somewhere new. He had lived all over the western part of Pennsylvania and the eastern part of Ohio, farming and trading in land, and moving on whenever other settlers began to crowd in on him. He married twice and had two girls and six boys by each wife, and with that many people under his own roof I do not wonder that he wasn’t more gregarious. My great-great-grandmother, Mary Edie, was his second child by his
first wife, a Miss Dunbar. One of his sons became a doctor and another served in the Virginia legislature. Alexander Edie was sufficiently well-regarded by his fellow citizens to serve as foreman of the first grand jury of Washington County, Pennsylvania, and he seems to have witnessed a good many wills. On petition of the town of Washington, he and four others were appointed to view and if necessary lay out a road from Catfish Camp to the Presbyterian meeting house. He secured by deed from the Commonwealth of Virginia a tract of a thousand acres on the Ohio River near Steubenville. On this land there was a large blockhouse, half fort and half dwelling, where the people of the community took refuge during Indian raids. He went security for a friend who got into trouble, and when the man fled, Alexander Edie had to pay the bond of £5,000, which all but ruined him.

Standing in my grandmother’s bedroom, with a distant look in her eyes, as if she saw it all happening, Max Fuller’s mother told me a story that I now know was about the frontiersman’s daughter, Mary Edie. In the early spring, Robert Maxwell, having told his wife he would return at a certain time, went farther west, into Ohio, in search of better land, in a valley that was reasonably flat and fertile. He found land that he liked the look of, but the crop had to go in at once, so he stayed and planted before he started back. When he did not return at the time he said he would, his wife decided that something had happened to him, for he always did what he said he would do. She waited a week while she made him a pair of trousers and parched a bag of corn, and then, with the baby in her arms, wrapped in a shawl, she set out on foot, along a footpath through the forest. The trees frequently had trunks five or six feet thick, and almost no sunlight penetrated their dense foliage. The virgin forest was gloomy and oppressively silent. She could have twisted her ankle and been unable to go on or turn
back. She could have been overtaken by a drunken hunter who had been too long without a woman. She could have met up with a party of Indians and been scalped and the baby’s brains dashed out against the trunk of a tree. She could have lost her way and starved to death. Instead, after many days, she met my great-great-grandfather coming home.

Apart from their gravestones, which their descendants soon lost track of, the people who settled in the wilderness did not leave lasting memorials; they left stories instead. The music of Beethoven’s
Fidelio
always rises up in my mind when I think of that meeting in the forest, and my throat constricts with an emotion that is, I’m afraid, purely factitious—unless feelings are more a part of our physical inheritance than is commonly believed, in which case it is Mary Edie’s joy, unquenchable, passed on, and then passed on again, generation after generation, along with the color of eyes and the shape of hands and characteristic habits of mind and temperament.

In 1800 Robert Maxwell took out a patent for land lying along Indian Short Creek. In that same book about the early days of Harrison County, there are a good many references to him. The scouting party is mentioned, and the fact that he and his brother Thomas were among the first white settlers and came before the roads were built. In 1805 Robert Maxwell was paid $1 for a wolf’s scalp. In 1810 he was elected constable and held this office for nine years. He served as a private in the War of 1812. At about this time he was elected county commissioner and squire—a title of office and courtesy usually given to justices of the peace. In 1824 and 1830 he took title to more land. From 1834 to 1840 he was an associate justice of the Court of Common Pleas.

His oldest daughter, the same old woman I spoke of, said that he was a man of clear, cool, and calculating mind, self-made and self-educated; that he had endured many hardships
and was deeply religious; that when angered he would not allow himself to speak until he had regained control of his feelings; that he was stern, severe, and sarcastic, and boasted that no one had ever said anything to which he could not make a satisfactory retort; that he was a kind husband and father, and his children revered and honored him.

A child’s view.

As it happens, I do know what my great-great-grand-parents looked like. A pair of oval photographs, made from daguerreotypes and considerably retouched, has come down in the family. The rather elegant tailoring of his coat and waistcoat suggests a man of some position, but he was not affluent. As for the face, you could not possibly mistake him for anything but a Scot. Looking at the photograph I feel I almost know what his voice sounded like. And even what he would say. For this rather mournful letter, written to his brother Henry during the War of 1812—at which time my great-great-grandfather was forty-seven or forty-eight—brings his personality into sharp focus: “… we had a Daughter Born to us on the Seventeenth of June last which makes the Seventh Daughter we have now living we have had likewise two Sons Born Since we come out here which makes our family now ammount to Eleven and thanks be to the giver they are all in prety good health at present Mary is not yet got very Stout Since she has had the little one but She has been generally in good health Since we come out I my Self had a very sore Spell last Fall a year ago and was even Dispaired of by the Doctor that waited on me and weakly as I was before I have been more so since indeed I am very often almost unfit for any Business but as I still do the business of Constable and as Sister is in the Township in which I live we are inabled to get along prety well for so far grain has been very scarce here indeed, it has been almost impossible to git atall but I hope it soon will be plenty enough we are now in great Expectations of gitting a Minister
placed ammongst us Shortly. Mr. Walden’s Congregation has become weak as not to be able to keep him any longer and We are about putting in a Call for him which all expect he will except. Brother Thomas and family are well I expect he will perhaps write therefore I will leave his Concerns to to himself we have Rumors ammongst us about the downf of Bonaaparte if true I am afraid it will operate much against us as it will give the British an opertunity of bringing there whole force bouth by Sea and land against us which in our present divided State may have very Serious Consequences The Federalists ammongst us opin they are about it what your Sentiments about the present war is unknownt to me but I hope the name of Tory will never be anexed that of Maxwell at least that Carries the same Blood in there veins that I do we have no Maxwell Tories in this part.”