Katie Perkins was born in 1875 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, a small factory city of traditional New Englanders and immigrants from Europe. Her parents were George Henry Perkins of Rhode Island and Margaret Rennie Crawford, an immigrant from Glasgow, Scotland. Katie had three siblings, half-brother George, brother William, and sister Hattie. Katie lived her entire life in Pawtucket, sometimes living with her parents, her widowed mother, and late in life by herself. She was educated at Pawtucket High School, and worked in various jobs as a bookkeeper, brush-maker, and house-cleaner. She died alone in 1937.
Infant Katie
Katie’s heritage on her father’s side was the Perkins, who immigrated from England in the 1600s. Her grandfather was John Prosser Perkins, a farmer, married to Huldah Tyler. John Prosser and Huldah had five children: Hannah Mahala, born 1827, Charles C., born 1838, George Henry, born 1833, John Riley, born 1834, and Palmer Gersham, born 1834. Their youngest son, Palmer, was thirty, married with a child, when he was killed at Cold Harbor in Virginia, during which thousands of Union and Confederate troops died.
George Henry Perkins, born November 9, 1833, departed during the 1850s from the small farming town of Exeter, where he grew up and where his parents and siblings would live out their lives; George moved northeast to Pawtucket, where there were more opportunities for a person engaging in industrial work. George married Mary Ann Tourgee of North Kingston, a town east of Exeter, on July 3, 1854. The Tourgee’s were descendants of French Huguenots. He was twenty-one and she was seventeen. In the 1860 census for North Providence/Pawtucket, George and Mary Ann lived as tenants with a family; George was a mill operative, that is, he worked in a spinning mill. Husband and wife had a personal estate of $200. The couple had a child, George Francis, in 1862. Unfortunately, Mary Ann died three years later on May 13, 1865. George remarried a Scottish immigrant, Margaret Rennie Crawford, nineteen months later, on December 27, 1866. He was thirty-three and she was twenty-five. By 1870, George and Margaret Rennie had thrived sufficiently that they owned their own home in Pawtucket. Besides George Francis, George had another child with Margaret, William Lennox, born July 12, 1868. George was no longer a mill worker, rather a peddler. In 1880, the family lived at 24 Woodbine St. in Pawtucket. (Apartment complexes now occupy the spot where they lived.) By this time, they had two more children, Katie, age five, and Hattie, age one. In time George gave up his occupation as a peddler. In 1900 he was an overseer at a cotton mill, living on Central Avenue (in a dwelling that no longer exists).
Margaret Rennie Crawford had immigrated to America from Glasgow, Scotland, along with her parents Hugh and Margaret Crawford on April 9, 1853, arriving at Pawtucket. Hugh Crawford was born in Glasgow on January 31, 1789; he died in Pawtucket, Rhode Island on July 1, 1857 when he was 68. He was the second-born son to John Crawford and Agnes Wright of Glasgow. He had many siblings, though most died in childhood. His mother died in childbirth in 1809 when Hugh was twenty. His father died at age of 86 in 1853.
Katie as a young woman
Hugh married Janet Rowan at Canongate, Edinburgh, Midlothian Scotland on April 4, 1809. Janet was twenty-one and Hugh was twenty. Their firstborn son was John in 1811, followed by Hugh, Jr., in 1814, George Hugh in 1816, Janet in 1818, and Agnes in 1819. Wife Janet died in 1839, and Hugh remarried Margaret Lennox on August 19, 1840 in Glasgow. She was thirty-five and he was fifty-one. They had two children, daughter Margaret Rennie, born Oct. 9, 1841, and son William, born in 1845.
The 1851 Scotland Census listed Hugh as a paper stainer who lived at 55 High St. in St. Paul parish in Glasgow. He was erroneously listed as sixty-seven years old (actually sixty-two). His wife Margaret was forty-three, daughter Margaret Rennie was nine, and son William was six. A paper stainer was an old and honorable profession in the British Isles, typically involving the staining of wall hangings such as wallpaper, sometimes engravings. Hugh’s son Hugh Jr. had been trained in this craft as well, as seen in a letter written from son to father in September, 1852.
Hugh Jr. had sailed for America in 1843, arriving at New York on August 13. He migrated to Providence, Rhode Island, and established himself in business as a paper box manufacturer. His wife Catharine Blair Crawford followed eight years later, arriving at New York on the vessel StatiraMorse on Sept 15, 1851, from Glasgow. Accompanying her was their daughter, Janet, age sixteen.
Hugh Jr. became a citizen Sept. 1852, which perhaps inspired him, joined by Catherine, in writing a letter of invitation to America to his father, on Sept. 27. Hugh Sr. was sufficiently impressed by the prospect of America to emigrate with his family, arriving at Pawtucket on April 9, 1853.
Hugh died in 1857. His widow Margaret worked to raise her children Margaret Rennie and William during the rough times of the Civil War. William served with the Union troops for four years. In 1860 Margaret was eighteen years old and was like her half-brother Hugh a box maker. William was sixteen and also employed. The mother and widow Margaret was a wash woman. Margaret, who went by “Maggie,” outlived Hugh by 18 years, dying May 3, 1875. Before she died she lived with her daughter Margaret Rennie and son-in-law George at their home in Pawtucket. Hugh and Margaret are buried next to Hugh Crawford Jr and Catherine Blair Crawford at Mineral Spring Cemetery in Pawtucket.
George and Margaret in 1880 had a growing family. Son George was seventeen; he worked as a clerk in a Pawtucket store. William was eleven, Katie was five, and Hattie was one. A niece of George and Margaret, Hannah Caroline Perkins, daughter of John Riley and Susan Perkins, lived with them at this time. She was seventeen, and worked in a woolen mill. Twenty years later, George and Margaret lived at 439 Central Ave. in Pawtucket. They had quite an extended family living them. George was sixty-seven and Margaret was fifty-eight. Son William Lennox was thirty-one, and lived at home after the tragic death of his first wife, Harriet L. Johnson, who had passed away three years earlier in 1897. Will and his unmarried sister Katie, twenty-five, worked as bookkeepers. Daughter Hattie, twenty-one, was by this time married to Samuel Brown, age twenty-five. He was listed by the census taker in 1900 as a chemist. Their daughter Florence Beatrice was an infant, born in 1899. Samuel, Hattie, and Florence lived with George and Margaret at the house. Charles and Margaret also had a family living as borders with them: a husband, wife, and young daughter. All in all ten people lived at this home on Central Ave.
Brown/Perkins Family: Katie is on the lower left; her nephews Will and Henry are next to her; next to them is Margaret Rennie; her granddaughter Florence is next to her; above Florence is Hattie; next to her is Will, and next to him is his second wife Lizzie; next to Lizzie is Samuel Brown
Katie, who was single her whole life, was surrounded by family. Living nearby were many of the Perkins’s. About 25 miles away, in Exeter, Rhode Island, Katie’s aunt Hannah Mahala Perkins Reynolds lived until her death in 1911. Her husband Almon Perkins had died in 1899. Her son Whitman Greene Perkins continued to live in Exeter. Katie’s uncle John Riley Perkins died in 1912 in Exeter, Rhode Island. He was married to Susan and had children David G. Perkins and John Palmer Perkins. They all lived and died in Exeter. In 1900 Katie lived with George and Margaret Perkins as well as her siblings William, Hattie, and Hattie’s husband and daughter. After George’s death Katie and Margaret continued living at the home on Central Ave. They took in a boarder as well. In 1900, Katie was a bookkeeper; in 1910, she was a brush maker; in 1920, she did not work. Perhaps she was taking care of her mother, who was dying. At this time, she and her mother lived with Samuel, Hattie, and Florence. After her mother’s death in 1921, one assumes that Katie lived with Samuel and Hattie until Samuel’s death in 1928, when Hattie moved in with Earl and Florence Phillips. In the 1930 federal census, she was listed as a servant working for a private family; she lived alone at 33 Clark Ave, an apartment in a tenement house, in Pawtucket. In the 1935 Rhode Island census, she listed her occupation as a housekeeper. Katie died October 3, 1937; she was buried at Oak Grove Cemetery.
Fear had attached itself to his very being. It was a presence, something a part of him, deep inside, usually hidden, absent from awareness.
All creatures in each moment sense the Fear. Instinct usually takes over to impel the creature to act, to survive, to put off, for a time, the inevitable. Humans sense the Fear but willingly brush it aside, submerge it, ignore it, make it appear ludicrous, mask it. But it is unrelenting. TheFear arrives from everywhere, nowhere, instantly surrounding its prey, overwhelming, suffocating.
The Fear is the most horrible nightmare, the most disgusting creature that attacks without warning, its coils, or pincers, or tentacles grab, overpower, squeeze, cut, tear the flesh, wrap around the throat, strangling, excruciating.
TheFear strikes, a plague, erupting with horrible swelling boils, aching, bulging with pus, sickening, bringing about a slow agonizing end to life. Fear has a tendency to reproduce, like a virus splitting, dividing, becoming infinitesimal in number, legion, finding obscure parts of the brain to hide and wait for a moment of weakness in the host at which time to emerge, attack, disable.
The Fearinvaded a man.
It was the most hideous torture, burning the man alive at the stake of thoughts and emotions, drowning him slowly in his past guilt and sin, nailing him to the cross of the mistakes of all humankind and forcing him to bleed, suffocate, and thirst to death.
The Fear was his dark side, always on the brink of taking over his mind. In each moment, the fear convinced him that he would lose control, give in to the obsessions, do exactly what he did not want to do. To become something different, unrecognizable. To become legion.
Thousands of images, experiences, memories, feelings of guilt and humiliation, times of wanting to do something but being afraid to do it, moments of embarrassment and inaction, other times of action that were wrong, sinful: These were legion, stored in his mind, penetrating every aspect of the present, like countless atoms banging against the walls of his brain, wishing to exit, to be free—but the Fear kept them in control, waiting for the right time, the exact moment—when the man never knew—and without warning the legion of demons, of the images of the past, would come together, marshaled under the commanding Fear, and the man then would be faced with images of committing the unthinkable.
He thought of the most disgusting things, the most horrible crimes, the excruciating details of murder, all a product of his ruminating mind. He was like a cow, a horse, a donkey, an ass, grazing, hungering for grass, and more grass, unable to fill himself, unable to stop, obsessed with eating, compulsively swallowing–but it was never enough.
The thought, the panic, gripped him, as images, a legion of images, erupted in his consciousness about death and destruction and evil and sorrow. His future appeared determined. Fantastic thoughts foretold reality.
He was a demon, an agent of Hell, intent on destruction, on murder, biding his time, awaiting the moment when suddenly he would lose all sanity, all control, and he would throttle, strangle, and his victim would die horribly without a sound, silently.
The webs of fear were spun in earlier years. To live is to experience fear. The man’s fear was in response to the uncertainty of his environment–the constant possibility of loneliness, the darkness of night, the unknown, pain. The Fear was the result of restlessness, the dependence on the passing moment, as well as the narcissistic search for constant gratification, for pleasure to counter the pain of existence. The wisdom of the past supports the reliance upon doubts and fears to guide humans through the years; this message of despair and unhappiness seeps into the brains of old and young alike, instilling an infernal hubris and arrogance, that what cannot be known for sure is not worth knowing, indeed does not exist. Decay overwhelms delight and joy. Pleasure, beauty, and euphoria give way to pain, blemishes, and sorrow.
The man was a certain person in a certain place in a certain time who represented all humans in all places and in all times. Ancient sources briefly describe the man tortured by fear. He is unnamed save for his own appellation: Legion.
Whatever creature inhabited his brain, whatever legion of demons possessed his soul—it stirred the pot of fantasy with so many ingredients of fear and foreboding, so many tormented images of crime, of uncontrollable sins, insane murders. followed by accusations, torture, dungeon, chains, trial, confession, guilt, execution.
The Fear became the dominating force in his life. Every morning upon awakening his mind ferreted within to find a thought, an obsession, with which to destroy his sense of peace, his happiness. The legion of images flocked about him, settled upon him, determining the day of fear and anxiety. He could not rid himself of the thoughts that entered his consciousness; he could not reason them away; he could not convince himself that he would not do what he imagined. The Fear was like a great automaton within him, calculating, indiscriminate, unpredictable, and completely autonomous from what this man, Legion, wanted, wished, thought, or said.
He was unable sometimes to think because of the overwhelming presence of the Fear, his mind jumbled by so many images of disaster and despair—unspeakable images that he could not believe he was having, and yet he was. They were images of folly, one after the other. He dreamed of murder, of patricide, of random death, of rape and torture, involving people known and unknown. He envisioned himself as the agent of destruction. The resultant guilt mixed with confusion of how to explain it, what to do about it. So random were the fantasies that they were ultimately nonsensical.
Legion tried everything he could think of to resist, to fight, to avoid, to ignore; to embrace fear so to familiarize himself with it, to laugh at it. Nothing worked. Only death would bring it to an end. But death is not an option for a person unwilling to die. Death is to be resisted. Every part of one’s being—mind, body, spirit—must fight to survive.
Resist. Resist the foe. Resist the fear. Struggle against it. Force it away. Throttle it. Destroy it. Murder it. Free yourself from it at all costs. Run from it.
Legion had tried running from fear time and again. When the thoughts came, he tried to stifle the fear by going outside into the summer heat or cool winter nights; he drank wine beyond normal intoxication; he had sex, thought of sex; he hid in places of darkness to see if the Fear would go away; he called out to Heaven for help; he tried hiding in the city, anonymous, normal; he tried secluding himself. Fruitless. Winless. Exhausted.
How does a person resist Fear? How does a person resist the countless images from the past of error, sin, wretchedness, lust, violence? How is a random thought, a sensation, an image, a horrible feeling in the pit of the stomach, the stark loneliness, the seclusion from reality, the temptation, the deception, the demonization of the mind, the overwhelming presence of a legion of fear—how is it to be resisted?
Legion’s entire life had been focused on resisting. He had resisted how he looked, who he was, what he was taught, how he lived, where he lived, his society, his culture, dominant institutions, religious leaders, education, teachers, morals, ethics, government, war, life, death, and the present. He resisted anything that tried to pigeon-hole him, to define him, to control him, to institutionalize him, to make him what he was not.
To spend a life resisting yields questions upon questions. Some questions are simple, childlike: Why do we steal? Why do we lust for another? Why do we lie? Why do we seek to hurt? Why are we only concerned with Self? Some questions are profound, unknowable: How can the diversity of nature have a single point of origin? How can the years and months of countless centuries have a representative moment? How can the multitude be singular? How can the lives and thoughts of humans throughout time be contained in one? Then there were the ultimate unanswerable questions: Is there a god or gods? Who? What does he, they, want from us? Why does he, they, allow chaos, destruction, war, disease, hunger, death? What deity/deities would allow the suffering seen everywhere, every day, throughout time? What deity/deities would allow such Fear?
Legion personified the age-old struggle between freedom and order, liberty and authority. The liberty and freedoms human yearn for are opposed by the restrictions of society, artificial rules that impede natural inclinations, systems that guarantee order in a world filled with potential chaos. Youthful ideas of wantonness and misbehavior are confronted by authority imposing restrictions and regulations. The ways of the body, feeling, going against the ways of the mind, thought. Legion’s fantasy world—some of it he allowed, some of it he could not help—was opposed by the standards, norms, and decorum of society.
His fears were a veritable army of images, thoughts, recollections, fantasies, and dreams covering years of angst about physical cowardice, angst about self-control and obsessive thoughts, guilt about so many actions based on fantasy and images. He had obsessed about making mistakes, saying the wrong thing, looking askance at a person, appearing ridiculous, obsessing over the erotic.
He was insane with guilt, grief, and fear. Guilt is a deep well in the human psyche, and it takes much effort to descend deeper and deeper into the well of the past to discover the pangs of conscience that represent guilt. His guilt combined with poor self-esteem and an appalling lack of confidence; it burdened him with chains of the weight of the past. He was known throughout the region as a man in chains, naked and savage, violent and angry, fearsome, haunting. He was a man pursued. All throughout the village. Everywhere. No place to hide. Who were the pursers? Legion did not know. Likewise, he did not know what they wanted, why he was being pursued. He kept trying to hide. He found the best place of refuge to be living among the tombs of the dead.
When in 1911 Claude Christopher Largent and Bessie Lura Amos were married, they brought to their union centuries of ancestral history that spanned the American South and Southeast, as well as early modern England and France. They descended from families who immigrated to America in the 1600s.
The Largent side of the family descends from French common people, artisans and farmers, who lived in the Old Regime of France, when monarchy and aristocracy dominated society and government and common people were typically living on the edge of poverty and exploited by the ruling elite. The name Largent is derived from L’Argent, meaning silver, or silversmith, which hints at the family’s forebears. The shadowy and distant past implies that the Largents emigrated from France to America in the 1600s. The earliest traceable ancestor was Sinon De L’Largent, who lived from 1590 to 1659 in the Bourgogne region of northeastern France. His son was Jean De L’Largent, born in the same place, who married Elizabeth Gonsal and relocated to the Ardennes region of northern France. Elizabeth was the daughter of Jacques and Jeanne (Carre) Gonsal of the Bourgogne region. She lived from 1615 to 1682; she and Jean had a son, Louis, who lived from 1648 to 1740. Louis appears to have been the Largent who emigrated to America along with his wife Jeanne St. Suplice, 1660-1740, daughter of Guillaume and Martine Cornuau St. Suplice. Louis and Jeanne had a son, Jean (or John).
The records that tell the story of John Largent’s life are vague, contradictory, and anecdotal. In the Maryland census/tax list for 1704 a John Largent is listed as residing in Baltimore Co., N. Side Gunpowder Hundred. Another record indicates that a John Largant arrived at Maryland in 1716. In “Virginia Select Marriages, 1785-1940,” there is a vague record of a John Largen son of Lewis Largen married to Rachel. Perhaps this was Rachel Moss, born September 21, 1701 in Wigan, Pemberton, Lancashire England to John Moss (1668-1735) and Rachel Fairhurst (1672-1747). An anecdotal account of Rachel (also known as Roselle Eviss Rachel DeMoss) is that she was a Protestant Huguenot from France who had escaped with her family from religious persecution. Perhaps this is what brought them, at some unknown date at the beginning of the 18th century, to America. More likely, because the Moss (or DeMoss) family goes back in time several generations in England, John and Rachel Moss emigrated to America for other, unknown reasons. When John Largent and Rachel Moss married is uncertain, perhaps about 1720; and how many children they had is similarly uncertain.
In a letter written from Lewis Largent to Joseph Largent in 1913, Lewis wrote confidently that John and Rachel had in addition to their first three sons probably another, Thomas, born about 1728. Thomas was apprenticed in 1738 apparently upon the death of John. “Thomas Largent removed with his guardian Daniel Burnett to South Carolina and was the progenitor of the North Carolina and South Carolina Largents,” Lewis wrote in the letter. Burnett was a blacksmith.
Meanwhile, the earliest known Amos that relates to this family history was Nicholas Amos, whose forbears, whoever they were, doubtless derived from England in the 1600s. Nicholas himself was born to unknown parents in New Kent, Virginia, in or about 1640, perhaps before. He was christened at St. Peter’s Parish. This parish, in New Kent, is situated near the Pamunkey River east of Richmond. He married perhaps in the 1650s though this is uncertain, probably to Mary, whose maiden name was perhaps Lowe. She was, perhaps, the daughter of Charles and Frances Lowe. Nicholas and Mary’s children included Rebecca, Margaret, Valentine, and Francis, born 1677 in the same parish. Francis married Elizabeth Lowe, born in 1690, in 1712; their children were Valentine, Charles, John, Francis, Judith, Mary, William Valentine, and James. Elizabeth’s father was William Lowe and her mother was Selina Ann Bailey, both of North Carolina.
Francis and Elizabeth’s son James was born on October 15, 1716, in St Peter’s Parish, New Kent County, Virginia. He married Elizabeth Carlysle in 1720, and they had a son, James Jr., born in 1755 in Lunenburg, Virginia, far to the southwest from St. Peter’s Parish, where James and Elizabeth had relocated. James Jr. married Lena Bradford, and they had a son in 1785, George Washington Amos. The Bradford’s had a long and varied history dating from sixteenth-century England and the seventeenth-century New England colonies.
Lena Bradford was the daughter of a North Carolina farmer, Thomas Bradford and his wife Sarah Ransom; he was the son of Thomas Bradford and Elizabeth Smith, who had migrated from Virginia to North Carolina in the mid 1700s. His father Richard Bradford was married to Frances Taylor. They emigrated from England to Virginia in the 1650. His father Richard Bradford lived in England, married to Jane Kendall. Richard’s father was Vespasian Bradford.
Vespasian Bradford of early 17th century London was a craftsman belonging to the city livery company, or guild, of cooks, people involved in the preparation of food. His namesake was the Roman Emperor Vespasian, who ruled Rome from 69 to 79 AD. Who named the English child born in 1560 this unique name is a mystery. His parents were either William and Alice Bradford or Richard and Catherine Bradford.
Vespasian was likely born in Yorkshire, England, in 1560, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth Tudor. He died during the reign of Elizabeth’s successor, James Stuart. Vespasian married late in life, to Joane Burrowse, on May 28, 1604, when he was 44, and she was 12. This young woman was the daughter of Sir Richard Burrowse and Lady Barbara Burrowse. They were married in the Shoreditch Church in London.
According to The Parish Registers of St. Thomas the Apostle, London, containing the Marriages, Baptisms, and Burials from 1558 to 1754, London, 1881, Vespasian and his wife had a son Richard, baptized June 25, 1605, a daughter Margaret, baptized May 15, 1606, a daughter Elizabeth, baptized May 9, 1607, a daughter, Anne, baptized June 18, 1608, a daughter Jane, baptized July 6, 1609, a daughter, Joane, baptized Aug. 7, 1610, and a son Richard, baptized Dec. 9, 1611.
Vespasian was a member of the Worshipful Company of Cooks in London, a very old livery company. In 1616 he was listed in the charter of the Worshipful Company of Cooks as an Assistant, one of a small group of liverymen who were in charge of the guild—the Court of Assistants.
Vespasian was buried April 11, 1618, at St. Antholin Church, Budge Row, London—an Anglican church in the heart of the city. Joane outlived Vespasian by seven years, dying in 1625.
Back to the Largent family: Thomas (Largin) Largent, according to marriage records, was born in Virginia in 1728 and he married Nancy Lang in 1750. Little is known about the early lives of Thomas and Nancy besides the anecdote about Thomas’s apprenticeship to a blacksmith noted above. Thomas and Nancy at some point migrated from Virginia south to Burke County North Carolina, where their son Thomas was born; and then they moved on further south to South Carolina. In 1780, Thomas was fifty-two and Nancy was fifty; a South Carolina census record from the ninety-sixth district indicates that Thomas was on the Grand Jury, “Petit-Jury men and Jury Men in Civil Causes,” in a region of northwestern South Carolina between the Broad and Saluda Rivers. More specifically, he lived on the Little River near its confluence with the Saluda River in Newberry County. In the 1790 federal census, he was listed as having seven family members, one male over sixteen years, one male under sixteen, and five women. In the 1800 census, there were thirteen household members, all free, six males and seven females. In his last will and testament, dated 1802, we learn that Thomas, Nancy, and family had migrated south of Newberry County to Edgefield County, on the southern border of South Carolina with Georgia, near Augusta. In his will, Thomas divided his lands into thirds, giving equal amounts to his sons Reuben, William, and Thomas Jr. The remainder of his moveable estate he divided among his daughters Mary, Sarah, Janey, Ann, Nancy, and Elisabeth. He left his widow Nancy most of his stock, tools, furniture, and money. She did not long enjoy this, as she died soon after Thomas.
Nancy Lang, Thomas’s wife, was the daughter of Robert Lang, born in Portsmouth, NH, in 1728. Robert Lang moved to South Carolina, became a plantation owner, and died in 1763. His wife was Millicent Higginbotham, who was born in Barbados in 1675 and died in 1740. Her father was a sea captain, hence the reason for her birth in the Caribbean. The Higginbotham’s of Barbados were quite wealthy because of the sugar trade.
The life of Thomas and Nancy Largent’s son Thomas, Jr., is shadowy at best, in part because of the scarcity of records, in part because he is easily confused with his father of the same name. I speculate that Thomas, Jr., was born in North Carolina, meaning that Thomas Sr. and Nancy in their peregrinations from Virginia to South Carolina must have lived in North Carolina, where Thomas Jr. was born. Thomas Sr. and Nancy lived in North Carolina long enough for their son to take up roots there and stay when they moved south to South Carolina. Thomas Jr. lived in Burke County, in central North Carolina. He likely served as a soldier during the American War for Independence, as he received a grant of one hundred acres in 1800. The land was located on Smoky Creek, a tributary of the Catawba River. It is possible that his children included William Anson, Thomas Washington, Elijah, Elizabeth, Mary, and James. However, the records are so unclear, that even the name of his wife—possibly, Nancy—is not known for certain.
Meanwhile, while this line of the Largent family moved west from Virginia to North Carolina to Illinois, the line of the Amos family I am tracking was moving from Virginia to Georgia to Alabama. George Washington Amos, son of James Amos Jr., who died in 1818, and Lena Bradford, who died in 1829, traveled with his parents from Virginia to Georgia in the early 1800s. George married Anna Bentley in Virginia before their move. They benefited in 1832 from the Cherokee Land Lottery in Georgia, purchasing perhaps 160 acres in Hancock County of land confiscated from the Cherokee Tribe by the state of Georgia. George and Anna had a large family; their children were Daniel, Martha Ann, George Washington Jr (II), Henry, Beverly, John W., William, Wyatt, Millyann E., James M., Caroline F., Mary J., and Susan C. They also acquired a number of slaves to work the land, owning 22 in 1840, half of whom were children. Anna died in 1843, and George followed two years later.
Their son George Washington II was born February 9, 1813 in Hancock, Georgia. During his life he relocated west to Grimes Alabama, where he died April 1, 1889. His wife was Catherine Hammock, born April 8, 1817 in Georgia; she died 1886; they were married August 24, 1831 in Georgia. George Washington II was a successful land owner both in Georgia and Alabama. He and family relocated to Alabama sometime during the 1850s. According to 1850 slave schedule, he owned 14 slaves ranging from age 69 to age 1; in the 1850 census owned land worth $600. In the 1860 census his land was worth $3200. After the war the value of his real estate declined precipitously to $900. George and Catherine’s children were Willborn, Jane, Henry, Beverly, William, George Washington III, Martha, and Zachary. Surviving portraits of George Washington II and Catherine show him to have been a strong, severe, serious man and his wife a pious woman with a somewhat gentle demeanor.
George Washington Amos II and Catherine Hammock
Meanwhile Thomas Largent Jr’s son James migrated from Burke County North Carolina to Bond County Illinois sometime in the early 19th century—perhaps after Illinois became a state in 1818. It is possible that James lived for a time in Tennessee, a place where many North Carolinians migrated in the late 18th and early 19th century. His brother William Anson Largent migrated to Tennessee. There is a vague record of one James Largent having served as a private from April 3 to 12, 1812, in the Tennessee Militia during the War of 1812.
In the 1830 Federal Census for Bond County, Illinois, James’s family included 1 son under age 5, 1 son between 5 and 10, 2 sons between 10 and 15, and a male between 40 and 50 (himself), 1 girl aged 5 to 10, 1 girl from 10 to 15, and 1 girl from 15 to 20, and 1 female 40 to 50, his wife. Their children were Thomas, Archibald, Harriet E., Margaret Mahala, Hugh Fox, Nancy Adeline, and John Marshall.
James died in 1830; his wife Margaret Fox Largent outlived him by 10 years. She was born in North Carolina in 1780 to James Hugh and Mary Fox. James and Margaret were both buried in southern Illinois.
Of their children, Archibald was born Feb. 1, 1806, in Burke, North Carolina; he died Nov. 20, 1838, Fayette, Illinois (buried at Mulberry Grove Cemetery, Mulberry Grove, Bond Co., Illinois); his wife was Lucenda Beach; they married April 26, 1825, in Burke County, North Carolina, when she was 17.
More is known about Lucenda A. Beach (who was Thomas Largent’s mother, George Washington Largent’s grandmother, and Claude Christopher Largent’s great-grandmother). Before her husband Archibald’s death in 1838, she bore five children: Thomas W., Eveline, Mahala Caroline, Archibald, and John. Lucenda was born in North Carolina, and died in 1875 in Illinois, living in Bond County. The Bond County federal census for 1830 lists Archibald and Lucenda with one child, the firstborn Thomas. As Thomas was born in Tennessee in 1827, we can assume that Lucenda and Archibald had lived in Tennessee until recently, moving to Bond County, Illinois soon after 1830. She was the daughter of John Marshall and Sarah Beach.
In the 1850 federal census for Fayette County, Illinois, Lucenda (spelled Lucinda) was a 41-year-old widow owning real estate valued at $600. She had living in her family the following: Eveline Merryman, age 20, Caroline Largent, age 17, Archibald Largent, age 15, John Largent, age 13, and James Largent, age 1. Archibald was listed as a farmer. Caroline, Archibald, and John attended school. There are several interesting items about this census. First, Eveline was called Merryman, and there were two families living next to the Largents with the last name Merryman. Eveline was a widow, her first husband was Cayson Harris Merriman, who was born between 1825 and 1828 and died in his twenties in 1850. James, their son, was 1 year old and living with Lucenda. Thomas, first born son of Archibald and Lucenda, and his wife Narcissa and child Nancy lived nearby on their own farm worth $150.
In the 1860 federal census, Lucenda lived in Vandalia, Fayette County Illinois, with Eveline and her new husband, James Thomas Davis. Eveline and Thomas were married Dec 18, 1852. Eveline was to die soon after, in 1861. Her son Thomas would live until 1887. Lucenda’s other daughter, Mahala Caroline, married William Stokes on Dec 12, 1855. Also living with Lucenda in 1860 was Rosetta Davis, age 2, James Merriman, age 11, Augustus Davis, age 19, Mary Evans, age 14.
Lucenda was a significant landowner. The year that her husband died, 1838, the land office of Fayette. Illinois, issued her “the South half of Lott number two of the South west quarter of Section eighteen in Township Six North of the base line of Range one West of the third principal Meridian, in the District of Lands Subject to sale at Vandalia, Illinois, containing forty acres.”
Lucenda’s eldest child, Thomas, departed Illinois for Missouri during the 1860s. Born in Tennessee, having moved with his father and mother to Illinois, Thomas lost his father when he was 10. Thomas met Illinois native Narcissa Ann Hayes and they were married Jan. 4, 1848, in Fayette County. He was 22, she was 17. They had five children together: Nancy, Narcissus Archibald, nicknamed Norris, George Washington, Lauretta, and Charles. Thomas and Narcissa lived at Township 12, Range 9, Macoupin, Illinois. Unfortunately, Narcissa died in childbirth or soon after when she bore Charles, leaving Thomas a widower with five young children.
Death and dislocation were common experiences for Thomas Largent and his family. A land record listed under Thomas Largin Largent, has one Thomas Largent purchasing land (34.94 acres) July 15, 1854, in Hickory Co., Missouri. Perhaps this was Thomas Largent father of George Washington Largent. Indeed, during the 1860s Thomas and his small family moved to Missouri. He remarried Lydia Stout in 1866. In the 1870 census from Missouri, Thomas is called Largin; he was 43, a farmer; Lydia was 23, at home, taking care of children Norris (17), a laborer on their farm, as well as George (14), also a laborer, Laura (4), and Thomas (1). The children of Thomas and Narcissa, Nancy, Lauretta, and Charles, were either dead or did not make the move to Missouri. Thomas and Lydia could read but not write; Norris and Grace could neither read nor write. They lived in Deer Creek township, Bates, Missouri.
While Thomas Largent and Lydia Stout Largent and their children were trying to make a living in west-central Missouri, further south, in western Arkansas, a family had arrived from Alabama: this was George Washington Amos III, son of George Washington Amos II and grandson of George Washington Amos Sr. GW Amos III was born in Talbot County, Georgia, on February 28, 1845. His family moved to Alabama when he was young, and after his marriage and service in the Civil War, he moved his family to Arkansas.
In the 1850 census, GW Amos III was six years old with seven siblings. His father, GW Amos II was 37, married to Catherine Hammock (married August 24, 1831). GW Amos II had been born in Hancock Georgia, south of today’s Oconee National Forest, near Atlanta. He would die on April 1, 1889 in Grimes, Alabama. The grandfather, GW Amos I, was born in Lunenburg, Virginia, in 1785. He married Anna Bentley on Oct 8, 1807. They moved to Georgia, where GW Amos I died on April 3, 1845.
During the 1850s, George Washington II and Catherine Amos and family moved to Pike County, Alabama, where they farmed. After the war began in 1861, and when George Washington Amos III reached his 18th birthday, he enlisted as a private in Company B, 57th Infantry Regiment organized at Troy, Alabama. He fought in numerous battles in Tennessee and Georgia, fighting against the invading armies of the North. Many of his comrades died, but he survived. A monument erected by the Atlanta Historical Society in 1944 commemorated the “American Valor” of the “participants in the Battle of Peachtree Creek, July 20, 1864,” in which GW III fought.
After the war, GW married Mary Jane Carter, born Sept. 29, 1842; she was 24 and he was 21. Mary was a native Alabaman, daughter of Seaborn and Hannah Carter; Seaborn Carter was a fairly wealthy Alabama farmer. According to the propriety of the time, GW (along with his brother Henry W.) had to post a bond of $200 guaranteeing that there were no impediments to the marriage: “Know all men by these presents, that we .. are held and firmly bound unto the State of Alabama in the penal sum of two hundred dollars; for payment of which, well and truly to be made, we bind ourselves and each and every of our Heirs, Executors, and Administrators, jointly, and severally, firmly by these presents….The condition of the above obligation is such that if there be no lawful cause why George W. Amos and Jane Carter should not be joined together in the Holy union of Matrimony, then this obligation to be void; otherwise, to remain in full force and virtue.”
Their first born was William Wilburn, 1867, followed by Seaborn Washington, 1868, John Henry, 1871, James Belvy 1873, Mary Catherine, 1875, Martha Matilda “Mattie”, 1877, Alexander Zacariah, 1879, Nettie, 1887, and Ada Lee, 1892. Remarkably for the time, all of their children survived childhood to die in adulthood.
In the 1870 census GW III and Mary Jane lived in Pike Co., Alabama, and had two young children (William Wilburn and Seaborn, 3 and 1); GW was listed as a farmer. His wife was illiterate, unlike him. He lived next to his father GW Amos II, probably farming the family land, as he was listed as having no real or personal estate. GW II was 58, wife Catharine was 53; two daughters lived with them, Rebecah and Isabella, 18 and 16.
In the 1880 census eldest son William Wilburn, aged 12, was listed as farm laborer to his father. The family had relocated to Arkansas, living in Big Creek, Sebastian, Arkansas (southeast of Fort Smith).
The move must have been in 1870 or 1871, as the following letter, from GW Amos III to his brother William Greensberry Amos, who was two years older, reveals:
febuary the 19 1871
To Mr. Wm. G. Amos
Der Brother it is with mutch pleasure that I seat myselfth this eavening to drop you A few lines to let you no that mea and my famerley is well at this time and I hope that these few lines may cum safe to hand and find you and your famerley snjoying they saim blessings brother I hant got no nuse to right to you onley we are getting A long verry well if I can just have good helth and A plenty to eat I think that I am all right brother this is A grate farmeing cuntry A man can make as mutch as he can gether here and not have to wirk near as hard as they do there if you was here you cold make as mutch in one year as you can there in too and stop every saturday and go A fishing land an’t as hy here as it is there but it is wirth three times as mutch A man can make enny thing here that he wants and there is A verry good range here and there is timber A plenty we don’t have no pine here but we can have just as mutch good oak wood to burn as we wont and hit burnes as well without lightwood here as hit does there with it brother hit lookes like ruiming A man to sell out everything and moove this fure but I dont burgrudge my move my selfth I han’t got nuthing but I hope hit won’t bea so all ways I have wirked A nuff since I landed here to get as mutch corne as I wont and to get 10030 lbs of meat I am getting A doler A hundard for splitting rails and they ant but 8 feet long timber is as good as I ever saw
Brother A man can get wirk to do here at enny time there is a right smart of people that han’t dun picking coton yet A man can get a doler and a quarter for every hundard poundes of coten they will pick brother you must excuse my bad rightting and spelling for this time for I am so fat and lazy that I can’t right good brother you must right to mea as soon as you get this and right to mea all of they nuse Tell all of my friendes to right to mea and al so tell them howdy brother it lookes like that you all wait for mea to right first I have rote this makes 7 or 8 leters that I have roten but I han’t got no anser from men onley those that I rote to pa and beckey brother I will Close for this tim by saying to you that I remain as ever your loveing brother until death so give my love to all of they famerly and receive A potion for your selfth so good by
G.W. Amos to W. G. Amos, Sabaston Conty Ark Greenwood To
The letter reveals that GW Amos grew corn, hunted or traded for meat, split rails for fencing and railroads, and picked cotton; he counted himself happy even if struggling to make a living. His family was large: five boys and two girls.
Mary died in 1895; GW married Martha Ann Harper, aged 47, in 1899. They had two children, one out of wedlock, Emma, born in 1897, another, Nada, born in 1901 (died, 1973). Martha died in 1902, and GW remarried Sarah E. Alford; they had no children. She was 49 when they were married.
In the 1910 census, GW and Sarah had three grandchildren living with them and one child, Emma, from his previous marriage. They were homeowners, farming in Bloomer, Sebastian Co. Arkansas, near Big Creek.
GW Amos III was a strong-looking man, according to several surviving photos. The photo taken when he was 18 before he enlisted reveals a pudgy, healthy young man with a full face and narrow, penetrating eyes. A later family photograph taken shortly before Mary Jane’s death shows a middle-aged man, stern, with a square face, no longer pudgy, thick hair and beard (without moustache). A photo taken around 1910 with four of his children shows a stern-faced man, lean, with heavy eyebrows, penetrating eyes, and a thick white beard sans moustache. A portrait perhaps drawn from a photo with his third wife Sarah Rambo Amos shows a white-bearded, brown-haired, stern man with sunken cheeks.
George Washington Amos III and Mary Jane Carter
In 1902 GW applied for an Arkansas pension as a Confederate veteran. His widow Sarah applied again after his death on Feb. 20, 1916. GW is buried at Greenwood, Arkansas. Sarah outlived him by six years.
GW and children Ada, Alexander, John Henry, Mary
About a hundred miles to the north in the 1870s, when GW Amos III was writing his brother about the virtues of his farm at Big Creek Township, Sebastian County, Arkansas, another family lived at War Eagle Township in Madison County, Arkansas. George Washington Largent, his first wife Armenty Dunagan, nicknamed Mittie, and their two daughters Louisa, 2, and Rosettie, 6 months, lived and farmed in 1880. Soon another child would arrive, Mae (or May). Nearby, GW’s brother Norris and his wife Amanda and children also farmed.
George Washington Largent’s life has a bit of mystery about it. His gravestone lists his birth date as August 15, 1859. The month and day are probably correct, though the year of his birth was probably 1855 rather than 1859. According to the 1860 U. S. Census, the family of Thomas Largent, in Macoupin Co., Illinois, was comprised of four children, including five-year old George Washington. He could not have been born in 1859, as he had two younger siblings, Lauretta, two, and Charles, four months. His mother, Narcissa Ann Hayes, died with the birth of Charles. So, George Washington was five-years old when his mother died. (The 1870 census lists him as 14—so he must have been born in 1855.)
When George was 10 or 11, his father married a 19-year-old, Lydia Stout. They moved from Illinois to Missouri at some point. In the 1870 federal census, Thomas farmed in Deer Creek Township, Bates, Missouri. He and his wife Lydia could read but not write, but his son George Washington was completely illiterate, and apparently remained so his entire life.
George had four wives during his life, outliving three. He was married to Armenty Dunagan, Sarah Bryant, Mary Lue Smith, and Annie Pool. George’s first three children were born to Armenty: Louisa, Rosettie, who was born Nov. 23, 1877, and lived for 85 years, and Mae, who was born Feb. 14, 1881, and lived for 47 years. When Mae was born, the young family and moved south to Chismville, Arkansas, north of Booneville.
After Armenty died Oct. 23, 1883, in her 28th year, George married Sarah Bryant on Feb. 7, 1884. Their marriage was childless, and she died within four years, date unknown.
The rest of GW’s children were born to Mary Lue Smith, who was, according to family tradition, ½ American Indian, tribe unknown. Her family lived in Dahoma, Franklin, Arkansas, in north central Arkansas, where George and Mary were married. George and Mary conceived their first child, Claude, out of wedlock, as they were not married until July 25, 1888, and Claude was born on July 2, three weeks earlier. George was about 33, Mary was 17. Overall, they had 13 children.
George Washington’s namesake, born in 1889, died in infancy; GW and Mary Lue’s third child, Norris, seems to have been favored over their first born, Claude. In the 1920 federal census, Norris and his family lived next door to GW and Mary Lue; meanwhile Claude and his family lived in a shack on GW’s land. In 1920, GW was 60, Mary L was 50; four daughters lived at home. He was a general farmer, owned his land. He and Mary L were illiterate. He was born in Illinois, his parents also. She was born in Arkansas, her father in Missouri, mother in Arkansas.
According to family traditions, GW left “Illinois under some kind of trouble,” which would be strange as he was but a child when they moved. Perhaps family tradition referred to Missouri. Another tradition has it that GW would lock the gate to keep suitors from courting his grand-daughter Marie.
GW and Mary Lue Largent
Mary Lue Smith Largent died Nov. 3, 1924, at age 53. GW remarried Annie Pool, age 63, on Feb 19, 1925. In the 1930 federal census GW owned his house, farmed, was 71, was illiterate and had no schooling. He was 71 and Annie was 68.
When GW died in 1936, he was buried next to his third wife Mary Lue in Ferguson Cemetery, Chismville, Logan Co., Arkansas. His epitaph reads: “An honest man’s the noblest work of God.”
By this time of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, branches of the Largent and Amos families were living in western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma. They were soon to be joined together.
The eldest child of George Washington Amos III was William Wilburn Amos, who was born on April 18, 1867, in Pike Co., Alabama, in the southern part of the state, to George Washington Amos III and Mary Jane Carter Amos. William was their first-born son. He was brought up as a farmer and was so designated in the 1880 census. At age twelve he had not yet learned to read and write. He had six siblings. At some point in the 1870s the Amos family moved to Big Creek, Sebastian, Arkansas, on the Arkansas River. Nearby was the Calhoun family, whose youngest daughter, Arsula, met William at some point; they were married on Christmas Day, 1890, in Greenwood, Sebastian Co., Arkansas, south of Fort Smith in western Arkansas. She was seventeen and he was twenty-three.
Arsula was the daughter of William and Martha Rhodes Calhoun. William was an Illinois and Arkansas farmer and carpenter. He was born in May, 1826, in Williamson, Tennessee, to Jacob (Jack) Julian Calhoun (1802-1856) and Rebecca McCall (1797-1869). Martha Rhodes likewise was born in Williamson, Tennessee. the daughter of Christopher and Elizabeth Rhodes. Martha married William C. Calhoun on October 17, 1850 in Marshall, Tennessee. He was 24 and she was 19 years old. William and Martha had eight children. In 1852 their daughter Elizabeth was born, followed by William Thomas in 1853. After his birth the family moved to southern Illinois, Johnson County, in the corner of the state between the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. There their daughter Amanda F. was born in 1856, James A. in 1862, Susan in 1863, Samuel H. in 1866, Robert M. in 1868, son Alphus in 1871, and daughter Arsula Jane in 1873. Martha apparently died in childbirth or soon after the birth of Arsula.
In the 1860 federal census, William listed himself as a carpenter. He registered for the Northern Civil War draft in 1863. In the 1870 census William listed himself as a farmer. He and Martha were both listed as illiterate. The value of their real estate was $800, personal estate $600. In 1870, the Calhoun family lived in Township 11, Range 21, Johnson Co., Illinois; the post office was at Goreville (southern corner of Illinois north of Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River).
After Martha’s death, William took his family of eight children to western Arkansas, Bates Township, south of Fort Smith, just east of the Oklahoma border, where he farmed and worked as a carpenter. By this time, William as well as all of the children were listed as literate. His oldest daughter Elizabeth kept house for William.
After Arsula married William Wilburn Amos Christmas, 1890, they had a daughter, Bessie, born on December 24, 1891.
In the 1900 census, Will was listed as a farmer who could read and write; perhaps Arsula helped him to learn. They rented. Their children were Bessie, 8, Harland, 6, Charley, 4. The lived in Center, Sebastian Co., Arkansas, southeast of Fort Smith. Ten years later the family had moved a few miles east to Boone Township (Booneville), where Will still farmed. By this time, Will and Arsula (or Sula) owned their own farm. Their children were Bessie, age 18, Harland, age 16, Charley, age 14, Reba, age 8, and Wayne, age 3.
During the next decade, one would assume that hard times came upon the family. They left Arkansas and moved to Oklahoma, settling in the town of Stigler, in eastern Oklahoma. They lived on N. Ninth St, and Will still farmed, working on his “own account,” either as a renter or farm laborer—it is not clear. His son Charley, still living at home, worked as a salesman at a drugstore. Bessie and Harland had left home, but Reba (Elizabeth Reba) and William Wayne were living at home. Will was 52 and Sula was 46.
During the next ten years, all of their children left home. Will and Sula lived at 341 S. 3rd St. in 1930. Will was no longer a farmer, rather a caretaker of the town cemetery. He was 60, she was 55.
Will and Sula Amos
Will died soon after, on died Feb. 17, 1931; he is buried in the cemetery in which he had once worked. Soon after Sula moved to Holdenville. There she lived in a small house by herself; no doubt she often visited with her children and their spouses Ray and Reba, Wayne and Willa Mae, Charles and Rose, all of whom lived in Holdenville. Sulla outlived Will by 17 years, dying on June 10, 1948. They are buried next to each other in Stigler.
Bess and Sula Amos
Will and Sula’s oldest child, Bessie, married Claude Christopher Largent on December 3, 1911, in Booneville, Arkansas, where they made their residence during their early years of marriage.
Claude Largent was born to George Washington Largent and Mary Lue Smith in Booneville, Arkansas, on July 2, 1888. George Washington (GW) was a farmer and Mary Lue, who was half Indian (tribe unknown) was his third wife. Mary Lue and GW had thirteen children, of which Claude was the first. His siblings were: George (November, 1889-December, 1889), Norris (Narcissie) A. (1892-1952), (Mary E, 1893-infant), Bettie (1893-1960), William (1896-1896), Evert (1898-1899), Sarah E. (1900- ?), Tommy (1901-1907), Mattie (1904-1981), Mae (1906-2002), Viola M. (1907-2002), Georgia Naoma (Oma) (1909-1984), and step siblings Louisa (1979-?), Rosettie (1879-1963), and May (1881-1926).
For many years Claude’s children and relations believed he was born in 1889, and indeed the 1900 U. S. Census claims as much. However, George Washington II was born in November, 1889, and died the following month. Hence what Claude recorded on his 1917 draft registration, that he was born in 1888, was true. (Strangely, however, in his 1942 draft registration, Claude listed his birth erroneously at 1889.) Claude was born a few weeks before GW, aged about 32, and Mary L, aged 17, were married. So Claude was an illegitimate, firstborn son. Perhaps the illegitimacy haunted him and he did not receive some of the benefits of the second living son, Norris.
Claude’s early life was undoubtedly a struggle, in part because he was illegitimate and ¼ Indian (perhaps), he was not well educated, though he sometimes attended school (his parents were both illiterate). A family tradition has it that Mary Lue stood up to GW in support of Claude when he wanted to attend school. Of Claude’s many siblings, five died in childhood; hence Mary Lue was pregnant a lot and the babies and infants died regularly—death was a frequent visitor to the Largent household.
In the 1900 federal census, he was listed as 10 years old, born in July, 1889–an error. Claude’s father George W. was born August, 1860, in Illinois, as were his parents, and Claude’s mother Mary L., born Oct. 1871 in Arkansas. Her father, about whom little is known, was born in Missouri, and her mother, otherwise unknown, was born in Arkansas. GW in 1900 owned his own farm, and had no mortgage. Mary was mother of 7 children, 4 living. Their place of residence was Washburn, Logan Co., Arkansas.
Claude’s draft registration in 1917 reveals that he was a self-employed farmer, was married with two children under 12. He lists himself as Caucasian. He was medium height, slender, brown eyes, black hair in June 5, 1917.
Claude and Bess had four children: Marie, born in 1913; George Amos, born in 1915; Joyce, born in 1919, and Wanda June, born in 1928.
In the 1920 federal census, Claude and Bessie and three children—Marie, Amos, and Joyce—were living in Center Haskell, Oklahoma on the road between Stigler and Keota. Claude was a farmer who owned his own home with a mortgage.
Claude was ambitious enough to educate himself so that he could eventually serve as a school teacher. His daughter June recalled that “the folks talked about several towns where they lived and Dad taught. I believe Pawnee, Shawnee, and towns around Seminole were some. Dad taught in Oklahoma and Arkansas. I remember them talking about him teaching “up on the mountain” in Arkansas.” This was probably Mt. Home School, established in 1920 on Beaver Mountain, Haskell County, Oklahoma.
Claude Largent
In 1928, they were living in Booneville, Arkansas, where GW lived. GW allowed Claude and family to live in a small shack on his land. June recalls that “Mother talked like she didn’t like him; I don’t remember why. Of course, he didn’t leave Dad anything, and I think he had a lot of land. He also had a lot of kids.” Their youngest daughter Wanda June was born in this shack December 15, 1928.
The 1930 census shows Claude and Bessie living in Seminole County, Econtuchka township, Oklahoma. It reveals that they did not own a farm, rather rented. Claude was a school teacher in Econtuchka.
During the Depression, according to family tradition, “Claude taught school for some $40.00 per month. Walked 10 miles to teach singing lessons during the summer. Sold newspapers in Wewoka. . . . Was not easy, but they made it.” Wewoka is 35 miles from Econtuchka, so either Claude drove to sell newspapers, or the family lived in Wewoka for a time.
Claude moved his family to Stigler in 1934. For a few years they lived in the home of Bessie’s parents, Will and Sula Amos (Will having died, and Sula living in Holdenville). The 1940 census reveals that Claude and Bess continued to live in Stigler, Oklahoma. They rented a home and did not farm. Claude had completed the second year of college, attending Northeastern University in Tahlequah. His son George Amos had completed the third year of college. Claude taught music in a Works Progress Administration school in Stigler, now the Stigler Grade School, at 5th and B streets. Claude and Marie were a singing duo in local Stigler churches. The Largent family were Methodists.
In 1942, they were living in Stigler, Oklahoma; Claude was employed by Claud Frix, who was the proprietor of a retail dry goods store. But that same year Claude, Bess, and June, their youngest child, made the trek of the Okies to California to look for work. They lived in San Diego in 1942, moved back to Stigler, then moved to Santa Monica, California in 1943, living there until 1944. Claude worked in the aircraft industry and in a lumber yard. June attended Santa Monica schools. They returned to Stigler in 1945, and Claude worked as an elementary school custodian while they lived outside of town. Nearby, Claude’s sister Bettie lived near Stigler Lake with her husband Newton McCaslin.
Claude, Bess, and daughter June
The family moved to Tulsa in 1945. Claude worked for the Tulsa Public Schools, Irving and Mark Twain schools, as a custodian. He also worked for a church in Tulsa. They purchased a house in West Tulsa in 1946 with a Teacher’s Credit Union loan. Claude, who didn’t drive, walked just about everywhere to work. Claude daily walked from their home at 3613 W. Admiral Blvd. in Tulsa (in a home that no longer stands) down the street to S. 33rd W. Ave to the grocery store on the Sand Spring Line, now Charles Page Blvd—a walk of a mile.
Claude retired in 1959 from Tulsa Public Schools and spent his time working in a large garden in the backyard where he grew all sorts of vegetables. Every Christmas the entire extended family of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren filled the house and enjoyed Christmas cheer. Claude and Bess had their own easy chairs, from which they could sit and watch television. Claude enjoyed smoking his pipe and Bess enjoyed dipping tobacco. They were both quiet people. Bess, especially, was tough, no-nonsense. Claude’s grandson, Rusty, remembers him as very old, thin, cross-eyed, yet quiet, possibly thoughtful. He wore sun-glasses, even inside, perhaps because of his cross-eyes. Rusty would sometimes join his grandfather in the vegetable garden. Claude said little but walked about gathering the vegetables and pruning branches; Rusty followed, watching. One time, Claude gave Rusty some books without comment. The books were a two-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln by Carl Sandberg. The books appeared well-used, so clearly his grandfather had read them again and again. They must have been his favorite books, and now he was giving them to Rusty—perhaps his grandfather’s wisdom and Carl Sandberg’s wisdom and Abraham Lincoln’s wisdom would combine to provide the sixteen-year-old inquisitor with wisdom itself. And so, despite the fact that most of the books he read were about sports, Rusty began to read. Sandberg’s portrayal of Lincoln was of a humorous, shy, witty, thoughtful, caring, empathetic man who became President of the United States. Rusty’s grandfather had the same body-type, the same apparent demeanor, as Abraham Lincoln, though as far as Rusty knew his grandfather had only been a custodian for his working years. Sandberg’s Lincoln cared for people, for all people of whatever color, and for this care he became a martyr, a sacrifice to the principles of equality and freedom.
Claude had a slight stoke a year or so before he died. “Never the same,” his daughter June recalls. Claude predeceased Bess by three years, dying July 21, 1975. Bess lived for a brief time in a nursing home and died on April 29, 1979.
Claude and Bess, 1967
The descendants of Claude Largent and his ancestors extending back to Jean Largent and Bess Amos Largent and her ancestors extending back to Nicholas Amos continue to live in Arkansas and Oklahoma, and throughout the United States.
As the War for Independence drew to a close in 1783, leaving so much death and destruction in its wake, it gave pause to many thinkers of the time as to the role of God in such affairs: was God’s providence active or a figment of the imagination?
The correspondence of two Christian Enlightenment thinkers of the time, Jeremy Belknap and Ebenezer Hazard, sheds light on the grand questions that faced all Americans at the end of the war. Whence is God? Where is God’s love on the battlefield, in the prison ships, in the sick room, on the death bed?
These questions were uppermost in Ebenezer Hazard’s mind at the end of the war when he ended his bachelor days and married. He had been on the road for a good part of the war, a postal official ensuring good communications for the American Patriots. With war’s end, the cautious Hazard decided it was time to marry and begin a family. But when his wife became pregnant, and she gave birth to a boy, the haunting fear of death, which had been so familiar to him during the war, began to interfere with the joy he felt at the presence of his newborn son. These fears became excruciating when during the summer and fall months of 1784 his son became dangerously ill.
Jeremy Belknap, a clergyman living in New Hampshire, tried to advise Hazard about his fears. Writing at the end of November, particularly in response to Hazard’s mixed feelings of the past months of fear for his son’s life, tremendous love for the boy, and a sense that a more distant attachment to children is best, Belknap had to disagree. Speaking as a friend and pastor, he counseled: “I have no fondness for encouraging parents in making themselves uneasy because they love their children, as if they were in danger of idolizing them. It is natural to love them, it is necessary we should. Reason, prudence, and time will teach us how to set bounds to this fondness; but where is the harm of indulging it, especially at first, when the thing is new? How much more rational to play with a darling child than with a lapdog, or parrot, or squirrel! Let Nature have vent. ‘Enjoy the present, nor with needless cares, Of what may spring from blind misfortune’s womb, Appal the surest hour that life bestows’.”
“I have administered,” Belknap continued, “the same wholesome advice to our good friend the Metropolitan [Joseph Buckminster of Portsmouth], who has the same fears respecting his child. For my part, I think it is an exercise of gratitude to Heaven for its blessings, to enjoy them. As they are sent to sweeten the bitter cup of life, let us taste the sweet, and thank the Giver.”
Hazard, unconvinced, responded laconically three weeks later: “Your advice about loving children is natural, but not prudent; for, in case of their being taken away, the pangs of separation must be in proportion to the strength of the attachment, and that must be very, very, very great.”
For Belknap, the suffering and violence of war taught him to have complete faith in God, to accept all experiences, pain, suffering, even death, with piety and happiness, allowing God’s love to extend even in life’s most bitter moments. Belknap realized during the war that the love of God is limitless, found even during war, even during death. The love of God is ubiquitous, if mysterious.
For Hazard, however, the light of God’s love was dimmed by the experiences of the world, the pain and fears respecting the prospective loss of loved ones: for all of those whom one loves will eventually suffer and die. Hazard had seen the suffering of war during his travels, and it overwhelmed his sense of God’s love. There were too many orphans, too many widows. Sorrow is too much. How can one live life happily when in the next moment, or in the next year, or even in a decade, those whom one has lived life for become ill and die?
The disciple John wrote in his first letter, “perfect love knows no fear.” Hazard, who admitted to Belknap that he often focused on God’s wrath rather than his love, could find little solace in this passage of Scripture. Yet for Belknap the words of John meant everything. Total and complete love vanquishes all fear. Yet who has total and complete love? No one, of course. But it is a goal, a pursuit, and one must make the attempt at such love. To deny love because of the fear of death is to fail in life, and goes against the ways of God, who requires his creation to procreate, to spread love, to enjoy each other.
Belknap eventually was tested in his words and faith, when in 1789 one of his sons became terminally ill and died. Belknap cared for him at the death bed and asked him to commit himself to the love of Christ. He buried his son content that God’s love had triumphed over death: how? This is the mystery of God’s love. How can love allow pain and death? Christ Himself experienced pain and death, yet became triumphant in love. Belknap believed that God was an efficient Creator who would not lose any of His Creation, but all Creation would be embraced in the unrestrained love of God. Death is the moment at which the perfect love of God overwhelms and vanquishes all fear: for the one who passes if not the one who stays, who has to wait, be patient, accept God’s love, and know that in time the transcendent love of God will embrace all the living—at the end.
“Every creature is thus the object of the Father’s tenderness, who gives it its place in the world. Even the fleeting life of the least of beings is the object of his love, and in its few seconds of existence, God enfolds it with his affection.”[1]
The Logos is the force of life. When John wrote the words, He through whom all things are made, he meant that the Logos is the mediator between the Creator and Life.
Yet, in remarkable blindness and arrogance of “tyrannical anthropocentrism,”[2] humans now and have for millennia considered themselves the masters of creation. For hundreds of thousands of years—a period lost in time, far beyond the power of human memory to recall—humans have fought the war of survival against other creatures, and slowly emerged victorious, in apparent control. Yet humans are themselves animals and have throughout recorded human history displayed the characteristics of what they disparagingly called brutes: savagery, instinctual competition, bloodlust, mercilessness—anything to survive. The battle to live results in the death of the other. Humans, like all animals, learned that to survive required the extermination of the enemy. The enemy could be large and ferocious, an individual creature that could alone fearlessly face many humans in conflict: such as a tiger, lion, shark, or bear. More often, the enemy was small, individually insignificant, yet collectively powerful, lethal: swarms of insects could cause greater destruction than a pride of lions or a pack of wolves. Death has always been the great equalizer. Nature does not appear to select one above another life: all life is equally at the mercy of the forces of nature, of disease, of predators, of conflict. A lion is equal to a human in the chance for survival. Matching the lion’s hunting prowess, guile of the predator, and strength, is the human’s prowess with tools, guile of the prey, and ability, through use of reason, to adapt to a given situation. Although different animals use tools in a rudimentary fashion, humans contrive tools to different challenges of survival, share tools in community, and manufacture sophisticated forms of technology. Long ago human tool users slowly tipped the balance of the equality of nature.
So began the reign of humans as the self-appointed masters of all creation. Humans hurt, injured, destroyed, tortured, all creatures, including other humans, to serve the particular interests of the individual or group. This mentality of domination is found in all human cultures, past and present. Humans learned from other humans how to use, control, exploit, overwhelm, destroy. Befitting the sense of superiority of the human over all other creatures, the power exercised was often spontaneous, frivolous, purposeless. Destruction was a by-product of dominance; death was a random act upon a perceived insignificant creature.
Creatures of the Earth have existed, according to this anthropocentric view, to serve humans in all matters of life and culture: food, work, entertainment, religion. Yet fundamental scriptures of the world’s philosophies and religions provide clear guidelines, which contradict self-congratulatory human power, on how humans should treat other creatures. The implication in the Old Testament book of Genesis, Chapter One, is that humans have the moral obligation to treat all things, all of existence, as good, to cherish, to embrace, to love, to preserve. In Genesis, Chapter Two, humans arrogantly disobey God, take the fruit from the tree of knowledge, and as a consequence suffer humiliation, pain, and death. Human arrogance, to determine our own destiny, to seek more knowledge than is good for us, than is consistent with the goodness of Creation, is wrong. But this lesson is of course the teaching of world philosophies: hubris is the key to self-destruction. Skeptical Greeks such as Aeschylus condemned hubris as inconsistent with the power of the divine. The wise laughed at the human pretension to know. The poet of Ecclesiastes argued that in much wisdom is much sorrow. In Plutarch’s “On the Use of Reason by ‘Irrational’ Animals,” he questioned whether human existence was more valuable than the existences of other creatures. Michel de Montaigne, the great skeptical mind of Renaissance Europe, who wrote witty, critical essays questioning human reason, wondered when he played with his cat, who was actually in control, he or the cat? In the Creator’s eyes, whose life is more important? Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers, though the scientific revolution was convincing humans of their ability to figure everything out, could not help but realize that human knowledge was dependent upon Elder Scripture, the wonderful works of the Creator—so that Cotton Mather pointed out that even the miracle of a simple fly contradicts the arguments of an atheist.
As increasing knowledge in the physical and life sciences began to move more people away from the old ideas about human hubris and dependency upon Providence, there continued to be thinkers and writers who challenged the rising arrogance of humanity. Living at a time during which human activities were having such an impact on nature as to bring about the extinction of animal species, the English naturalist Thomas Nuttall wondered in his many books why humans believed they had the right to discontinue the lives of any beings of the “feathered race.” His view is echoed today by Pope Francis, who writes: “We read in the Gospel that Jesus says of the birds of the air that ‘not one of them is forgotten before God’. . . . How then can we possibly mistreat them or cause them harm?” A profound and religious American Indian writer, Alexander Posey, wondered if the simple beauty of a flower such as a daffodil was less significant than human actions and concerns. In the wake of the expansion of human power worldwide, the naturalist John Muir wandered about the coasts and mountains of California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska, empathizing to such a degree with all God’s creatures as to see beauty and significance—and the right to live—even in those creatures that humans feared most, such as the rattlesnake.
Even so, the 20th and 21st centuries have seen humans reveling in their superiority over other creatures, mass-producing slaughter of countless individuals of countless species, disregarding the teachings of centuries that warned that such hubris could have disastrous consequences. One scientist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, discovered this when he watched his creation, a plutonium atomic bomb, explode with the apparent force of the sun on a summer day in 1945. He could not help but conclude that he had become death, the destroyer.
Human power has increased yearly since 1945 with predictable consequences in terms of environmental change and the wholesale destruction of life, both human and other creatures. But if humans are advanced over other creatures, as we think, should not then humans act in such a way that human civilization means something besides the exercise of human power? Civilization should have something to do with taking the lead among all creatures to preserve and protect life: humans must turn back to the old philosophies, the old ways, of respecting life, recalling those thinkers who have advocated the idea that all life is to be respected and protected, and live in harmony with each other, and all other creatures.
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus tells his disciples, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.” Jesus’s comments in Mark differ from those in Matthew, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations.” Mark uses the Greek word, “ktisis,” literally meaning “creature” or “creation.” Mark uses the word on several occasions, always meaning creation, implying the beginning as described in Genesis chapter one. The word can mean as well all things or beings, the whole or a part, the many and the one. Paul, in the Epistle to the Romans, 1, 20, uses the word to imply the creation as a historical whole, from the beginning to the end, including the present. In the Epistle to the Colossians, 1, 23, Paul refers to the Gospel being proclaimed to “all creation under heaven” in the same manner as Mark.
In Hebrews: 4, 13, the word ktisis refers to creature: “And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.” This passage enlightens us as to what Jesus meant by the creation, which includes all creatures. Likewise, in Revelation, 5, 13, John’s vision includes “every creature” in heaven, on earth, under the earth, and in the seas, singing “to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power for ever and ever.” In Luke, 19, 40, Jesus tells the Pharisees that even if humans at the excitement of the Son of Man coming were silenced, “the stones will cry out,” an explicit reference to the idea that “through him all things were made” includes more than just living things.
But how does one preach to all creatures, to the whole creation? In the Great Commission to his disciples and followers Jesus commanded them to care for all of God’s creatures, even bringing the Good News of God’s love to all members of God’s Creation. The ability to love each individual form of life in the Creation is what Jesus had in mind in preaching the gospel to the whole creation.
The ancients, at the time when the Gospel accounts were written, thought of the creation as involving a physical as well as a spiritual component. Philosophers expressed this as the chain of being. The chain involved the spiritual levels of incorporeal beings as well as physical levels of corporeal beings. There was a sense of a rank, an orderly hierarchy of existence that would never change. There was no sense, as in later centuries, of movement, of evolving, of change from one level to another. Change occurred within time, from birth to death, but not in and among the different levels of life. If the Creation, ktisis, therefore includes all beings in a hierarchical arrangement, then Jesus’s words, His commission, is meant to reach all beings, all creation, from first to last, from top to bottom.
The Great Commission, then, outlined in Mark, calls upon humans to embrace all creation, not just other humans, in the love of God, which encompasses the entire creation, not just humanity—only when humans realize that we are part of something greater than ourselves rather than the means as well as the end, will we be able to turn back the clock on environmental destruction and ecological chaos, to fully preach to the Creation God’s message of Love.
[1] Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter on Humans and God’s Creation, Laudatum Si, On Care for Our Common Home.
Ancient science was the intellectual pursuit to understand the origins and workings of nature and humanity. Science is a term that encompasses many methods and varied disciplines over time. Science has engaged human thought for millennia. The questions that scientists ask tend to remain largely the same even as the answers differ according to time and culture. The strange and sometimes simple explanations that the ancient Greeks and Romans gave for natural phenomena appear less absurd to the modern mind when one considers that the answers of today may appear ridiculous to observers a thousand years from now. Among ancient scientists–the Mesopotamians, Persians, Indians, Chinese, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Africans, Americans–the Greeks were far and away the leaders in scientific inquiry because they asked the most penetrating questions, many of which still elude a complete answer. There is a temptation to view the past according to the standards and precepts of the present. The historian encounters countless similarities when comparing modern and ancient science; clearly the building blocks of today’s science were formed two to three thousand years ago in the ancient Mediterranean. Nevertheless, the development of ancient science occurred in a pre-industrial age before the dawn of Islam or Christianity, during a polytheistic, superstitious time. Magic and astrology were considered as legitimate as medicine and astronomy. The earth was the center of a finite universe; the planets twinkled like gods watching from above; the moon governed the fertility of nature and woman. Fertility symbols and statuettes of priestesses and mother goddesses dot the archeological finds from the dozens of millennia BCE, reminding us of the power women once had in ancient societies before the coming of male gods reflecting male dominance. Rhea, Cybele, Artemis, Hera, Isis, and Ishtar were early fertility goddesses who represented the universal mother image who brought life, love, and death to her children the humans.
In some ways ancient scientists would be scarcely recognizable to contemporary, twenty-first century scientists. The scientists described and portrayed in this book were priests, government officials, kings, emperors, slaves, merchants, farmers, and aristocrats. They wrote history, biography, essays. They were artists, explorers, poets, musicians, abstract thinkers, sensualists. The demands upon scientific study then were different than today. The study of astrology was necessary to know one’s fate, the future. Astronomy and mathematics were essential to forming calendars to fit the cycles of nature and seasons of the year. The ancient scientist was often seeking a practical result rather than pursuing scientific thought for its own sake. At the same time, the ancient scientist was something of a wise person, a community savant who was expected to know–or at least to have thought about, or investigated–all things natural, spiritual, and human. The Greeks called such a thinker polumathes, which is the origin for our word polymath, someone who is learned in many fields of knowledge. At the same time ancient scientists pursued some of the same goals as their modern counterparts. Modern physicists and chemists seek to know the basic particles that comprise matter in the universe; ancient Stoics and Epicureans hypothesized the same particles and sought the same knowledge of the movement and patterns of atoms. Albert Einstein the theoretical physicist wanted to know the mind of God, the ultimate secrets of the universe, which was a continuing search inaugurated three thousand years before in the ancient Mediterranean. Einstein would have liked Plato; Neils Bohr the twentieth-century Danish physicist would have found a friend in Aristotle. What are the abstract patterns present in the universe? Mathematicians today and millennia ago have been united in the quest to find out, to impose the rational human mind upon the most complex and least concrete inquiry. Psychologists today still work in the shadow of the great psychologists of the past, though the present concern to know the human mind and the nature of personality is a more secular pursuit than it once was. Political scientists today still rely on the initial systematic inquiries into human government that Plato and Aristotle made in the fourth century BCE. Students at modern medical schools take the Hippocratic Oath, recognizing that if the techniques of medicine have changed from the days of Hippocrates and Galen, the ultimate goals and humanitarian concerns have not. In short, the college arts and science curricula and professional scientific careers of today are not a recent development. Rather the moderns in pursuit of knowledge of man and the universe continually ascend the intellectual and methodological building blocks constructed during antiquity.
(From the Introduction, Science in the Ancient World: From Antiquity through the Middles Ages, published by ABC Clio, 2021).
The search for the self can take many paths. I especially like the path of the past. Past lives open up so many avenues for exploration of self. I love to engage in a dialogue with past individuals: the way we communicate is by means of existing records and my historical imagination. In particular, I believe each one of us is comprised in part by our ancestors. Ancient peoples knew this, and venerated their ancestors. I might not go that far, but I do believe that the personalities and experiences of my ancestors are in me, are a part of me, in ways that I cannot know scientifically, rather intuitively. I can sense the presence of the past in me. This is what draws me to investigate and to try to recreate the lives of my ancestors. For example, the Lawsons.
The Lawsons of America derive from the MacClaren Clan of Scotland. In the 1600s one branch of the many Lawsons who came to America was a family who lived along the Falling River in central Virginia. These are called by genealogists the Falling River Lawsons. One family was that of William and Isabella (Kennedy) Lawson. William was born about 1680 in Henrico County, Virginia. He was possibly the son of Joshua and Ann (Smith) Lawson. When William was a young man he moved along with his family to the Falling River region, what came to be called Lunenburg County. Here he lived and farmed until his death around 1754. Lunenburg County is in south central Virginia north of the North Carolina border, west of Norfolk, southwest of Richmond, southeast of Lynchburg. It was a forested, fertile region with a warm southern climate good for growing grains, tobacco, and eventually cotton.
William and Isabella had at least three sons, John, Jonas, and Bartholomew. Bartholomew was born sometime in the 1720s in Lunenburg County. In the 1750s he married Susanna Simpkins, born around 1731, daughter of John and Elizabeth Simpkins of Lunenburg County. John Simpkins purchased land at Falling River in 1746 making him a neighbor of William Lawson. It is unknown when Bartholomew and Susanna married. They made their home in Lunenburg County like their respective parents. In local records, Bartholomew is often called Bartly, Barclay, Bart, and Bartlett. Bartholomew and Susanna moved south to North Carolina in the early 1760s. Some genealogists report that Bartholomew died in 1765. However, in a court record from 1848 a very old Randolph Lawson, Bartholomew’s son, reported that his father served under the same Captain Gholston as he did around 1780 in the Revolutionary War. It is likely, therefore, that Bartholomew died shortly thereafter, in 1782. Susanna died about five years later. The number of their children is uncertain, but possibly included two girls and six boys, including Randolph Lawson.
Randolph was born probably in November 1752 in Cumberland, North Carolina. According to a court record in 1835, Randolph informed the court that he was 82, having been “born in Cumberland Co, NC in the fall or winter of 1752.”
When the War for Independence broke out, many of the Lawsons participated on the Patriot side. These included Randolph’s brothers John, Morman, and William and their sister’s husband Moses Carrick. Randolph’s father Bartholomew most likely also fought during the war. Randolph served in 1780 and 1781 in battles in North Carolina and South Carolina. In court testimony fifty-five years later, Randolph recalled that he enlisted as a militia soldier in July 1780 under a Captain Coke (or Cox) under the command of a Colonel Knowles. The exact nature of his service is unclear. His papers were burnt in the early 1800s, and his memory was not precise when he tried to get a veteran’s pension in the 1830s and 1840s. The records indicate that he served to protect the baggage train during battles and also briefly served as a scout.
Randolph married Susannah Cross on 13 June 1791 in Patrick County, Virginia. Born in 1765, she was the daughter of William and Sarah Elizabeth Cross. Anecdotally, over the course of their marriage Randolph and Susannah had eleven sons and thirteen daughters. The reality was probably not so prolific. Compared to many couples of the time and since, this was a rather late first marriage for Randolph, being thirty-nine; Susannah meanwhile was twenty-five, again, rather late for the first marriage of a young woman. One obvious explanation is the disruption of war; Susannah lived through it, and Randolph fought in it, hence it disrupted their lives, and many pressing things in life, such as marriage and begetting children, would have to wait. But then again, the war ended eight years before their marriage, which is a long time to delay it. It is possible, therefore, that their 1791 marriage was a second marriage for either one or both of them. This would explain the presence in the record of a daughter born in 1786. Either Randolph and Susannah had conjugal relations long before their marriage, or their daughter, Elizabeth (Millie) was the product of an early marriage of either of her parents.
The young couple after their marriage moved to Montgomery County, Virginia, living there until 1797. They relocated to Hawkins County, in eastern Tennessee after the turn of the century. They bought one hundred acres in the Puncheon Camp Valley on Clinch River. Puncheon Camp is in northeast Tennessee about forty miles south of the Cumberland Gap. At Puncheon Camp their son Maxwell was born, on May 5, 1802. It was around this time, according to Randolph’s 1838 court testimony, while living in Hawkins County, that “his house was burned and all papers destroyed.” This tragic event must have precipitated the move to Campbell County, perhaps in 1803. The family stayed in Campbell County for thirty years. They lived near the present town of Huntsville in the hilly, forested part of northeast Tennessee. They lived on land near the mouth of Paint Rock Creek where it flows into New River.
At this time, Paint Rock Creek in Campbell County was a complete frontier with few inhabitants or towns. Jehu Phillips, son of Elizabeth Lawson “Millie” Phillips and grandson of Randolph Lawson, when he was a very old man early in the twentieth century recalled that “in those days one could see deer by the gangs, and there were plenty of bears, wolves, wild cats, foxes and turkeys and a few panthers.” The land had to be cleared with the ax before the seed planted. Once a harvest provided for steady food, split rail fences went up to designate one’s land holding. The families wore home spun made of linsey (linen clothes made of flax fibers) and moccasins. The boys wore coonskin caps. There were no churches, though sometimes an itinerant Baptist preacher held a service. There were no schools, stores, etc. Salt had to be imported. Phillips recalled that “lead was brought from Virginia to Jacksboro and the people here had to go to Jacksboro to get lead. At that time lead was worth about 25 cents per pound. . . . the people used to make powder by hand. . . . Everybody had flint lock guns.” He recalled also the “plenty of fish in the streams in this county. Father had a trap in New river just below the mouth of Bull Creek and we got all the fish we wanted.” The inhabitants entertained themselves with “log rollings, house raisings and corn shuckings,” which “would always be followed at night by a frolic and I tell you the people used to have some good old times in those days. At the frolics there was always one or more fiddles. The fiddles were home made but I tell you they were good ones.”
Jehu Phillips was in error (or there was a typo in the printed recollection) when he recalled a Reynold Lawson as one of the few inhabitants of Paint Rock Creek. This was undoubtedly Randolph Lawson, who according to Phillips “built the first water grist mill in the county.” Earlier in his document he had reported that his mother Millie lived where there was a “water grist mill near the mouth of Paint Rock,” that is, on her father Randolph Lawson’s land. A grist mill was for grinding grain into flour. Inhabitants from the region would bring their harvested grains to the mill and for a fee in cash or kind grind the grain. If it is indeed the case that Randolph Lawson built the first grist mill, this would have been quite an accomplishment requiring a lot of skill. In fact, a grist mill was the ultimate expression of technology in such a frontier environment. It required a craftsman to create an exact waterwheel that the falling water of a spring would turn. The waterwheel would connect by a piston to gears within the structure of the mill. These gears in turn drove a large flat stone in rotation against another flat stone, which would grind the grain. To contrive such a machine required the skills of a blacksmith and wheelwright.
Downstream from Randolph and Susannah Lawson their daughter Lakey Kattie Lawson and her husband Thomas Chambers lived at the mouth of Buffalo Creek. Next door to Randolph and Susannah lived their son Thomas Andrew Lawson, who married one of the daughters of an early settler, William Jeffers; her name was Nancy. She and Thomas married in 1822. Next to them lived one of her brothers or uncles, Jacob Jeffers.
Jehu Phillips recalled that there were no roads in Campbell County at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Inhabitants moved about on foot or horse. Crops were brought to the mill via sled. People grew corn and potatoes and raised hogs. People drank water, though some fermented drinks from stills were common. Generally the inhabitants “were all very healthful and there was very little sickness.”
Driving through the region even today one can easily imagine the wildness of the land two hundred years ago. The region of northeastern Tennessee is still largely rural, with dense forests cut by small streams and rivers. The people are heavily given to the Baptist church, as were their forebears of two centuries past.
In the nineteenth century, the farmers were poor and the land not the type to sponsor slave labor, hence there were very few slaves in Campbell County, and indeed the people of northeastern Tennessee were against secession from the Union in 1861.
In the 1830 federal census for Campbell County, the Randolph Lawson family had five people living with them. Next door was their son Thomas. Two doors down was Robert Lawson, two people living there, and next door to Robert was Blackburn and Lucretia Lawson Thompson, with ten people in their family. Down the way was Samuel Lawson, two people in his family. Thirty lots away was Maxwell and Anna Lawson, with seven people in their family. There was also Randolph’s son Elisha Lawson nearby.
Trying to determine the exact line of descent of one’s ancestors is dependent on historical sources. The Lawsons of Campbell County were widespread, so much so that even today there are landmarks named for the family. There is a Lawson Mountain and a Lawson Cemetery. Several different families of Lawsons from Virginia and North Carolina inhabited the region. Many shared similar given names, such as Robert and Randolph.
Some Lawson genealogists believe that Maxwell Lawson was the son not of Randolph and Susanna but Robert “Robin” Lawson and Anne Goad Lawson, he being the son of William Lawson of Scotland, she being the daughter of Abraham Goad and Anne Ayers Goad. Circumstantial evidence for this claim, besides tradition, includes the following: Robert and Anne lived in Campbell County, and he lived near other Lawsons, such as Randolph, Maxwell, Samuel, and Thomas. There is a record that he fought in the American Revolution. Indeed, the Montgomery, Virginia court records list that in 1778 joining Capt. Jonathan Isom’s militia company was Abraham Goad, James Goad Sr., James Goad Jr., Randolph Lawson, Robert Lawson Sr., and Robert Lawson Jr. One might assume that one of the Robert Lawsons so mentioned ended up living in Campbell County, Tennessee. And it is possible that this Robert Lawson was the father of Maxwell Lawson. But I think that tradition and evidence lean more toward Randolph Lawson. Added to this evidence is Ancestry Thrulines, which clearly indicates that Randolph was the father of Maxwell.
Land Purchase Record for Randolph Lawson
In the late 1830s Randolph and Susanna relocated to Illinois, then moved to Clinton County, Kentucky, where they would die, she in 1844, he in 1848.
Although all of these states in which Randolph and Susanna lived—Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky—practiced slavery, Randolph and his descendants appear not to have owned slaves.
Randolph and Susanna, like many of the Lawsons of the southern Appalachian hill country, had many children. Their first child, Elizabeth “Millie”, was born June 10, 1786, in Montgomery County, Virginia, living there until 1797. She moved with her parents when an infant southwest to the Cumberland Plateau, in northeast Tennessee. Here she lived until her death. She married Joseph Phillips and would die in Scott County, Tennessee in 1838.
Their second child, Lakey Kattie, was born in 1792; she married Thomas Chambers and died in 1838 in Scott, Tennessee. Lakey’s twin sister Lucretia “Lucy” married Blackburn Thompson and moved to Wesley Arkansas along with her sibling Maxwell. Other children: Elisha was born in 1793 and died in 1870; Sophia was born in 1794 and died in 1880; Mary Louis was born in 1797 and died in 1870. When Randolph and Susannah relocated to Hawkins County, in eastern Tennessee, they bought one hundred acres in the Puncheon Camp Valley, on Clinch River. Here, south of the Cumberland Gap near Hawkins and Campbell counties, Tennessee, daughter Maggie was born in 1800. She would die young in 1812 in Campbell County. Also at Puncheon Camp their son Maxwell was born, on May 5, 1802. It was around this time, according to Randolph’s 1838 court testimony, while living in Hawkins County, that “his house was burned and all papers destroyed.”
This tragic event must have precipitated the move to Campbell County, perhaps in 1803. The family stayed in Campbell County for thirty years. Here, their son Thomas Andrew was born in 1803. He lived in Campbell County but eventually moved to Erath County Texas, where he died in Feb. 1891. He was married to Nancy Jeffers. Also in Campbell County their daughter Clary (Clarissa) was born in 1812. She married William Jeffries, and died in 1897 in Barry County, Missouri. Son Madison Addison was born in 1814 and would die in 1870. Their last child Milton was born in 1820.
Like many early Americans, the story of Randolph Lawson’s full life is very unclear for the historian of today. It is not known precisely when and where he was born, precisely who his parents were, and precisely who his children were. Although he was a veteran of the American War for Independence, fighting in the southern colonies against the British, his precise actions during the war are lost to time.
Randolph Lawson was born, perhaps, in November 1752 in Cumberland, North Carolina. Other sources put his birth in 1757 or as late as 1765. But in a court appearance in 1835 he told the court he was 82, having been “born in Cumberland Co, NC in the fall or winter of 1752.” His father, perhaps, was Bartholomew Lawson and his mother was Susannah Simpkins. Bartholomew Lawson possibly died in Cumberland County, North Carolina, in 1765 or in Lundenberg Virginia in August, 1782.
Randolph’s siblings included his older sister Elizabeth, who married George Rogers, a younger sister Susan, who was born in 1755 and married Moses Carrick (1750-June 17, 1826); Moses Carrick lived in Pennsylvania during the War for Independence; he was a corporal in the continental army; he moved to Kentucky and died in Tennessee.
Another of Randolph’s siblings was John, who was two years older than him. John was born in 1750 in Cumberland County, North Carolina and died January 4, 1838, at Morgan County Tennessee. John was a Revolutionary War veteran like Randolph. Randolph was present at his older brother John’s wedding to their cousin Anna Lawson in January 1775. They were married in Stokes County, in north central North Carolina, at the home of John Heart by a minister named Newman.
Other siblings included veteran of the Revolutionary War Morman I., born 1751. Morman also served in the War of 1812 as a corporal. Another brother, William, was a Second Lieutenant in the Virginia Continental troops during the Revolutionary War. Elisha, another brother, was born about 1753; he died in 1834. Brother Jacob was born in 1761, and died in 1832 in Hawkins Co, Tennessee. Brother Peter Lawson was born in 1758 and died in 1834.
When the War for Independence broke out, many of the Lawsons participated on the Patriot side. Randolph served in 1780 and 1781 in battles in North Carolina and South Carolina. In court testimony fifty-five years later, Randolph recalled that he enlisted as a militia soldier in July 1780 under a Captain Coke (or Cox) under the command of a Colonel Knowles. “They then marched toward Camden,” he remembered, “near which place they met Gen. [Horatio] Gates by whom they were then commanded and soon after were engaged with Lord Rawdon in the Battle of Camden, sometime in Aug 1780. This applicant was not actually engaged in the battle being detached as a guard of the baggage in which the Americans scattered and appeared by the conduct of the Militia.” The battle was a horrible loss for the patriots. The record continues: “They did not get together to effect any thing again during this term of 3 months. He did not receive any discharge from this tour of 3 months and there was nothing more of any interest or possible during this tour of service. He again entered service as a volunteer for a tour of six months sometime in Jan. or Feb. 1780 under Capt. Duck. He thinks under the same Col. [Knowles]. He does not recollect where they rendezvou[s]ed but when organized, they marched on toward Guilford Court House where they Met Gen. [Nathaniel] Green, who commanded them and where they had an engagement with Lord Cornwallis and were again defeated. This applicant was not again actually engaged being young was again on detached duty as a guard of the baggage. After the battle, General Green marched on toward Camden, where he attacked Lord Rawdon, sometime in April, but this applicant under the command of this same field officers and he thinks commanded by General [Charles Henry] Lee was sent on a different expedit[i]on, in which, however, he had no engagement, that he recollects, nor does he recollect for anything further being done or transpiring of interest during this term of six months. He was discharged however, 2 weeks before the expiration of this tour of six months, having served 5 months and 2 weeks, making in all eight months and 2 weeks. He received a written discharge from this last tour of six months.”
As an old man living in Tennessee and Kentucky, Randolph was attempting to secure a pension for his revolutionary war service, which required proof that he has served six months. In another court record from May 1842, Lawson, “a resident citizen now of Clinton Co., KY, age 90, said that he volunteered under Capt. Gholston, as he yet believes his name to be, he thinks it was in June 1780, for 3 months under Capt. Gholston, or Gordin, is not positive as to the name, but knows the Capt. under which applicant’s father served one tour in the same war, was Gordin but his captain ‘s name was Gholston. He then lived in Cumberland Co., NC and was attached to army command by Gen. Gates.”
His memory being clearly problematic, he was assisted by various old comrades who appeared on his behalf. One, John Parley, “a resident citizen of Wayne Co., KY; states that he was personally acquainted with the soldier in the state of NC and knows that he was a private soldier in the Revolutionary War at the time of the Gates defeat but was not retained in service at that time, the length of the time for which he was engaged, afterwards, he was a volunteer private in the other tours one of which was under Capt. Gholston, attached to Gen. Green’s army, for 3 months and in scouting a company for about 3 months.”
It appears based on these records that Randolph served as a soldier protecting the baggage and as a scout. Why one record indicates that he protected the baggage due to his young age doesn’t make sense, as he would have been 28-29 years old at the time.
Another old comrade appeared on his behalf: the “Affidavit of Thomas Phillips, resident of Campbell Co., TN, who states that he and the soldier were both residents of Cumberland Co., NC and well recollects that in the year 1780, and knows that he now lives in the south edge of KY and volunteered under Capt. Cox, and was in the Revolution and hence it was sometime before Gates’s defeat and that shortly after the defeat he returned home and knows that in the later part of the season of the fore part of 1781, he again went into service under Capt. Gholston in Col. Alston’s regiment and was . . . army and was back at Camden or scouting expeditions for sometime and then returned home to Cumberland Co., NC – affiant being now age 75 and not far from the age of Applicant. Affiant has been acquainted with the Lawson family for many years, from his first recollection, having married an own cousin to the applicant for pension, Randolph Lawson. Signed – Thomas Phillip.”
Another affidavit by Willis Cole “states, he was personally acquainted with Randolph Lawson, who is now of KY when the said Lawson resided in NC and knows he was in the Revolutionary War, sometime under Gen. Gates. Then in 1781, served under Capt. Golston, attached to Gen. Green’s army and was engaged for 3 months in actual service of his affiant’s certain knowledge. Although he did not belong to said company and again in the Summer of 1781, was again in service. Afterwards believes he served 3 different campaigns, the 2 last was under Gen. Green and affiant believes and has no doubt that in the 2 campaigns that Randolph Lawson served full six months in the Revolutionary War, called out by the Capt. Authority that an emboided corp and in his acquaintance with Lawson after the war, he frequently heard Lawson state that he served 3 tours of 3 months each, but has not seen him for many years, until lately. This affidavit was made in Fentress Co., TN.”
The testimony was deemed inconclusive, and Randolph never received a pension.
Randolph married Susannah Cross on 13 June 1791 in Patrick County, Virginia. Randolph and Susannah were reputedly the first couple to be married in Patrick County, a newly formed county in mountainous southern Virginia.
The marriage contract reads:
“Know all men by these presents that we Randolph Lawson and Jacob Lawson of Patrick County are held and firmly bound unto the Govourner of the state of Virginia and his Successors for the time being in the sum of Fifty Pounds to which payment well owed Truly to be made we do bind ourselves our . . . firmly by these sealed with our seals and dated this 13th day of June 1791.”
“Whereas this is a marriage depending & by Gods permission . . . intended between the above bound Randolph Lawson & Susanah Cross. The bond action of the above Obligation is such that of these is no lawful cause to Obstruct the said Marriage. Thus the above Obligation to be read else to remain in full force . . . . Signed sealed and delivered in the Presents of Sam Shaples. Randolph Lawson his mark. Jacob Lawson his mark.”
The bondsman was Jacob Lawson, Randolph’s brother. The bond was an early American institution by which the man declared his intent to marry and was so serious that if any objection came forward before the nuptials he would forfeit the bond money.
Over the course of their marriage Randolph and Susannah had eleven sons and thirteen daughters. One of those sons (probably) was Maxwell Lawson, a farmer of Tennessee and Arkansas.
The young couple after their marriage moved to Montgomery County, Virginia, living there until 1797. Here they had their first child, Elizabeth “Millie”, born June 10, 1786. She would marry Joseph Phillips and would die in Scott County, Tennessee in 1838. Their second child, Lakey Kattie, was born in 1792; she married Thomas Chambers and died in 1838 in Scott, Tennessee. Lakey’s twin sister Lucretia “Lucy” married Blackburn Thompson and moved to Wesley Arkansas along with some of her siblings. Other children: Elisha was born in 1793 and died in 1870; Sophia was born in 1794 and died in 1880; Mary Louis was born in 1797 and died in 1870. Randolph and Susannah relocated to Hawkins County, in eastern Tennessee. They bought one hundred acres in the Puncheon Camp Valley, on Clinch River. Puncheon Camp is in northeast Tennessee about forty miles south of the Cumberland Gap. This was near Hawkins and Campbell counties, Tennessee. Here, daughter Maggie was born in 1800. She would die young in 1812 in Campbell County. Also at Puncheon Camp their son Maxwell was born, on May 5, 1802. Possibly Maxwell had a twin brother, Randolph, who died in 1870. Here also, Randolph, Sr, became embroiled in some sort of religious conflict at the Big Springs Baptist Church. The church records for October 2, 1802 state: “The report from Rob Camp and thought not proper that Randolph Lawson’s name should be made record til he cleared himself of a charge against him.” What were these charges? Often people who broke one of the commandments had to face their accusers. Sometimes the drunk and disorderly did as well. However, the church records for December 2, 1802 state: “Released Randolph Lawson from the charges lodged against him.”
Two weeks later, on December 18, 1802, Randolph received a grant of 500 acres from the State of North Carolina. The record reads: “Know that we have granted unto Randolph Lawson Five hundred Acres of land in our Eastern District on Poor Valley and waters of Holston River.” North Carolina granted land in the claimed territory of what is today eastern Tennessee to veterans at the end of the war in the 1780s. Whether this was the case respecting the land grant to Randolph Lawson almost twenty years later is unknown. This land was located in the Eastern District of Poor Valley Creek on the Holston River in Hawkins County, TN.
It was around this time, according to Randolph’s 1838 court testimony, while living in Hawkins County, that “his house was burned and all papers destroyed.”
This tragic event must have precipitated the move to Campbell County, perhaps in 1803. The family stayed in Campbell County for twenty years. Here, their son Thomas Andrew was born in 1803. He lived in Campbell County but eventually moved to Erath County Texas, where he died in Feb. 1891. He was married to Nancy Jeffers. Also in Campbell County their daughter Clary (Clarissa) was born in 1812. She married William Jeffries, and died in 1897 in Barry County, Missouri. Son Madison Addison was born in 1814 and would die in 1870. Their last child Milton was born in 1820.
A Tennessee land record still exists that indicates that Randolph’s brother William granted him one acre of land in 1811:
“The State of Tennessee To all to whom these presents shall come greetings that in of an entry made in the office of the surveyor of the fourth district of number 758 dated the 15th day of November, 1810 founded on a certificate of number 28 issued by the register of East Tennessee to Micajah Cross for four hundred acres of land dated the fifth day of January, 1810 fifty acres of which are assigned by Cross to William Lawson and one acre by William Lawson to Randolph Lawson. There is granted by the said state of Tennessee unto the said Randolph Lawson and his heirs a certain tract a parcel of land containing one acre lying in the county of Anderson in the district of Hamilton on Paint Creek waters of the New River beginning at a hickory and buck on the south side of the buck thence north forty four east sixteen poles to a white oak north forty six west poles to a dogwood south forty four west sixteen poles to a spruce pine then south forty six east ten poles to the beginning of survey September 16th, 1811 with the and appurtenances to have and to hold the said tract or parcel of land with its appurtenances to the said Randolph Lawson and his heirs forever. In witness whereof Willie Blount, Governor of the State of Tennessee hath here unto set his hand and caused the oath of the said state to be affixed at Nashville in the day of July in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and thirteen.”
Another Tennessee land record reads:
“State of Tennessee Campbell County Scale 100 poles [16.5 feet] to the inch By virtue of an entry no. 189 dated the 12th day of Aug, 1824, I have surveyed for Randolph Lawson twelve acres land including a part of his improvement where he now lives on Paint Rock Creek in said county beginning on a weeping willow tree standing yard and running thence north 180 east 40 poles to a stake in his old line in his field north 54° east 6 poles to a maple and sweet gum South 46° east 41 poles to a stake South 18° west 47 poles to a stake thence North 46~ west 46 poles to the beginning as represented by the plat-surveyed 30th August, 1824.”
And another:
“I do certify that by virtue of an entry made in the entry taker office of Campbell county, Tennessee No,301 dated January 27, 1826 I have surveyed for Randolph Lawson twenty five acres of land in said county on the waters of Paint Rock Creek beginning at a white oak near the top of a ridge running east 64 poles to a chestnut thence north 64 poles to a stake and beginning as represented in the annex plat surveyed the 4th day of September, 1805. Henry Thompson-scc Mark Richardson __ Robert Jeffers-scc Surveyor cc 25 acres-scale 80 poles inch.”
The land purchased on Paint Rock Creek is in the vicinity of the modern town of Huntsville, Tennessee.
In the 1830 federal census for Campbell County, Randolph’s family was listed as: one free white male, age 15-19, one free white male, age 60-69, one free white female, age 10-14, one free white female, age 15-19, one free white female, age 40-49. He lived next door to his son Thomas Lawson, who had six people living in his family. This census was in error, as Randolph was 78 in 1830 and Susannah was 65. The young male was perhaps Milton. The teenage female was perhaps Clarissa. The young teenage female, perhaps a relative.
Two doors down was Robert Lawson, two people living there, and next door to Robert was Blackburn and Lucretia Lawson Thompson, with ten people in their family. Down the way was Samuel Lawson, two people in his family. Thirty lots away was Maxwell and Anna Lawson, with seven people in their family. There was also son Elisha Lawson nearby.
In the 1840 federal census, Clinton Kentucky, the Randolph and Susanna Lawson household had one free white male, 20-29, one free white male 80-89, two free white females, 5-9, one free white female, 30-39, and one free white female, 60-69. Their next-door neighbor was son Elisha with a family of seven. The census taker made an error in Susannah’s age; she was 75. The young male was perhaps Milton. The two young females were perhaps grandchildren.
In his 1838 court testimony Randolph claimed that he left Campbell County, Tennessee, “in the fall of 1832. Two men had been talking to him about securing a pension, but having sold out and was preparing the move to Illinois, with his children he knew anything of the matter and had no chance to stay and attend to the business, he decided to move on have his business attended to where he settled. Accordingly, moved to Johnson Co., IL, and there became sickly and having no old acquaintance nor no chance of proving service and after having lived there sometime and concluded to move back and accordingly started back, but on his way concluded to settled in Clinton Co., KY, immediately on the Fentress Co. line in TN, about 60 miles from Campbell on the settlement where he started from and from his extreme old age and bodily infirmity is unable to attend court or attend to business from home and having no acquaintance in Fentress Co., it is most convenient to have his business transacted in Fentress Co., TN.”
Randolph died March 1848 in Albany, Clinton, Kentucky, near the border of Tennessee, where he was buried. Susanna had preceded him in death by four years, in 1844.
Maxwell Lawson (perhaps christened as John Maxwell Lawson) was born in 1802 in Tennessee, but who exactly his parents were is unclear. Maxwell married Anna Gray in 1820, but what her ancestry was (besides her parents) is overall unclear. Maxwell and Anna had 19 children; they lived in Tennessee until the 1830s, when they moved to western Arkansas.
Maxwell was a farmer, initially in northeast Tennessee near the Cumberland Mountains. He did well enough to be able to support a large family and buy land. He must have moved west in part because he sought more opportunity where land was more available and perhaps less expensive.
Maxwell was a Democrat politically and a primitive Baptist religiously.
Maxwell and Anna relocated to Wesley, Arkansas. They bought a house in 1832, which was destroyed or razed, replaced by a two-story house still standing in Wesley that was built by their son William Riley after the Civil War; Maxwell and Anna probably lived in the house at the close of their lives. The house was a southern style house with a broad open veranda-porch. It was situated in the Arkansas forest.
Maxwell and Anna’s children fought for the Confederacy. Maxwell was apparently a captain in the Tennessee militia during the 1830s. There is no evidence that he owned slaves, though his father-in-law, Jacob Gray, who also moved to western Arkansas, owned a few female slaves.
Maxwell’s sister Lucretia married Blackburn Thompson in 1832; he was born in 1791 in Virginia. They moved to Campbell Co Tennessee and had a child Andrew J. Thompson on Oct 7, 1816. Blackburn fought under Jackson in the War of 1812. He and Lucretia moved to Madison Co Arkansas in 1856; he died in 1861.
Maxwell possibly had other siblings as well: Sophia, (1794-1880); James Robert (1803-1871); James Henry (1805-1876); Martin (1820 -?)
Maxwell’s parents were probably Randolph and Susanna Cross Lawson (the other strong candidates are Robert and Anne Goad Lawson). In support of the Randolph and Susanna is a land deed from 1832 that shows that Randolph purchased land in Campbell Co, the same place where Maxwell was born and where he too owned land. There is also a land purchase in the 1820s that shows Randolph Lawson and Maxwell Lawson buying land by New River. Robert Lawson also bought land in Campbell County. He and Randolph were apparently close friends or relatives, and fought together in the Virginia militia during the American Revolution.
Anna’s parents were probably Jacob C. Gray and Mary A. (Polly) Shreeves.
Maxwell seems to have been a big, burly man, very serious, virile, living until age 70. His photographic portrait shows a stern, dignified country man. He does not appear sad, just more of a serious gaze into the hardship of life. A survivor. He had a full head of hair and was generally handsome.
His wife was likewise big, burly, serious, and virile, bearing 19 children and living until she was 70. She was born five years after Maxwell and outlived him by five years. There is a sense of sadness and hardship in her photographic portrait. She appears to have been a beautiful woman with nice features.
Of their children, first born Calvin, 1825 to 1907, was a farmer who fought for the Confederacy. He married Jane Ann Fritts. Both were illiterate. Their second child was Polly, who married a man named Johnson. Their third child was Sarah, born in 1829 and dying in Texas in 1897. She married Clairborne Fritts in 1847. He was a Confederate soldier. Their fourth child, Elizabeth, born in 1830, married Martin Counts. Their fifth child was an unnamed female who died young. Their sixth child, Caroline, born in 1834, married Bud Williams. Their seventh child, David, born 1835, married Bashaby Counts. He was killed in the war. Their eight child, named Miles, died young. Their ninth child, Martha, was born in 1837. Their tenth child was William Riley Lawson, who was a Captain in the Confederate cavalry during the war. He married in 1866 and served as a postmaster and storekeeper in Wesley Arkansas. Their eleventh child, Samuel, born in 1841, married Kesiah Fritts. He was killed May 10, 1865, crossing the Mississippi River, coming home from the war, by bushwackers. Their twelfth child, Matilda, born in 1842, married a man who was killed in the war. Their thirteen child, John, born in 1843, married Mary Burks. Their fourteenth child, Phoebe, married Sam Henson. Their fifteenth child, Calloway, born in 1846, married Elizabeth Jane McElhaney. Their sixteenth child, Freeman, was born in 1848. Their seventeenth child, Nancy, married Zak Templeton. Their eighteenth child, Louisa, was born in 1855. Their nineteenth child, Margaret, married Dave Lucas.
The grinding movement of time toward the end was slow and steady, one day following another, night falling expectantly, darkness ruling the land until the hues of dawn foretold the beginning of a new day like all the others. The beauties of starry nights and rosy dawns were lost amid the suffering and cries of the tortured, ill, and dying. The people could not see that truth and goodness overshadowed the land at dusk and brightened the world with new light. The divine punctuated the sameness of daily toil and disturbed repose. Creation waited expectantly, if humans were blind to the emerging truth surrounding them. The stars appeared ever brighter, the night sky ever clearer, the sounds of night like a choir rejoicing in the arrival of the child. Most people closed their doors and shuttered their windows to the lights and sounds of the night. Some people, however, could not help but see and hear. Shepherds watching over their flocks knew the night sky, watched the progression of stars and constellations, kept track of Orion and the Pleiades, the rising of the Dog Star, Sirius, the strange patterns of the wandering planets. They knew the sounds of night, and the sameness of each night, the constancy of creation from season to season. But there was a change to the unending sameness. The constancy of nature was suspended as the timeless entered time. The lights and songs of the night jarred them from their slumber, and they looked in awe, listened intently, to the message told them by the night. A child is born. God is with you.
Travelers caught on the road took extra care to keep to the path, letting the stars, which shown brightly in the clear desert air, guide them. Gentle zephyrs whispered among the palms, sycamores, and figs. Those still awake resting after the labors of the day awaited sleep and the new day. Everyone, human and beast, anticipated dawn. In the town, a few feeble lights interrupted the overwhelming darkness. Candlelight and oil lamps cast great shadows upon mothers caring for sick children, feeble old men refusing to sleep, and the anxious despairing over deeds of the past and retribution yet to come. Tavern owners had shut the doors and hostelers closed the gates. Those wanderers needing food and rest were left to fend for themselves.
The man and woman, having come from afar to fulfill the requirements of the law, arrived after dark. The man was a native of the town, though not a resident, and had known of neither friends nor family who could host him and the woman for the night. The woman was exhausted and about to give birth. Starlight pointed the way to a rustic barn filled with hay and feeding troughs. The woman tried to stifle her fears and the cries of pain as the baby would wait no longer. The man found a bucket and a well, drew water and wet some clothes, and tended the woman the best he could. After a time she made the final push and the baby emerged in a splash of warm fluid from the womb amid cries of anguish and joy. The man cut the cord and gave the naked child to the mother, who wrapped him in clothes to protect him from the cold and held him to her still heaving breast. Soon the cries were stifled and the child slept. The man put the child in the only object resembling a cradle, a manger that he packed with straw. The woman kneaded her womb to try to stop the ongoing cramps.
In the dead of night the stars shown more brightly, particularly one that seemed to herald for the man the new life brought into the world. Accompanying the apparent brightening of the star were noises caused by the movement of the natural and supernatural. The man heard rapturous singing voices and wondered whence they came. Soon he heard the footsteps and shouts of man, and guardedly asked what they wanted. He could detect trembling in their voices and fear in their faces, glistening from tears. They were shepherds, they said, who were reclining in the surrounding hills, watching over their sheep, when they had been astonished by amazing figures in the sky, glowing ethereally, singing, glorifying God. One of the messengers told them of the miraculous birth of the son of the most high God in this very town of Bethlehem, and that the child would be found lying in a manger in a barn. When the messengers departed, in their wake was the bright starlight that shown upon the town. The men said that though they had been terrified they could not doubt their senses, and knew that God had commanded them to go and find the baby, to worship this child, Immanuel. They looked upon the sleeping infant and continued to weep and shutter excitedly, glorifying God and the great miracle He had deigned to allow them to witness.
The appearance of the shepherds astonished Joseph, the father, who was nevertheless not completely unprepared. He was a descendant of King David, the anointed, and had been taught the Scripture, and knew the prophecies that the Messiah would herald from the house of David, and be born in the City of David, Bethlehem, Joseph’s own birthplace. Although Joseph was a craftsman, not a scholar, he was dutiful in attending the synagogue, following Mosaic Law, and reading the Scriptures. He knew what Isaiah said about the suffering servant who would be born of a virgin. Reality and experience reflected the dream that had informed Joseph that his wife, Mary, was this virgin.
Mary listened to the shepherds and pondered what they had witnessed. All that she had been told was coming true. Nine months before, she had been a young maiden living with her parents in Nazareth in Galilee, betrothed to a good man, Joseph the carpenter. Her dreamlike experience of the messenger who hailed her and proclaimed that she was the mother of God had in due course occurred as predicted: her body had changed and her womb had grown. The birth of a wonderful, healthy child and the words of the shepherds were amazing, if expected.
Joseph and Mary had bound themselves in the acceptance of God’s will. During Mary’s pregnancy they had learned, along with the other inhabitants of Galilee, Samaria, and Judaea, of Caesar’s requirement that all heads of family enroll at the place of their birth. Mary had been in her ninth month when they began the five-day journey to Bethlehem. Jews were taught to obey the Mosaic Law in synagogue and the Roman law by circumstance.
The checkered political history of the Jews, the ongoing political struggle for power by dynasts among the chosen people, combined with the ceaseless aggression directed toward Israel and Judah, later Galilee, Samaria, and Judaea, by outsiders—Chaldeans, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans—had left the Jews a weakened people subject to the whims of outside forces. For several generations the most compelling and dominant force was that of Rome. Like most occupying powers throughout history, Rome required little from its subject peoples as long as they obeyed the laws and paid their taxes. The enrollment that forced Joseph and Mary to journey to Bethlehem was in accord with the latter. Romans governed subject peoples indirectly by means of local rulers, kings and tyrants, and directly, by appointed officials, who were given complete authority subject to the supervision of the Senate, formerly, and at this time, the imperial power, held by Octavian, or Augustus, Caesar. Augustus, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, had held power for almost forty years. He along with other tyrants, had destroyed the Republic, substituting the rule of one person. Augustus held power by controlling Rome’s huge military. In the Near East, he preferred to control kingdoms by means of a patron-client relationship with rulers such as Herod and his sons and successors. These men ruled as long as they followed Augustus’ bidding and kept order. Often they worked in cooperation with Roman officials—procurators, propraetors, proconsuls, and governors. Augustus maintained remarkable control by a strong Roman troop presence on the frontiers of an empire that encompassed parts of three continents. The large military was a continual drain on the empire’s resources, for which Augustus paid by taxation. To know what was the proper tax quota for each province and client kingdom required meticulous records of the number of citizens. Hence Augustus ordered the enrollment, or census. Joseph, Mary, and the child stayed in Bethlehem for several days to allow for Mary’s recovery and for Joseph to enroll with the local officials. Joseph was able to find more secure lodgings for his family. He prepared to make the journey home to Nazareth, planning on his way to stop at Jerusalem to accomplish Mary’s purification according to Mosaic Law and for the circumcision of the child according to the Abrahamic Covenant. Meanwhile the shepherds were not silent about their miraculous experience. Word had spread and the devout and curious came from surrounding villages to see the child. Most astonishing of all the visitors were Chaldean stargazers bearing gifts and kneeling before the child.
