History Knox
Regional author Mark Sebastian Jordan shares a Knox County history column with our readers each Saturday, reflecting on the community's local lore.
MOUNT VERNON — Interesting stories sometimes pop up in unexpected places. One such place is the 1876/77 Mount Vernon city directory, published by the White Company.
Like any directory, it lists the people who lived in the town, but unlike most directories, this one also includes stories about local residents for entertainment value.
One such story involves the adventures of an early settler in the region, Sarah Patterson.
According to the directory, at the time of printing, Sarah was 73 years old and living in the city’s fourth ward with her son. She had only retreated to the city after giving up the family farm a few years previously.
The farm is said to have straddled the Knox/Licking County border. Since she had already moved to Mount Vernon before the 1871 county atlas was published, I initially didn’t have any information about exactly where the farm was.
The directory praises her as proud, old-time stock: “Raised at a period when both sexes were inured to toil and hardships, unknown to the present generation, she has preserved all her early habits, which allows her to bear the infirmities of old age with almost the characteristics of youth full of life and laudable ambition.”
Ah, yes, the good old days. Now we know for certain that they happened from approximately 1805 to 1820, not in the 1950s, as is commonly thought today. Glad this settles that. Amazing that we’re still going, considering that it’s been all downhill since 1820.
The directory tells us that Sarah was born in Virginia in 1804, and that her parents moved to the Knox/Licking County frontier in 1806, although it wasn’t yet called that, as neither county was officially created until 1808.
Frustratingly, not only does the directory not give us a more specific location for the farm, it doesn’t even say what Sarah’s maiden name was, nor her parents’ names.
renaming it “Rublington” Township. The Patterson farm is marked, though with the initial M. Short of “Mrs.” Patterson, or was the property in another relative’s name before it was transferred to Sarah? (Image source: Licking County Atlas, 1854.)
At some point she married a man named Patterson and had children, but she outlived her husband by quite a way, for by 1850, she’s listed on the census as a widow living in a farm on the Licking County side of the border with two children, James and Eliza.
We’ll come back to the farm location and family information in a moment. But first, the story of Sarah’s brave expedition, which proves that the notion of her being of hearty settler stock was not an exaggeration.
The family, having carved a farmstead out of the wooded frontier in 1806, grew, but the work was hard. One day in 1820, when Sarah would have been 14 years old, her father was away from the farm on business.
Sarah’s mother realized that they were running low on cornmeal, but she was far too busy with household chores and taking care of younger children to go herself. So, she informed Sarah that she would have to go fetch a bag of cornmeal from the mill.
Sound simple? Well, here’s the catch. In 1820, the closest mill to the family farm was the one located just south of Mount Vernon, about where Ohio 661 intersects with Ohio 13 today.
That is a voyage of around 15 miles through the woods, which at this point were populated by more American Indians than settlers.
As the directory puts it: “Sarah performed the trip on horseback, following the Indian trail through the forests, and returned home safely with the much-needed article of food.”
That would have taken some courage for a 14-year-old girl to make such a trip alone, knowing there was only one other cabin between her family’s farm and the mill.
While Sarah did not encounter any difficulties, her family’s farm did have a couple of visitations in the early years.
One time the entire family was out working on chores on the large farm, which was only partially cleared of trees.
According to the story in the directory, one day they returned home and found their turnip patch torn up. Inside the cabin, they found six Indians having quite a party.
(Image source: Pinterest.)
They had husked the turnips of their rinds, threw the rinds on the floor, and were eating the turnips with delight. Some of the natives were singing and dancing, and one was “spinning the flax-reel,” the humming of which caused his friends great amusement.
Though it isn’t mentioned, I can’t help but think these young men may have also partaken in some potent beverages before their turnip raid. Somehow or other, Sarah’s father got them to leave, though the story offers no details of how.
Since I had no idea what “spinning the flax-reel” meant, I contacted my friend Ginger Stoops, a fiber arts expert who lives in Olivesburg and teaches classes about fiber arts, soap making, and similar pursuits.
She explained that to make flax usable, it had to be processed. The first step was spinning the fibers into a thread, which then had to be reeled up before it is dyed and prepared for weaving on a loom.
Ginger agreed that the young natives’ hilarity at the flax reel might well have something to do with what they were drinking.
She also pointed me towards a photo included with this column. But it turns out I had more to ask her.
On another occasion described in the article about Sarah Patterson, an Indian chieftain named Custo visited her family’s farm. Intriguingly, I’ve not been able to find any other written historical reference so far to Custo.
He visited the cabin and announced that he wanted Sarah’s mother to make him a vest. She used “three yards of Dimity” to make the native his vest. In return, he paid her with a pair of scissors and a silk handkerchief.
I asked Ginger about the fabric, the amount used, and the payment.
“Dimity is a specific type of cloth that is spun on a harness loom and has raised stripes or checks,” Ginger said. “It was considered very special in colonial times because it took extra time and processing to create, as opposed to a solid cloth.”
That this vest took “three yards of Dimity” gave Ginger an idea about Custo’s stature.
“Three yards would be about for a person your size,” Ginger said. “A vest for Scott (Ginger’s husband) would take about 1-1.5 yards.”
This gives me a strong image of Custo, because I know that Ginger’s husband, my friend and fellow writer Scott Stoops, is tall and slim. I’m tall, but not at all slim, so I suspect Custo wasn’t either.
For anyone to be plus-sized in the early 1800s meant that he was wealthy, which was borne out by his payment.
“Scissors … Oh, that is precious!” Ginger said. “Silk, that was imported and VERY expensive in the colonies. That would have been very high-quality linen because linen was comparatively cheap and common, unless it was of fine quality. This was a quite wealthy Indian.”
She then wondered how this native on the frontier even ended up with these precious goods, suggesting that there must have been a good story behind that, too. I agree, and wish there was some way to know.
It may well be that Custo was a man with connections who did a lot of trading to acquire high quality luxury goods from distant sources.
How exactly he selected Sarah’s mother to be his tailor isn’t known, either. Perhaps her work was known on the frontier, and Custo wanted the finest.
“Keep in mind that Dimity also ups the cost,” Ginger added. “It requires a tedious weaving technique that creates physical raised areas in stripes or checks. If they are a different color, then you have a dye process involved.
“This was an expensive vest. and well worth a pair of scissors and silk handkerchief.”
Frontier life must have been an endless series of adventures and misadventures. Fascinated by these stories, I wanted to track down the family a little better, to see if it was possible to reconnect their names to this story.
The directory tells us that Sarah later moved in with her son James in the fourth ward in Mount Vernon.
By following that connection, I was able to trace them back to a property in Burlington Township in northern Licking County in 1850. Sarah was already widowed by then, and an 1854 Licking County atlas shows that the farm doesn’t quite reach Knox County.
My guess would be that this was only a part of the original farm, perhaps sold off to Sarah and her husband in the 1820s.
I still didn’t know Sarah’s husband’s name, and some of the genealogy you’ll find for James Patterson and his mother online on Ancestry.com is obviously wrong. Many people claim a Sarah Gardner as James’ mother, though Sarah Gardner Patterson died in Kentucky in 1867, while this Sarah is clearly still living with James in 1870 and 1880.
Knowing this, I did a cemetery search and found the real Sarah: She died in 1881 at the age of 76, just a couple months shy of her 77th birthday, and is buried in the cemetery in Utica, with the husband who preceded her in death by over 30 years. His name was Henry.
It makes sense that they had a plot there, because their farm was just a mile or two west of Utica, and it’s no great surprise to find that Sarah wanted to be buried there, with her husband.
A search for Henry Patterson shows that he was born in 1800 and died in 1850, and that he married one Sarah Dunlap on Dec. 27, 1829.
That finally gives us Sarah’s maiden name which leads to her parents, James Dunlap Sr. (1776-1842), and Mary McCreary (1778-1839).
N.N. Hill’s 1881 History of Licking County, Ohio confirms that James and his family were among the very first settlers of Burlington Township, and that James also served as one of the first Licking County surveyors and commissioners.
James’ family traces back to Virginia.
Mary’s can be traced all the way back to Scotland, where she had a great grandmother from the Charlton family, which raises the interesting possibility that she may be a distant relative of the present author, because I also have Charltons in my family tree.
Most importantly, though, I like to be able to restore Sarah Dunlap’s name to the mill trek story, Mary McCreary Dunlap’s name to the story of making the fancy vest for the imposing Indian chief Custo (whose name is also otherwise forgotten to history), and to restore James Dunlap’s name to the story of finding the natives partying with turnips, as well as being one of the earliest settlers, whose farm was crossed by later-drawn county lines.
In the grand scheme of things, reconnecting the threads of such stories might not matter much. But it matters to me, and to those people’s memories.
I hope it matters to those of you who like to read about our local history, too.