The Hale Talbot Story
December 5, 1754 - August 31, 1828

by

Ann Talbot Brandon Womack
and
Farris W. Womack

February 2002

Hale Talbot first saw the light of day in the Wilderness of western Virginia on December 5, 1754.  His parents, Matthew (II) Talbot and Mary Hale, now had two children from their union and they also had Mary's child, Elizabeth,  from her marriage to Thomas Day whose untimely death after a short marriage had left the young widow, Mary,  free to remarry.  We have written extensively and posted on the Talbot web page more about the courtship and marriage of Matthew (II) Talbot and Mary Hale Day.  Hale Talbot was named to honor his mother's family, many of whom also lived in Bedford County and had long family ties with the Talbots.  Throughout his life, his name would be spelled in a variety of ways.  In this piece, Hale is used exclusively except in those instances where the official record shows another spelling.

Although we have written about life in the Virginia Wilderness in the middle of the 18th century, a brief review of conditions helps to understand the childhood and adolescence of Hale Talbot.  In 1754, Bedford County was new, having been formed only a few months before Hale's birth.  Indians still roamed the frontier and their presence was  a constant source of anxiety, dread, and real danger.  The communities of Forest and New London were hardly more than a dot on one's mental map, certainly not towns with any organizational structure or the means of providing public safety.  That responsibility fell to each settler and the militia which included all the able bodied men in the area..  The first session of the Bedford Court had recently been held at the residence of his grandfather, Matthew (I).  Virginia was a colony of the British and the Talbots were subjects of the British Empire.  Bedford County, the westernmost English settlement in Virginia, was more than a week's travel away from the capitol in Williamsburg and thus far from the civilizing influences of the aristocratic society that developed around the colonial capitol.  In July 1754, Washington and a company of Virginians had suffered an ignominious defeat at the hands of the French on the Ohio River.  The authorities were far more concerned with the larger dangers presented by the French and the Indians than in the individual hardships of settlers in Bedford.

Hale's uncle, Charles, was the only other child of Big Matthew who had married and he and Drussilla Gwinn Talbot had two children, the oldest, Williston, a lad of four.  His uncles, James, John, and Isham and his aunt, Martha, were living at home with their father and Hale's grandfather, Matthew (I).  James and John were grown men but Isham was a teenager of 16 and Martha a young lady of 14.   Hale's arrival brought the number of grandchildren to five, a very small number when considered in the light of the thousands of descendants who would come from this small band of Talbots who struggled to survive in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in 1754.

There were no schools and the only church was the organizational structure of the Church of England, more inclined to matters of the commonwealth than to matters of the soul.  Matthew (I) was a leader in the Church and the titular head of the vast country that made up Bedford County.  There was no University of Virginia in Charlottesville, in fact, Charlottesville was no more than a small village and the University would not be established for another 70 years.  Although the College of William and Mary was in operation in Williamsburg, it was quite remote from the frontier communities along the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge.  But the Talbot children did not grow up unschooled and ill lettered.  They were taught to read and write, probably by their parents or conceivably by the patriarch, Big Matthew,  himself.

And so, it was into this colonial wilderness that Hale Talbot began a life that even the most imaginative storyteller would find hard to imagine.  But let us not get ahead of the time.  In 1756, another child, Matthew (III) joined the family.  Thomas followed in 1760, William in 1761, Clayton and Edmund a few years later, probably about 1765.  By the time Hale Talbot was 11 or 12, Matthew (II) and Mary Hale Talbot's family was complete. Six sons and one daughter plus Elizabeth from Mary's first marriage made up the family and a lively bunch it must have been with eight children at home and the oldest not much more than 15.  The County was growing and although the work was hard, life had a special quality and substance - at any rate, these were things that young children didn't think about often.

Matthew (I) had died in 1758 and thus Hale would not have remembered him except through the larger than life legend that he left.  And the Talbot sons were making names for themselves in their own right.  John Talbot was elected to the House of Burgesses and would make many trips to that far off place in the east called Williamsburg.  Surely when he returned, he regaled not only the adults with stories but told tales that caught the imagination of the younger Talbots as well.  Hale's father and his uncles were doing well in their work and the family was prospering, at least by the standards of the time.  Charles, Matthew (II), and James were respected members of the community and officers in the Militia.  By 1765, many Virginians were chafing under the rule of the British but that rebellious sentiment probably grew stronger the closer one came to the political capitol..  And the restlessness that would so color the next century had already begun for some.  Daniel Boone had reached Kentucky for the first time in June of 1769.  Although Hale at 15 probably did not know or care about Boone and he surely would not have imagined that he would spend a considerable portion of his life that far from Bedford County.  Little did he know that within a very few years he would, indeed,  be in Kentucky and ultimately even beyond the Mississippi into country that in 1770 belonged to another sovereign nation.

The watershed event in 1776 was certainly the "shot heard round the world" that marked the beginning of the American Revolution.  All the Talbots were engaged in that epic struggle, and Hale was no exception.  He served as Captain of the Bedford Militia and his service has been recognized not only by the NSDAR but also by a marker at his gravesite in Missouri. (Click here for documentation.)   As important as the Revolution was to the country, it did not reach the level of personal importance for Hale that his marriage to Elizabeth "Betsey" Irvine in 1778 surely did.

The Talbot migrations from Bedford County seem to have begun about 1778 although they may have begun a few years before.  We have written that Matthew (II) moved his family to the Watauga area in what was then western North Carolina or perhaps western Virginia in 1778.  Whether Hale accompanied him or not is speculative, perhaps Matthew had gone earlier and Hale followed later after his marriage to Betsey.   Hale and Betsey may have moved to Watauga before 1780 and Hale may have been a combatant  in the battle of Kings Mountain along with his brothers, Matthew (III),  Thomas, and William.  Brother Thomas was wounded in the Battle and wore a visible scalp wound from it for the remainder of his days.  The sketchy stories that exist show that Hale and Betsey were at Watauga but they offer no proof.  

But there is evidence that Hale might not have been in Watauga.  His oldest child, Jane, reported on the 1850 Census when she was 71-making her birth year 1779-, that she had been born in Kentucky.  It may be that she did not know the place where she was born and Kentucky may have been the only place she remembered. But it is equally plausible that Hale and Betsey remained in Virginia after the other Talbots moved to Watauga and that they moved to Kentucky sometime before 1788.  If Jane was correct about her birthplace, Hale and Betsey moved to Kentucky soon after their marriage and thus they were not a part of the Talbot party that moved to Watauga.  Because we do not have a reliable record to show what Hale did during the American Revolution from 1776 to 1781, we cannot assert with confidence where his residence might have been but we do know that he was an Officer in the Bedford Militia in 1780 and that fact alone suggests that he was living in Virginia.. 

Whatever the circumstances and under what conditions he moved to Kentucky remain unsettled but the fact that he was in Madison County, Kentucky soon after 1785 can be established.  Madison County was formed in 1785 and with its formation came many new settlers in search of free or cheap land.  Hale Talbot was among that group and may have had claim to land under military service although we have not been able to document that.  We do know that his mother, Mary Hale Day Talbot died about 1785 and that his father moved from Watauga to Georgia soon afterward.  Whether these events played a part in his removal to Kentucky is unknown.

We turn now to a discussion of the children of Hale and Betsey.  We noted above that Jane Talbot reported in 1850, then age 71,  that she had been born in Kentucky in 1779.  We discussed the confusion that surrounds that claim although it is the only factual record we have to show the residence of the family.  In every writing that we have seen, Jane Talbot is shown as the last child of Hale and Betsey but that simply cannot be true.  We believe that she was the first born and that the other children were in the order shown below and that all of them were born in Madison County, Kentucky.

Jane Talbot married her half first cousin, James Talbot, son of Isham Talbot and Elizabeth Davis,  in Madison County, Kentucky in 1806.  That event coupled with the 1850 Census record confirms her birth  at approximately  the time she reported.  [In other pages on the Talbot website, we write about the Talbot migration from Virginia to Kentucky and we assert that there is strong evidence to show that the families making the trip may well have been Isham Talbot, Hale Talbot, and children of James Talbot who had died in 1777 and appear to have been living with Isham.]  The next child, Christopher, was born in 1788 in Madison County, Kentucky.  The nine year skip between Jane and Christopher suggests that other children may have been born but did not survive.  The Census records for 1790 and 1800 for Virginia and Kentucky have been lost thereby depriving us of a record that would have fixed the residency of Hail and Betsey.  The 1810 Census is available and the results are shown below.  

  The four males shown in Hale's household conform roughly in age to the ages we reported above.  Christopher would have been 22, Thomas 17, William 15, and David 12.  Hale would have been 56.  The ages shown for the four females still at home are more problematic.  The ages for Betsey and the two younger girls appear to be correct but the ages for Nancy and Elizabeth are at odds with what we show above.  We suspect that the Census is correct and that the age we show for Nancy above is incorrect by a few years and that for Elizabeth may be off by as much as six years.  We earlier speculated that there may have been additional children born between Jane and Christopher and there may well have been still other children who did not survive.  But these nine did survive and each had families of their own, more about which shortly.

James and Jane Talbot lived a few houses away from Hale and Betsey and by 1810 they had two young children.  The son show on the Census appears to be Isham H. Talbot, no doubt the "H" stands for Hale and the daughter must be Martha J. Talbot.  Martha married John A. Hunter in 1833 in Missouri and gave birth to four children.  She died in 1841 when all of her children were very young.  The 1850 Census shows those children living with their grandmother, Jane.

The official enumeration day of the 1810 census was 6 August 1810. All questions asked were supposed to refer to that date. The enumeration was to be completed within nine months, but the due date was extended by law to ten months.  Accordingly, we know that Hale and his family were living in Kentucky as late as August 1810 and , indeed, may have lived there beyond that time although most accounts assert that he moved to Missouri in 1810.  

In each of the accounts that we have seen concerning Hale Talbot, the writer asserts that Christopher Talbot and two slaves left Madison County in 1809 for Missouri, that they planted, cultivated, and harvested a crop of vegetables and then returned to Madison County in the fall of 1809 to prepare for the relocation to Montgomery County, Missouri the next year.  Some accounts state that Hale accompanied them or more precisely that they accompanied Hale.  Virgil Talbot's account in his work, The Talbots: Centuries of Service, includes the following paragraph:

Hale (or Haile) Talbot may have been the first [Talbot] to venture into Missouri.  It is known he came to Missouri and cleared land on Loutre Island and built a cabin.  With him were his son, Christopher and two slaves.  They returned to Kentucky and in 1810, the family and 76 fine brood mares, were brought to Loutre Island, located near Hermann.  Coming along was Lindsay Carson, whom Hale had helped raise in Kentucky.

The author of the history of Montgomery County, Missouri, clearly quoting from the same material that Virgil Talbot had used recounted the story as follows:

Mr. Talbott came to the territory of Missouri in 1809 with his eldest son, Christopher, and two negro slaves. They cleared a small farm on Loutre Island, and raised a crop of corn and vegetables. The following year (1810) the rest of the family came out and settled at their new home. Mr. Talbott brought to Mo. 76 fine mares, from which he raised horses for the western and southern trade. During the Indian war he kept the greater portion of his stock on the opposite side of the river, where they could not be molested by the savages.

We do not know if the entire family moved to Missouri in 1810.  Christopher, who had played such a major role in the planning for the move may have moved with the family but if he did, he returned to Madison County, Kentucky in 1811 for it was there and in that year that he married Susan Parrish.  We present these differences to point out the difficulty in establishing factual dates and not to show that the the stories are untrue, for they surely are true.  We hope that the reader will concentrate on the general story and not the minutiae of dates to gain an understanding of the times, travels, and lives of these Talbots.  In many ways, they were so like other families who tended to move together, live near each other, and share their lives although the living may have taken place in many different locales widely separated.

Hale Talbot and Betsey were 56 and 50 years of age, respectively, when they left Madison County, Kentucky for Montgomery County, Missouri in 1810.  It appears that all of the children, including Jane who had already married James Talbot made the move with them.  Montgomery County, Missouri in 1810 was truly the frontier.  The home place they chose was on the Missouri River across from the present day city of Hermann and near what is now McKittrick.  A mere four years before the Talbots arrived, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark along with their "Corps of Discovery" had descended the River from their successful exploration of the territory that President Jefferson has acquired in 1803.  Although the more adventuresome souls had already made trips up the Missouri, the Talbots were surely among the first to settle the area.  St. Louis, about 65 miles away as the crow flies,  was a city of no more than a few thousand.  Going westward from St. Louis, the traveler was entirely on his own.  Into this virgin wilderness, Hale Talbot brought his entire brood and quite likely a few other families.  It must have been some wagon train!  Hale's stock of horses alone would have produced a need for a rather large entourage but that would have paled by comparison to the requirements to move every possession they had.  Although the Indians had now been exposed to many strange sights, surely the sight of this procession must have astonished them.

We found the following account to be both humorous and descriptive of the business dealings of Hale and his sons.

Major Thomas Talbott, the second son, was a roving, fun-loving youth. On one occasion, his father sent him to Cotesansdessein {this was the real name of an old French settlement on the Missouri River about 40 or so miles upriver from Hermann., although sometimes there are separate words Cote Sans Dessein. The name means a "Hill without form or shape"}  for some apple barrels, and gave him the money to pay for them. He was gone about a month, and came back without the barrels or the money. In 1828 he made his first trip to Santa Fe. He was afterward employed by the government as Indian agent, and while acting in that capacity, the Indians stole a lot of mules from him that were his individual property. The government promptly paid him $5,000 for his mules. On one of his expeditions to Santa Fe, there was a MR. BRADUS, of Ky., in his company, who one day accidentally shot himself in the arm. The pain of his wound soon became so great that he could not endure it, and it was decided that his arm must be amputated to save his life. there were neither surgeon nor surgical tools in the company, but they made much preparations as they could, and successfully performed the operation. The flesh was cut with a butcher's knife, the bone separated with a hand saw, and the veins seared with the king bolt of a wagon, which had been heated for the purpose. The man got well and lived to a ripe old age. A number of years after this event, Maj. Talbott took a number of horses and mules to S. C., but finding no sale for them, he loaded them on onto a couple of schooners, and sailed for Cuba. During the voyage, a violent storm came up, and the rolling of the vessels excited the animals so that they began to fight one another, and several of them had their ears bitten off. But these sold as well as the others, and the Major had a very successful trip. That was the first importation of American horses to Cuba; but since then, the business has been extensively carried on. The major was married twice, and became a consistent member of the Methodist church before his death.

The Montgomery County Tax List for 1919 showed the following Talbot taxpayers:  David I. Talbot, Haile Talbot, James Talbot, Thomas Talbot, William F. Talbot, and Irvine S. Pitman.  The Missouri Census for 1820 is missing but judging from the 1819 Tax List and the 1830 Census, it seems clear that Nancy must have married Irvine Smith Pitman about 1815, and Elizabeth married Mathias McGirk in 1818.  The other children were probably still at home in 1820 but they would all be married by 1830 and, as we shall soon see, they were not far away.  The decade following the Talbot migration to Missouri was a busy one and beyond our capacity to describe but certainly filled with new adventures and much hardship along with exceedingly good times.

Missouri was a busy and thriving new country and soon the numbers of new settlers coupled with the expanding importance of St. Louis as a commercial center for the west and the transportation opportunities on the Missouri River caused the citizens to begin the push for Statehood.  The Talbots would play an important role in that activity with many serving in positions of critical importance to the Territory and ultimately to the new State.  James Talbot, Jane's husband and the son-in-law of Hale and Betsey,  represented Montgomery County in the Constitutional Convention and later as a member of the House of Representatives and still later as a Senator.  Mathias McGirk was elected to the State Senate but resigned in 1820 to accept the appointment to be the first Chief Justice of the Missouri Supreme Court.  Irvine S. Pitman was elected Sheriff of the County and would later serve many terms as the County Judge..

Another source wrote about Hale's son, William Talbot,  in the following manner.

Colonel William Talbott, the third son, was a ranger in Nathan Boone's company, and was afterward chosen Colonel of militia. He was married twice; first to JANE FERGUSON, and after her death, to a widow lady named BASCOM, a sister-in-law of BISHOP BASCOM, by whom he had one daughter, Emma, who married a MR. LINBERGER, of Boonville. At the time of his death, which occurred June 14, 1874, the colonel was living with his daughter in Boonville.

Statehood was granted in 1820 and along with it came additional opportunities for the Talbot families.  By 1830, all of the children of Hale and Betsey had married and most had children.  Sadly, Hale and Betsey were no longer around to enjoy their families for they had died and had been buried on their home place near McKittrick.  Betsey Talbot had died on September 1, 1827 and Hale had died 364 days later on August 31, 1828.  She was 67 and he was 73.

What an extraordinary life they had led and yet, in many important ways, their lives had been so much like hundreds of others who followed the sun toward the west for all their days.  By the then current standards they were successful farmers and business owners.  Hale's success as a horseman, probably a skill learned from his father, Matthew (II), served him well in the frontier where roads were non-existent and travel was usually on foot.  The story of Hale and Betsey could end with their deaths but the character and determination that thet gave to their children warrants more description of the contributions that those children made.  The legacy of Hale and Betsey is a rich one and their thousands of descendants can take justifiable pride in a lineage that was strong and courageous in a time when individual initiative was the principal determinant of success.  Contest rather than sponsored mobility reached its peak in the decades that spanned the lives of Hale and Betsey.

Within a couple of years of the death of Hale, the 1830 Census provided a glimpse of how the Talbot children were faring.  The table below discloses the names and family size for each of the nine children of Hale and Betsy.  Five of them lived on adjoining properties in Montgomery County while David lived a few houses away but certainly nearby.  Mathias and Elizabeth Talbot McGirk lived still further away but in the same county.  Fletcher and Sophia Talbot Wright were living in Boone County while James and Mary Ann "Polly" Talbot Pitzer were in St. Charles.  Those two counties adjoin Montgomery and the Wright and Pitzer homesteads were not far from the others.  And they were all doing well financially.  

There were now 44 members of the extended family with 18 children under the age of 15.  Each of the families owned slaves and together their ownership amounted to 83 although Christopher, Thomas, and Irvine Pitman were the largest holders.  Living on adjacent properties not only provided the Talbots with the joys of an extended family, they were all engaged in similar businesses although James was a practicing physician as well while McGirk was busy with his law practice and the duties of the Missouri Court.  Still, they were all farmers and probably busy with their horse breeding and sales.  One can imagine the "Talbot Compound" that included all these farms, many children and 83 slaves all within close proximity.

The decade between 1830 and 1840 seemed to be a continuation of the pattern of living that had prevailed before 1830.  Elizabeth and Mathias, Christopher and Susan, and David and Susan were still living in Montgomery County.  Nancy, Jane, and William were living in Warren County, all within close proximity to each other.  Warren County was formed in 1833 by taking substantial parts of Montgomery.  Accordingly, the proximity of the Talbot children to each other had not changed.  Sophia and Fletcher were still in Boone County and Mary Ann and James Pitzer were still in St. Charles.  Thomas was on the census in Clay County.  Clay is far away from the others and we are somewhat suspicious of the listing.

(John A. Hunter is the husband of Martha J. Talbot, daughter of James Talbot, MD, and Jane Talbot.  Isham H. Talbot was the child,  we think the first, of Jane and James Talbot, MD,   and he was living only a few houses away from his parents and his aunts and uncles.)

The extended Talbot family now totaled 66, 19 of the number still under the age of 15.  Each family owned slaves and the total number owned had grown in ten years from 83 to 92.  

We have attempted to capture a small bit of the life and times of Hale Talbot and Elizabeth "Betsey" Irvine.  Much more could be said about them and, indeed, much more has been recorded about them in the pages of Missouri's history.  Their children made significant contributions to Missouri's founding and to its early history.  This Talbot clan continued the record of service that has been such a signal characteristic of the Talbot family for centuries.  Although we bring this episode to a conclusion at about the mid 19th century, most of the Talbot children were still living in or near the place where they had settled almost 50 years before.  It is our hope that the descendants of this great couple will take up the story where we have stopped and provide details about recent and current generations.

The data shown in the table below represent Counties and page numbers for members of the Hale Talbot family.