IN THE YEAR 1829 an emigrant train out of Kentucky wended its way across the Illinois prairies. In the train were
twenty-four men, women and children, one wagon and eight pack horses. Three Kentucky families made up this emigrant
outfit, trooping westward with high hopes, seeking to improve their conditions in a new country. In the train were
Solomon Hobbs, his wife and six children; Obadiah Mitchell, his wife, seven children and one Negro; and Benjamin
Morris, his wife and four children.
The first halt was made in the old Sangamo county, in what is now Scott county. Five years later, in 1834, the
Hobbs family crossed the Illinois river at Philips Ferry into Pike county, Illinois, destined to be the home henceforth
of many of the Hobbs name.
It was not the first time that families of the name of Hobbs had been upon the American emigrant trails.
Far back in the days of early Kentucky settlement, their forebears had braved the perils of the old Wilderness
Road, which Daniel Boone had blazed in the time of the Revolution. In creaking covered wagons, their children slung
from the backs of pack horses in basket cradles made of hickory withes, the men going on before with rifles at
‘half mast," on the lookout for game or "Injuns," they had groped their way westward "in quest
of the country of Kentucke,"
And as they came, there were others with them upon the trail, those who, little suspecting it then, bore the destiny
of a nation in their hands. Along the old Wilderness Road, with some of the pioneering Hobbses, crept another creaking
covered wagon, freighted with history, bearing into the west a ne'er-do-well tribe by the name of Hanks.
What prompted the poverty-stricken Hankses to pull up stakes in Virginia and pull out for the west to try their
luck in the land that Boone had opened to immigration, will never be known. Perhaps it was the sharp tongues of
gossip that spurred them westward, for one of the Hanks girls, Lucy, had an illegitimate daughter, who traveled
beside her upon the Wilderness Road; in the neighborhood where the Hankses lived, back in Virginia, there had been
plenty of talk, nasty talk.
Lucy, perhaps, was too proud, in spite of her poverty, to take lip from any of them. The family, perhaps, thought
that out yonder in the country "beyond the mountains," in the land that Boone had discovered, they would
have a chance to live unnoticed, that out there among strangers no questions would be asked. And so, along with
some of the early Hobbses, we find these Hankses also upon the western trail.
Lucy may have thought of herself as a bad woman as she journeyed over the Wilderness Road with the illegitimate
daughter. But perhaps she had best be judged, according to the admonition of old Doctor Johnson, who said "God
himself does not propose to judge a man until the end of his days." And if Lucy be so judged, her life is
glorified; for Lucy gave two sons to the ministry and one of her grandsons became president of the United States.
In Kentucky the Hobbses and Hankses separated, settling in different neighborhoods, but not far apart. Lucy's illegitimate
daughter married one of the lowliest men in all Kentucky, an itinerant unlettered laborer who was called Tom Lincoln.
But in a log cabin in Kentucky, countless thousands have stood with uncovered heads in memory of a child who one
snowy Sunday in February, 1809, was born to Tom Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, a man child they called Abraham.
Which means that if you become bored with life, you need not seek excitement in some embellished and overdrawn
Hollywood cinema; the great adventures of humankind are found along the common way.
The story of the early Hobbses is shrouded in obscurity. Coming westward, they traveled with light packs, as did
the other pioneers, bringing with them little of written record. Here and there, in Kentucky, Ohio and in Virginia,
are outcroppings of their family history, mostly of vague, indefinite character.
The first Hobbs of whom we have any very definite record was Hinson Hobbs, whose name was repeated among Pike county's
pioneers and borne by the eldest of Solomon Hobbs' sons who came in the pack train of 1829. Hinson Hobbs was the
father of Solomon Hobbs, the 1829 emigrant, and the grandfather of Hinson S. Hobbs of the early Perry neighborhood.
Hinson Hobbs (first on record) was one of the earliest settlers in the beautiful Severns Valley in Kentucky, near
the site of present Elizabethtown. Here, in old Indian times, dwelt four families, forming the nucleus of Elizabethtown;
they were the families of Hobbs, Haycraft and Van Meter. With the Van Meter family is also associated the family
of Chenoweth, the two families having intermarried in the pioneer days of Kentucky, even as their descendants intermarried
later, here in Pike county, Illinois.
Herbert H. Vertrees, former mayor of Pittsfield and a direct lineal descendant of one of these families, recalls
having heard related the story of how these four families, in the very early days of Kentucky, settled on four
tracts of land that cornered, and of how, at the center of the square, where the lands cornered, each family, on
its respective corner, built a blockhouse, equipped with portholes and other means of warding off attack, thereby
forming a four-square defense against their common enemy, the Indians.
Nor was this confederation, born of the desperate need of the time, dissolved with the passing of the Indian peril.
The families, in succeeding years, continued to amalgamate, to act in common. When many in Kentucky began to turn
their faces towards the Illinois country, seeking homes farther west, descendants of all four families came to
this western country and settled in the same neighborhood here in Pike county, Illinois, where still live many
of their descendants.
The heads of the four original families who first peopled the Severns Valley in (now) Hardin county, Kentucky,
were Hinson Hobbs, Samuel Haycraft, John Vertrees and Jacob Van Meter. Some of the most thrilling history of early
Kentucky flows from the lives of these four men, all of whom today have descendants here in Pike county.
Hinson Hobbs, the Kentucky pioneer, was an early inhabitant of old Fort Washington, where now is Cincinnati, Ohio.
Later he was at Louisville, Kentucky, where he founded the First Baptist church in that place. Still later he settled
in the Severns Valley at a point now about a two hours' ride out of Louisville, being one of the early settlements
out of which grew present Elizabethtown.
Hinson Hobbs was with Daniel Boone in St. Clair's defeat in the Ohio country in 1792, where Joseph Boone, son of
Edward and brother of Charity, maternal ancestress of the Pike county Elledges, was wounded. Joseph was a nephew
of Daniel; he and the writes's great grandfather, James Thompson, wounded in the terrible defeat, nursed each other's
wounds for three days in the wilderness, being at last carried by a rescue party to the old fort on the site of
Cincinnati, where Hinson Hobbs and his family then lived. Solomon Hobbs, Hinson's first-born, 1834 settler in Pike
county, was then a babe in arms in the old fort, being less than a year old.
Hinson Hobbs' wife was Sarah Shipman, whose name was borne also by her brother's daughter, the Sarah Shipman who
married Jordan Freeman of early Derry township, two of whose daughters, Nancy and Elizabeth, married two Hornbacks,
Solomon P. and Reuben W. The Shipmans, like the Hobbses, were once of Virginia.
Hinson Hobbs (ancestor of the Pike county Hobbses) was born August 27, 1771; he died August 14, 1821. His wife,
Sarah Shipman, was born November 21, 1773. They were the great grandparents of Fred Hobbs and Wells C. Hobbs, and
the great great grandparents of Charlotte (Hobbs) Campbell of Pittsfield; the great grandparents of Lillia and
Herbert H. Vertrees; and the great great grandparents of Mrs. Dot Dorsey Swan, publisher of The Pike County Republican.
Hinson Hobbs and Sarah Shipman had five children, namely, Solomon, Nicholas, David, William and Nancy.
Solomon Hobbs, born October 14, 1791, where now is Cincinnati, Ohio, became an infant contemporary of Nancy Dunbar
(later Nancy Heath), who taught the first school in Pittsfield in the winter of 1834. Nancy was born on the site
of present Cincinnati January 1, 1791, being the first white child born at that place.
Solomon Hobbs married Mary L. Young, in Kentucky, she a daughter of one of the early families in the Severns Valley.
They had six children born to them in Kentucky, whom they brought with them to Pike county, Illinois, in the migration
of 1834; here in Pike county three more children were born. The nine children were: Hinson S., Eli, Finis Lowery,
Jacob, David K., Elizabeth G., Downey C., Alexander Chapman and Mary D. Hobbs.
Solomon Hobbs died in Pike county April 16, 1869, aged 77 years, six months and two days. He is buried in Old Baptist
cemetery at Perry.
Nicholas Hobbs, son of pioneer Hinson and brother of Solomon, was born April 22, 1795, in the Severns Valley in
Kentucky. He and his wife Elizabeth came from Kentucky to what is now Scott county, Illinois, in 1829, settling
later in Pike county at Perry where he died July 10, 1879, aged 84 years, two months and 18 days. His wife, born
in Kentucky March 11, 1798, died at Perry December 21, 1887. Both are buried in the McCord cemetery at Perry.
Nicholas Hobbs and his wife Elizabeth had ten children, namely: Hinson, Patrick, Artemisia B., William F., Mahala
J., Rachel, Sarah A., Veturia, Jacob and Solomon Hobbs. Jacob died before their father.
David Hobbs, another son of pioneer Hinson, born in Kentucky and known in early pike county as Elder David Hobbs,
had a daughter, Matilda, who in Pike county, in 1851, married Bennett F. Dorsey, who was born near the celebrated
Perry Mineral Springs, November 11, 1832, a son of Charles Dorsey and Eleanor Broiles. Elder Hobbs' wife was also
Kentucky born, her birth having occurred October 8, 1832.
Bennett Dorsey and Matilda Hobbs had two children, Edgar Ralph, born May 9, 1859, and Asa L., born March 22, 1861.
Edgar married Rachel Anna, daughter of Miles B. Chenoweth, December 31, 1877, he a son of Pike county Abraham and
a grandson of Major William Chenoweth of the Revolution, who married a daughter of Jacob Van Meter, head of one
of the four families who were united in the early days of the Severns Valley for defense against the Indians. Thus,
here in Pike county, the union born of the Indian threat in early Kentucky, was perpetuated in the union of descendants
of two of those families, as, later, we will find it perpetuated in the unions of others of the descendants of
the original four.
William Hobbs, fourth child and son of the elder Hinson, because the father of the Reverend Charles Albert and
Mary Hobbs; Charles Albert being the father of Dr. Charles A. and Dr. Ralph Waller Hobbs.
Nancy Hobbs, only daughter of Kentucky Hinson and Sarah (Shipman) Hobbs, was born at Elizabethtown, Kentucky, October
20, 1812. On October 19, 1836 in Pike county she married Jacob Sneed Vertrees, pioneer of the Perry neighborhood
and a son of John Vertrees, who was the grandfather of John E. and Cephas D. Vertrees, so long associated with
the town of Pittsfield. John Vertrees, grandfather of John E. Vertrees, founder of the Vertrees store in Pittsfield
and father of former Mayor Herbert H. Vertrees and of Miss Lillia Vertrees, proprietress of the Vertrees Book Store
in Pittsfield, was one of the original four of Severns Valley history, whose thrilling stories will be recounted
in succeeding chapters.
Thus, in the marriage of Nancy Hobbs and Jacob Sneed Vertrees at Perry more than a century ago, were united two
more of the descendants of the original families in the Severns Valley, a daughter of Hinson Hobbs and a son of
John Vertrees.
Jacob Sneed Vertrees and Nancy Hobbs had five children: Mary E., John Eaton, Cephas D., Anna E. and Emma S. Vertrees,
whose stories, along with those of other Pike county descendants of the Severns Valley pioneers, will be related
in succeeding chapters.