CAPTAIN JOHN VERTREES, great great grandfather of Miss Lillia Vertrees, proprietress of the Vertrees Book Store
in Pittsfield, and Herbert Vertrees, former Pittsfield mayor, is the first of the Pike county Vertrees line of
whom we have any very definite account. Captain John, a soldier under General George Rogers Clark in the time of
the Revolution, was the grandfather of Jacob Sneed Vertrees of the early Perry settlement, and the great grandfather
of John E. and Cephas D. Vertrees, both of whom were long identified with the town of Pittsfield.
Captain John Vertrees, whose name has been handed down to many members in succeeding generations of the family,
came to America from Holland and settled in the Virginia Colony long before the Revolution. His name at the time
of his arrival in America was John Van Tress. In America, for some reason, he assumed the name of Vertrees. His
great great grandson, John J. Vertrees, sales division manager in the Atlantic district for the American Can Company
of new York City, states that later, in Kentucky, Captain John made no secret of having charged his name; that
he, in fact, seems for some reason to have boasted of it in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where he married his second
wife.
John Vertrees was in America as early as 1746 for it is known that his son Isaac, one of a numerous family, was
born in that year in that part of Virginia which is now West Virginia. In 1779 John and this son, Isaac, and their
families, migrated from Virginia to Kentucky. There, in Kentucky, which was then a county of Virginia, Captain
John was granted four land grants totaling 1,300 acres; these grants, dated in 1781, being made upon Virginia warrants.
All of this land lay in and around present Elizabethtown, Kentucky, in the Severns Valley. John Vertrees and his
son Isaac and their families were among the very earliest settlers in that region, along with the families of Hobbs,
Haycraft, Van meter, Helm, Hynes and Hart.
The families of John Vertrees, Hinson Hobbs, Jacob Van Meter and Samuel Haycraft took up four separate tracts of
land in the Severns Valley (site of present Elizabethtown), which four tracts cornered at a common center. At this
common center was erected the rude fortification known as Haycraft's Fort, which consisted of four log structures
resembling block-houses, these being the respective family abodes, each on its own homestead, forming a square
with a block-house at each corner, and connecting fortifications with port-holes, between the block-houses, thereby
providing a fortified quadrangle with opportunity for defense from Indian attack in all four directions.
Other forts of that time in the Severns Valley were those of Captain Helm and Colonel Hynes which, with Haycraft's,
formed a triangle, equidistant a mile apart. Each of the three forts was on elevated ground, commanding springs
of never-failing water. Helm's Fort stood on a hill on which Governor John L. Helm's residence later stood. Hynes'
Fort stood on an elevation which later was occupied by the Geoghegans and still later by the J. H. Bryan family.
Haycraft's Fort was above Cave Spring, in which the flesh of many a deer, buffalo and bear was preserved for use,
as salt was then unobtainable. A gunshot at any one of these three forts was the signal to the others, warning
of Indians. There were at this time no other settlements in Kentucky between the falls of the Ohio (site of present
Louisville) and the Green river.
Inasmuch as descendants of all four of the families who occupied Haycraft's Fort in those perilous days are today
residents of pike county, Illinois, we here present for the information of those descendants and their friends
an account of the building and defending of these forts as related by the historian, Samuel Haycraft, Jr., son
of the elder Samuel who was contemporary with Hinson Hobbs, John Vertrees and Jacob Van Meter. The following account
first appeared in the Elizabethtown (Kentucky) News in 1869 and was republished in book form in 1889- 90.
"In the year 1780 the first settlements were made around the present site of Elizabethtown, then Jefferson
county, Virginia, and the three forts of Col. Andrew Hynes, Hon. Thomas Helm and Hon. Samuel Haycraft were erected.
They were rather stockades, afterward called stations.
"The manner of erecting these forts was to dig a trench with spades or hoes or such implements as they could
command, then set in split timbers, reaching ten or twelve feet above the ground and fixed around the proposed
ground sufficiently large to contain some five, six or eight dwellings with a block house, as a kind of citadel
with port holes.
"That was considered a sufficient defense against the Indians armed with rifles or bows and arrows, but with
a siege gun of the present day (1869) a well directed shot would level a hundred yards of these pristine fortifications.
"The mode of attack by the Indians when in sufficient force was to try to storm the fort, or by lighted torches
thrown upon the roofs of the buildings within to burn out the besieged, but they rarely succeeded in setting fire.
If in small force the Indians would conceal themselves behind trees and watch a whole day for some unwary pale-face
to show himself above the fortification and pick him off.
"But this was a two-handed game, for it sometimes happened that the redskin in peeping from his tree got his
brains blown out. It was very rare that the siege was continued after an Indian was killed, for those Indians were
remarkable for carrying off the dead and wounded, even on field of battle.
"It was a war custom of the Indians never to take an open field, but they always treed or lay low in the small
cane or high grass, and this mode of fighting was more universally adopted by the old and experienced braves than
by the young and untaught warriors. If, by deploying, the whites could get a raking fire upon the red man, they
retreated hastily to more distant trees and renewed the fight, and if by force of circumstances they were compelled
to come to a hand-to-hand fight they fought with the desperation of demons, using the scalping knife, war axe and
war club.
"The latter was formed of a hickory stick about three feet long and there was fastened to the end a stone
curiously wrought from one to three pounds weight, one end of the stone representing the blade of an axe, the other
end representing a sledge hammer. A collar was cut in the stone near the end or poll, in which groove the stick
was fastened around either by twisting the stick, or with thongs of leather fastening it firmly in the end of the
stick, split open so as to receive it.
"Many of these stone axes are now found in Kentucky. They are always made of brown stone as hard as granite,
and when wielded by a strong arm are a formidable weapon. They also used another weapon made of flint, small in
size, in shape of a dart. These were for arrow heads."
It appears that John Vertrees was one of the "Long Knives," as the American frontiersmen who marched
with George Rogers Clark were called. It is probable that his first introduction to the Kentucky land in which
he later settled was when he passed down the Ohio river with Clark's expedition in the spring of 1778. Clark, with
150 Virginia frontiersmen, among them John Vertrees, had set out from Redstone on May 12. In the winter of 1777-78
he had laid before Governor Patrick Henry of Virginia his bold plan for invading the old Northwest. He had learned
through spies of the defenseless condition of Kaskaskia and the Illinois villages.
Thomas Jefferson, George Mason and George Wythe were taken into consultation by Governor Henry, and all gave their
approval of Clark's plan, promising to obtain from the legislature 300 acres of land for each man enlisting in
the expedition if it were successful. The council of Virginia voiced its approval on January 2, 1778, and the assembly
gave its consent to a measure for the protection of the county of Kentucky.
John Vertrees was a captain in Clark's force. Floating down the Ohio to the site of present Louisville, the little
band expected to be joined there by four companies of troops from Holston, but only a few came and with them a
small force of Kentuckians. But Clark and his band did not despair. He took possession of and fortified the island
near the falls of the Ohio (where now is Louisville, known first as Clarksville) and which from that time on became
the base for all far western military operations.
On this expedition John Vertrees was a comrade of Richard Chenoweth and his family. Richard was a grandson of the
first Chenoweth in America, John, the "gentleman blacksmith," ancestor of the Chenoweths in Pike county.
Richard was a brother of Arthur Chenoweth, Sr., who was the grandfather of Rachel Chenoweth, who married her third
cousin, Abraham Chenoweth of the early Perry settlement. Richard was also a grandson of Mary Calvert, daughter
of the third Lord Baltimore, who married John Chenoweth, the blacksmith. Richard was born in 1738, being 40 years
of age when he emigrated to Kentucky with the Clark expedition.
This Richard Chenoweth, friend and comrade of John Vertrees in one of the great adventures of history, was a carpenter
and builder of houses. He was descended from the early Chenoweths of Maryland and had settled near the North Mountain
in Berkeley county, Virginia. Here his son, James Chenoweth, hero of Alfred Pirtle's story of one of the earliest
boys of Louisville, Kentucky, was born May 17, 1777.
While Richard and his wife were making preparations to emigrate to the new land that Daniel Boone had opened to
settlement, word reached them that a Lieutenant Colonel Clark was raising a little army to go to Kentucky. Richard
thereupon decided to go under Colonel Clark's escort, and preparations for the journey were made. His family at
this time included Mildred, Thomas, Jane and Baby James. These all figure in the terrible Indian massacre that
followed later.
There were no wagon roads then; so Richard loaded his household goods, his wife and his little ones on pack horses
and he and his oldest son Thomas walked beside them. In April, 1778, they found themselves at Redstone (later Brownsville,
Pennsylvania), a place familiar to all genealogists because so many families started to this western country from
this point. From here the family moved on to Fort Pitt, at the junction of the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers,
where they met Colonel Clark and his soldiers, among them Captain John Vertrees, under whose escort the family
traveled. Here also were assembled about twenty other pioneering families, eager to travel out to the new Kentucky
country under the escort of troops, all of them preparing to float down the Ohio river.
At this place Richard built a houseboat with windows, doors and a fireplace, and with gun holes so they could protect
themselves against savage onslaught.
The boats were allowed to drift, but were also propelled in shallow water by poles touching the bottom, while deckhands
walked along the sides from the bow to the stern, thus pushing the boat along. In deep water the boat was propelled
by means of large oars placed on a pivot on each side. To steer this unwieldy craft there was a large oar mounted
on the stern and the steersman walked across the roof and pushed on his oar, directing the boat to the left or
right. - From Alfred Pirtle's story of James Chenoweth, the son of Richard.
Clark and his hardy frontier troops, with these early settlers who came under his escort, reached the falls of
the Ohio May 27, 1778, and landed on an island at the edge of the falls, near present Louisville. With the assistance
of the soldiers, a small enclosure was raised on the island to protect the families and the military stores which
Colonel Clark had decided to leave behind when he pushed on down the Ohio on his way to the Illinois country, which
he did on June 24. Richard Chenoweth, being the most experienced carpenter in the company, was selected by Colonel
Clark to direct the building of this little fortification.