CAPTAIN JOHN VERTREES had eight children, namely; Isaac, Daniel, Joseph, John, Jacob, Charles, Mary and Sarah.
Isaac Miles Vertrees, born in 1746 in that part of Virginia which is now West Virginia, emigrated to Kentucky with
his father in 1779. Here all record of Isaac Vertrees ends. It is possible that he was the Vertrees (Van Tress)
who fell at the battle of Blue Licks in Kentucky in 1782 but of this there is no positive confirmation.
The fate of Isaac's brother, Daniel Hardin Vertrees, is known. He was killed by Indians and lies in the lost burying-ground
of the Vertrees in the Severns Valley. Haycraft speaks thus of him and of the encounter in which he fell:
"Dan Vertrees was a stalwart young man of daring. He, with the late Colonel Nicholas Miller and others, was
pursuing a band of Indians; Miller, then young, was tall, slenderly built, as active as a cat and fleet as a hind,
and as brave as Julius Caesar. This company, coming upon the Indians suddenly, a desperate fight ensued. Vertrees
was killed at the first fire. A stout warrior seized a white man, wrestled his gun from him and was about to cleave
his head with an axe. Miller at that moment, with a celerity of action which few men could equal, and with a power
that few possessed — in the language of John Glenn, ‘snatched the white man from the Indian as he would a chicken
from a hawk,' and, with an equally rapid motion, killed the Indian. This turned the tide, and the remaining Indians
fled, leaving several dead on the ground."
Dan Vertrees's grandson, Judge William D. Vertrees, served in the Mexican War and became county judge of Hardin
county, Kentucky. He married Eliza Ann Haynes, a daughter of Dr. John Haynes of Virginia, who was a graduate of
Harvard Medical School. Her mother was Martha Ann Campbell of Massachusetts. Dr. Haynes and Miss Campbell were
married in Virginia and came across the mountains to Kentucky and settled at Big Spring. Eliza Haynes was born
at Big Spring, October 3, 1824. On November 3, 1854, she married William D. Vertrees. She was the first graduate
of Bethlehem Academy in Kentucky. A skilled musician, she engaged in music teaching.
"Miss Eliza," as she was known to all of the children and most of the adults, became one of the outstanding
women of Elizabethtown. Haycraft says of her:
"She was a Christian woman who was interested in everything for the good of the town and its people. Because
of her unusual personal and mental qualities she was one of the town's most beloved characters."
Judge William D. Vertrees and "Miss Eliza" had four children, namely, Haynes, Martha, Charles and Catherine
Vertrees. Mrs. Vertrees survived her husband and three of the children; she died at the home of her daughter, Catherine
V. Young, at Oakmont, Pennsylvania, January 30, 1911.
Joseph Vertrees, another son of Captain John of the Virginia "Long Knives," was captured by the Indians
when quite young and lived with them a number of years in the old Northwest Territory, finally returning to his
people in Kentucky. He married Margaret Hodgen, eldest child of Robert Hodgen and Sarah Larue (La Rue), pioneers
of 1784 where now is Hodgenville in Larue county, Kentucky.
Margaret Hodgen Vertrees was born in Virginia on May 14, 1776, the birth year of America's independence. She was
a sister of Jacob Hodgen, who built the first brick store in Pittsfield and who was counted a pillar of the pioneer
Pittsfield Christian church, whose congregation (a mere handful) met in his house for religious worship prior to
the erection of their first church building. Mrs. Vertrees was an aunt of Dr. John Thomson Hodgen and a great aunt
of Dr. Henry Hodgen Mudd, two men of common family stock who were reared and educated in Pittsfield and whose contributions
to humanity are commemorated on a memorial stone in the Pittsfield public square.
Mrs. Joseph Vertrees's father was Robert Hodgen, a native of England, supposedly in line of descent from Robert
Bruce, king of Scots, who, with less than half the English force arrayed against him, defeated "proud Edward's
power" at Bannockburn in 1314. The Hodgens were also supposed to trace back to some ancient noble of the Douglas
line; one of Mrs. Vertrees's nephews, Robert S. Hodgen, in a letter written from Edwardsville, Illinois, in 1862
to his Pittsfield kinswoman, Frances H. Mudd, daughter of the Honorable Henry T. and Elizabeth Hodgen Mudd, referring
to this Douglas strain, speaks also of a descent from the Scottish patriot, Sir William Wallace ("Scots wha
ha' wi' Wallace bled"), who in 1305 was betrayed to his English enemies, condemned for treason, hanged, drawn
and quartered at West Smithfield and his head placed above London Bridge, while his limbs were sent to Newcastle,
Berwick, Perth and Stirling.
Robert Hodgen, father of Mrs. Vertrees, was born in England in 1742, an only child. His father was English born;
his mother was a Dutch lady. About 1765 he came with his parents to the United States of America and settled in
Pennsylvania. He was a millwright and followed that trade here in the new world.
Robert Hodgen married Susannah Adkin and they had four children, William, Robert, Joseph and Susannah Hodgen, they
being half-brothers and half-sister of Mrs. Vertrees. William Hodgen died young in Pennsylvania; Robert Hodgen
married at 16, in Virginia, and of him there is no further record. Joseph Hodgen was killed by the Miami Indians
at St. Clair's defeat, in a wilderness that is now Ohio, on a wild November morning in 1791. Susannah Hodgen married
John Thomas, the noted general who commanded the Kentucky sharpshooters under General Andrew Jackson at the battle
of New Orleans in January, 1815.
Robert Hodgen's first wife died about 1773. He then moved to Virginia, and there, in 1775, he married Sarah Larue,
member of the noted family that later gave its name to Larue county, Kentucky, and sent its emissaries to Pike
county, Illinois. Nine years later, in 1784, Robert Hodgen moved his family to Kentucky and settled in the Indian-infested
wilderness that later was erected into Hardin county, from which the county of Larue was cut off in 1842. There,
on Nolin Creek (so named because no "lin" -linden-trees, the bark of which was used to poultice wounds,
could be found on its banks), Robert Hodgen founded a mill, known as Hodgen's Mill, predecessor of Hodgenville,
the present county seat of Larue county.
Margaret Hodgen Vertrees, first born of twelve children of Robert Hodgen and Sarah Larue, was eight years old when
the family settled in the Kentucky wilds. There the Hodgen children and the children of Captain John Vertrees grew
to dislike each other, siding with their elders in the long and bitter county seat war that was waged between the
Vertrees settlement in the Severns Valley, where now is Elizabethtown, and the settlement at Hodgen's Mill on Nolin.
Later, we find this dislike changing into love, followed by the wedding of a daughter of Judge Robert Hodgen to
a son of Judge John Vertrees.
Robert Hodgen was the father of 16 children, four of whom, as already noted, were by his first wife. By his second
wife, Sarah Larue, he had 12 children, namely: Margaret (Mrs. Vertrees), Pheba (who married her cousin, Jacob Larue),
Isaac (a noted Kentucky Baptist pulpiteer), Sarah (who married her cousin, William Larue), John (Kentucky farmer
and preacher), Rebecca (who married Jacob Reath), Elizabeth (who married the famous Kentucky merchant, Horace G.
Wintersmith), Mary (who was never married), Samuel (a pillar of the Christian church in Elizabethtown), Jacob (pioneer
of Highland and Pittsfield whose story will be related in another chapter), James (who pioneered in the far Northwest),
and Jabez Robert (who died unmarried.)
Joseph Vertrees and Margaret Hodgen had seven sons, John, Robert, William, Isaac, Lewis, Josiah and Joseph Vertrees.
The elder Joseph Vertrees migrated from Kentucky to Missouri and it was in Missouri that some of his children were
born. Some of the descendants of Joseph and Margaret settled in Iowa; others in South Dakota.
Josiah Vertrees, next to the last of the seven sons of Joseph Vertrees and Margaret Hodgen, settled where now is
Morning Sun, Iowa, in 1839, and was still a resident there in 1871. A letter written by him on July 15, 1871, dated
at Morning Sun and addressed to his aunt, Mrs. Frances P. Hodgen of Pittsfield, is among the Hodgen letters (some
of them more than a hundred years old) discovered by Harold Dell in the attic of the old Dr. E. M. Seeley place
south of Pittsfield, among the effects of the late Mrs. Mary Hodgen Seeley, daughter of Jacob and Frances P. Hodgen
and niece of Mrs. Joseph Vertrees.
Josiah Vertrees in this letter tells of having lost trace of most of his relatives. He asks Mrs. Hodgen if she
knows of any still living in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and says he would make inquiry of his brother, Robert Vertrees,
if he knew of anyone to whom he might address a note. He relates that the only relative he has in Iowa is a cousin,
John Hodgen. (Note: This John Hodgen would have been a son of Margaret Hodgen Vertrees's brother John, Kentucky
farmer and preacher.)
Josiah Vertrees, at the time he wrote Mrs. Hodgen, had five daughters and two sons, three of them married. He speaks
of the great changes in the Iowa country that had taken place in the 32 years since his first settlement. The town
of Morning Sun, which in 1871 was 15 years old, and a railroad, then two years old, had been built adjoining his
early preemption.
Jacob Vertrees, a son of Captain John Vertrees by his second wife, was born in the Severns Valley in Kentucky in
1785. He became the father of ten children, one of whom was James C. Vertrees. James C. had a son, John Jacob Vertrees,
an attorney of Nashville, Tennessee, who edited the Tennessee Code in 1884. He died in Nashville in 1931, leaving
one child, John J. Vertrees, now sales division manager in the Atlantic district for American Can Company, New
York Central Building, 230 Park Avenue, New York.
Charles Vertrees, another son of Captain John, came west in wilderness times and settled on the verdant plains
of Indiana, founding there a family and a country estate around which Booth Tarkington wove his story of "The
Turmoil," the story of "a midland city in the heart of fair, open country," that, spreading and
expanding, finally engulfed with its Bigness and Turmoil the quiet old country place of the first settler, the
pioneer Vertrees.
Tarkington's story has to do in period of time with the great grandson of this first settler, and more particularly
with his great great granddaughter (the heroine of the tale), the lovely and enthralling Mary Vertrees, whose laugh
filled the old country place, a laugh so joyous that "a cripple would crawl five miles to hear it."
In the story, this pioneer Vertrees is reputed to have had trouble with Daniel Boone, on account of which he came
westward and founded this branch of the Vertrees family on the Indiana plains. Bibbs Sheridan, a son of the wealthy
house of Sheridan, which more than any other was responsible for the city's spread and its belching factory chimneys
that shut out the sun from the once wholesome prairies, is made to say, in the book: "I always understood
the first house was built by an old party of the name of Vertrees who couldn't get along with Dan'l Boone, and
hurried away to these parts because Dan'l wanted him to give back a gun he'd lent him."
Bibbs at this time (this from Tarkington's story) had never met a member of the Vertrees family; but the families
of Sheridan and Vertrees, heretofore as far apart as the poles, are soon to be brought together by needs peculiar
to each. The Sheridans have wealth but lack social prestige; the Vertrees have social prestige but the income upon
which they have always lived has vanished.
"It's just this way," says Bibbs' social-climbing sister, Edith: "If we don't know them (the Vertreeses)
it's practically no use our having built the New House (they had built next to the old Vertrees mansion); and if
we do know them and they're descent to us, we're right with the right people. They can do the whole thing for us."
So Edith cautions Bibbs not to spread any gossip about Vertrees the First stealing Dan'l Boone's gun or he will
ruin the chances of Mrs. Vertrees and her daughter calling on the house of Sheridan.
Coincidently, in the old Vertrees mansion, with its numerous evidences of culture, its "Eastlake" bookcases
with their long glass doors, its half dozen Landseers, and its beautifully-bound edition of Bulwer-Lytton, counter
designs upon the Sheridans are taking form. The Sheridan sons have money and the once well-to-do Vertreeses, because
of financial disasters, are in dire extremity. Mary therefore, harassed by parental distress, sets herself to snare
a son of Sheridan.
Bibbs is the forgotten man in the Sheridan family. Bibbs has always been sickly, has been much of his life in a
sanitarium, suffering from nervous dyspepsia. Mary has heard about the sanitarium and supposes Bibbs to be a lunatic
or at least a mental incompetent. The Sheridans keep Bibbs in the background, do not even take the trouble to introduce
him and Mary when Mary calls; they trot out another son for Mary's inspection.
Of course, Bibbs is the misjudged son; he recovers from his dyspepsia, proves to be the brain and bulwark of the
family. Bibbs courts and marries Mary, and neither social prestige on the one hand nor fortune-hunting on the other
has anything to do with the ultimate glory of their love.
So, in the Tarkington story, the supposed descendants of Charles Vertrees are made to play a leading part, their
actions obedient to the plot of the story but the actors themselves clothed with the tradition of a family that
was old and revered even before Mary Vertrees's great great grandfather came west and founded the settlement; a
family whose ancestors had fled together from many a stricken field and in whose veins flowed Crusaders' blood.
Mary and Sarah Vertrees, the two daughters of Captain John, both married into families connected with the early
Hardin county, Kentucky, courts over which their father presided as gentleman justice and quarter session justice.
Mary Vertrees married a Miles (probably Maurice), who, at the February 1798 term of the quarter sessions court
in which Captain John Vertrees was then a sitting justice, was appointed clerk of the court. Haycraft says of him;
"Maurice Miles was a business man of fine promise, wrote a beautiful business hand, and would have made an
excellent clerk, but he lived but a short time." Records of the June term, 1799, show that Maurice Miles,
the clerk of the court, had "departed this life" and that Major Ben Helm was appointed clerk pro tempore
to succeed him.
Sarah Vertrees married Edward Rawlings, probably a son of Stephen Rawlings who sat with Robert Hodgen and George
Helm as a justice of the Hardin county, Kentucky, court in 1797 and who was associated with both Hodgen and John
Vertrees on the first board of trustees of Elizabethtown in 1797. Stephen Rawlings was a carpenter as well as a
public official, and as such he built the stocks and whipping-post that stood on the county court house plot in
early Elizabethtown. Stephen Rawlings had a son Edward (later Captain Edward Rawlings), who qualified in 1795 as
deputy sheriff of Hardin county, under Sheriff Samuel Haycraft.
Sheriff Haycraft's son, Samuel Haycraft, Jr., relates the following story of Deputy Sheriff Edward Rawlings in his "History of Elizabethtown"
"He (Rawlings) was a slender, tall man, with but little surplus flesh, nearly all muscle, very active, and prided himself on his manhood and high sense of chivalric honor.
"A warrant was placed in his hands to arrest ‘Bill Smothers,' who was a rollicking kind of outlaw, and frequently guilty of personal outrages. He infested the lower end of the county (now Daviess county, formerly a part of Hardin), about 130 miles from the present court house. Rawlings, by stratagem and some help, arrested Smothers, tied him on a horse and started with him on the long journey to the jail. When on the road between Hartford and Hardin's Settlement, Smothers addressed Rawlings something after this manner:
"‘Ned, I have heard of you, and that you boast yourself to be much of a man. It is fair if you are a better man than me to keep me tied? I promise to go with you untied if you are the better man, and if I prove to be the better man then let me go.'
"Rawlings was too high-strung and chivalric to stand that. He immediately dismounted, untied his prisoner, and at it they went. They were well matched, and, like James Fitz James and Rhoderic Dhu, without a spectator to behold the contest. Their brawny arms encircled each other, and every power of muscle, sinew and bone was put in requisition. The contest was long and doubtful. But Smothers, being as accustomed to hardships and lying in the woods as the wild beasts, outwinded the Deputy and came off the victor, and accordingly went his way. Rawlings considered that the matter had been settled by the code of honor, fist and skull, and was content with the issue. His fee in case of success would have been three shillings in tobacco at a penny ha-penny per pound."
Last of the children of Captain John Vertrees, although not in order of birth,
was John Vertrees, Jr., first Vertrees to come to Illinois and immediate ancestor
of the Pike county family, whose story is related in the following chapter.