SEPTEMBER 3, 1826. IN THE LOG house of Nimrod Philips at Philips Ferry, on the Illinois river, is an unusual gathering.
The old ferryman is making his will. He has decided to go on a trip back to Kentucky and fears he may not return
alive. The family is around him. Leah Scholl and Thomas Norris have been called as witnesses. Laboriously the old
pioneer, in the manner of the times, designates with the utmost particularity the division of his property in the
event of his death.
Philips Ferry was a rude affair. Pirogues or canoes, lashed together, with a railed platform across them, carried
stock and vehicles. The crude craft with its cargo was propelled across the river by means of long poles or sweeps.
The ferry had been started in 1821 by Garret Van Dusen, a Knickerbocker Dutchman who later operated the first crude
water mill on Blue Creek. In 1824, Van Dusen assigned to Philips the ferry license that had been granted him by
the Pike county commissioners in 1822.
Leah Scholl and Thomas Norris, attesting the will, subscribe their names to as quaint a document as is to be found
in the century-old records of the Military Tract. The document, penned on a coarse sheet of blank paper, is readily
decipherable after 110 years. The will is as follows:
"Illinois Pike County in the name of God Amen I Nimrod Philips and the State and County aforesaid inten to
travel and Not knowing but I may die before I return do make this my last will and testament first I give to Zerrelda
Jean my youngest child five head of Cattle a cow cald Cherry and her Caves a horse Cald Jack three beds and furniture
and all the kitchen furniture and utensils this I give to my youngest child by Nancy Philips onst (once) Nancy
Norris Zerrelda Jean Philips is her name I give to Nancy Philips my wife one loom and its furniture 3 breeding
sows and their pigs six barrows for her meat she is to have her choise of the above named Hoggs she is to live
where I now live at the ferry my part of the crop of corn that has been on the place this year to be hers she is
to live on the place until Zerrelda is of age and have the benefit of the improved land Zerrelda is to have six
dolers for 3 years Scholling 18 dollers I give to Elizabeth Elledge my oldest daughter one doller the rest of my
estate and property is to be equaly divided between my 3 children Andrew Philips, Selah Philips, Ana Philips except
Andrew is to have the ferry this is my last will and testament as witness I set my hand and seal
NIMROD PHILIPS
test Leah Scholl
test Thomas Norris
Nancy Philips and
Andrew Philips executors"
Nimrod Philips lived five years after making his will.
He died in 1831 and on August 7th of that year Leah Scholl (then Leah Rattan) and Thomas Norris testified before
Probate Judge William Ross at Atlas to the genuineness of the will. Leah had meantime married Hiram Rattan; Thomas
Norris later, in 1835, married Louisa (Scholl) Key, a cousin of Leah, being a daughter of Peter and Mary (Boone)
Scholl.
Leah was the first of the Scholl children married in Pike county. She had first met Hiram Rattan at the house of
old Dicky Rattan whose settlement was three miles south of present White Hall. Rattan's was the farthest north
of the white settlements when Illinois became a state. At his house the early explorers, northward bound from Alton
and Wood River, were wont to stop. It was while the Abraham Scholl party was stopping overnight at Rattan's on
the way here from Kentucky in 1825 that Hiram Rattan and Leah Scholl became acquainted. They were married two years
later, June 15, 1827, here in Pike county.
The Rattan and Scholl wedding was one of six in Pike county in the year 1827. The marriage license issued to them
was the fifth issued in the county under the marriage license laws of Illinois which were established by the legislature
of 1826-27. The license was issued by William Ross, then clerk of the county commissioners' court at Atlas. The
license itself was burned in the fire that destroyed the clerk's office at Atlas the winter of the Big Snow (1830-31).
The license entry is the fifth on Page 1 of Volume 1 of the Marriage License Records of Pike County. The marriage
service was said by the noted John Garrison, one of the great Christian evangelists of the early day and a brother
of Elijah Garrison who married Boone Allen's daughter Sally, a granddaughter of Jonathan Boone. The Rattans later
left Pike county, returning to the old Rattan settlement in Greene county, where they died and are buried.
Sarah (Sally) Scholl, eldest of Abraham and Tabitha (Noe) Scholl's daughters, was the only one who married before
coming to Illinois. She was married in Clark county, Kentucky, to Marshall Key on October 3, 1820. Three of their
children, Eliza C., George and Amanda were born in Kentucky. Amanda was a tender baby when the family came to Illinois.
John Wilson of Baylis, who visited the Key family in Grant county, Wisconsin, in the 1880s, recalls the message
given him by his grandfather, William H. Wilson, to convey to Amanda, then married and living at Patch Grove, Wisconsin:
"Tell Maud," said he, "that I put the first bite in her mouth to eat on the trail from Kentucky."
Amanda received the message replied: "Yes, he put the first one in; I wonder who will put the last one in."
Marshall Key was a kinsman of Francis Scott Key, author of "The Star Spangled Banner." Sally's cousin,
Louisa Scholl, daughter of Abraham's brother Peter, had also married a Key (Bentley), brother of Marshall. He died
and she later married Thomas K. Norris in Pike county, March 31, 1835, with Jesse Elledge, pioneer Baptist preacher,
officiating. Louisa's brother, Dudley Scholl, had previously married Thomas Norris's sister, Katherine (Kitty Ann).
The Norrises were kinsmen of Nancy (Norris) Philips, wife of the noted ferryman, Nimrod Philips.
Marshall Key and his family, after sojourning a short time in Pike county, located at Naples, in Morgan county,
and Key there built and operated the first grist and saw mill in that early Illinois river town. Their first child
born to them in Illinois was born at Naples in 1827 and is buried there. After engaging in business at Naples for
a few years, the Key family returned to Griggsville and on September 20, 1830, Marshall Key homesteaded a half
quarter-section of land (80 acres) in the northwest of Section 14, adjoining the present city of Griggsville. Later
he decided to locate in Grant county, Wisconsin, and sold the 80 to Hasten Wells but his wife Sarah refused to
sign the deed.
Wells, becoming dissatisfied with his title, eventually took the case into the circuit court of Morgan county at
Jacksonville, and at the October term of that court in 1835 (Hasten Wells appearing as complainant against Marshall
Key and Abraham Scholl), the court ordered and decreed that Marshall Key should, within twenty days, make, execute
and deliver to Wells a good and sufficient warranty deed to the Griggsville tract. Sally (Scholl) Key persisted
in her refusal to sign the deed and Key did not comply with the court's decree; whereupon, pursuant to the decree,
James Berdan, Master in Chancery for the county of Morgan, executed a warrant deed in his official capacity, and
confirmed, insofar as he could lawfully do, the conveyance of the tract in the name of Key to the complainant,
Wells.
The Key family, later, in the 1840s, located in Grant county, Wisconsin, and Marshall Key built a mill there. Still
later, Leonard Boone Elledge, a son of Benjamin Elledge and a great grandson of Edward Boone, migrated from Pike
county to the Key settlement in Wisconsin Leonard Elledge had married Eliza C. Key (daughter of Marshall Key and
Sally Scholl) and they had a son who became a noted St. Paul attorney. After many years, Sarah Scholl Key, who
had refused to sign the deed to the Griggsville eighty, put her claim to the property in the hands of this Elledge
grandson, and he, prosecuting his grandmother's claim, finally got more for his grandmother out of her equity in
the eighty than Marshall Key had originally got for the entire eighty. (The foregoing from the relation of John
Wilson of Baylis, 71-year-old great grandson of Abraham Scholl.)
Marshall and Sally Key died in Wisconsin and are buried near Patch Grove in Grant county, where they and numerous
of the early Scholls and Elledges settled when Wisconsin was still a territory. Nancy (Nan) Key, daughter of Marshall
and Sally Key, married Sam Patch of the family for whom Patch Grove was named. They had a son, Abraham Key Patch,
who lived at Patch Grove and died there. Mary Key (known as Mate), also a daughter of Marshall and Sarah Key, married
Jacob Martin; both are dead, as is also their son, Orlo Martin, who had a sister, Addie Martin, who married George
Stevens at Cassville, Wisconsin. Ninon Key (known as "Nin"), another daughter, married John Thompson,
and they too lived and died at Patch Grove. They had a son and daughter, John and Almira Thompson, who, John Wilson
believes, are still living at Bloomington in Grant county, Wisconsin.
Amanda Key, cradled in a basket on the long journey to Illinois in 1825, was twice married, her first husband being
Frank Parrish, her second Joe Jacko; all are dead. Marshall and Sally Key were also the parents of three sons,
George, Abraham and Bentley. George was born in Kentucky, Abraham in Griggsville and Bentley in Wisconsin. Most
of the family is buried in Grant county, Wisconsin.
Eliza C. Key, first born of Marshall and Sarah Scholl Key, on April 8, 1841, married in Pike county Leonard Boone
Elledge, a son of Benjamin and Catharine Elledge, he a son of Francis Elledge and Charity Boone, Charity being
the eldest daughter of Daniel Boone's brother, Edward. Leonard Boone Elledge lived with his parents in a log house
that stood a short distance north and east of the present large house on Mrs. Clarence Riley's farm, now occupied
by Glenn Riley, two and one-half miles northeast of Griggsville. Scattered stones and a depression in the earth
still mark the site of this early habitation, which stood near the old stage route from Meredosia to early Pittsfield,
the course of which can still be traced diagonally across the Riley farm. Less than a hundred yards northeast of
the house was the Benjamin Elledge cemetery, now marked by a few scattered and broken stones in the midst of a
farm driveway, near the center of the southeast quarter of section 2 in Griggsville township, now a part of the
Riley farm.
Glenn Riley and the writer, scraping away the accumulations of nearly a century from some of the buried slabs,
and piecing together the scattered fragments, established the family character of this burying ground and the names
and birth- and death-dates of some of the descendants of the Boones who are buried there, among them two children
of Leonard Boone Elledge and Eliza C. Key, namely, Mary E., who died September 20, 1845, and Sarah C., who died
on May 30, 1848, aged 6 months and 2 days. Nearby was found the fragment of a stone that had marked the grave of
the Boone grandson, Benjamin Elledge (a son of Edward Boone's daughter Charity), born in Kentucky in 1782, died,
near the burial, Oct. 21, 1853, at the age of 71; also another fragment of a stone that had marked the grave of
Benjamin's wife, Catharine, who was born in Kentucky in 1786 and died May 16, 1863, aged 76 years, 11 months and
3 days. Here also were found fragments of stones that had marked the burial of Richard Boone Elledge, another noted
Boone descendant; and the burials of his children.
In Griggsville cemetery is interred another child of Leonard Boone Elledge and Eliza Key, namely, Marshall B. Elledge,
who was born in Griggsville September 17, 1852, and died February 21, 1875, aged 22 years, 5 months and 4 days.
Charles Harrington, an early minister of the Baptist church at Perry, who was elected county judge of Pike county
in 1850, and who was the father of Samuel Harrington who married Charity Margaret Elledge, a great granddaughter
of Edward Boone, officiated at the wedding of Leonard Boone Elledge and Eliza C. Key in 1841.
Along with the marriage license on file in the office of County Clerk O. D. Gicker in the Pike county court house
is a brief missive from Marshall Key, dated "Pike County, April 7, 1841," and directed to the Clerk of
the County Commissioners' Court of Pike County, wherein the father of the youthful Eliza gives his consent to her
marriage as follows: "I, Marshal Key, do acknowledge and consent to the Union of my daughter Eliza C. Key
to Boon Elledge and further that you have the goodness to grant the said Boon Elledge a license for the same. Yours
Respectfully, Marshall Key."
Leonard Boone Elledge, Charity Boone's grandson, was for many years a Pike county justice of the peace. He was
one of the finest scribes of his day. Numerous documents of record in the Pike county court house bear his hand.
He appears to have been one of the best educated men of his time in Pike county.
The name "Leonard Boone" is a familiar one in the Elledge family. It comes down from remote times in
the Virginias and the Carolinas. In the time of the American Revolution, a Leonard Boone Elledge started with John
Donelson to discover a water route westward to the Mississippi. Even then the Elledge and Boone families had become
related by marriage and Elledge descendants had begun to bear the Boone name.
Another Leonard Boone Elledge in early Pike county was a first cousin of the Leonard Boone who married Eliza Key,
being a son of Benjamin Elledge's brother, William, who married Tabitha Beall, William and Tabitha Elledge being
the maternal grandparents of Charles Ingalls of Perry, now in his 85th year, and the paternal great grandparents
of the late Dr. Clyde B. Ingalls of Pittsfield, who was a great great great grandson of Edward Boone, brother of
Daniel. This latter Leonard Boone Elledge married Adaline Hill, a relative of Thomas Carlin, sixth governor of
Illinois. A nephew of this Leonard Boone Elledge, and bearing his name, is now residing with his family in Griggsville,
and with his sons conducting a feed store.
Marshall Key accumulated considerable land in Griggsville and Flint townships. He owned an 80 in Section 23, Griggsville,
and 90 acres in Section 32 in Flint, in addition to the 80 adjoining present Griggsville. On December 30, 1839,
shortly prior to his migration to Wisconsin, he sold 170 acres in Griggsville and Flint for $1650.
John S. Wilson of Baylis states that Marshall Key kept the first tavern or hotel in the town of Griggsville. He
remembers his Grandfather Wilson telling of a finely-dressed youth who came out from Kentucky in an early day and
stopped at Marshall Key's tavern. The young man was a tailor by trade. Stopping at the tavern, all dressed up as
he was, he helped Sally Scholl's girls run down the chickens for the Sunday dinner. This was Charles F. Gibbs,
who 100 years ago last June 29, married Abraham Scholl's daughter Elizabeth, who became the mother of Linn Jackson
(Jack) Gibbs, the father of Miss Mary Gibbs, present Griggsville librarian.