WHEN ABRAHAM SCHOLL settled on the then timbered prairie north of present Griggsville, near the "breaks"
of McGee, in 1825, some of his family feared he was venturing too far out on the prairie. The fertile prairie lands
were then in disrepute. They were considered sickly. Up from the plowed-under vegetation arose rank miasmas. Chills
and ague shook the denizens of the plains.
Abraham Scholl himself scorned the prairies. To the south and west of his settlement extended a vast unpeopled
plain that he thought would never be fenced and never be fit for anything but pasture for his herds. Lewis C. Beck,
in a "Gazetteer of Missouri," published in 1823, said of these great plains regions: "The prairies,
although generally fertile, are so very extensive that they must, for a great length of time, and perhaps forever,
remain wild and uncultivated."
The early settlers almost invariably passed over the rich prairies in search of a wooded location near a stream
or spring. As late as the 1840s and early 1850s, a complaint of western home-seekers was "too much prairie."
The settler who moved out onto the prairie was considered by his neighbors utterly reckless. They warned him that
if he didn't freeze to death in winter, he would be scorched to a cinder in summer. They predicted that he and
his family would die of prairie fever or starve to death on the barren land that would raise nothing but grass.
The prejudice against the prairies was thus sung by an early western versifier:
"Oh, Lonesome, windy, grassy place,
Where buffalo and snakes prevail;
The first with dreadful looking face,
The last with dreadful sounding tail!
I'd rather live on camel hump,
And be a Yankee Doodle beggar,
Than where I never see a stump
And shake to death with fever 'n' ager."
There were reasons other than those of health why the cool woods adjacent to living water were preferred in the
early settlement. The woods were full of game. Upon the wild game the settler must depend largely for the supply
of the family larder. In the woods turkey roosts abounded; in the brush were the haunts of other food animals;
in the streams, fish were to be had. Then, too, the prairie sods were stubborn. For centuries they had been forming.
The weak wooden-mold plows of the first-comers were unable to cope with the tough sod of the prairies. On the other
hand, a clearing of trees and brush left the ground "mellow as an ash heap," easy to work and plant,
and the logs from the felled trees went to make the walls of the cabin.
William Howerton Wilson, following in the footsteps of his father-in-law, Abraham Scholl, built his first log home
near the "breaks of McGee," north of Griggsville. Here all of the Wilson children were born. When finally,
in 1856, Wilson left the Griggsville Prairie, he again sought a rugged, wooded location near a stream, locating
this time on the high bluffs above McGee Creek near the Pike-Brown county line, in Fairmount township. His youngest
child, a daughter, was only two years old when the family home was established above Wilson's Ford on McGee.
Children of the younger daughters of Matilda Scholl Wilson remember their mother's accounts of the robbery of Abraham
Scholl by the notorious John A. Murrel gang on the way from Kentucky to Pike county in 1825. William Howerton Wilson,
who married Matilda, came with the Scholls on that trip. Anna Eliza Manker and Minnesota Fisk, youngest daughters
of the Wilsons, related that Tabitha Noe Scholl, wife of Abraham, had much money concealed in her bed, under her
head, which the robbers did not get. This was partly money which she herself had earned in Kentucky with her wheel
and loom. Abraham was robbed of $1,000 in gold and the money saved from the robbers by Tabitha Scholl thereafter
became the nest egg of the family fortunes in the new land. Mrs. Teresa Haney recalls being told that the money
Tabitha had secreted under her head in the bedding exceeded the amount stolen from Abraham.
The Wilson children have passed down to their children and grandchildren many memories of the early settlement.
Victuals were measured in terms of what the wild land afforded. Sugar, even that from the sugar maple, in the early
years was scarce. "It was only used for the sick, or in the preparation of a ‘sweetened dram' at a wedding
or the arrival of a newcomer." Coffee was another luxury. "Ten pounds of coffee was a large annual supply
for a family, which was used only on Sunday morning, none but the adults being allowed a cup." At other times,
the nut of the Kentucky coffee tree, which once grew in the neighboring forests, or various roots, dried and browned
in the Dutch oven, were used as substitutes. A tea made of bark and roots of sassafras was in general use.
Salt was the great problem. The Scholl family brought a quantity of salt with them into Pike county. In what is
now Pleasant Vale township, on the northwest quarter of Section 9, was a salt spring which afforded considerable
salt water. Willard Keyes and John Wood, who later became governor of Illinois, carried water from this spring
to their log home, a distance of a mile and a half, and Keyes boiled it down and made salt for their own use and
for numerous settlers throughout this region. Salt also was brought in on pack-horses from St. Louis. John Lewis,
one of the family of Pike county Lewises, had begun boiling down water out of Saline Creek in what is now St. Louis
county at the beginning of the nineteenth century and was selling the salt thus obtained in St. Louis at $5 a bushel.
In early days, the salt gourd kept in every cabin, was a treasure. "Often a family would not get more than
a pound of salt a year." So meat was packed in wood ashes, then washed in boiling water, and smoked over the
fire. "Cured in this way, it remained fresh as long as if it was salted."
In early times, "nearly every hollow tree was a bee hive," another reason why the first comers sought
the woodlands in which to settle. Honey was worth 37 ½ cents a gallon; beeswax 25 to 30 cents a pound. The
usual price of a bee tree was $1 as it stood in the forest. Its finder put his mark or initials on it; it was then
his property, "even though it stood in another man's pasture." "Bee trees were sometimes exchanged
in trade for horses, oxen, flour and groceries."
Scholl and Wilson descendants remember the difficulties recounted by their forebears in the matter of milling and
smithing. In the early years, they had to go to the John Ottwell shop near the mouth of Bee Creek or to the Reeve
shop in the Sangamon country to get their smithing done. At Ottwell's they often camped on the bank of the stream
and hunted and fished while waiting their turn at the smithy. At the Reeve shop, east of the river, the Pike and
Scott county Scholls, descendants of the two brothers, Abraham and Peter, often met and swapped news of the folks
back in Kentucky.
These early smithy shops were spacious. Talk of the great skyscrapers of today, with their acres of floor space;
these shops were bounded only by the horizon. Under the trees, in the open, the pioneer smithy planted his forge
and anvil.
Isaac Reeve, Sr., proprietor of the Sangamon smithy, arrived in 1820, with his wife and nine children, tracking
the prairies between Alton and present Jacksonville, "driving before them all the way a sow and her shoats
and two cows with bells on them so they would not get lost." Finally, at a spot in present Morgan county,
a halt was made, the property was dumped on the ground, and Reeve went back to Edwardsville for provisions. With
the second load he brought a blacksmith bellows, an anvil and a hammer. "The former was swung between two
saplings, a tree was felled and an anvil block made of the stump, logs were rolled up for the furnace and thus
they began life."
The Reverend N. P. Heath of Jacksonville once said of this first shop in the Sangamon country: "It was a mammoth
structure, as big as all outdoors. The outside walls of the shop extended as far as the lines of creation, to say
nothing of the internal arrangements. This shop was the first for some time, and the only one in the county; in
fact, it embraced all the county and more, too. (All of this region, including Pike county, was then in Madison
county.)
"There, like the Athenians of old, the settlers would meet from all points, in order to tell and hear the
news."
The stories of nine of the children of William Howerton Wilson and Matilda Scholl have been related in previous
chapters. The tenth and last of the Wilson children was Minnesota, mother of Mrs. Josie Fisk Harshman of Rockport
and George W. Fisk of Baylis, Route 3, Fairmount township.
Minnesota (Minnie) Wilson, born October 6, 1854, was the latest born of the ten children of William and Matilda
Wilson. She and her sister (Anna Eliza, who married Perry Manker), the youngest daughter of the Wilsons, although
born six years apart, were almost constant companions in their girlhood. Josie Fisk Harshman, Minnesota's daughter,
has an old tin-type picture of these two Pike county maidens of the long ago, taken together. Teresa Haney, daughter
of Anna Eliza, and Josie Harshman, Minnie's daughter, both recall interesting stories told by their mothers of
early days in Pike county.
The two girls, Eliza and Minnie, never forgot the great "hog killings" at the family homestead on McGee
in early times. Father Wilson always took his family into the winter with great stores of food and fuel. "Plenty
of meat, meal and wood for winter," was one of his maxims. The annual "hog killing" was a great
event. On one occasion he butchered seventeen hogs that averaged three hundred pounds, dressed. Eliza and Minnie,
when hog killing time came, always clamored for a bit of tenderloin which, with a sprinkle of salt, was a tidbit
fit for a princess. In the sugar camps, when the sap came up in springtime, these two little girls lived glorious
days, carrying buckets of the sugar sap from spigot to kettle and sipping the sweet juice of the maples.
These two girls in their old age recounted to their daughters the story of a trip to mill by their brother, LeGrande
Wilson, in an early day. LeGrande started to mill on horseback with a sack of corn to have it ground into meal.
He reached the mill, got his meal and started on the return trip when he was pursued by hungry wolves. The chase
became so hot that he finally had to abandon his sack of precious meal, thereby effecting his escape. Next day
the father, retracing the trail with another sack of corn for meal, found the abandoned sack, literally torn to
shreds by the rapacious wolves.
The granddaughters recall their mothers saying that their Grandfather Wilson claimed in his old age to have trapped
and killed more wolves and rattlesnakes than any other man in Pike county. In the early years of their sojourn
here, William Howerton Wilson and George W. Hinman (the latter of whom crossed the Illinois river by the old Philips
Ferry to made a permanent home in Pike county on October 14, 1829) invented a novel method of trapping rattlesnakes
and, on Mossy Mountain, in northern Pike county, ancient home of the rattlers, trapped huge numbers of the reptiles.
Josie Harshman, a granddaughter of William and Matilda Wilson, has a prized picture of her grandparents taken in
their old age, seated in front of the ancient Wilson farmhouse, on the hills above McGee at Wilson's Ford, with
their two latest surviving sons, John H. and George S., standing behind them. The last of this group, John H.,
died in 1924.
Minnesota Wilson, on November 25, 1869, with the Reverend C. E. Ryder officiating, married Daniel Webster Fisk,
youngest son of Eleazer and Lucy (Russell) Fisk, early comers to the New Salem region. Eleazer Fisk was born May
3, 1803 in New Hampshire and died March 23, 1872 in Pike county. His wife, Lucy Russell Fisk, was born October
13, 1809 in Massachusetts and died October 19, 1871 in Pike county. Both are buried in Swiggett cemetery, northeast
of New Salem.
The Fisk or Fiske family in America dates back to an English ancestry, ancient and honored. Amid the gentry and
the lords and nobles of the English court in the fifteenth century are found the first known ancestors of the Pike
county Fisks.
Lord Symond Fiske, recorded also as Simon Fiske of Laxfield England, is the first recorded ancestor. He married
first, Susannah Smyth, and second, Katherine (last name unknown). He left a will dated December 22, 1463 and proved
at Norwich, England, February 26, 1463-4. He had a son William who married Joan Lynne and they had a son Simon,
who married Elizabeth (last name missing). They were parents of a second Simon who died at Laxfield in 1505, leaving
a will dated January 25, 1505.
To this marriage was born a son, Robert Fiske, at Stadhaugh, England; about 1525 he married Mrs. Sybil (Gould)
Barber, and they had a son Thomas who married Margery (family name unknown). He was born at Laxfield and died at
Fressingfield, England, in February, 1610. Thomas fathered a son, Phinehas Fiske, who was the first of the family
to come to America.
Captain Phinehas Fiske was born in Laxfield, England in 1610 and married there in 1628, Sarah (family name unknown),
who died September 10, 1659, in America. Phinehas came to America to the Colony of Massachusetts in 1642. At Wenham,
in Essex county, on June 4, 1660, he married a second time, his bride being Elizabeth Easterisk. In an old Wenham
record this first Fiske in America is referred to as follows:
"Phinehas Fiske, freeman of Wenham, 1642, one of the first settlers and until death leading citizen of that
town. Youngest son of Thomas Fiske of England and grandson of Robert and Sibyl (Gould) Fiske of Laxfield, County
Suffolk. Captain of Militia in Wenham, Constable in 1644, Representative to General Court 1653, Justice 1654. He
died in 1673."
To Phinehas and his wife Sarah before they left England had been born a son James, who married first Anna (last
name unknown), and second, Hannah Pike. In Massachusetts this son was known as Sergeant James Fiske. Records show
that James went from Wenham, Massachusetts, to Haverhill in that state, that he had a grant of land in 1646, that
at a "General Towne meeting" December 11, 1674, Sergeant Fiske was chosen Selectman and that he was Selectman
a number of times in Haverhill.
James had a son Samuel who became a resident of Groton, Massachusetts, and died there in 1728, leaving a son Samuel,
born March 5, 1704 at Groton, who married January 12, 1726, Elizabeth Parker, also of Groton. They became parents
of Eleazer Fiske, Junior, born November 23, 1731, who married Esther Stewart, both of Dunstable, New Hampshire,
February 26, 1760. This Eleazer Fisk died at Dunstable June 21, 1803, the year in which Eleazer Fisk, who settled
in Pike county, was born.
Eleazer Fisk (first of that name) was a soldier in the Revolution. In Volume IV of the War Rolls in the Pension
Bureau at Washington, D. C., on the muster roll of men raised in the Fifth Regiment militia in the state of New
Hampshire for the defense of Rhode Island in 1779, appears the name of Eleazer Fisk, Junior. Junior Fisk, engaged
from the town of Dunstable to serve six months, was mustered into service at Amherst July 27, 1779. Fisk's name
is found subscribed to the following enlistment, dated at Amherst "ye 12th July 1779."
"We the Subscribers Voluntarily Inlist ourselves as Soldiers (to Serve Six Months after we arrive at Providence)
In the New Hempr Regiment Commanded by Colo. Mooney for the Defense of Rhode Island and we promise obedience To
the Officers Set over us During Sd term."
Pay rolls show that Private Eleazer Fisk, Jr. served in Major Daniel Reynolds' company in Colonel Hercules Mooney's
regiment, which was "raised by the State of New Hampshire for the Continental Service at Rhode Island."
Fisk also served nearly four months during the Revolution in Captain James Tiken's company in a New Hampshire regiment
of militia commanded by Colonel Thomas Bartlet "in the service of the United States," in 1780.
Josie Fisk Harshman of Rockport, a descendant of the Revolutionary soldier, is eligible for membership in the National
Society of the D. A. R. and possesses an application filled out and endorsed by the late Elizabeth Shaw Jett but
which has never been submitted to the National Board for approval. Mrs. Harshman is descended from Revolutionary
forebears on both her father's and mother's sides. On the mother's side is the Revolutionary service of the mother's
grandfather, Abraham Scholl, in the Indian expeditions under Daniel Boone on the "dark and bloody ground of
Kentucky."
Eleazer and Lucy Fisk, the first of the family in Pike county, coming in 1840, settled on the sparsely peopled
prairie near present Maysville, their nearest neighbors at first being Amos Blood, A. P. Sharpe and Thomas Bates,
the latter a noted early day teacher in the Maysville log school. They brought with them to the new country their
five children, two sons and three daughters, who had been born in Massachusetts, with the exception of Charles
Bruce, the eldest, who was born in New Hampshire. Two other sons were born after the settlement in Pike county.
Charles Bruce Fisk, the first born, was a native of New Hampshire, born 1, 1839. When he was a year old, his parents
took him to Massachusetts, from whence they came in 1840 to Illinois. In 1860, Charles B. married Betsey T. Cobb,
who was born in New York in 1837 or 1838. Lucy E. Fisk, a daughter of Charles B., married William Curtis of Monroe
county, Missouri, September 14, 1879, the Reverend John Jay Dugan saying the service. Fisk in 1880 was president
of the town board of New Salem.
Martha Wait Fisk, first daughter and second child of Eleazer Fisk and Lucy Russell, was born in Massachusetts November
24, 1839 and married Abner J. McWilliams in Pike county, May 7, 1857. She died April 17, 1909, in Illinois. Hannah
Elizabeth Fisk, born November 16, 1832, at New Bedford, Massachusetts, married Joseph M. Spring in Pike county,
March 29, 1849. She died August 5, 1908. Mary Ann Fisk, born in Massachusetts August 31, 1835, married John A.
Howland in Pike county, October 18, 1855. She died April 17, 1902. George W. Fisk, born September 8, 1837 in Massachusetts,
died January 11, 1882 in Nebraska. Nathan C. Fisk, born May 10, 1842, in Illinois, died April 28, 1891 in Nebraska.
Daniel Webster Fisk, the youngest child, married Minnesota Wilson; he died in Illinois October 24, 1894.
To Daniel W. and Minnesota Wilson Fisk were born two sons and one daughter. George W. Fisk, born August 16, 1873,
married Nora Watkins and resides on Section 6 in Fairmount township. He is father of three sons and three daughters,
namely: Frank, who married Helen Hahn and resides in Chicago; Zelma, who married Leonard Henricks and lives in
Chicago; Ruth, a resident of Chicago; Ralph, who married an Iowa girl and lives on Keokuk, Nowa; Ruby, who married
Pressly Lewis and resides near her parents, her address being Siloam, Illinois; and Nelson, at home.
John E. Fisk, second son of Daniel W., was born June 20, 1875. He married at New Salem, Ivah Myrtle Stratton of
Camden, Schuyler county, Illinois, February 24, 1901. She was a daughter of Frank and Eliza (Carnes) Stratton.
They became parents of two sons, Charles William, born at New Salem, March 23, 1902, and J. Roscoe, born at New
Salem June 6, 1903, the latter having been born after his father's death which occurred at New Salem February 4,
1903; he is buried in Swiggett cemetery. The son, William, resides in California; Roscoe, who married Develle Brinson,
a niece of Captain M. J. Brinson of Texas fame, lives at Fort Worth, Texas.
Nellie Josephine Fisk, the only daughter of Daniel W. Fisk and Minnie Wilson, was born August 17, 1886. She married
J. P. (Peter) Harshman at Pittsfield December 15, 1906, Justice S. P. Rupert performing the ceremony, Charles Saunders
and Daniel Harshman witnessing. The Harshmans are of sturdy ancestry. Peter Harshman is a son of Noah L. Harshman
and Lydia (Liddie) E. Markey. Noah L., brother of Perry, Eli, Rachel Ann and Daniel, was a son of an earlier Peter
Harshman who in 1836 married Susannah Sherer, a daughter of Daniel and Catherine Sherer. This Peter Harshman, a
son of Peter Harshman, Sr., was born in Preble county, Ohio, in 1813 and came with his wife to this county in 1852,
settling first in Pittsfield township, where they resided until 1869, when they removed to Section 11 in Griggsville
township and settled on the old Abraham Scholl estate north of Griggsville, which remained for many years in the
Harshman name. Peter Harshman, Sr., father of this Peter Harshman and great grandfather of Peter Harshman who married
Josie Fisk, was in the War of 1812 and was one of the soldiers of Hull's army that surrendered at the siege of
Detroit.
J. P. and Josephine Harshman, who occupy a pleasant home in Rockport, are the parents of a son and daughter, Harry
Wilson Harshman, born January 11, 1908, and Nellie Harshman, born November 19, 1909. Wilson, named for his grandmother
Wilson's family, married May Margaret Tucker of Pittsfield, daughter of Charles and Elizabeth (Ryan) tucker, November
6, 1930, the Reverend Lowell B. Hazzard officiating. On August 7 of the same year the daughter Nellie married Carl
Althoff of Hull, a son of Mr. and Mrs. C. H. Althoff. The wedding was solemnized at Macomb, Illinois, at the home
of Mr. and Mrs. Claude Hesh, close friends of the bridal couple. Both had attended Western Illinois State Teachers'
College at Macomb. Professor Althoff is now a science teacher in the Kankakee (Illinois) high school, in which
city the couple resides. Wilson Harshman and his wife resides in Rockport, where he is postmaster (1936). Wilson
and Nellie both graduated from Pittsfield high school.