EARLIER PIKE COUNTY historians are agreed that no settler tarried in what is now Fairmount township prior to 1831.
Says Chapman's History of Pike County, published in 1880: "It is a matter of no little surprise to know that
for so many years this beautiful section was left without the pioneer. Many doubtless passed to and fro through
it on their way northward and westward and return, and perhaps marveled at the beauty of its groves and prairies;
but it was so far from civilization that the most sturdy and daring did not feel disposed to pitch their tents
and make their home here."
"Over eleven years elapsed," says this early historian, " from the time that Ebenezer Franklin,
Daniel Shinn and the Rosses came to the county before Barker Crane, the first settler of Fairmount, came to live
in this then wild country. Mr. Crane made improvements on Section 3 in 1831 but even he remained for only a short
period. We do not know whether it was his remoteness from other settlements that drove him away or that he found
a more desirable location, as none are left to inform us."
So say the early historians. But William Howerton Wilson, 1825 pioneer on Griggsville Prairie, has left a wholly
different account of the first settlement of Fairmount. As in the case of Hadley township, first settled by "Free
Frank," a former negro slave, Fairmount's first settler was a colored man. In 1825, the year of his arrival
here with the Abraham Scholl family, William Howerton Wilson explored the region of present Fairmount where, in
1856, he founded the present Wilson homestead. There, in a rude cabin, in that remote wilderness, a short distance
west of present Wilson's Ford on McGee and a short distance south of the present brown county line and east of
the Adams county line, Wilson discovered this first settler of Fairmount, who apparently had been there for some
time. This was six years prior to the Barker Crane settlement.
Who this first settler of Fairmount was, whence he came and whither he went are questions that doubtless will remain
forever unanswered. But there he was, living alone, cultivating a small patch of ground and living off the victims
of his gun and traps, when Wilson penetrated the region in 1825. A little farther west, in McGee Creek which dips
into Pike county at this point, Wilson discovered an abrupt turn in the creek, which had the appearance of having
been caused by a beaver dam. The region that now is Pike was once a beaver country and here Daniel Boone hunted
and trapped in the late 1790s and early 1800s, after his removal to the Femme Osage in then St. Charles county,
Missouri. In the years of the Territory, before Illinois became a state, the fur trade flourished throughout the
valley. Boone, trapping along our wild and beautiful streams, sold his beaver pelts in St. Louis as high as $9
per pelt.
The Territory for a number of years offered two fields of operation, says Alvord in the Centennial History of Illinois:
"The Saul-Fox-Winnebago country, centering at Prairie du Chien and extending along the Rock river and down
the Mississippi and the valley of the Illinois river. In the Prairie du Chien and Mississippi regions the American
Fur Company had to meet heavy competition from traders in St. Louis, but even so their profits were undoubtedly
large. In the Illinois valley the company had practically a free hand, and here it maintained a force of some 30
clerks, traders, interpreters and boatmen, reaping a harvest in 1816 of about $23,000 worth of peltry."
In the winter of 1819-20 there were among the Sauk and Foxes five traders employing nine clerks and interpreters
and 43 laborers. The Indians sold that year 2,760 beaver skins, 922 otter, 13,440 raccoon, 12,900 muskrat, 500
mink, 200 wildcat, 680 bear, and 28,680 deer, the estimated value of the whole being $58,800. (Marston,"Letter
of Major Marston to Reverend Dr. Morse," in Blair's "Indian Tribes," 2:150.)
William Howerton Wilson who, through his descendants, has contributed so much to the hitherto unchronicled history
of this region, died December 31, 1894, and is buried on the McGee Creek hills in the Fairmount region he explored
in 1825. He died at the age of 88, two years after the death of his wife, Matilda Scholl Wilson, who is buried
beside him.
The name "William Howerton" which he bore and which is perpetuated by Wilson and Scholl descendants is
an old and noted name in Virginia. Spencer Wilson, father of William Howerton Wilson, married Ann Howerton, a daughter
of William Howerton (born about 1730, died 1781) and Nannie (Mary) Hayes, and granddaughter of Thomas Howerton
of Essex county, Virginia, who died in 1757. Another Thomas Howerton, a younger brother of Anna (born October 21,
1764), married Frances Jones in Virginia and they had a son William Howerton (born April 5, 1788) who married Betty
Yancey in Grayson county, Virginia. The name of William Howerton is born today by Dr. William Howerton Saunders
of Omaha, Nebraska, and Council Bluffs, Iowa, and his 16-year-old son, William Howerton Saunders, Jr., they being
descendants of Anna Howerton Wilson of Virginia. Spencer Wilson, who married Ann Howerton and went from Virginia
to Kentucky in an early day, later settled in the state of Texas.
Having concluded the stories of Matilda Scholl's ten children, we now turn to another of Abraham Scholl's daughters,
the girl Serelda, Sirilda or Zerelda, these three spellings being found in various records. No living Scholl descendant
knows anything of this lost daughter of the house of Scholl, except that an incomplete family record states that
she married a man by the name of Miller. None of the family knows who this man was, or where Serelda went following
her marriage, or where she died, or whether she was survived by any child.
The only known record of Abraham Scholl's children has been lost for three quarters of a century. Abraham's nephew,
Edward Boone Scholl (founder of Perry) is authority for the statement that there was such a record. Says he, in
course of a letter addressed to Dr. Lyman C. Draper, collector of the Boone manuscripts at Madison, Wisconsin,
dated at Griggsville, March 9, 1861: "The spring before he (Abraham Scholl) died he got me to set down all
his children's ages in a favorite book of his, but it cannot be found." This record, set down by Boone Scholl
in the spring of 1851, doubtless was the only family record that was ever in existence and it was never seen by
any Scholl descendant now living.
According to the meagre records available, Serelda Scholl was born in Clark county, Kentucky, near Boone's Fort,
probably about the year 1806, as she appears in a Scholl genealogical record as the ninth child of Abraham and
the third by his second wife, Tabitha Noe, to whom he was married in 1803. She doubtless spelled her name "Serelda,"
since this is the spelling which appears on her marriage license unearthed by the present writer among some old
records of the Atlas courts in the Pike county courthouse.
On November 2, 1833, the year in which the town of Pittsfield was founded, Serelda Scholl married Asher A. Miller,
believed in the light of recent evidence to have been a son of Adam and Nellie Miller, who married in North Carolina
and settled later in Casey county, Kentucky, whence they came with their seven children in 1820 to what is now
Scott county (then Madison county), Illinois. James A Stewart, late of Macoupin county, a descendant of Thomas
Allen who came with the Millers from Kentucky to Illinois, stated that one of Adam Miller's sons was named Asher
and that this son married a Scholl who was a cousin of the early Scott county Scholls and Elledges. The Miller
family, he said, later left Scott county and went to the St. Francis country in southeastern Missouri, some of
the family going on from that region to the new state of Texas.
The Millers were kinmen of Joseph Miller and his daughters Sallie and Elizabeth, who in Kentucky in 1813 and 1824
married Septimus and Jesse Scholl, sons of Abraham Scholl's brother Joseph and the latter's wife, Levina Boone,
daughter of Daniel. Abraham Scholl and his family were to have come with Adam Miller and his son Alfred and four
other comrades to the Illinois river country in 1819 but for some reason Scholl did not show up at the appointed
rendezvous in Casey county, Kentucky, and the others came on without him, Scholl following in 1825.
Serelda Scholl's marriage license is the only one of the early Scholl licenses that is still in existence. The
earlier licenses of her sisters (Leah, Adeline and Matilda) were lost, along with numerous other records, in the
fire that gutted the clerk's office at Atlas in the winter of the Big Snow (1830-31). The license, written in longhand
on a rough sheet of paper (the county had yet no official blanks) reads as follows:
"State of Illinois, County of Pike — License and permission is hereby granted unto any Minister of the gospel
authorized to marry by the church or society to which he belongs, To any Justice of the Supreme Court, To any Judge,
or, To any Justice of the Peace to join in the holy bonds of Matrimony Mr. Asher A. Miller, Gentleman, To Miss
Serelda J. Scholl, Lady, agreeably to the laws of this State.
"In Testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and affixed the seal of the County Commissioners' Court,
at Atlas, this 2nd day of November, A. D. 1833.
--W. Ross, Clerk."
This was among the last marriage licenses issued from the ancient justice seat at Atlas, the courts being transferred
immediately thereafter to the new county seat town of Pittsfield.
On the reverse side of the license appears this certification:
"This is to certify that the rights of matrimony of the within named party were solemnized by me the Second
of November 1833. — Jesse Elledge, United Baptist Preacher."
This Elledge, noted Baptist of early days, was one of the Elledges who came in the 1820s from Kentucky to what
is now Scott county, Illinois; he later crossed the river into Pike county, took up government land in what are
now Griggsville and New Salem townships, and lived on this side of the river for many years. He was the first clerk
of the Sandy Creek (now Winchester) church in Scott county, which he helped organize at the house of David Casebier
(a large landholder of early days in Pike county), in June, 1825. A little later, in 1828, Elledge and Jacob Bower,
the latter of whom arrived that year from Kentucky with his family and a wagon train of neighbors who were all
Baptists, carried the gospel into Pike county. Preacher Elledge had married Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of Nimrod
Philips of the old Philips Ferry, and their daughter, Charity Elledge, married Abraham Scholl's nephew, Jesse Bryan
Scholl; she died in Scott county in 1878 at the age of 83 and is buried in a field on the old Claywell farm southwest
of Winchester.
The coming of Serelda Scholl's husband's people to this region in 1819-20 is one of the epic adventures of the
great valley, having its beginning in an Indian massacre on Wood river near present Alton in 1814, an account of
which was given by Colonel John Shaw in his narrative reproduced in earlier chapters of this history. The story
of the Miller family, into which Serelda married, and their pioneer settlement in the Sangamo country, will be
told in a subsequent chapter dealing with the early Elledges.
It is believed that Asher Miller and Serelda Scholl, following their marriage, resided for some two or three years
in Scott county where both had numerous relatives, and that in 1836, when the Republic of Texas came into existence
under Sam Houston, the couple removed to the new Republic, where Spencer Wilson, father of Matilda Scholl's husband,
had already located. It is believed that Serelda Scholl died on the plains of Texas, bitten to death by a diamondback
rattler.
Mrs. Josie Fisk Harshman of Rockport, daughter of Minnesota Wilson and a granddaughter of Matilda Scholl Wilson
who was a younger sister of Serelda, remembers her mother saying that one of Abraham Scholl's daughters died in
Texas from the bite of a diamond-back rattlesnake. This could only have been Abraham's daughter Serelda.
No record exists, so far as is known, as to the part of Texas in which Asher Miller and his bride settled; neither
is there any record of their place of burial or of the time or manner of their deaths, except that which has been
passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation as to a daughter of Scholl meeting death by the bite
of a prairie reptile.
William Scholl, eleventh child of Abraham and the fifth by his second wife, Tabitha Noe, was born in Clark county,
Kentucky, January 23, 1810. He was Abraham's first son by Tabitha Noe and was named for his paternal grandfather
who brought his family out to Kentucky from Virginia with Daniel Boone in 1779. He was 15 when the family settled
on Griggsville Prairie.
On April 1, 1838, William Scholl married, in Schuyler county, Miss Polly Dale, known among the early Scholls as
"Aunt Pop" Dale. The Dales lived in that portion of early Schuyler county that is now embraced in Brown
county, which county was cut off from the jurisdiction of Schuyler in 1839. The ceremony was said by Phillip Briggs;
the marriage is of record in the court house at Rushville, county seat of Schuyler.
To William and Polly Dale Scholl were born two sons and four daughters, namely, Silas W., Rhoda, Phebe, Dotha,
Israel Putnam and Diantha. Silas, the oldest, was born May 21, 1839 in Griggsville, Pike county. He married Sarah
Jane Webb, who was born near Liberty in Adams county, December 30, 1842. Her mother dying when she was young, she
was taken by her uncle, John Webb, to his home in Missouri and there she met Silas W. Scholl, to whom she was married
March 31, 1859 in Missouri. They then came to Illinois and settled near Benville, in Brown county.
Silas W. and Sarah Jane (Webb) Scholl had six children, as follows: Nelson E. (Boone) born October 16, 1863, who
married his second cousin, Emma T. Manker, in Pike county September 29, 1887, and who resides with his wife in
Kimberly, Idaho, having formerly resided in Hooker, Oklahoma, and Utleyville, Colorado; Mattie and Estella, the
earliest born, both of whom died young; Edward P. Scholl of Mt. Sterling, Illinois, born February 23, 1866, who
married, first, Ollie Owen, and, second, Maude E. Buskirk, they being parents of the following children:
Ada, oldest daughter, wife of Otis Bullard, born February 26, 1887, residing eight miles west of Mt. Sterling,
address Timewell, Illinois; Mamie, wife of Darius Noble, born June 9, 1897, residing at Camp Point in Adams county,
she and her sister Ada being children of Ollie Bowen Scholl. Children of Edward P. and Maude Buskirk Scholl are:
Kathryn, wife of Thomas McNeal, a government surveyor located at Washington, D. C.; Grace A., wife of Russell Jones,
residing in Quincy; Pearl, wife of Lozell Hatch, residing in Peoria; Raymond, 17, Charles Edward, 14, and William
N., 8 years old, who are at the family home in Mt. Sterling.
Daisy Scholl, daughter of Silas W. Scholl and Sarah Jane Webb, married John Patton, March 13, 1892, and they have
four children: Leslie Patton, first born, married Blanche Putnam and they have one child, Glenna Mae, 10 years
old, their address being Hersman, Illinois; Alyeen Patton married Jack Grissman and lives at Galesburg, Illinois;
Robert S. Patton married Ida Mae Davis and they have two children, Robert and Richard, their home being at Timewell;
and Maude Patton, unmarried, who resides in Galesburg.
Wesley Lee Scholl, youngest child of Silas W., born July 25, 1889, married Lydia Webb in Colorado, formerly resided
in Hooker, Oklahoma, and now resides in Wichita, Kansas. They have no children.
Silas W. Scholl died in Brown county, August 17, 1900, aged 61, and is buried in Benville cemetery, Brown county.
His widow, Sarah Jane Scholl, later, April 25, 1911, married Timon Friday, in Brown county. She died June 6, 1915,
at the home of her daughter, Mrs. Daisy Patton. A Baptist in faith, she had worshipped as a girl in the old log
church at Siloam Springs.
Rhoda Scholl, oldest daughter of William and Polly Dale Scholl and a granddaughter of Abraham Scholl, was born
December 5, 1847. She married Lewis Allen Tucker in Brown county July 26, 1866, he being named for Lewis Allen,
the pioneer Pike county Baptist preacher and grandson of Daniel Boone's brother Jonathan. They had three children,
namely: Fred, who went west about 1902 and was never heard of again; he is supposed to be dead. Lois M. married
Perry Orr of Perry, Illinois, March 13, 1887, and of their six children, four sons are living, and two, a son and
a daughter, Ferris and Grace, are dead, the latter dying when quite young.
Claude Orr, Pittsfield Route 1, eldest son of Perry and Lois M. Orr, married Myrtle Wilson, daughter of Andrew
and Eliza (Brown) Wilson, at Griggsville October 30, 1907, and they had two children, Paul and Pauline, the latter
dying in babyhood. Ralph Orr of Baylis married Marie Gebhardt and they have a daughter dead, and three children
living, Ralph, Jr., Alberta Lucile and Freda Marie. Lee Orr married Hettie Carpenter, daughter of Albert Carpenter
and Hettie Taylor of Brown county, her father being the only son of Phebe Scholl Carpenter, twin sister of Rhoda
Scholl Tucker. The marriage was solemnized at Perry, March 12, 1919. They have three daughters, Zelma Lois, Virginia
Lee and Hettie Grace. They live four miles west of Perry, on Griggsville Route 1. Russell Orr married Mary E. Noble,
daughter of Harvey Noble and Matilda Smith of Perry township, December 26, 1922. They have four children, Mary
Margaret, Arline, Richard and Edith Mae. They live six miles northwest of Perry on Baylis Route 3.
Ferris Orr, born in 1893 during the Chicago World's Fair, was named for the Ferris wheel which was the sensation
of the Fair. Ferris was killed at the age of 17 in July, 1910, in a runaway accident near the family home, his
neck being broken when he was thrown from the buggy.
Perry Orr, father of the foregoing children, is descended from that noted family of Orrs whose forerunner, John
Orr, coming from Ohio, settled in Fairmount township in 1852, later removed to Mt. Sterling in Brown county. Perry
Orr, a son of David Orr of Buckhorn township, Brown county, married Lois M. Tucker, great granddaughter of Abraham
Scholl, in Brown county, March 13, 1887.
Lois M. Orr died at Perry March 21, 1936, aged 68 years, 9 months and 13 days. She is buried in Morrellville cemetery,
six miles northwest of Perry, in Brown county. Since her death, her cousin, Mrs. Daisy Patton, has kept house in
the Orr home in Perry.
Rhoda Scholl Tucker, sometime after the death of her husband, Allen Tucker, married James Six and by him had one
daughter, Maude Six, who married Frank Hofsess, residing near Hebron church. Rhoda died near Perry, February 24,
1912, and is buried in Morrellville cemetery in Brown county. Her husband, James Six, preceded her in death.
Phebe Scholl, twin sister of Rhoda, married Bryce A. Carpenter in Brown county, November 4, 1868, S. D. Watkins,
a Brown county justice of the peace, performing the ceremony. They had one child, a son, Albert Carpenter, who
married Hettie Taylor and lives at Mt. Sterling. Bryce Carpenter was noted in Brown county for his wit and optimism.
He was a humorist of a high order, being known by his people and referred to in local history as "the Mark
Twain of Brown County." Phebe Scholl was born December 5, 1847 and died in Brown county August 23, 1905. She
is buried in Benville cemetery, Brown county.
Dotha J. Scholl, sister of Silas, Rhoda and Phebe, married Frederick S. Decounter in Brown county, August 13, 1871,
William Carpenter, a justice of the peace, officiating. They had one son, Morris, who died very young. Israel Putnam
Scholl, fifth child and second son of William and Polly (Dale) Scholl, died in the Civil War in 1864 and is buried
at Port Hudson, Mississippi. Diantha, last born of William Scholl's children, died when about 16 years of age.
William Scholl died in Brown county, August 18, 1879, in his 70th year. He is buried in Benville cemetery in Brown
county. His widow, Polly (Dale) Scholl, died in August, 1893.