Thompson

Chapter 71

Seymour Kellogg Arrives; Nancy Scott Elledge First White Child Born in Scott



FOR A CENTURY the name of Kellogg is associated in the records of the valley with the family names of Elledge and Scholls. In the early annals of Morgan, Scott and Pike counties the names are frequently linked in a manner suggesting a sort of Damon and Pythias friendship between the houses of Kellogg and Boone. Among Scott county's oldest inhabitants is some vague recollection of a pioneer experience wherein a Scholl and an Elledge (children of Boone mothers) saved the life of a Kellogg far back in the very beginning of Illinois state history.

Just what the pioneer adventure was out of which grew such a lasting friendship is not clear. One old settler, residing near present Oxville, remembering dimly the narrative of an early ancestor, thinks it grew out of an Indian encounter, another remembers hearing it related in early days that William Scholl and William Elledge once rescued one of the pioneer Kelloggs from death in a howling blizzard that swept early Illinois. This latter recollection, which was that of the late Samuel Peak of Winchester, seems to find an echo in a letter written by Seymour Kellogg's daughter (quoted later), wherein she refers to a harrowing experience of her father in such a blizzard.

The Kellogg daughter, in her letter, fails to give any details of her father's rescue, out of which may have grown the Scott county tradition; also, if William Scholl and William Elledge had anything to do with such rescue (which the daughter places in the winter of 1819-20), we must conclude that these two men came up into this country on an exploring expedition at least two years before they brought their families into the valley, the family pilgrimage occurring in the early spring of 1822. Scholl and Elledge may of course have been in this region coincidently with their kinsman, Alexander Beall, whom we have seen here in the closing days of the Illinois Territory.

Be the origin of the Elledge-Scholl-Kellogg friendship what it may, these three, William Elledge, William Scholl and Seymour Kellogg, seem in early times to have been a sort of "three musketeers of the valley," with a motto of "one for all and all for one." In the early annals of the valley the three names are inseparably linked: together they founded a pioneer school and a daughter of Kellogg taught it; together they rafted a cargo of beeswax to St. Louis, and again a cargo of honey, 21 barrels; together they laid out a pioneer town-site, which plan they later abandoned; together they journeyed by ox-wagon to the lower part of old 'Madison county and wagoned provisions into the northern settlement from Edwardsville.

Coming down to later times, we find the relationships of the early triumvirate continuing among the Pike county Kelloggs, Elledges and Scholls. When Boone Scholl arrived in the Illinois country in 1825, he "put up" at the house of Seymour Kellogg; later, Seymour Kellogg surveyed lands for Boone Scholl on the present sites of Griggsville and Perry; still later, in 1858, we find Uriah Elledge, son of Boone, marrying as his second wife a daughter of the house of Kellogg.

The history of the first Kelloggs here in the west is a thrilling one. They came when there were yet no white settlements in all the vast region that now includes Pike, Scott, Morgan and Cass counties. A region of trackless wilds, all this territory was yet the home of roving red men.

Up to the closing days of the Territory (1818) most of the white inhabitants in what is now Illinois lived south of a line between the mouths of the Wabash and the Illinois rivers. East of the Illinois river and present Pike county lay what called in early times the Sangamo country, the region drained by streams heading in the Grand Prairie, and emptying into the Illinois river between Alton and Peoria; by this name the country was known in the south and east and it was the country of the Sangamo that was the destination of all emigrants of the central or south central part of the state.

It was in the closing days of the Territory, in the year 1818, that Seymour (Colonel) Kellogg came to Illinois and located in the Sangamo country. The Kelloggs were New Yorkers, most of them natives or early settlers of Genesee county in that state. Colonel Kellogg dated back to the Revolution, his birth having occurred March 21, 1779. He served his country in the War of 1812. Coming to Illinois in 1818, in the fall of the following year, with his brother Elisha, he moved to the headwaters of the Mauvaisterre, he and his brother and their families becoming the first white settlers of what is now Morgan county.

Mrs. Asenath K. Mundy, a daughter of Seymour Kellogg, writing from Brighton in 1879, said of her father and this frontier home:

"He then built a log cabin, clapboard roof and ground floor and no doors or windows, and 20 miles to any neighbors. Indians, wolves, wild turkeys and hogs were all around us. He stayed there one winter and came near freezing to death, having gone with two yoke of oxen twenty miles for a load of corn. A severe snowstorm came and losing his way he lay out one night and turned his oxen loose. They found their way home. Search was made at once by an uncle who came out with us, and my brother, then 13 years old. They found my father with his feet frozen and had hard work getting him home, where he laid for months unable to walk. That spring we moved west of Jacksonville near the creek. We caught fish from the Mauvaisterre, that ran over the prairie out near the high mound where Mr. Strawn located a beautiful place.

"My father was appointed State Surveyor, and he laid out the towns of Jacksonville, Exeter, Naples, Beardstown, Meredosia, Perry, Griggsville, and many other places. He kept the first store of Exeter was Postmaster, Justice of the Peace, and held other positions. While living at Exeter, he went to St. Louis for goods, going in a wagon, for there was no rail in those days. One week after arriving there he was buried from the residence of Mr. Charles Collins, his son-in-law.

"The first preaching in Morgan county was at our house. The first school taught was by my sister in a log cabin without any doors or windows, in 1821."

It was at the pioneer log house of the Kelloggs that an exploring party from New York City made temporary headquarters in this western country in the year 1820, before the Rosses had reached Atlas. This party consisted of three explorers, David Berdan, George Nixon and Isaac Fort Roe. They had come into the west at the instance of an emigration society organized in the city of New York to explore this western country. At Kellogg's they secured corn for their horses that had been wagoned from the southern part of the county (then Madison), near St. Louis.

The New York explorers had reached St. Louis on the first day of January, 1820. Journeying into the northern wilds, they passed and named Diamond Grove (a beautiful tract of timber containing 700 or 800 acres two miles southwest from present Jacksonville), in which timber Explorer Roe built himself a log cabin. Roe died there October 12, 1821, and was buried in the grove, his being the first death in present Morgan county. His remains were later removed to Diamond Grove cemetery in the city of Jacksonville, where they were re-interred on a lot furnished by the city.

In 1825, Edward Boone Scholl (known in pioneer history as "Boone" Scholl), who arrived in Illinois from Kentucky that year, came over into Pike county, accompanied by Seymour Kellogg. Boone Scholl, writing years later of this, his first trip into Pike county, told of killing a deer along the trail from the river out to the knoll on which Griggsville was later built, which they hung up out of reach of prowling beasts and pushed on to where they found the family of Boone's uncle, Abraham Scholl, who some weeks earlier had stopped at this place and built a cabin, the first on Griggsville knoll. Henry Bateman, second settler at what is now Griggsville, came later in the same year.

Boone Scholl in his narrative told of a horse and Indian pole-carrier being sent back along the trail to drag in the deer, and the feast that they had at Abraham's, after which Kellogg did some surveying for him (Scholl), in the neighborhood of Abraham's house, and of later going on a trip to the north of Abraham's location and doing some surveying where Perry now is. These surveys are not noted in the Pike county records but are referred to by Scholl in connection with his narrative of his first years in Illinois. The purpose of these surveys is not evident, but it seems probable, in the light of later developments, that Scholl, even as early as 1825, had it in mind to lay out a town in this new country. In 1833 we find him actually laying out the town and officially recording the plat of Booneville, on the site of the 1825 surveys at Perry.

The records do not show Seymour Kellogg as the original surveyor of the towns of Exeter, Naples, Beardstown, Perry and Griggsville. His daughter, however, in her letter, stated in 1879 that her father as State Surveyor laid out all of these towns, together with Jacksonville, Meredosia and many other places. It is possible that those first surveys were recorded only in the surveyor's own notebooks. Seymour Kellogg died at St. Louis April 13, 1827.

Another Kellogg of early Illinois days was Florentine E., who came to the region that is now Morgan county with his father Elisha in 1818 and lived in the pioneer cabin with him a year, moving then to a point three miles northwest of Jacksonville, where he resided seven years, when he and his father moved to Rushville in Schuyler county, and built the second house there.

In 1833 (the year in which Pittsfield was laid out), another family of Kelloggs, Ira and his wife Lydia and their children, came out from New York and settled at Naples, in Morgan county. Ira Kellogg was the first pilot on the Illinois river; for many years he boated for the east Pike county settlements. Said Asa Hinman, writing in the Griggsville Reflector, issue of July 1, 1876: "It was several years (after 1829) before there was any grain shipped from the county. The only means of transportation was a keel-boat owned and run by Ira Kellogg from Naples to St. Louis. It would make a trip once in five or six weeks. Naples was the only trading point for all the east side of the county."

Ira Kellogg, Sr., came to Pike county from Naples in 1835 and settled near Perry; there he died February 3, 1855. Ira Kellogg, Jr. died in the same year on August 22. Ira Kellogg, Sr., was the father of Theodore Kellogg who was proprietor of the Pittsfield House in Pittsfield at one time and who, in 1878, although running as a Republican in a strongly Democratic county, was elected sheriff of Pike county, serving in that capacity for four years.

Theodore Kellogg was born in Genesee county, New York, in 1825, being eight years old when his family settled in the Illinois valley. On March 8, 1849 he married Margaret Ann Morrison, they becoming the parents of the late Mrs. Mayme K. Grigsby of Pittsfield. Theodore, for a period of five years in the early days of the county, carried the mails between Quincy and Perry and was proprietor of the hotel at Perry. On June 9, 1860 he married as his second wife Miss Sarah J. Cockill and later moved to Pittsfield. His sister, Delia A., whose first husband was Gideon O. Ball of Griggsville, on December 12, 1858 married Uriah Elledge, having by him four children, namely, Anna B. and Florence M. Elledge (who became school teachers in Kansas City), Charles H. and Frederick O.

Theodore Kellogg by his second marriage was the father of Mrs. Anna Ward of Evanston, Dr. John Kellogg of Chicago, and Joseph Kellogg of Los Angeles. Sheriff Kellogg died at Perry March 16, 1888, at the age of 63. His mother, Lydia Kellogg, widow of the early Illinois river pilot, died at Perry July 5, 1887, aged 87. Sheriff Kellogg's sister, Mrs. Delia Elledge, died in Kansas City and is buried at Perry, where also other members of her family are buried.

Alexander Beall, as we have seen, found no white settlement north of Apple Creek, below present White Hall, when he came on an exploring trip up through this country in 1818. General Murray McConnell, passing up the Illinois river in 1819, found no white settlers on either bank of the river. Upstream, just above present Meredosia and on the east bank of the river, he discovered a beautiful level plateau of about 15 acres and an Indian village thereon. He found also at this point a hut occupied by a French wilderness priest by the name of Antoine D'Osia, who preached to the Indians. From the circumstances of this priest's name and the fact of his living on the bank of a beautiful lake or were, the town of Meredosia derived its name.

Even as late as 1821 there were but twenty families in (now) Morgan, Cass and Scott counties. (Statement by Judge J. Henry Shaw, in "Historical Sketch of Cass County," an oration delivered July 4, 1876.) The first white man's cabin in these three counties was built in February and early March in 1820, by Thomas Allen, whose wife Sarah (Charity) Elledge is named by an early historian as the first white woman inhabitant of present Scott. (Note: It is possible that Mrs. John Scott and Mrs. Adam Miller came at the same time as Mrs. Allen.)

Thomas Allen's cabin was followed closely by that of John Scott, which was finished early in April, 1820.

Possibly before the interstices in the log walls of John Scott's cabin had been chinked with clay to keep out the chill winds of early spring, the wail of an infant, first white child born within the present borders of Scott county, arose within those walls. Nancy Scott, destined to become the bride of Pike county Benjamin F. Elledge, had been born, two years before Nancy Ross was born at Atlas; Nancy's twin sister Julia being a close rival for the title of "First Scott County Baby." This was April 2, 1820.

Note: One account has it that Nancy Scott was born in a cabin in the forks of the creek at Wood River, near Alton, where the Scott, Allen and Miller families had been left in the winter of 1819-20 while the men of the party pushed on into the northern wilderness into what is now Scott county. There is evidence tending to support this account, but in the Benjamin F. Elledge family records it is asserted that Nancy Scott Elledge was born in Scott county, April 2, 1820.