BENJAMIN ELLEDGE has been dead 84 years; his wife, Catharine, 74. Their ten children, five sons and five daughters,
most of whom were once prominent in Griggsville's life, are all long since dead. Scattered over the country, in
many states, are Benjamin Elledge's grandchildren, and their children and children's children, who are following
eagerly this history of their Griggsville forebears of a century ago.
The girl Adaline, first born of Benjamin's children, was the first who died in the Illinois country; hers is the
oldest grave in the long abandoned cemetery on the old Elledge homestead, two and a half miles northeast of Griggsville.
She was buried there in 1841.
Adaline, born in Kentucky January 26, 1807, married Sheldon Baldwin in Harrison county, Indiana, September 1, 1825.
They, with their children, came with her parents to Griggsville, Pike county, in 1834. There they settled on a
tract of land near the Elledge settlement.
To the Baldwins were born five sons and one daughter, namely, John G., Samuel G., Benjamin F., Simeon M., Mary
Ann and William. Mary Ann married David D. Hensell in Pike county, May 7, 1854. John G. located at Ottawa, Illinois.
Benjamin F. married Mary Bloomfield in Pike county December 24, 1850. They emigrated westward, as did his brothers,
Samuel and Simeon, all being non-residents of Illinois when their father died, in the time of the Civil War.
Simeon, who had married outside the state (his first wife's name is not of record), later returned to Pike county
and at New Salem, on April 28, 1881, married as his second wife Mary M. Condit, daughter of George W. and Sarah
A. (Ogden) Condit. Simeon was a mechanic by profession. He was 42 and his wife 29 at the time of their marriage.
Adaline Elledge Baldwin died near Griggsville October 28, 1841, aged 34 years, nine months and two days.
Her son William was an infant when she died. Sheldon Baldwin, the father, again married on October 22, 1843, his
second wife being Mary Elizabeth Hutchinson. William was taken into the home of James Copeland of Perry, who had
married Elizabeth Baldwin on March 2, 1841, and thereafter took the name of William Copeland.
Sheldon Baldwin, born March 20, 1800, died at Griggsville, June 20, 1862, aged 62 years and three months. He is
buried in Griggsville cemetery, as is his second wife, Mary E., who died January 4, 1859, aged 60 years, four months
and three days. Mr. Baldwin owned a residence property in Griggsville at the time of his death.
Mary Elledge, second child of Benjamin, was also Kentucky born; her birth was on June 25, 1809. In Harrison county,
Indiana, she married William Beswick (or Bessick); they had issue, as noted in Benjamin Elledge's will, but no
name is of record. Mary died in the Indiana settlement and is buried there, her death occurring October 1, 1830,
when she was three months and six days past 21.
Charity Elledge, third of the Elledge children and named for her Boone grandmother, was born in Kentucky November
10, 1811, shortly before the family's migration to Indiana Territory. Charity also is buried in Harrison county,
Indiana, where she died December 19, 1830, less than three months after her sister Mary. Charity was one month
and nine days past 19.
Sarah (Sally) Elledge, first of the children born in Indiana Territory, was 20 years old when she came to Griggsville
with her parents. She was born in Harrison county, in then Indiana Territory, August 7, 1814. This was the closing
year of the second war with Britain, and the Indian troubles, incident to the war, alarmed all the settlements.
Five years after the family settled at Griggsville, on May 5, 1839, Sarah married Samuel G. Baldwin, being the
second of Benjamin's daughters to intermarry with the Baldwin family. Peter Kargis, an early Pike county justice,
performed the ceremony.
The Baldwins appear to have left Pike county shortly after their marriage and of them there is no further authentic
record. It appears that Samuel G. Baldwin died and that his widow may have married again, although in her father's
will, made in 1853, subsequent to Sarah's death, she is named as Sarah Baldwin. Mrs. Alice Elledge Carter, a daughter
of Sarah's brother, Reynolds Elledge, speaks of a Doctor Thomas Nantz of Terre Haute, Indiana, whose mother was
an Elledge, a sister of Reynolds Elledge. This must have been the Elledge daughter who first married Samuel Baldwin.
However, in the family records, there is no mention of a second marriage. Sarah Elledge Baldwin, according to the
family record, died September 25, 1850, aged 36 years, one month and 18 days.
James McClain Elledge, first of Benjamin's sons, was born in Harrison county, Indiana, on Washington's birthday,
1817. Coming with his parents to Pike county when he was 17, at the age of 25 he married Sarah W. Elliot, a daughter
of Samuel D. Elliot, pioneer settler in Section 26, Perry township. The wedding was June 16, 1842.
Following the wedding, James and his bride began housekeeping alongside the old stage route, in the southeast 40
of the northeast quarter of Section 2, in Griggsville township, a short distance northeast of present Shelly school
house and immediately west of Abel Shelley's. Here James McClain Elledge died September 20, 1842, three months
and four days after his wedding. His was the second grave in the Benjamin Elledge cemetery. His son, James McClain
Elledge, Jr., was born in April, 1843, more than six months after his father's death. Growing to manhood, James,
Jr., went to Memphis, Tennessee, and then to Texas, in which state he died.
The father and widow of James M. Elledge administered his estate. The 40-acre home site was sold at public vendue
in Griggsville by Zachariah N. Garbutt, then Master in Chancery, November 13, 1844, for the sum of $187.62. The
purchaser was Tabitha Elledge, widow of Benjamin Elledge's brother William, and reputed one of the shrewdest business
women of her day. The sale was cried in that bitter period which followed the great internal improvement boom of
1836-37, when property of all kinds became almost worthless and farmers had to take a bushel of wheat to get a
letter out of the postoffice. Elledge, shortly before his death, had taken eight fatted hogs, dressed, to market
at Griggsville to pay a store bill of $8.75 he had contracted on the strength of his fattening pork, the hogs falling
short of paying the bill.
The records of the Elledge land sale, wherein 40 acres of Griggsville land sold for $4.69 an acre, reveal what
were then considered the most public places in Pike county. The Master in Chancery, stating that he had posted
notices of the sale in three of the most public places , designated those places as Ross & Co.'s store at Florence,
the door of the courthouse in Pittsfield, and the store of Ayres & Lombard at Griggsville.
Sarah W. Elliot came of illustrious lineage. Although the Pike county Elliots adopted a somewhat different spelling
of the family name, they claimed kinship with the noted Massachusetts Eliots, who were also interrelated with the
forebears of the Pike county Harringtons. Elizabeth A. (Elliot) Ham, wife of William Ham of Chambersburg, and a
sister of Sarah W. Elledge, stated in 1872 that she was regularly descended from the old Eliot family of Massachusetts
history, which numbered among its American notables that "morning star of missionary achievement," John
Eliot, "Apostle to the Indians," who converted many of the Algonquin tribe to his "praying schools,"
writing also an Algonquian grammar and translating the Scriptures into the tribal dialect, which translation was
printed at Cambridge in 1663, the first Bible published in America.
Sarah Elliot was born near Worcester, Massachusetts, and came with her parents to what is now Perry township in
Pike county in 1837. Her grandfather Elliot had been a soldier and officer in the war of the Revolution, participating
in the battle of Plattsburg and others, receiving an honorable discharge at the end of the conflict. Sarah's father,
Samuel D. Elliot, while yet a lad, wandered over the battlefield at Plattsburg the following day, and saw it strewn
with the munitions of war and many mangled bodies. He related that balls literally covered the battleground.
Sarah's sister, Elizabeth Elliot (named for her mother who died in Perry township in 1842), married William Ham
in 1846, he a son of James and Mary (Broils) Ham who settled in what is now Chambersburg township in 1830. There
the family experienced the common terror of the exposed border, incident to the Black Hawk War. Once, during this
war, a raiding party of seven redskins crossed McGee Creek and invaded the Chambersburg settlement. James Ham and
six others pursued the savages, leaving William, then a lad of about 10, with another boy, James Hegger, 13, with
one shotgun between them, to protect William's mother and four neighbor women and about a dozen children against
assaults of the momentarily expected savages. The women, armed with axes, clubs and knives, and with doors and
windows barricaded, would doubtless have met savage attack with vigorous defense, but fortunately no redskins appeared
and in a few days their men returned from the chase, having failed to overtake the fugitives.
Among the yellowed and fragile records of the James M. C. Elledge estate (he always thus signed himself) is an
old sale bill, being a record of the sale of his personal property on November 12, 1842. This bill shows that wheat
was then 20 cents a bushel. Elledge's granary consisted of barrels and goods boxes. Nine barrels of wheat sold
to John McCallister for 85 cents a barrel. James had been engaged with his father in the cooper and stave business
and some of his cooper supplies were sold at the sale, 875 staves selling for $3.50 and 160 pieces of heading for
$1,25. Bidders at that 1842 sale included Richard Beall, Samuel Baldwin, Otis Parsons, Abel Shelley, Benjamin Elledge,
Catharine Elledge, Harvey Elledge, Morris Welch and Samuel Elliot, the latter the father of James' widow. The sale
was cried by John McCallister and clerked by James' brother, Leonard Boone Elledge.
Another record of the estate is the bill of Willard Guild for making James M. C. Elledge's coffin: it reads, "to
making one coffin, lined, $7.50."
Mrs. Sarah W. Elledge, widow of James, married again on November 26, 1844, her second husband being John C. Short.
The Reverend Calvin Greenleaf officiated at this wedding. Sarah was a sister also of Samuel D., Jr., Charles B.,
Mary J., and William N. Elliot. Her father, Samuel D. Elliot, died October 20, 1846.
Leonard Boone Elledge, second son and sixth child of Benjamin Elledge and Catharine Reynolds, was born in Harrison
county, Indiana, November 27, 1819. He was the Elledge most prominently identified with the official and business
life of early Griggsville. He was long a Pike county justice of the peace and as such officiated at many early
weddings. His penmanship was exceptional, an attribute possessed by others of the Benjamin Elledge descendants
although Benjamin himself wrote but a scrawl. The Reynolds hand, however, was fluent.
This "Leonard Boone" was one of numerous "Leonard Boones" of the Elledge line who for a century
and a half have perpetuated the name of that lost "Leonard Boone" of 1779-80, with his brother Benjamin,
joined the flat- boat flotilla of Col. John Donelson down the Indian haunted Tennessee into the then unexplored
Western waters, lured, perhaps, to the great adventure, by a feminine member of the party, black-eyed Rachel Donelson,
the Colonel's wilderness daughter, afterwards the politically maligned and ridiculed wife of "Old Hickory"
Jackson, seventh President of the Republic.
Note: History records that anyone who bore the name or the blood of the Boones was dear to the heart of Old Andy
Jackson. It is related that a son of Daniel was once detained in Nashville for some weeks and had taken lodging
at a small tavern. Jackson heard of it, went to Nashville, and, carrying Daniel's son to his home as a guest as
long as his business should keep him in that section, said, "Your father's dog should not stay in a tavern,
where I have a house."
Leonard Boone Elledge, at Griggsville, on April 8, 1841, married Eliza C. Key, a daughter of Marshall Key and Sally
Scholl, the latter a daughter of Pioneer Abraham. Marshall Key and his wife and children had migrated from Kentucky
to Pike county in 1825, coming with the Abraham Scholl family. Eliza had been born in Clark county, Kentucky, where
her parents were married on October 3, 1820.
Marshall Key entered a farm adjoining the present city of Griggsville. He was related to the author of the "Star
Spangled Banner" and was descended from English royalty through King Henry VII, who founded the House of Tudor
and became King of England 1485-1509 and was father of King Henry VIII and of Lady Mary, who married, first, Louis
XII of France, and, second, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, by whom she had two daughters, the eldest, Lady Frances
Brandon, who married Henry Grey and had three daughters, viz., Lady Jane (Queen of England for nine days when she
was beheaded by Queen Mary), Lady Elizabeth and Lady Mary, who secretly married Thomas Key, sergeant-porter to
Queen Elizabeth. Of their children, one, Thomas, came to America, founding the Key family in the western world.
The famous abolition melee, which occurred in Griggsville in 1838, centered around Eliza Key's father, as related
in an earlier chapter, growing out of an election contest between Key, a southern champion of slavery, and D. F.
Coffey, a Northern advocate of freedom. Attached to Eliza Key's marriage license, on file in the Pike county courthouse,
is the written consent of Marshall Key to his young daughter's marriage with Boon (so spelled) Elledge.
Marshall Key left Griggsville in 1841, shortly after Eliza's marriage, and settled near Banner Boone Elledge, and
his father, James Elledge, in Grant county, in the then Territory of Wisconsin. There he engaged in lead mining
and there he died on January 16, 1879. He had been born in Clark county, Kentucky, in 1800. He left a wife, three
sons and five daughters, all residents of Grant county, except the daughter Eliza (Mrs. Elledge), who was then
living at Bloomington, Illinois. Many descendants of Marshall Key still live in Grant county, in or near the towns
of Patch Grove, Bagley and Bloomington. A large number of them were present at a family reunion at Nelson Dewey
State Park September 16, 1936, on the occasion of the 85th birthday of Abraham Key's widow. Abraham was a brother
of Eliza and a native of Griggsville.
Two children of Leonard Boone and Eliza Elledge, their earliest born, died in infancy and are buried in the little
Benjamin Elledge burying ground. Mary E., the first born, died September 20, 1845; Sarah C., the second child,
died May 30, 1848, aged six months and two days. Two other children, Jennie and Marshall Boone, grew to maturity.
Marshall Boone, who became the idol of his parents, was born at Griggsville September 17, 1852.
When Marshall was 17, in 1869, Leonard Boone Elledge and his family moved to Bloomington, Illinois. Leonard and
his son Marshall later returned to Griggsville and bought a stock of furniture, which business they continued for
a while, and later, in October, 1874, they opened a "Gents' Clothing Store" in Griggsville in the store
house formerly occupied by Tobie & Johnson, with a stock consisting in part, according to F. K. and B. L. Strother's
Griggsville Reflector of October 24, 1874, of "chinchilla overcoats, fine fancy cassimeres in suits or single
garments, heavy satinets, cassimere overshirts, undershirts and drawers, white shirts, linen and paper collars,
neckties and bows." The elder Elledge had been engaged in the clothing business prior to that time. In 1874,
Elledge & Son had the only strictly clothing store in Griggsville.
On February 21, 1875, fell the blow which all but crushed Leonard Elledge and from which his wife, Eliza, never
recovered. The Strother newspaper of February 27, 1875, thus tells of the death of Marshall B. Elledge, idol of
early Griggsville town:
"On Monday, February 16th, he (Marshall) took a severe cold and upon the same afternoon left the clothing
store of L. B. Elledge & Son of which he was junior partner and went home feeling quite unwell but was not
considered in any wise dangerously ill by his friends or physicians until the Friday morning following, when his
cold developed into pneumonia and from that time forward he grew rapidly worse, his disease baffling all medical
aid and skill, and at eight o'clock on Sunday evening, February 21st, 1875, he breathed his last. During most of
the time of the last few hours of his brief illness he was delirious and almost constantly talked of his business
and imagined himself selling goods, etc., but a few moments before he breathed his last he returned to consciousness
and opening his eyes recognized his father and mother, greeted them with a pleasant smile and took his last look
upon friends and earth, then closing them fell asleep to wake no more until he should have crossed the dark river
and awake in glory."
At Bloomington, to which the family had moved in 1869, Marshall served four years as deputy county clerk of McLean
county, bringing to his office the strictest integrity. The Griggsville editors paid a splendid tribute to his
many excellences at the time of his passing, in fact one of the most unusual newspaper tributes of record even
in those days of high-sounding and poetic eulogies. The newspaper printed also a beautiful poem to Marshall's memory,
penned by the girl who had loved him and who sorrowed, as the poem expressed it, over "the clay of one who
once my girlish heart possessed." This poem is signed with the initials "I. F. L."
Marshall Boone Elledge is buried in Griggsville cemetery; a broken stone marks his grave. He was 22 years, five
months and four days old.
Broken by the loss of this son, the father later in 1875 closed out his clothing business in Griggsville and returned
to Bloomington, going thence to Grant county, Wisconsin, and later to Chicago where he lived several years. He
lived to a great old age. The following letter to his niece, Miss Maude Elledge (now Mrs. Charles Gruzebeck of
Ironton, Minnesota), dated April 4, 1899, when he was 80 years old, tells something of his wanderings after leaving
Griggsville.
"Your Aunt Eliza (the former Eliza Key) has been a constant care for about 15 years, although she has been
about most of the time and will insist on doing household work yet. She is not properly at herself, her trouble
is nervousness, superinduced by the death of our son, Marshall. Your father (Harvey V. Elledge) can tell you about
him. Now I will rehearse to you something of our wanderings.
"You probably recall that when I was at your home (at Moulton, Iowa) we had been living in Chicago for a few
years. After going home I went into business at Colfax, Illinois, remaining there about seven years and then to
St. Paul to our daughter Jennie (Mrs. Herbert Straight), your cousin. From there we went to Owatonna, Minn., lived
there one year, and then to West Concord, Minn., where we now live and perhaps will remain. I am in business (this
was in 1899) with my grandson, Herbert M. Straight."
Boone Elledge at this time was 80 and his wife Eliza 78. Their daughter Jennie had married Herbert A. Straight,
a Minnesota lawyer. They had two sons, Leonard Boone and Herbert Marshall Straight. Leonard Boone followed his
father in the law profession and practiced in St. Paul, Minn. Herbert Marshall went into the drug business, first
with his grandfather, Leonard Boone Elledge, and later as proprietor of a drug store in Pierre, South Dakota. There
is second cousin, Evelyn Thayne Elledge (Mrs E. E. Boone of Hibbing, Minnesota) met and became acquainted with
him when she was city editor of the Pierre "Capital Journal." At West Concord, Minnesota, in 1899, Leonard
Boone Elledge and his grandson were associated in the drug business under the caption, "Elledge & Straight,
Drigs, Prescriptions & Sundries."
Leonard Boone and his wife Eliza both died in Minnesota and are buried there. Neither the Elledge nor Key family
records contain the dates or places of their deaths. Leonard Boone Elledge was living at West Concord as late as
August, 1902, at the age of 83, and was still attending to business as usual. He expected to end his days there.
It is believed that West Concord or St. Paul is the last resting place of these two descendants of the Boones and
the Tudor kings.
Leonard Boone Elledge cherished his family traditions and was proud of his Boone ancestry. Once, on a visit to
his brother Harvey's family at Moulton, Iowa, he almost quarreled with his brother whom he accused of having failed
to bestow upon any of his sons the name of Boone. He was finally pacified when convinced that Harvey's son Carl
had been named Carl Boone.
THE STORY OF PIONEER Harvey V. Elledge of Griggsville, great grandson of Daniel Boone's brother Edward, who was
killed and scalped by Indians in Kentucky in 1780, is one of the classics of Boone family history. The story of
Harvey Elledge's children is of special interest to Pike county people, since they descend in direct line not only
from the Boones and Elledges but also from the Shinns and Hacketts who were among the very earliest whites to make
permanent settlement in what is now Pike county.
Harvey Viven (or Vivion) Elledge, son of Benjamin Elledge and Catharine Reynolds, was born in Harrison county,
Indiana, June 2, 1826; came with his parents to the neighborhood of Griggsville when he was eight years old, in
1834; there grew to manhood and engaged with his father in the manufacture of staves. Griggsville, when he came,
was a raw prairie hamlet with a log house standing in the center of what is now Quincy avenue.
In 1850, when Harvey was a youth of 24, he went a-courting to the pioneer home of Thomas J. Rogers, the object
of his solicitude being the daughter, Hannah Rogers. The Rogers family, in pioneer Kentucky, had already become
related by marriage to the Elledges and the Boones; two brothers of Thomas J. Rogers — David R. and Robert (Robin)
— married two daughters of Robert (Robin) Alcorn and Mary Elledge, she a daughter of Francis Elledge and Charity
Boone.
On December 8, 1850, Harvey Elledge and Hannah Rogers were married, the ceremony being at the bride's home, with
the Reverend Charles Harrington, pioneer Griggsville Baptist preacher, officiating. Following the wedding, the
Thomas J. Rogers family emigrated overland to the new state of Iowa, Harvey and Hannah going with them. The two
families settled in Appanoose county, near the little town of Orleans, three miles north of the present town of
Moulton, Iowa. There, Elledge engaged in the cooper and stave business which he had learned from his father.
Harvey Elledge's wife Hannah was a daughter of Thomas Jefferson Rogers, who on July 16, 1832, at Atlas (then the
Pike county seat of justice) married Phoebe Shinn, with William Ross, one of the founders of Atlas and then a Pike
county justice of the peace, officiating. Phoebe Shinn was a daughter of Pioneer Daniel, who in April, 1820, hewed
a road into the Pike county wilderness for the first wagon upon the Military Tract. Phoebe, the mother of Hannah,
attended the first white American school on the Military Tract in a log room at Atlas, in the winter of 1820-21.
John Jay Ross, son of Captain Leonard Ross, hero of the War of 1812, was the teacher. Phoebe's fellow pupils in
that first Pike county school included her brothers and sister, Benjamin, John and Eliza Shinn; Orlando and Charlotte,
children of Captain Leonard Ross; Mary Emily and Elizabeth (Betsy), children of John and Dorothy Ross; Schuyler,
son of Clarendon and Roby Ross; John Webb, a six-year-old lad who had come with the Daniel Shinns; Frederick and
Eliza, children of Ebenezer Franklin, first permanent white settler in the county; Jeremiah, Jr. and William Tungate,
children of Jeremiah Tungate; and James, Laura and Nancy, children of William Sprague, who also was among the Ross
emigrants from Massachusetts in 1820. The next school, with these same pupils, was taught at Atlas in the fall
of 1821, by James M. Whitney, the noted "Lord Coke" of early days.
Daniel Shinn, grandfather of Mrs. Harvey Elledge, was a native of New Jersey, the family being of English descent
and founded in America by three brothers who came from England in an early day. In New Jersey he married Mary Hackett,
likewise a native of that state, one of whose forebears, Daniel Hackett, fought in the Indian wars with George
Washington and reared his family in a log house equipped with portholes through which he often held the Indians
at bay with his rifle. A stained spinning-wheel, treasured by generation of the Hackett family, was reputed to
have been so stained by the life-blood of Phoebe Hackett (for whom Phoebe Shinn may have been named). Who one day,
according to the tradition, while singing at her spinning as she shifted back and forth across the floor of her
father's cabin, suddenly drooped upon her wheel and died, her bosom pierced by an Indian arrow; and found thus
by her returning father, Israel Hackett, he thereafter waged relentless war upon the savage tribes, himself falling
in Indian combat at the famous battle of the Point, where he fought alongside Daniel Boone and Peter Scholl. The
latter married Charity Boone's sister, Mary.
Daniel Shinn and Mary Hackett, moving westward in 1813, settled in Ohio, residing there seven years, first at Cincinnati,
where they followed gardening and where the girl Phoebe was born, then at Batavia, whence they came in the spring
of 1820 to Illinois, arriving at the site of present Atlas in the latter part of April. Shinn, on his way here,
stopped at Edwardsville, where he left most of his large family, he himself with his two elder sons pushing on
into the northern wilderness with oxen and wagon. His family comprised at this time his wife and eight children:
Benjamin, John, Eliza, Hannah, Mary, Phoebe, Daniel and Nancy. Five more children were born subsequent to the Pike
county settlement, making a total of 13. With him on the trip to Illinois came the boy, John Webb, born near Jersey
City in 1814 and living in Pike county to a great old age, a resident of Pittsfield for 23 years, where he was
interested in pork packing and general merchandising, and residing in his latter years in Newburg township, five
miles east of Pittsfield.
Up "Jockey Hollow," near present Atlas, Shinn found upon his arrival the family of Ebenezer Franklin,
who had arrived the preceding month from Franklin Prairie, near present Milton, where they had earlier (in 1819)
pitched camp. Franklin's family moved to Adams county. Franklin had sheltered his family against the chill winds
of early spring in a tent, up the hollow, by a spring on land later belonging to the Dober family. Shinn pitched
a tent near Franklin's, and in the following month of May, aiding each other in the work, they erected two cabins,
one for each family. So came into existence the first Pike county settlement and for the first time the prattle
and shouts of little children were heard in the Pike county wilderness.
Shinn, with his two sons, Benjamin and John, cleared a piece of ground that first spring and planted three acres
of corn. It was easy to grow the grain but to get it ground into meal and prepared for food was an arduous task.
There were then no mills within easy reach. The first mill available was a horse mill run by John Shaw at Coles'
Grove (now Gilead) in present Calhoun county.
Daniel Shinn became a great wolf hunter, prompted by the fact that he found it impossible to raise stock on account
of their ravages. He lost 200 pigs by wolves and thereupon made determined war upon the beasts. He finally succeeded
in raising fine hogs by shutting them in a close log stable from earliest pighood.
Shinn contracted the first public improvements in the great original county of Pike, which then embraced a third
of the state, extending to Wisconsin and Lake Michigan on the north and Indiana on the east. He built the first
courthouse, at Coles' Grove, in now Calhoun county, getting out the logs and completing the edifice for $26 in
specie. This log structure was torn down and re-built at Atlas in 1823, where it continued to serve as the seat
of justice. Shinn and Daniel Husong built the first jail at Atlas in 1824, of squared logs, 15 by 24 inches, "scotched"
down, making a tight log box with the floor also of logs. Prisoners were let down through a square hole in the
top by means of a ladder which was then removed and the opening covered by an oak door about six inches thick.
The logs for this jail, according to statements of John Webb in his old age, were all cut within one mile of the
building. The old log jail was bought a great many years ago by J. C. Adams and rebuilt near the Sny on land belonging
to him, where it long served as a corn crib.
Mary Hackett Shinn died in 1846, and on April 6, 1851, Daniel Shinn married again, his second wife being Mrs. Ann
Camp. David R. Rogers, J. P., performed the ceremony. Daniel Shinn died early in the following year, February 28,
1852; he is buried in the old Shinn burying-ground northwest of Summer Hill.
Such was the historic Pike county background of Hannah Rogers on the maternal side. On the paternal side, her lineage
was likewise distinguished. Far back in the dim past her Rogers ancestors made glorious English history, among
them John Rogers, English divine and martyr, who was burned at the stake at Smithfield in 1555. Her grandfather,
Bartlett Rogers, first of the John Rogers descendants here in the great valley, was born in North Carolina in 1771,
served in the War of 1812, came to Kentucky and then to Indiana whence he came in 1826 to early Morgan county in
the Illinois country, settling in that part that later became Scott county, and near the pioneer town of Williamsport,
founded by Joseph Bentley, father of Susannah Bentley, who married Edward Boone Scholl, noted Pike county pioneer.
At Williamsport, on Big Sandy Creek, opposite Montezuma, Bartlett Rogers on December 29, 1826, purchased a bond
for a deed to lot number 15, from John Radcliff, who had bought the lot from the town's proprietor, Joseph Bentley,
for $70, but before paying for it sold it to Rogers, the bond and deed being still in the possession of one of
Bartlett Rogers' descendants, William Riley Willsey of Maysville.
Bartlett Rogers died in Williamsport, in then Morgan county, May 2, 1831, and was buried there. His wife Elizabeth
had died September 19, 1825. Among his sons were David Redmon, Robert (Robin) and Thomas J., the latter of whom,
born May 7, 1810, married Phoebe Shinn and became the father of Hannah Rogers, who married Harvey Elledge. David
Redmon, born in North Carolina, February 18, 1802, came to Kentucky when a young man and there married Fanny Alcorn
on February 26, 1824, she being a daughter of Robert Alcorn and Mary Elledge, the latter one of the eleven children
of Francis Elledge and Charity Boone, Robert Alcorn appears on the records of Clark county, Kentucky, as bondsman
for the license of his brother-in-law, Boone Elledge to marry Rebecca Beall, in the year 1809. Robert Rogers, a
brother of David Redmon, married Cynthia Alcorn, an elder sister of Fanny, the two Rogers brothers marrying the
two Alcorn sisters on the same day in a double wedding, February 26, 1824. Together the two couples came to Illinois,
leaving Harrison county on October 3, 1826.
David Redmon Rogers and Fanny Alcorn had a daughter, Malinda, who in Pike county June 19, 1851 married James Gallett
Willsey, and they had a son, William Riley Willsey, a great great great grandson of Edward Boone, born in Pike
county July 29, 1853. Malinda Rogers and Hannah Rogers were first cousins. Hannah Rogers and Harvey Elledge had
a son, born near Orleans, Iowa, June 20, 1853, who was named William Riley Elledge, his birth being a little more
than a month before that of William Riley Willsey. William Riley Elledge died in 1921; William Riley Willsey is
still living at Maysville in Pike county at the age of 83. The name "William Riley" was handed down by
descendants of the Boone line for several generations, one such of the name, William Riley Rogers, a son of David
R., having been an early resident of Pike county, as was also William Riley Elledge, a son of William Elledge and
Tabitha Beall.
The Rogers family is associated in Pike county history with the Lewis and Collard families at Pleasant Hill, and
with the pioneer Hendersons, of whom we have spoken in earlier chapters. Lewis Rogers, a cousin of Thomas J., crossed
the Ohio from Kentucky into Indiana at about the same time as the Elledges, the two families having long been associated
in Kentucky. Lewis Rogers later settled in Iowa Territory, which then included present Minnesota and the Dakotas,
emigrating thence in 1846 to Oregon Territory, where he became one of the pioneers of the Northwest.
In Oregon, Lewis Rogers' son, James William Rogers, married Mary Ellen Henderson, a daughter of Jesse C. Henderson
and Elizabeth Mussett, of early Missouri, she a cousin of Kit Carson, noted Western scout. Mary Ellen's sister,
Martha Frances Henderson, married in Oregon John Jasper Collard, a native of Pleasant Hill and eldest son of Felix
Alver Collard and Martha Damaris Lewis, who in 1847 with their six children left Pleasant Hill behind an ox team
for Oregon Territory. These families (Rogers, Henderson, Collard and Lewis) became further inter-related by the
marriages, in Oregon, of two of the sons of Felix Collard and Damaris Lewis, namely, Isaac Newton and William Franklin
Collard, to two of the daughters of James William Rogers and Mary Ellen Henderson, namely, Jane Ann and Priscilla
Evaline Rogers. Mrs. Evelyn Collard Fidelle of Portland, Oregon, a daughter of Isaac Newton Collard and Jane Ann
Rogers, and Victor Wayne Jones of Seattle, a grandson of Felix and Damaris Lewis Collards' eldest child, Mary Jane
(Mrs. Douglas Jones), have contributed much authoritative data to this history, which will be related in the Lewis
and Collard family histories.
Isaac Newton Collard, born in Oregon City, Oregon, January 15, 1848, married Jane Ann Rogers, January 15, 1878.
He was the seventh child of Felix Collard and Damaris Lewis. Felix Collard, Kentuckian by birth, was the first
justice of the peace at Pleasant Hill; also one of the earliest school trustees and the notary who in 1836 acknowledged
the signatures of the founders and proprietors of the town of Fairfield (now Pleasant Hill). John Jasper Collard,
elder brother of Isaac Newton, was named for Felix Collard's Pike county brother, the John Jasper Collard who was
one of Pleasant Hill's first school teachers and who was clerk of the Pike county court in 1847-49. Damaris Lewis,
who married Felix Collard at Pleasant Hill in 1832, was a daughter of Samuel Harding Lewis and Mary Barnett, the
latter a heroine of Indian adventure in early Missouri Territory. The Lewises and Barnetts were among the one hundred
families which Daniel Boone brought into Upper Louisiana (now Missouri) from Kentucky and Virginia at the close
of the 18th century, and for which, pursuant to an agreement with the Spanish authorities, Boone was to receive
10,000 arpents (an arpents about five-sixths of an English acre) of land.
Lewis Rogers was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1795, a son of Aquilla Rogers, who was in the Army of Virginia
in the Revolution. Lewis Rogers had an uncle of the same name, who was also in the Revolution and participated
in the battle of the Blue Licks in Kentucky in 1782. Lewis Rogers' grandfather (Aquilla's father) was Giles Rogers
II, a brother of Ann Rogers who married John Clark; George Rogers Clark and General William Clark being own cousins
of Aquilla and Bartlett Rogers. Aquilla's mother was Ann Iverson Lewis, cousin of Meriwether Lewis, who was also
a cousin of Samuel Harding Lewis of Pleasant Hill, and of his wife, Mary Barnett. Parents of Giles Rogers II and
Ann Rogers Clark were John Rogers and Mary Byrd of Virginia, and the grandparents were Giles Rogers I and Rachael
Eastham, the family's Pilgrim ancestors from England and Scotland, he in direct lineal descent from John Rogers,
first of the Marian martyrs, whose name was borne by one of Hannah Rogers' brothers. Lewis and Rogers relationships
were further involved by the marriage of John Rogers, Aquilla's and Bartlett's brother, to Sera Iverson Lewis,
of the noted Warner Hall line. Aquilla Rogers, in 1838, was a resident of Clark county, Illinois, and prior to
that had resided a few miles from Louisville, Kentucky, in Clark county, Indiana.
Thus, we see that Harvey Elledge married in Pike county into a family of distinguished lineage, even as his brothers,
James McClain and Leonard Boone, one of whom married a descendant of the early Massachusetts Eliots, the other
a descendant of the royal Tudors, also that the stalwart pioneering lines of these illustrious ancestors, moving
westward on the tide of emigration and settling here between the two great rivers, had much to do with the ultimate
destiny of this region, laying broad and deep the principles of their glorious cultures.
Harvey and Hannah Elledge, settling near present Moulton in Iowa, late in 1850, remained near that place for many
years. There five children were born, and when the fifth was but a baby, Hannah Rogers Elledge died. Harvey later
married again, his second wife being Mary Scott Jennings, a young widow of 22, with a child about the same age
as Hannah's youngest.
Harvey Elledge, shortly after his second marriage, took a contract to grade a section of railroad. His wife boarded
a number of his laborers. Before the road was completed, something went wrong with the company and Harvey lost
everything the family possessed. Then came a demonstration of the stuff of which our pioneers were made. Writes
his daughter, Evelyn (Mrs. E. E. Boone) of Hibbing, Minnesota:
"A less gallant soul than he would have gone under, but he had such a never-failing stock of optimism he refused
to be counted out. He gloried in the fact that his part of the work had been done and done well, and in his old
age, after he had lived in complete blindness for more than fifteen years and his mind was more in the past than
in the future, he built that road to completion! It consumed his last energy, but as all other tasks had been completed
to the best of his ability, so this, the one pet project of his life, was completed too. We were glad for his sake
that his end came this way, even though it shut out last recognition of us, his loved ones.
"He gave to his children a heritage of fine courage, a singing kind that found a song on his lips nearly every
day of his fifteen years of blindness."
Edward Boone Scholl, the Pike county pioneer, in his memoirs, speaks of a "singing Elledge" who sang
joyously as he manned the sweep of the early St. Louis ferry, in about the year 1800. But here was another "singing
Elledge," who sang under far different circumstances, in his blind old age singing his troubles away, lifting
his voice in old Kentucky folk song or some old church hymn or singing school roundelay, singing, as his daughter
says, even "when death came for him."