necessary) respect for their father and mother, and a proper devotion to the Almighty God, who ruled their lives. I see them sitting down at a rude table—seven long-legged, shaggy-haired, hungryboys. What are they having for supper? Fried perch, possibly. Or bear meat. Or hog and hominy. Whatever could be cooked in an iron pot or a long-handled skillet or in the ashes of the huge hearth. Very likely there is a flintlock rifle within reach as they eat. (A trader on Middle Creek, after getting drunk in the company of some Indians, murdered them in their sleep—four men and two women. And in the morning he and his nineteen-year-old servant-boy threw the bodies in the creek and then went upstream to the cabin of one of the Indians and killed another Indian woman and two girls and a child. And now nobody was safe.) If Henry Maxwell heard an owl or a sound like a twig snapping, the inside of his mouth turned dry, for they were totally unprotected. In the fall of the year, he left his family and drove from farm to farm, with his loom in his cart. And the women brought out great masses of carded wool and flax, and he opened his pattern book before them. From time to time he was able to send word where he was, and from this they judged when he would be home.
Though he grew up among Quakers, Henry Maxwell never became one. The proof of this is that he bore arms against the British. So did his oldest son, James. In 1776 Henry Maxwell was in his late forties. Soldiers in that ill-fed, ill-clothed, undisciplined and perpetually dissolving army did not have to be young; only able-bodied. He had just turned sixty when he died, during the first administration of George Washington. I don’t know what he looked like.
As for his seven sons, James married
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Walter married Rachel
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Thomas married Jane Dixon; Samuel, John, and Henry again married
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Robert married Mary Edie. Gone to graveyards every one, but not in any great hurry. They all died in their seventies except the youngest, Robert, who lived to be eighty-one and was my great-great-grandfather.
He was a shoemaker by trade, but it was by no means his only occupation. For a number of years, he and his brother Thomas were Indian scouts in the service of the Federal Government. In a book of reminiscences published in 1837, a certain Thomas R. Crawford states that the earliest visit of white men to what is now Harrison County, Ohio, was in the fall of 1793, and that five men, Indian scouts and spies, were sent out from Fort Thomas (which was built on the site of the present city of Wheeling, West Virginia), and that Robert Maxwell was one of them. They made their way “from the mouth of Wheeling Creek up the dividing ridge and crossed over on the evening of the second day. After they left the river, they proceeded to the headwaters of the Stillwater, venturing rather far into the interior for so small a force.” They were attacked by Indians during a night’s camping, and not all of them managed to return to the fort.
My great-great-grandfather was twenty-six at the time of the expedition from Fort Thomas. Within a year he had moved north, and settled in Brooke County, in what is now the extreme northern part of the state of West Virginia, a little way down the thin wedge that separates southern Pennsylvania from Ohio. Though it was part of Virginia until the Civil War, the reader must think of a hilly country with small farms and few slaves, and of a frontier society very different from that of the great plantations of the Tidewater. Here Robert Maxwell met and married the daughter of a Scotch-Irish frontiersman named Alexander Edie, who was exceedingly given to pulling up stakes and trying somewhere new. He had lived all over the western part of Pennsylvania and the eastern part of Ohio, farming and trading in land, and moving on whenever other settlers began to crowd in on him. He married twice and had two girls and six boys by each wife, and with that many people
Richard Ellis Preston Jr.