This article invokes a measure of personal privilege, though there is a definite Sutton/Clay County connection. I found the Walton House during a visit to Jefferson County, Indiana in July. The house was built by my 3rd great, grandfather, Abraham Walton in 1820. The house was occupied just a couple of decades ago but its age is catching up quickly here in 2016.
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The Walton House is currently known in the neighborhood as the Cain House as the Cain family lived here for about a full century. Our Walton family also had about a full century in the home. My great grandmother Rhoda was born in this house in 1843 and lived here until her marriage in 1865 before she and James D. Rowlison began their 18-year, multi-step migration including stops at four different farms around Edgar. |
The Marshal Union Cemetery is southeast of Sutton on Road "S" between 310 and 311. Near the center of that cemetery is a small flat gravestone for two men, a son on the left, his father on the right. We're interested in the father, Isaiah Walton.
No, it's not anything remarkable, just a small rural cemetery, just a grave.
History
is mostly just the collection of things that people have done. It’s our
responsibility to remember those people and those things.
Certain
primitive societies believed that we die twice, once, as we understand, when
the body stops working but they say we die a second time upon the death of the
last person who remembers us.
That’s
an interesting thought that places a value on our memory of the ones who’ve
gone before.
When
we visit a cemetery where we keep our inventory of past people, and as we walk
past a grave we seldom have an appreciation for what that person did or what
contributions they may have made during their lifetime. Our loss.
There
are about 30 cemeteries in Clay County with from a few dozen graves to over 3,000
in each cemetery. There is a story that can be associated with each grave. Some
may be surprising.
I
have an interesting illustration.
There are 104 graves in
Marshall Union Cemetery. Could any of those represent an interesting story? I have a
candidate: my great, great grandfather.
Near
the middle of that cemetery is a flat stone with two names: J. P. H. Walton and
Isaiah Walton. We will talk about Isaiah.
Isaiah Walton was born on February 18, 1812 in the town of Woodstock in Oxford County, Maine to Abraham and Mary “Polly” Hutchinson. Isaiah’s ancestors, nearly all of them, were British colonials from the earliest days including his 4th great, grandfather, William Walton who arrived in Massachusetts in 1636 and became the first preacher in port of Marblehead near Boston.
Other
of Isaiah’s ancestors included the Putman family of Salem Village who were in
the midst of the Unpleasantries of 1692 but that’s another story. And other
branches have stories worth remembering.
Some
of William Walton’s descendants moved to the northern frontier of New Hampshire
after a father-in-law qualified for land in payment for his service in King
Philip’s War in 1675-1676. King Philip was a Pokunotek chief named Metacomet
(the Philip name is a long story) who led a bloody rebellion by Wampanoag,
Nipmuck, Narragansetts and other tribes we don’t hear much about. Metacomet was
captured and beheaded and many of his troops sold into slavery. No, we don’t
teach our kids much about that war.
Many
militiamen did not take that New Hampshire land offer – it was the wild
frontier. The Walton’s helped tame that frontier and another generation pushed
to the eastern frontier in Maine. Abraham Walton became friends and a partner there
with Ebenezer Hutchinson in a grist mill and married Ebenezer’s daughter Mary.
Isaiah was one of ten children from that marriage, eight of whom made it to
adulthood.
Several
years ago we visited Oxford County and located the site and the remnants of the
Walton-Hutchinson grist mill on the outlet to Moose Pond.
In
1815 when Isaiah was three years old, the Hutchinson and Walton families along
with a Jordan family and others learned of land in the new frontier, this time
to the west. They traveled by team and wagon to Pittsburgh where Abraham bought
a flat boat and they floated down the Ohio River.
One
account has them pausing near Cincinnati briefly before continuing to Madison,
Indiana, then the largest town in the new state.
Abraham
Walton took a quarter of land in Graham Township, Jefferson County in 1815
where he raised that family. The Hutchinson family was nearby.
The
Ohio River separated Jefferson County from slave-state Kentucky. The Walton and
Hutchinson families shared abolitionist sentiments with their neighbors and in
1839, 22 years before the Civil War, a group of 72 formed the Neil’s Creek Anti-Slavery Society. About 20 of those charter members were members of Abraham
Walton’s family including sons, daughters and in-laws, among them Isaiah and
his new bride, Eliza Jane Hall. The Halls were another colonial family, mostly
English but some Dutch dating back to the days of New Amsterdam.
The
anti-slavery society was not just a discussion group. Isaiah bought his
father’s farm in 1841 and later moved to a farm just northeast of the village of Lancaster, Indiana. There he soon became a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad
using the house on that farm, since lost, to hide runaway slaves. Two brothers in a free black family
near Madison were ferrying runaways across the Ohio. The Walton house and the
Hoyt House, today a museum, were two early stations on the Underground Railroad
route to Detroit and on to Canada. The story of the Underground Railroad is a large part of the proud history of Jefferson County.
The
Jefferson County sheriff was a zealot about enforcing the Runaway Slave Act
placing the anti-slave society folks in danger as law-breakers. Runaway slave
laws dated from the earliest days of our republic – George Washington signed an
early version. States had their own laws protecting the “property” of
plantation owners. Armed militias patrolled searching for escaped slaves and
periodically did shake-downs of slave quarters searching for evidence of
“misbehavior.”
Merritt Walton (1841-1913) as a nine-year old
boy was helping runaway slaves escaping from
Kentucky to Canada.
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Merritt Walton purchased the farm near Lancaster from his father in 1870 for $2000. Both Isaiah and Merritt later migrated to Clay County.
The
Neil’s Creek group had another project that the Walton family was involved
with. Their Abolitionist Baptist Church founded Eleutherian College in 1848 in
the nearby village of Lancaster. The intent was to provide advanced education
for all and in 1856 there were 18 African-American students including ten
ex-slaves enrolled. By 1860 the college had 200 students, 50 of them
African-Americans at a time when it was prohibited by the Indiana Constitution.
(BTW, “Eleutherian” is a Greek word for “free” offering some evidence of the
educational level of mid-19th Century frontier farmers.)
Eleutherian College in Lancaster, Indiana was built by members
of the Neil's Creek Anti-Slavery Society including members of the
Walton family as a "college for all" including African-Americans.
Ex-slaves were enrolled in the college as early as 1856.
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The
war was over in 1865, James came home, he and Rhoda were married and in late
1866 they took a boat from Madison down the Ohio and then to Missouri to a new
farm. I have the ticket stub from that trip indicating a fare of $6.00 for two
adults, one child, a trunk and a horse.
The
Rowlison’s western migration included farming near Kirksville, Missouri;
Moulton, Iowa; Peru, Nebraska; four farms near Edgar, Nebraska and finally near
Hoxie, Kansas. Those of us who descended from James Rowlison wonder what he was
searching for, or what he was running from.
One
of those Edgar area farms was about a mile south of the Marshall Union Cemetery
belonging to Rhoda’s brother Merritt, the nine-year old mentioned above. This
was about 1880 when the Rowlison’s followed Merritt to Clay County. The widower
Isaiah Walton also followed these two and others of his children to Nebraska
and Kansas.
The
Merritt Walton family made another contribution to history when a grandson,
also named Merritt Walton became Sutton’s first World War II fatality when he
was killed on Gavutu Island in the Solomon Islands on August 7th,
1942. The grandfather Merritt is buried in the Ong Cemetery, the younger
Merritt in San Jose, California.
It
is not an elaborate gravestone that marks Isaiah Walton’s grave in Marshall
Union Cemetery (Merritt’s is a less modest). There are thousands much like it
in Clay County. I’m not saying that every grave you walk past in the cemetery
contains the remains of a person with as full a life as Isaiah Walton’s but I’m
just as sure there are many with even better stories that are fading or worse,
have already faded.
I
like the thought mentioned above: we die twice, once when the body quits and
again when no one remembers us. It doesn’t have to be so. Someone just has to
take time and effort to re-establish the memory of a life and pass it on to
keep their memory alive.
After
all, history isn’t much more than the collection of things people did.
Full
disclosure: much of what I know about Isaiah Walton’s time in Jefferson County,
Indiana came as a result of a recent visit when I spent parts of three days in
the Jefferson County Courthouse and at the county historical society visiting
with some wonderful people. The staff at the museum welcomed me as a 2nd
great grandson of Isaiah Walton, a fellow they were very familiar with.
The earlier Walton House in Graham Township has been known for the past many decades as the Cain House for the
family that owned the farm during most of the 20th Century. The
house sits off the road down a lane almost a half mile deep in the section and
behind a “NO TRESPASSING” sign. The house sits back about 100 yards from the
north bank of Walton Creek where Abraham Walton operated his second mill. A
1922 account indicated that signs of the mill remained at that time. I waded
and slogged along the banks of the creek in dense growth but found no trace of
the mill. The tobacco looks good and someone is keeping the grass down around
the 200-year old house. Walking on the grounds of an ancestral home is not done
at a fast pace; the imagination runs wild and you draw on every known detail
about the family who lived there while wishing there were more.
The
sad story at the Jefferson County Historical Society was about the historical
preservation about the Neil’s Creek Anti-Slavery Society and its college. I’d
visited the Eleutherian College and its museum several years ago. I found the
place closed on this trip. The woman who was most knowledgeable about the
society developed Alzheimer’s disease before she had transferred all she knew
from her memory to paper. A staff member showed me the 20 or so boxes of
material her family had given them. It is not well organized and an intern was
15 hours into sorting the material when I visited.
A
group is diligently raising funds and laboring to re-open the college museum
and to document the accomplishments of Isaiah Walton and his colleagues.
And
that’s the story behind just one local grave. Do you know another? Please start
typing now.
(This article has been updated as subsequent research and yet another trip to southern Indiana in August, 2017 revealed that the Walton house associated with the Underground Railroad was not the Graham Township house pictured above but another house in Lancaster Township, on the NE 1/4 of Section 34 Township 5N range 9E. Unfortunately, that house has not survived. I did contact the current owner of that quarter and learned there are ruins of that house on the farm. The historians of the Neil's Creek Society had completed their examination of society information and it was on file at the Jefferson County Historical Society in August, 2017.)
The original version of this article appeared in the August, 2016 issue of Sutton Life Magazine. Contact Jarod Griess at mustangmediasales@gmail.com for more information about the publication.
(This article has been updated as subsequent research and yet another trip to southern Indiana in August, 2017 revealed that the Walton house associated with the Underground Railroad was not the Graham Township house pictured above but another house in Lancaster Township, on the NE 1/4 of Section 34 Township 5N range 9E. Unfortunately, that house has not survived. I did contact the current owner of that quarter and learned there are ruins of that house on the farm. The historians of the Neil's Creek Society had completed their examination of society information and it was on file at the Jefferson County Historical Society in August, 2017.)
The original version of this article appeared in the August, 2016 issue of Sutton Life Magazine. Contact Jarod Griess at mustangmediasales@gmail.com for more information about the publication.
3 comments:
Hello! Another descendant of Isaiah Walton here!
I would love to get some history of the home we purchased here in Sutton.
603 east maple st
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