East Feliciana Parish
LAGenWeb
When, in 1800, old Leonard Hornsby
took passage on a flat boat and floated out of South Carolina down the head
waters of the Tennessee river and around by the Ohio and Mississippi to Natchez,
with all his father's slaves and herds, his household and kitchen outfit, his
wagons, teams and agricultural implements, his gunsmith and his one-legged
shoemaker, his big mastiffs, bull dogs and deer hounds, he was tolerably well
equipped to plant and defend and expand an outpost in the vanguard of
civilization, which he did in 1802 in the forks of Beaver Creek and the Amite
river, to which his Anglo-Saxon love of running waters had attracted him. This
outpost of the Hornsby's, in 1802, lies in the extreme corner of the Eighth
Ward, and is now the property of Judge W. F. Kernan. When its site was selected
there were none within hearing of his cock's crowing for day-break, except the
sly, scheming foxes, thirsting for chanticleer's blood; none to hear the
deep-mouthed baying of his big dogs, except the frightened bears, panthers,
wolves and deer. No human being was nearer than old Mr. Furlow, a Georgian, who,
with a hermit's love of solitude, had planted his solitary log cabin on the west
side of Hepzibah Creek, about half a mile below the high hill, out of the sides
of which gush the living waters as fresh and strong and life-giving as those
which gushed from the rocks of Horeb when struck by Aaron's rod. The place is
central and has had many different proprietors after old Mr. Furlow was put away
in his grave. His immediate successor was Daniel Eads, of Kentucky, who
constructed the first grist mill just above where Hephzibah Church now stands.
Two other leaders of Eighth Ward society, Elisha Andrews and Mfijor Doughty,
followed Mr. Eads as proprietors of the Furlow place, and in 1812 or 1814 the
Rev. Ezra Courtney, having organized a numerous Baptist congregation, selected
the portion of the place lying on the east side of the creek for the site of a
Baptist house of worship, to which was given the name of Hephzibah.
Furlow, Eads, Andrews and Doughty, after life's fitful fever, all sleep quietly
in their graves, but the head waters of Hepzibah Creek still ripple and gurgle
joyously by the foot of holy Hepzibah Church, the congregation of which
multiplied amazingly under the zealous ministrations of its venerable founder.
It remained a harmonious brotherhood, without any family jars, except when old
Chesley Jackson, one of Hephzibah's stock-bolders, took it into his head to
invite a Universalist named Rogers to preach in Hepbzibah. This desecration of
the Hephzibah pulpit by an unbaptized heretic who didn't believe m Sheol, was
bitterly opposed by another body of organized Baptists, under the lead of that
good Christian and citizen, Major Doughty, who locked the heretic out, and
carried off the keys in their pockets. Then there was war in Hephzibah and the
contending factions were not appeased until the Rev. H. D. F. Roberts, from
Sumpter District, S. C., with a diploma from Columbia College, and Rev. Thomas
Adams, an impassioned and learned divine, from Richland District, S. C., came to
pour oil on the troubled waters. Under the impassioned appeals of these two
missionaries the conscience of the eighth ward was stirred to its lowest depths
and the list of Hepzibah members rapidly doubled. Perhaps it will add to the
interest of my narrative to say that Mr. Roberts left the work here to serve a
pulpit in a Tennessee church, where he reared four promising sons, of whom our
esteemed fellow citizen, J. M. Roberts, Esq., was one, and all of whom have
been, from time to time, members of eighth ward society, as guests of their
father's older brothers, Messrs. William and Sylvester Dunn Roberts, both
immigrants from Sumpter District, S. C. The Rev. Thos. Adams founded a home and
raised a family on the banks of Pretty creek, and continued his ministrations in
the East Feliciana church until his death near Clinton in 1859, where he was
buried, and over his honored grave the congregations he had so faithfully served
united in erecting a handsome monument.
After Furlow and Hornsby, the
dim and scattered germs of Eighth Ward settlers were first recruited by John
Chance and James Felps from Georgia, in 1803 and 1804, and probably by the
ancestor of Jack, Booker and Smith Kent. Mr. Chance made his first clearing on
the place in the Seventh ward on which in 1806 old Mr. Henry Dunn moved with his
family and slaves. This John Chance became conspicuous in the annals of the
Eighth Ward, for long and honorable services as a leader through its early
struggles, and as the founder of a numerous and powerful family by his marriage
with Miss Zilpha Doughty, who came into the ward in 1806 in company with her
father, old Mr. Levi Doughty, from Darlington District, S. C. In the same fleet
of flatboats which floated the Doughtys out of South Carolina, down the head
waters of the Tennessee and through the perilous Muscle Shoals, down the Ohio
and Mississippi to Natchez, came out of the same neighborhood a column of
immigrants with their families, slaves and household goods; and from Natchez, on
foot and in wagons, probably along the same trace which old Leonard Hornsby
blazed out in 1802, to the banks of Beaver creek, near which most of these
colonists commenced their clearings. This large column of colonists coming into
the ward in 1806, embraced the ancestors of the Doughtys, Rentzs, Brians,
Morgans and Whites, who used to tell their descendants some thrilling tales of
hairbreadth escapes from shipwreck on the snags, sawyers and hidden rocks in the
unknown channels of the French Broad, and how, appalled by the angry roar of the
swift torrents, whirlpools and eddies of the Muscle Shoals, the immigrants from
Darlington District landed their wives, little ones and slaves at the head of
the Shoals and trusted the ark containing their herds, household and kitchen and
plantation outfits to a skilled Indian pilot, who, standing with his long pole
at the bow, with his squaw at the helm, would brave the dangers of the perilous
passage while the the human passengers footed around the shoals by a "cut-off "
The Indian pilots brought most of the boats safely to the foot of the
Shoals, but sometimes one would be wrecked and an outfit for a home in the
wilderness would go to the bottom.
Of this band of neighbors immigrating
from Darlington District to the Eighth Ward in 1806 there were some famous old
pioneers who stamped the growing societies of the ward with the seal of their
rugged, virtuous and useful characteristics. Old Mr. Levy Doughty lived to
extreme old age, and died honored and revered as a good citizen and Christian
gentleman, by his friends and neighboris, the Stewarts, Humbles, and McAdams.
Old John White, blacksmith, from Timmonsville, S. C., founded the ancestral home
of the Whites on the headquarters of Clear creek. He was the venerated sire of
Mr. Eli White, who was the first born in the Clear creek home in 1807. In 1888
he was a venerable gentleman still reading the minion and agate of the New
Orleans Picayune without glasses, and it was from his lips the writer obtained
the following vivid picture of life in an immigrant family from 1807 to 1815: "I
never," said he, "tasted meat, except bear, venison and an occasional panther
steak, until I was a good sized boy. The only milk I ever tasted was my
mothers', until my father returned to South Carolina, and brought out with him
one of grandfather's old cows. The dairy utensils my mother used were old
fashioned, big bellied gourds, sawed in two, my only clothing until I reached
twelve years of age, was a long shirt of coarse cotton clotth woven on mother's
hand loom. I always went barefooted, summer and winter, and my first pair of
pants were obtained from mother, after pleading long and persistently. They were
of the fruits of the same old hand loom, made in the old style with broad flap
in front, a mile too big in the waist, and couldn't be kept up without
suspenders, for which there were no buttons." "These were very discouraging
drawbacks," smilingly remarked the old man, "but father, who saw my dilemma,
molded a set of buttons out of an old broken pewter spoon, and then I could wear
my pants, and I was as proud as a peacock. Our farm in those days was a two acre
patch which we planted in corn and sweet potatoes and cultivated with a little
pony and a scooter plow with a wooden shovel board."
The venerable man
who thus called from boyhood's memories these charming details of the simplicity
and scanty luxuries of frontier life, was the sire of a family almost as
numerous as Jacob carried into Egypt to make bricks for Pharoah. In his
eighty-third year, with intellect and all his faculties unimpaired, verily this
Louisiana scion of a Darlington District stock was one of God's rarest physical
conformations exceeding in preservation and endurance the average specimens of
humanity in any other part of the globe.
There was another large column
of immigrants starting from Darlington District m 1804 or 1805 voyaging by
flatboats down the Tennessee and its headwaters for East Feliciana via Natchez,
composed of the Scotts, Dunns, Perkins, Winters, Robins, McKneelys, all
connected by intermarriages with the Scotts of South Carolina who were near
kindred to the Scotts of Virginia, from whom the great Winfield Scott derived
his birth. Though starting earlier than the column in which came old Levi
Doughty and John White, they arrived in the eighth ward later, because, at the
head of the Muscle Shoals they diverged in wagons from the river route around by
Nashville and the Hermitage where they were hospitably entertained by "old
Hickory." At the head of this last column was Lewis Peikins and his daughter
Sarah, who was born in South Carolina in 1791, aud his son James, born in the
same State in 1800. When he reached the Eighth Ward in 1806, Mr. Lewis Perkins
made his clearing on the banks of Little Beaver Creek, but soon abandoned it to
remove to another clearing just above the line of demarkation, impelled by
hereditary and very natural reluctance to live under monarchial government.
The clearing he abandoned on Little Beaver was soon afterwards developed by
old Mr. William Stewart, of North Carolina, into a home for children who have
grown up with the Ward and have always held an honorable place in its social
ranks.
Coming back to old Mr. Lewis Perkins, who moved at such short
notice out of the King of Spain's dominions in 1806; he lived but a short time
in his last home, and died, leaving Sarah Perkins, at fifteen years, at the head
of the orphaned family. Notwithstanding her mother was a sister of Mrs. Henry
Dunn, who lived just below the line, a close neighbor to the orphaned family,
all the cares of her two young brothers devolved upon the inexperienced gril of
fifteen years. Young as she was her trust was discharged with good judgment and
conscientious care and won the lasting gratitude of her young brothers. She
married, in 1817, a worthy and handsome young gentleman from Georgia, named
Louis Talbert, with whom she reared a large and honored family; but even after
the added cares of a growing family began to exact much of her time and duty,
she still clung with motherly tenacity to the two boys entrusted to her by her
father at his death bed. This magnificent specimen of the highest type of
womanhood died in 1888 in full possession of her faculties which, unimpaired,
had withstood the storms of a rough world for ninety-seven years.
The
two brothers, whose early boyhood she had so sedulously guarded and so
intelligently guided, took high position in society when they became men. Doctor
James Perkins became a famous physician, and so much beloved, that he, an old
line whig, was elected by a strong Democratic society to the State Senate in
1844. During his term of service, in an investigation of the notorious
Piaquemine fraud, by which John Slidell, of the Tammany New York school, and not
in any sense a Louisianian, stole the vote of the State from Mr. Clay, Dr.
Perkins was chairman of the committee selected by the senate to investigate the
alleged frauds. His searching and incisive scrutiny into the rottenness revealed
many facts hitherto unsuspected, and which never have been refuted. His fame as
a scientific practitioner of the abstruse mysteries of the healing art has been
rivalled by his son, Dr. Lewis G. Perkins, and his two grandsons, Drs. James and
Harry Kilbourne, the last of whom left Clinton a short while ago, full of
youthful promise and bright aspirations, to practise his profession in the
parish of Morehouse. He carried with him the loving wishes and fond predictions
of the young and the old of his native town, and when the wires announced that
he had fallen a victim to malaria, there was not in his native town a family
circle without sorrow, nor an eye undimmed by a tear.
There have been
many fine old characters and families which have been powerful in shaping the
trend of Eighth Ward society, and the names of the Stewarts, Kents, Humbles,
Geralds, Rogers, McAdams and Woodwards are intimately connected with its social
annals. I regret my inability, from lack of authentic data, to give them a
notice better proportioned to their social standing and merit.
As a
faithful chronicler I cannot close my sketch without narrating my last interview
with another of the ward's best known landmarks. A lady, fit to be the mother of
a race of heroes and statesmen, who came into the ward as Miss Zilpha Doughty,
from South Carolina, and after rearing a large family as the wife of John
Chance, of Georgia, was left a widow with a large household to take care of.
During the war a Mississippi regiment under orders for Port Hudson camped near
my house in the suburbs of Clinton one stormy night; the wind blew almost a
hurricane and the rain came down in torrents. In the morning the half-drowned,
shivering soldiers flocked around my kitchen fires for warmth and food, and all
my scanty store were devoured by the hungry crowd. In my distress at finding my
family without food, I thought of the never empty smokehouse of my thrifty old
friend, Mrs Zilpha Chance. She, compassionating my destitution, took me to her
smokehouse, in which the meat was assorted in three piles. She pointed to the
largest pile, saying. "That is for the Confederacy; nobody can get that."
"That," pointing to the smallest pile, she said, "is for my own use." Looking
closely at the size of the third pile, she hesitatingly remarked: '"Well, I
reckon you can get 150 pounds out of the pile at two bits a pound." The bargain
was struck, the meat weighed and loaded into my wagon. When ready to leave, I
pulled out a roll of "Greenbacks" to settle for the meat. The grand old dame (I
can see her now) folded her arms with imposing dignity, but with an eye fiery
with withering scorn, exclaimed: "I have never yet touched that hateful money,
and have no use for it now. If you can pay me in Confederate money, I will take
it, because I can pay my taxes with it." I stood humiliated and rebuked in the
presence of a "mother in Israel" who regulated her duties to the State by such
elevated and patriotic rules of action. Pondering over the memorable scene, as I
rode home, I wondered how many women like Mrs. Chance and her neighbor, Mrs.
Talbert, would it take to make a "small State great ?" Ten years ago I met a
matron whose maxims and rules of conduct were closely akin to the exalted
standard held up by her near neighbors, Mrs. Chance and Mrs. Talbert. She was
probably a pupil of these two grand examplars; my last allusion is to Mrs.
Andrew White.
The Eighth Ward, like all the others, except the first and
third, has large areas of abandoned, uncultivated fields, which once furnished
luxury and plenty to the old slaveholders. Most of these have gone to render
their last account, and their former slaves have migrated to newer and fresher
soils, and their once spacious and comfortable homes await tenants with labor
and capital to restore and make productive the cheap abandoned fields around
them. Abounding as this ward does in bold streams of living waters, which empty
into the Amite river, its eastern boundary, or into Beaver creek, its northern
boundary, or into Sandy creek, its western boundary, its surface presents a
broad scope of cheap and fertile lands, blessed with an unfailing water supply,
and along its boundary streams and along its small tributaries as well, namely,
Poole's creek, Clear creek and Hephzibah creek are to be found many small
parcels of land which will produce without fertilizing a bale of cotton to the
acre.
The mention of Clear creek in the foregoing paragraph reminds me
that I have omitted any reference to a large, powerful and growing body of
Methodists, who have constructed a commodious house of worship on the banks of
that stream.
In a preceding sketch the men of East Feliciana have been
described as faithful and loyal to law, in times of peace; and dauntless in war;
and ever prompt, as in 1814, when the British landed at Lake Borgne; as in 1846
when the Mexicans crossed the Rio Grande, and as in 1861, when the rights of
their state was encroached upon, ever prompt lo bare the freeman's arm to strike
for the freeman's home ! Three levies, en masse without any summons but the
natural pulse beats of native patriotism. Three grand spectacles full of
cheerful promise and hope to the patriot's heart ! But there remains a fourth
pregnant with still grander and more sublime significance. Although their homes
were sacked by many a pilfering raid; although every house in the parish mourned
its dead, whose bones lie bleaching on the battle fields of the war of the
rebellion; as soon as the tocsin of war ceased to be heard in the disturbed
land, this warlike population, charmed by the sweet music of the peaceful church
bells on the Hallowed Day flocked to the shrines of a pure faith whose
inspiration is 'Peace and good will" and renouncing on their knees, the thirst
for vengeance, the hatred and discords of four years of civil strife, solemnly
renewed their vows of fidelity to a reunited country.
With a few more
words my sketch of East Feliciana and its social life will come to a close. I
know this announcement will be hailed with pleasure by some few prejudiced
critics who have already been complaining that "his old legends tire the ear;
they are but the tedious twaddle of a garulous old man." As a class critics are
not a new or original type of casuists. Nineteen hundred years ago their
prototypes thronged the streets of Jerusalem, injecting into the ears of the
wayfarers their venomous sneers by asking, ''Is not this the Carpenter's son?
Can any good come out of Nazareth?" From such a prejudiced judgment seat, I turn
to a generous, fair minded public and ask their verdict; whether my work has
been skillfully or bunglingly performed? If their unfavorable conclusions are
fairly deducible from my writings, then I have raked among the consecrated ashes
of our ancesters, in vain. Against such unfriendly conclusions I still maintain,
that homage for the ancestral dead is an instinct still alive in the breasts of
all except sordid, mean, unworthy people. An orator; seeking to warm the heart
of his generation to some heroic deed of self-sacrifice, always points back to
the tombs and monuments which enshrine the dust of the great chiefs who have
served the state, in camp or in council; so too, have I, in the name of our
Huguenot and Carolina ancestors, who founded our society, appealed to the living
to be worthy of the dead. In such an appeal I pay but merited homage to the
rough-hewn symbols and images of frontier life, which, if a little too rude for
imitation in a smoother and more polished civilization, are, nevertheless,
admirable m my eyes as images of Truth, Honor and Patriotism.
I have
tried to picture a good land, the home of good people, with good soil, good
climate, good laws, good churches and schools; if my picture fails to attract
the home seekers, with capital and labor, in that case I shall confess that my
aim has not been achieved. Such a confession will be made with deep regret, but
without humiliation, for I honestly feel that I have done my best. With a
sanguine hope for better results,
I am, etc.,
H. SKIPWITH.
Extracted 09 Aug 2019 by Norma Hass from East Feliciana, Louisiana by Henry Skipwith, published in 1892.
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