CHAPTER 55

The Tracy Family History

Anderson County, Tennessee

    I have told you previously the story of how my Proctors fought the Indians in Kentucky (chapters 22-23). And I have just told you a story of how our Wallaces fought the Indians in the Kentucky. Now here is a story of how our people who carried the name of Woods fought the Indians in Kentucky.

    "One night, most likely in the spring of 1782, the Indians made a raid on the Station at Crab Orchard (KY) and stole all the horses. The next day all the men in and about the fort went in pursuit, leaving only a negro – In these colonial Virginia and frontier Kentucky and Tennessee days, the word "negro" was the politically correct term for slave.-- with a lame hand at Mr. Woods cabin and a white man sick in another cabin close by. The children had been going to and from the spring all morning and had noticed nothing suspicious, except their sagacious dog would walk slowly in the spring path and look towards the spring and growl, but never bark. Towards dinner time, Polly Woods, then seventeen years old, had gone with her little brother, John, to a knoll not far from the house to gather salad, and the negro man, was in the yard playing on a buffalo robe with little Betsy Woods. Suddenly, Polly saw a huge Indian stealing up the spring path with his body bent, and on tiptoe leading a band of warriors, and she at once gave the alarm, at the top of her voice. The negro ran to the house in an instant to shut the door, but the Indian leader rushed in the door at the same time and there they clinched in a tremendous struggle, the negro being as good a wrestler as the Indian. During the scuffle at the door, little Betsy though only three years old, slipped in between them, in a minute or two they had gotten inside and Mrs. Woods, the mother of the family had secured the door. In one corner stood a rifle and the struggle was for the gun, the Indian forgetting to use his knife and tomahawk, which hung in his belt, but jabbering all the time to his companions out side who were trying to break down the door with their war clubs. Mrs. Woods ran for a knife near by, but seeing it was of no use seized the broad axe and hewed the Indian down, literally cutting him to pieces before they could stop her. Meanwhile Polly had rushed with her little brother to the house of the sick neighbor, who though hardly able to move, seized his rifle and shot one of the Indians out side. The savages then bet a hasty retreat, taking the dead body of their comrade with them. They had been concealed near the spring, and seized their opportunity to slaughter the family, but failed."

    The frontier dogs were trained to detect the presence of Indians. In this case, the dog wisely growled a warning rather than a loud bark, which would have forewarned the Indians.
    Between the years of 1776 and 1783, our people in the Kentucky would become a portion of the statistics of 1,500 settlers massacred by the Indians. This does not include the number (of ours?) who survived: scalped, tortured, kidnapped, adopted into Indians families; if lucky, ransomed. Our people were on the edge of the frontier from the beginning; in Pennsylvania, Virginia, now the Kentucky.
    This is the story of Hanna(h) Wallace Woods, who was the wife of Captain Michael Woods, who was a grandson of Michael Woods of Blair Park. Hanna Wallace Woods’ mother-in-law was also named Hanna Wallace Woods.
    With each succeeding generation, our Scotch-Irish ancestors become harder to trace. The problem starts back in Scotland during the Middle Ages. There was a high infant mortality rate. In order to perpetuate the memory of a dead child, the parents repeat the name to another child, or even more than one child. It was common to change their surnames when moving to another place to live. As late as the eighteenth century it was common for a Scottish woman to keep her maiden name when married. It gets crazier as it was also a custom for the husband to take the wife’s name.
    Seven grandsons of Michael Woods, of Blair Park, are also named Michael. Nicknames are often used to differentiate those who carry the same names: Baptist Billy Woods, Beaver Creek Billy Woods, Surveyor Billy Woods, Michael Woods of Botetourt, Beaver Creek William the Second, etc...
    Systems are developed. The Scotts name children after relatives or special friends. To add to the confusion, our people have massive intermarriage with close relatives: “William also married his first cousin, Susannah Wallace and Captain Michael also married Susannah Wallace, his double first cousin.”
    The custom of closely intermarrying of cousins was commonly accepted then; today our people would be thrown in jail.
    To add to the research quagmire: It was common to use one's given name for legal purposes: legal documents, marriage certificates, tombstones; but, they would go by their middle names for all of their lives. [“Children with double names used both. (?)] All of these idiosyncratic ways of dealing with names, easily understood and accepted at the time, becomes a nightmare for researchers 200 years later.
    In this genealogical maze there is one ray of light for the researchers. Usually, in America, the Scotch-Irish followed this custom for naming their children:

First son; named after father’s father (Paternal Grandfather)
Second son; named after mother’s father (Maternal Grandfather)
Third son; named after father
First daughter; named after mother’s mother (Maternal Grandmother)
Second daughter; named after father’s mother (Paternal Grandmother)
Third daughter; named after mother

    John Wallace has two sisters who move to West Virginia. (At the time still Virginia.) John takes his family by a different route, to Tennessee. We know from legal documents that the immigration takes place sometime between August of 1801 and 1803. (One historian states that they immigrated in the year 1799.)
    If the Bybee family immigrated in the Wallace wagon train, they did not settle with the Wallaces. Instead they establishing their community in Bybee, Tennessee, which lies 75 miles east of where our people settled.
    Once our people crossed the Cumberland Gap, they left the old religion behind in Virginia. In Tennessee and Kentucky our people are now Baptists. To this day, west of the Allegheny Mountains, we rarely have any Presbyterians.
    The veterans of the Revolutionary War flooded into Tennessee. Many of our Scotch-Irish abandon Virginia for the new fertile land west of the Alleghenies. They sell their old farms to the Germans from Pennsylvania and lower Shenandoah.
    Many Scotch-Irish were good at surviving against the Indians, but were not particularly good farmers. They often times picked poor land for their farms: for example, on the sides of mountains filled with slate. They did not understand even the most primitive practices of scientific farming. They used no crop rotation to protect and replenish the soil. They worked the land as it was and did not bother to develop their farms by removing the stumps. Swamps were undrained. Their farms were hard to work. The Scotch-Irish theory was simple. Work the land until it gave out then move farther West.
    They were replaced by the Germans who used a different practice: They were orderly, methodical, choosing ahead of time the best soil suited for farming, usually the rich bottom land of the fertile valleys. They removed the stumps, drained the swamps, did everything necessary to make their farms productive. The Scotch-Irish were good at developing and opening a nation, constantly pushing further into unknown land and fighting the Indians. The Germans were more mentally stable.
    In the Kentucky the farmland is rich and cheap. Being wise, our people never left a productive farm; never formed a wagon train and moved onto a new land that was plagued by drought, pestilence, and famine. Our cousin who built Woods Fort (KY) purchased 1000 acres of as good land as any in the Estill Station Survey (KY) for a rifle gun. (There was more than one Woods Fort.)
    The Scotch-Irish tide of immigration out of Virginia and into the Kentucky started in 1800 and lasted up to the Civil War. It was the same pattern of immigration: families, communities, church congregations forming a wagon train and reestablishing themselves elsewhere, further West. (By 1800, one-fifth of the US population lived in Virginia, making it a little crowded.)
    The pattern of establishing a new home in the Kentucky: Purchase a large tract of land, use 30-40 acres to live on and use the remainder for speculation, selling to others later; building a cabin, working the farm. In four years you could prosper enough to build a frame house, send the kids to school, buy a carriage and even have enough money left over to subscribe to the weekly newspaper.

What style of life did our people have in this new home? Ruth Petracek tells us:

    "The man usually wore hunting shirts of material spun and woven by his
wife. The color rarely varied as the material was usually dyed with butternut. His footwear was either buckskin moccasins or boots. In the winter, the men wore coonskin caps, but in the summer they had hats of straw.
    The costumes worn by the women were more colorless than that of the men. Unknown to them were feminine adornments such as fans, jewelry and ribbons (for the most part). Their dresses were plain and fashioned of a linsey-woolsey material. Sometimes they wore a shawl or the dresses had very large collars.
    Certainly, no attempt was made to have an elaborate coiffure, such as the colonial ladies in the more populated cities wore. They wore their hair long; gathered it into plaits or coiled in a knot at their back of their head.
    For shoes they wore durable square toed footwear (or moccasins) and in the summer they usually went barefooted."
    Most of the prosperous aristocrats did not migrate, for obvious reasons.

    John Wallace brings with him his family, which would be his wife Jane Miller and their eight children born in Virginia. Three more would be born in Tennessee. One son was named Brice. This is the first time the Brice name enters our family tree.
    As usual, the Wallaces proliferated in their new home. The community was called Wallaces Crossroads, simply because there were so many Wallaces living there. In the 1880's the name was changed to it's present title, Andersonville. (Notice the name Anderson shows up again.) Andersonville is, of course, in Anderson County, Tennessee.
    John Wallace’s farm was 2 miles southwest of Andersonville.
    Something very strange happens to the John Wallace family around the year 1820. His wife, (Rosanna) Jane Miller, was conveying a bolt of cloth to give to a friend. Apparently, this was a custom of the time. When crossing the field she was hit and killed by lightening.
    The chances of one being hit by lightening are I in 700,000; killed, 1 in 5,720,000. In 1820, the population of the United States was 9,638,453. It is theoretically possible (that is mathematically speaking) that my 5th great grandmother was the one of the 1.7 people killed by lightening in America that year.
    A year later John Wallace marries Rebecca Norton, She is believed to have been the mother-in-law of his son, Enoch. By Rebecca, he has nine more children (?).
    Somewhere along the line, John Wallace moves to Stilesville, Indiana. There he died. Born in 1848, he dies in 1832, at the age of 84. I am always amazed at how long some of our frontier ancestors lived. His grave is at the Snoddy Cemetery. The photo shows a new tombstone erected by the DAR in front of the old monument.
    John Wallace has three sons who marry three Adkins sisters. They were the daughters of Elijah Adkins and Nancy Hunter. (No one has researched this family line.) This is of interest to me as my 4th great grandfather was David Wallace, 4th child and 2nd son of John Wallace and Jane Miller. David married Elizabeth Adkins; Jane Miller born (?); Died 1820 (?); Married 1780 (?).

David Wallace
    My 4th great grandfather was born 24 November 1790, in Greenbrier Co., Virginia (now West Virginia). It is not known the year he married Elizabeth Adkins; conjectures vary, 1809, 1810, 1812, with 1810 being the best bet. Elizabeth's father was Elijah Adkins and mother was Nancy Hunter.
    "My family has and still is good friends of the Adkins that was in Nodaway Co., Missouri. There is quite a few still living up in there." from an old kin, 1982. His second wife was Elizabeth Worthington (?).
    He had ten brothers and sisters and the three youngest children were born in Tennessee.
    It is believed that he served in the War of 1812, because every man of fighting age in Anderson Co., was in the war. Thus, the nick name for Tennessee, “Volunteer State." (I have not done any research on our people and their involvement in the War of 1812. I don’t know if anyone has.)
    David and Elizabeth had 12 children. The first born was John Miller Wallace, my 3rd great grandfather.
    David died on 24 August 1841, and is buried in the "Old Wallace Cemetery" just outside Andersonville. His widow remarried a David Sharp.

Inventory of the estate of David Wallace, 28 November 1841:
1. Thirty head hogs
2. Two head horses
3. Ten head of cattle
4. One yoke oxen (one wagon)
5. Two stills and tubs
6. 800 bushels of corn (more or less)
7. Thirteen head of sheep
8. One cutting knife and box
9. Three whiskey barrels
10. One crosscut saw; one frow; one iron wedge; one set of blacksmith tools
11. One cupboard
12. One table
13. One chest
14. One clock
15. One bureau
16. One bed
17. Clothing
18. Five pear bedspreads
19. One set of firedogs
20. Two kettles; two pots; one over an lid; one skillet; one baker
21. One trunk
22. Five chairs
23. One big hackel
24. Twelve sheaf of oats
25. Two stacks of hay
26. Two saddles (for men)
27. Two scythes
28. One black woman (80 years old)
29. Augers; steelyards; two mattocks
30. Ten asses
31. Five sets of gearing; one set carping tool; one hack chain.
32. Five shovel plows
33. Three bark (or birch) plows
34. Three single trees
35. Four clevises
36. Four bridles
37. Eleven salt barrels
38. One brand ox and forage; two iron squares and files; two plank boxes.
39. Note on: Silas A. Gentry for $6.50
(Due: Dec. 25, 1841)
40. Note on: James Wallace Jr. for $200.00
(Due: Dec. 25, 1841)
41. Note on: J. P. Eaton
W. M. Eaton for $13.58
(Due March 17, 1841)
42. Note on: Allen McCoy
Andrew Pate for $27.13
(Due: Dec 25, 1841)
43. Note on: James Burris for $4.00
(Due: Nove. 7, 1841)
44. Receipt from: James Davis
(Oct. 2, 1841) $ .50
45. Note on: James Wallace Jr. $73.00
46. James Wallace due Two bushels corn for
50cents bushel $1.00
also: Five dollars and five
cents…cash.

The above is just a perfect inventory of the property,
goods and chattles of David Wallace, deceased, which has
come to our possession or knowledge or the hands of any
person to the best of our knowledge and belief.
Signed: John Wallace Jr.; James Wallace; Administrators: Nov. 28, 1844


    Two things to note in this inventory. One is an 80-year-old slave woman listed as property.
    (At this time in Kentucky the slaves were considered part of the family. One can see that an 80-year-old slave woman would be of no economic benefit. She was probably considered an aunt, or grandma, or just a nanny.)
    Second, is listed a still.
    There is an old Appalachian saying: When English settlers arrived they built a house, the Germans built a barn, and the Scotch-Irish built a distillery.

John Miller Wallace
    David Wallace would have 12 children. (One source list 11). The first born was John Miller Wallace, my 3rd great grandfather. He was born 1 January 1811 (23 Jan. 1811 or, 19 Jan. 1810 according to the family bible), in Anderson Co., TN, and died 10 January 1884 (near Stover, Mo.). He married Rosanna (Jane) Manley on 23 (21 ?) March 1833. Rosanna was born 10 May 1816 and died 17 September 1890. Her father was Wilson Manley and mother Louisa (?).
    One of Ruth Petracek's research puzzles was this question: Was John Wallace and John Miller Wallace the same person? I solved this question by discovering that their dates of death were the same.
    His wife's name, Rosanna, has always puzzled historians. The records intermix as to his wife's name being Rosanna, or Jane. On the tombstone it says, Rosanna. The 1813 census also gives her name as Rosanna. Yet, many records show her as Jane. Twenty years ago I did considerable research and came to the conclusion that her name was Rosanna Jane Manley and she used her middle name all of her life. On her marriage record the name appears R.J. Manley. Their daughter Martha Wallace's death certificate shows her father as John Wallace and mother as Jane Manely. Martha was my 2nd great grandmother.
    (Elijah is an old family name.)
    It was a double wedding with John Wallace and his brother, Elijah, marrying two sisters, Rosanna and Alvinia Manley.
    John and Rosanna Jane have six known children, I suspect more. The first born is my 2nd great grandmother, Martha Melvina on 22 September 1834, in Anderson Co., Tennessee.
    Anderson Co. would not always remain the land of milk and honey. After the War of 1812:
    "These men returned home to a desperate situation. They found that their farms had not been cared for, taxes were due and the banks refused to accept any payments in paper money but demanded either gold or silver."
    The families are large. The soil is depleting. There was no knowledge of crop rotation or practices of modern farming. The farms are not producing and there are too many mouths to fed.
    "Many of the people, even the most industrious and frugal, were complaining of hard times, and of not being able to obtain reasonable rewards for their exertions."- -1834.
    Our people do what they have always done; they migrate once more, this time westward into Missouri. In 1830 was the year of the "Noble 900 Wagon Train." These were the wealthy and elite of East Tennessee. They included relatives to George Washington, Reynolds, Meriwether Lewis, Walker, Boone, Nathanael Greene; the personal secretary to President Andrew Jackson turned down the same job offer in Washington, and headed for Missouri. It is believed some of our Wallaces were in this immigration company, although not my John Miller. He would come later.
    The immigrants took with them "...their wealth and spending power."
    "Some were lost site of but strong blood ties still draw many descendants back each summer who ask for the old families and homesites."
    “In the early 1830s a group of Wallaces; their relatives and friends went to Indiana. From there many went to Missouri...”
    "John Wallace and his wife Jane (Manley) Wallace moved to Morgan Co., MO., with their family in the spring of 1850. They came from Anderson Co. TN." It was in Missouri that our Wallaces, Proctors, Moons, and significant others became neighbors.
    Most of the information and photos for Anderson Co. comes from Ruth Petracek book. The more I read these these stories the more impressed I am with our Cousin Ruth's extensive research. We are all indebted to her.

Why did our people become Baptist?

    The frontier settlements of Kentucky and Tennessee were scattered, isolated, not ideally suited for the highly structured, control minded Presbyterians. As told before, the Presbyterians were idealists who demanded highly trained, college educated ministers. By college trained, they meant at a Presbyterian college such as Princeton. They wanted their churches  to belong to Presbyteries, centralized ruling bodies.

    As our people moved westward through the Cumberland Gap, the Presbyterian ministers rarely followed even on temporary visits. So remote were the settlements west of the Cumberland Gap that the Baptist churches became singular, choosing ministers from among themselves and often having little contact with the Baptist churches of the other settlements.

    A few of our people started becoming Baptist in Virginia as told previously in the story of Baptist Billy Woods. Most of our people entered the Cumberland Gap as Presbyterians, and came out the other side as Baptists.