Reminiscence Sung: Lane and Clark Families

My awareness of Horatio Clark and his father-in-law Wilkinson Lane, indeed my fascination with my family's history, began in my grandmother's basement in the summer of 1975. Reaching for some now forgotten object on a shelf of jellies and preserves, my glance fell upon an old, handcrafted, cherry box, with excellent joinery, its sides intricately dovetailed. My grandmother motioned for me to bring it down and she opened the lid. At one time it had belonged to my great-grandfather, John Horatio Clark, but by its appearance it looked to be a family heirloom predating the Civil War. It contained a ferrotype of his mother, Minerva Wright, letters to his son Fred during the latter's youthful odyssey in the West, a newsy letter from his sister Eleanor during World War II, grade cards dating from the 1870's, Victorian calling cards and a Civil War discharge made out to his father, George R. Clark. As a Civil War buff since grade school, I was especially drawn to this last document, which revealed George R. Clark's company and regiment during the conflict. Somewhere, I had once gathered the obscure knowledge that this was enough information to get more detailed records from the National Archives in Washington, DC. I obtained a form, completed it with the little information I knew about my great, great grandfather, and deposited it in the mail. One month later, I was rewarded with more information than I had ever reasonably expected to find. For instance, I discovered that at the outbreak of the Civil War, Clark was farming in Fairfield County, almost in my parent's backyard. Now there was a clue too hard to resist. Fired with zeal, I purchased a paperback copy of Doane's Searching For your Ancestors, and began learning about genealogical research. Some months later, on a visit to my parents, I hightailed it over to Wagnall's Memorial Library in Lithopolis, Ohio to discover what I could about the Fairfield County lead. I soon had before me a fragile, tattered, first edition of George Sanderson's 1851 A Brief History of the Settlement of Fairfield County. In the index I encountered the name Horatio Clark. “Ahh...the middle name of great-grandfather Clark,” I thought, my anticipation increasing. Straightway, I turned to page 30 and there the following words leaped from the text. “In 1799, Horatio Clark and Wilkinson Lane, with their families, emigrated from Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania.” I continued on in the account to discover they had settled in Bloom Township, only a few miles from where I sat reading about them.

Early the next morning, I sped to Lancaster and was practically the first citizen through the courthouse doors. All that day I buried myself in the stacks, checking wills, deeds, and birth and marriage records. By the end of the day, I had linked Horatio Clark and Wilkinson Lane all the way down through the line of their descendants to my generation. That was our first meeting. After all these years, I feel as though I actually know them. Horatio and Wilkinson introduced me to one of the most satisfying interests of my life. Since those days, I've become warmly and comfortably acquainted with quite a few other ancestors. However, the Lanes and Clarks are the genesis of my genealogy “avocation” (there are times my wife would have said “obsession”) so it is with them that this history begins.

Religion seems to have played a major role in the migrations of a large number of my ancestors. Henry Howland, the brother of Mayflower passenger John Howland, left England in 1633, a Separatist bound for Plymouth Plantation. In Plymouth Plantation, his family and he eventually turned to the gentle faith of the Society of Friends. Joseph Jewett and John Cogswell came with their families in the 1630's to practice the Puritan faith. The Schultzes clung to their Evangelical Lutheran faith through the horror of the Thirty Years War. It is probable that the Kramers left Palatinate in Germany to express their Protestant faith more freely. All these stories and others' will be recounted in the chapters to follow.

The experience of war also loomed large in the lives of many ancestors. Thomas Grim endured the torments of prison and disease as a result of his participation in the Civil War. George R. Clark knew moments of mind and body paralyzing terror, languishing many months in Civil War hospitals. As a result of his Civil War service, he would suffer, in his own way, long after the guns fell silent. As a teenager Frederick Bish, born in Europe, was a member of the Virginia Militia during the American Revolution. Some say Christian Grim left his home in Hesse to serve the British during that same struggle. He liked what he saw in American, discarded his mercenary ways, and made his way to Virginia. In 1641 Richard Lane, had been driven from the English Caribbean colony of Providence by the Spanish. His son, Major Samuel Lane, was slain by the Seneca Indians in 1690.

Other ancestors would face less dramatic crisis. They would lose loved ones; endure hard times and sickness. Their families were uprooted many times as they moved west. These family members knew the joys that we all know, as well as the sorrows.These forebears lived their lives quietly, out of the glare of fame and notoriety. It is a melancholy fact that the stories of many of these ascendants have been forgotten for a century or more.

Through examining our ancestor's lives, we can understand our own lives and destinies better. The richness and importance of our religious heritage comes into sharper focus. We examine the textures of our culture. In short, we discover how we came to be as we are. In the words of Harry Miles Muheim, “At the graveside...the power of the past rose to smite me in a new way. For some people, that power fades with age, but for me somehow the past has become a vivid...panorama, increasingly a source of wonder and revelation...”

BOOK ONE

The Ancestors Of Wilkinson Lane

1559-1779

With Notes About the Family Of His Son-In-Law Horatio Clark

1
RICHARD LANE
“A Merchant Taylor Of London”

On June 27, 1997, while on a fourteen-hour layover at Gatwick Airport, my wife Alison and I took the Express into Victoria Station in London. From there, we took the “tube” east to explore 17th century sites connected with Wilkinson Lane's great, great, grandfather Richard Lane and his family. Fortunately, these spots were in the heart of historic London. Within the square mile of the old city, we discovered All Hallows Church (complete with a very knowledgeable and gregarious rector), the Tower of London, the monument to the great fire, magnificent St. Pauls, and the splendidly ornate Guild Hall. We also enjoyed a marvelous stroll along the Thames to Westminster and detours to several fine pubs. Despite being continually pelted by “English dew,” we enjoyed ourselves immensely and gained new insight and appreciation for the London of Richard Lane's day.

I was particularly interested in finding out what became of All Hallows Bread Street and St. Mildred Poultry, both connected to the Lanes, thus pin pointing the area where they probably lived. Though the churches are now marked only by plaques on the walls of buildings of commerce, the search for the churches, and a subsequent visit to the library of the Guild Hall and to Saint Mary Le Bow, led to the following paragraphs about Richard's formative years in London. Here he first apprenticed, began his career as a merchant, grew in spirituality, married and started his family. From here, Richard also embarked upon a turbulent career in the New World.

Richard Lane's parents were Roger and Beatrix Lane of Herefordshire, England. The Lanes of this line have an “ancient” English pedigree, possibly going all the way back to Sir Reginald la Lone, a Knight in service of William the Conqueror. The Lanes of Herefordshire eventually became known as the Lanes of the Ryelands. Roger Lane was an apothecary in Hereford, England. At that time, one who followed this trade not only made and sold drugs but practiced the healing arts as well. Roger and Beatrix had ten children born in Hereford and all were christened in St. Peter's Church between January 29, 1590 and January 10, 1602.

Hereford, located near the southwestern border of England and Wales and about 28 miles north of Glouster, dates back to the Saxon era in the early 7th century. Its most notable feature is the remarkable Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin and St. Ethelbert. The cathedral has many architectural influences, from Norman to Perpendicular. Its initial era of construction was from 1079 to 1148. Since then, however, it has been altered many times, even into the 20th century. Once, in conversation about Hereford, an English friend informed me that the most exceptional facet of the Cathedral was its remarkable “chained library.” The old tomes are affixed to the ancient woodwork with shackles. “Herefordshire is the real England not London,” my U. K. friend likes to remind me. The area is relatively well wooded and has long been an agricultural district. Herefordshire was a wool center for many centuries and of course it graced the world with Hereford cattle.

Richard Lane was baptized in Hereford on August 27, 1596. Within a decade his father, Roger, was dead, leaving a young widow the unenviable task of supporting eight children, ages one through twelve. Though she seems to have remained in the parish, there is no record of her remarrying. It's possible that her family may have helped support her. Her son, John Lane was a grocer and an elder in All Hallows Bread Street. Her grandson, also named John Lane, followed in his father's footsteps and became a prosperous member of the powerful Grocer's Guild in London. An indication of cousin John's affluence may be judged by the quantity of silver plate he willed to his place of worship, All Hallows Bread Street in Bread Street Ward of the old city in London.¹ He also made bequests in thousands of pounds in his 1674 will, an impressive amount in that period.

Richard Lane soon left Hereford to make his fortune in London, for on December 14, 1613 he was apprenticed for seven years to Nathaniel Thornhull, a London Merchant Taylor. It is likely that Lane's relatives in London paved the way for this important stage in his life. The place in London where the young apprentice toiled was Burchin Lane. This was near the market and business area known as Cheapside. A few steps from Richard's doorstep was ñJonathan's,î the most popular of the many trendy coffee shops frequented by the merchants of London. Coffee shops, then the latest rage in London, were important places for the conduct of business and for making contacts. Perhaps over cups of London's “new and exotic ” beverage, Richard made the connections that fueled his rise in the world of commerce. At the time, London was a city of churches, with the spires of 136 houses of worship rising above its compact skyline. One of these steeples belonged to All Hallows on Bread Street in the ward of the same name. This was another area frequented by Richard. No doubt he was drawn by connections his uncle, John Lane, and his namesake son John, who bequeathed the plate mentioned above to the church in 1670. Richard's widow would one day be laid to rest in All Hallows Bread Street's cemetery, further suggesting a bond to this area.

All Hallows Bread Street, once located on Bread Street between Wattling and Court Streets, was first mentioned in the 13th century and was characterized as ña proper churchî by John Stow in A Survey of London. At about the time of Richard Lane's apprenticeship, the sublime John Milton, author of Paradise Lost and the literary voice of Puritanism, was baptized there. Perhaps Richard was present among the flock on that day. During Queen Mary's reign, the church's rector, Richard Saunders, had been burned at the stake for preaching Protestant doctrine. All Hallows Bread Street was destroyed, as was eighty percent of London, in the Great Fire of 1666. Christopher Wren, the architect of new Saint Paul's, designed the rebuilt church. All Hallows was celebrated for its graceful tower, which was surmounted by an arcaded top with four pinnacles. Alas the church was eventually done-in by Victorian greed, for it was razed in 1876 to make way for warehouses. The church's cemetery, where Richard's widow rested for almost two centuries, disappeared as well.

All Hallow merged with nearby St. Mary Le Bow and to this day a warden still represents the All Hallows Parish on St Mary's council (In 1997...Raymond Duffey, Esq.). Incidentally, several generations after Richard's day, the citizens of London began calling those who lived within the sound of Le Bow's bells, Cockneys. Cousin John Lane's silver plate was turned over to St. Mary Le Bow in 1876. The parish records of All Hallows Bread Street and its cemetery are presently in the library of the Guildhall, a short distance from St. Mary Le Bow.

Cheapside, the piece of London Richard Lane probably called home, was a warren of twisting, narrow streets and alleys. This busy commercial hub was the very heart of London, arguably, the greatest city of her day. Cheapside was in the oldest part of the city and her thoroughfares were crowded with ancient three and four story medieval houses of plaster and timber, often containing shops in their first floors. The upper stories of these venerable buildings were built out over the streets giving a closed-in, intimate feel. The Gothic girth of old Saint Paul's Cathedral loomed over the quarter. Near Cheapside, were the halls of the influential guilds, then becoming known as livery companies. The livery companies, and their predecessors the guilds, had dominated the city's affairs for centuries and were then at the height of their power.

The Guildhall would have been but a brief stroll from Richard's shop. Within the chambers and great hall of this noble old edifice, the proud and independent merchants of London conducted the city's commerce and government. To young Richard, the city must have seemed the very center of the Earth. Today, though the same lanes and streets wind through the quarter, the colorful, larger than life ñmovers and shakersî of Richard's day have been replaced by men and women in blue pinstripe, sporting umbrellas, and dodging traffic on their way to work.

On February 6, 1620 Richard Lane completed the traditional seven years of apprenticeship and joined the merchant class of London. Richard's fee being paid, he was admitted as a freeman of the Merchant Taylor Livery Company, also known as Fraternity of Linen Armourer. He had been admitted to an important institution of the time. Livery Companies were more then just guilds. Think of a combination of fraternal order, corporation, trade union, and regulatory agency and you'll get some idea of their form. The Liveries had a significant influence on London for centuries. In Richard's day the livery companies had changed little from the time of their champion, Edward III. In fact, Edward III and George VI were brothers of the Merchant Taylors Company. Following royalty's lead, many distinguished personages found it prudent to become members of livery companies.

All who practiced Richard Lane's trade had to belong to the Merchant Taylors. The company's authority extended to his general welfare, both spiritual and temporal. Its regulations were enforced with peer pressure, coercion and fines. Many of the Merchant Taylors' edicts regulated the domestic and private conduct of its members. Injunctions against rent gouging of fellow members, growing beards, playing football, and even restrictions against marriage to daughters of men outside the company were all regulations attempted by some liveries. If Richard had been reduced to poverty by his ñadventures at seaî or if he had experienced hard times due to other misfortunes of life and commerce, he knew he could rely upon his company. The Merchant Taylors would have granted assistance to him “out of common money, according to his situation, if he could not do without.”

By October 7, 1623, three years after joining the Merchant Taylors Livery, Richard had prospered enough to take a wife. He married Alice Carter at St. Mildred Poultry, which dated to the time of the Saxons. It was located at bustling Poultry market on Cheapside and was just a few streets over from Bread Street. Alice's father was Humphrey Carter, “citizen of London” and member of the Iron Monger Livery Company. As Richard stood by his bride in St Mildred, his gaze may have lingered upon the pulpit. Carved on it was a ship in full sail. The pulpit and a weather vane on the church's steeple both portray a ship under sail, reflecting the role of St. Mildred Poultry's patron in supporting trade and navigation. Was the altar's engraved ship also an omen, foreshadowing Richard's later adventures at sea?

Richard Lane seems to have been a man who knew his mind and didn't conceal his views. In 1631 he was subject to a review for unorthodox, non-conformist beliefs -- euphemistically speaking, Puritanism. Like many London merchants, Richard may have embraced Protestantism because it appealed to his sense of independence, a defining characteristic of his class. Protestantism's Bible and Prayer Book in English certainly appealed to the self-reliant streak of many London merchants. These merchants were also moved toward Protestantism because it was the faith of many of their trading partners in Northern Europe - Germany, the Low Countries and the Huguenots of France.

Given this independent mind set, Richard must have acutely resented the intrusion of the Anglican Church's “investigators.&rdquo With Richard's prospects dimming in England and a young family starting, he did what many of his fellow ñIndependentsî did. He contemplated joining the ñGreat Migrationî for the New World. Being a merchant, looking to make his mark, he may also have considered the new and exciting possibilities for commerce offered in the New World. He may have been to the Caribbean once and perhaps saw that there his future and fortune waited.

The background of Richard Lane's departure had been in the making since 1603 when James I of Scotland succeeded Queen Elizabeth on the throne of England. James believed in the divine right of kings. This was a new concept for England and an idea not well liked by Parliament or the Puritans. The latter had already incurred the wrath of King James by questioning some of the practices of the Church of England. As a Puritan, Richard was a member of a group of stern individualists who believed the Church of England was reminiscent of the Roman Church with many layers of ritual, pomp and superstition. In the beginning, the Puritans did not wish to leave the Anglican Church but rather to ldquo;purifyrdquo; it of such things, hence the name Puritan. To many of the English Protestants of the day, the Church of England was still Catholic, having only cut its ties with Rome. Because of this, many of them feared that James Stuart, and later his son Charles, were secretly intent on returning Catholicism to England.

Will Durant characterized the Puritans as carrying morality to excess with ñan inhuman code, which was a necessary response to the license of Elizabethan England.î There were many factions of Puritans but almost all held certain common beliefs. They scorned idle luxury, religious art, card playing, dancing, and theater. They held the Old Testament to be as important as the New and identified with the Judean concept of the chosen people. They fiercely believed in individual political liberty and the need for congregations to control their own affairs. Most believed in original sin. They named their children for the patriarchs and heroes of the Old Testament and believed in a stern God. The Puritans studied the Bible diligently and took it literally. They became known as ñRoundheadsî because the men shaved their hair close to the scalp. Merrymaking at Christmas was not for them and there were no games or frivolities on Sunday. It was an ethos they gave primacy to the mercantile class and decried taxation that bled its thrift and industry to sustain the Church of England and the idle aristocrats. Durant's final word was to say, “They produced the men who conquered the American wilderness. They defended and transmitted to us parliamentary government and trial by jury. To them, in part, England owes the solid sobriety of the British character, the stability of the British family, and the integrity of Britain's official life.”

Durrant's portrayal may be a bit too stark and simplistic, for there was never a monolithic Puritan church but many, diverse groups, abhorring centralization. Because of this they were known in their day as Independents. Kupperman argues that this diversity of belief and practice means that the word Puritan should not even be capitalized. Finally, the gentlemen who headed the Company of Providence, the leaders of the Independents, were quite at ease in London's theaters and were well educated, rich, sophisticated and risk takers of the first degree.

One thing is certain. Richard Lane and his fellow Puritans were not dangerous revolutionaries, but peaceful farmers, merchants, professionals and scholars, loyal to their king. Nonetheless, James I threatened, ñI will make them conform or I will harry them out of the land.î His son and heir, King Charles I, would be equally determined to continue this approach. The Stuarts' ally in this was William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was Laud and his onerous policies that are credited with sending a steady stream of Puritans to the New World at the time Richard began his adventures. Richard's Puritan beliefs would continue to complicate his life, even in the New World, and Archbishop Laud would also figure in his future.

2
Pirates and Planters

Richard Lane looked westward across the Atlantic Ocean to improve his position. Eventually he would assume the roles of sea captain, explorer, planter, would-be-governor and merchant trader. Evidently, through merchant and religious contacts in London, Lane became involved in the workings of the “Company of Adventurers for the Plantation of the Islands of Providence, Henrietta, and the Adjacent Islands.” One of its officers, Lord Brooke, became Richard's patron. This group was associated with the “Company of Adventurers of the City of Westminster,” the same group of Londoners involved in the colonization of Massachusetts. Its goals were to create “a Godly state” on the shores of the New World and to turn a tidy profit for themselves and the Company's investors. The company's leaders were the most powerful Puritans in England and all of them would be instrumental in the civil war that would engulf England in the years to come. The adventurers of the Providence Company had also been prominent in colonizing ventures in New England, Virginia and Bermuda (the Sommer Islands) and they took for granted that one day Providence Island would be the center of a great Puritan settlement of America; one that would spread to the shores of Central America. They presumed that eventually the New Englanders would forsake their cold, rocky shores for their more salubrious Caribbean island.

In 1629, the privateer Daniel Elfrith returned to Bermuda from one of his many forays on the Spanish Main. He informed Phillip Bell, his son-in-law and the Governor of Bermuda, that the island of Providence would make a suitable colony. But more importantly, this island off the coast of Central America would be a superb base of operation from which to harass the Spanish in the western Caribbean. Bell, recognizing a good opportunity when he saw it, dispatched a letter with Elfrith to Sir Nathaniel Rich, who was kin to the second Earl of Warwick ² This led to the formation of a company to exploit Providence and its sister island, Henrietta (also known as St. Andrews or today, San Andres). According to Harold Lane, Elfrith returned from England with Thomas Wiggin, Richard Lane, Sir Christopher Gardiner and other Puritans who were disaffected by the religious climate in England. This unlikely band stopped in Bermuda where they picked up Governor Bell, other Puritans, and more secular adventurers. The colonizers made landfall on Providence in December of 1629 and began to construct the port of New Westminster.

The Island of Providence is part of an archipelago that also includes nearby Santa Catalina and the San Andres Islands. Today the former two islands are joined by a bridge and together cover about 20 square kilometers. Though small (less than six miles long), Providence Island possesses an excellent harbor and more fresh water than usual for so small a Caribbean island. The archipelago is about 200 kilometers northeast of Costa Rico and 400 kilometers southwest of Jamaica. The islands are volcanic, and quite beautiful, with splendid coral reefs surrounding them. Providence, in fact, has the world's third longest reef. The highest peak on Providence, “El Pico,” is 360 meters high. The forested mountains of the island fall abruptly away to the sea, leaving little flat land. The Providence of Richard Lane's time is today known as “Isla de Providencia” or ldquo;Old Providence” and is a territory of Colombian. In colonial days, the island lay astride a strategic Spanish travel route between Panama and the Yucatan Peninsula. Upon it, sailed Spanish galleons crammed to the gunwales with bullion. In the 1600's, the Spanish naturally considered the English presence on Providence Island a thorn in their sides and attempted numerous times to crush the colony.

I retraced my ancestor's footsteps to “Isla de Providencia” in April of 1999 when my wife, Alison, and I gave ourselves a tenth anniversary trip to this special corner of the Caribbean. It was an unforgettable week at an island more suited for travelers than for tourists. We arrived on the island minus our luggage, which remained in Bogotá, and a day behind schedule. By the way, I recommend that a Yankee visitor to Old Providence fly there from San Jose and not Bogotá, but that's another story. Our connecting plane from San Andres to Providence had broken down a few days earlier and our host had not been able to get parts. Because of this, another plane had to be borrowed from a rival airline when it could be spared. As a result, schedules were a bit...shall we say, “flexible.” Jimmy Buffett knew his Caribbean stuff when he penned the words, “No plane come Sunday, maybe one come Monday.” The plane arrived, early the next day, and conveyed us to Providence, along with six other passengers and a crew of four. The half hour flight from San Andres was enlivened by a steward who served bread and butter sandwiches with crusts trimmed off. We flew low enough so that we could easily scrutinize the swells of the rolling sea and the fishing and pleasure craft that road them. All of our fellow passengers were in their Sunday best and profusely taking snapshots of everything and everybody on the airplane. We landed smoothly on a postage stamp size runway bounded, fore and aft, by two hills and bordered starboard and port by a mangrove swamp and the island's only road. We taxied up to one of the funkiest, most captivating terminals I have ever had the pleasure to encounter. Old Providence's airport would have been a familiar sight in the islands two decades ago but, unfortunately, most of the Caribbean's old style air facilities have given way to the homogenized style most tourists see today. The terminal is basically one big porch-like affair, surrounding an open area. Awnings and blinds, on the sides, can be lowered or raised, depending upon the sun's position in the sky. Lush island flora crowds the airport's buildings. The customs people are casual and not self-important in the least. In the parking lot you will usually find six or seven friendly and helpful taxi drivers (I recommend the services of Lambert Archibald Newhall). If you're watching your pennies, wait a bit, and you can catch a pick-up truck ride for a modest price. Actually, you can hail anybody driving down Providence's sole road and they'll give you a ride for a small fee.

What followed was one of the most relaxing, yet stimulating, weeks, I've ever experienced. We stayed at a small, seven-room cabana, the Hotel Miss Mary, on the beach at Southwest Bay. The hostelry was also the home of the Old Providence Dive Center, operated by Giovanni (Vanni to his friends) and Anna Vaschetti. Both are Italians from Turin. Next to the center is an open-air restaurant, which just happens to be one of the best eateries on the island, and had a darn good little bar to boot. The restaurant's seafood was same-day-fresh and deliciously prepared by an Italian expatriate named Raphael. Some of his specialties were Rondon, a fish soup with coconut milk, potatoes and yucca, crab soup and La Bola de Caracol, shellfish balls as well as international dishes. With no large tourist facilities on the island, most of the island's visitors, Colombians and Central Americans for the most part, stayed at similar small cabanas or in spare bedrooms, mostly on the west side of the island. Our host at Miss Mary's was Ambrosio Huffington, and we found his amiable, open style to be pretty typical of the island's citizenry, 5,000 strong. To the descendants of Richard Lane who would like to retrace his footsteps, I heartily recommend Huffington's lodgings. Check out Miss Mary's prices on the official Providencia web site. Be forewarned, Providence is not your usual glittery Caribbean retreat. It's about as authentic a Caribbean experience as you are likely to encounter. Providence is an island of sharp economical disparities. There are many wealthy mainlanders who have purchased large estates, including a Colombian senator whose summer home occupied the rocky point just south of our cabana. There are also many poor people who live in plywood shacks with glassless windows. The beauty of the island's topography and flora was leavened somewhat by the litter that seemed to be lying around everywhere. To be fair, the Colombian government hadn't paid the islanders for six months, so the garbage workers were on strike, the road cleaners were on strike, the teachers were on strike and even the beach combers had stopped working in protest. This reflects a recurrent grouse, among the citizens of Old Providence, that the Colombian government neglects the island. Only recently has the government taking any real interest in the island.

The week was crammed full of hiking, climbing, water sport and history. We retraced the steps of Morgan, privateer and former governor of Jamaica, and listened to countless tales of his boldness and of his lost treasure. We traveled the island's only road via beat-up pick-up trucks with benches in the back. The fare was 50 cents but one has to be careful how one phrases one's request. If you say to the driver, “Are you going through Santa Isabella?” your fare is only 50 cents. However if you say, “Take me Santa Isabella,” you have just made yourself a special charter and will pay a steep price. Since there is only one, circular, road on the island, the driver is bound to be going someplace you want to go without recourse to a special charter. We spent an afternoon, alone most of the time, on a breathtaking beach named Baja de Manzamillo. At night, Alison and I walked the strand in the light of a full moon, legions of crabs scurrying out of our way. One evening, we climbed down a shore side cliff to watch bats emerge for their nightly forays upon the mosquito population. But the most meaningful event of our stay was our ñinterview,î one evening, with the Island's resident historian, Miss Virginia Archbold.

Miss Virginia was a vital, cleared-eyed woman with an air of authority, who was very serious about her history. She returned to Old Providence, after a career on the mainland, to build the house of her dreams. The house, designed by her when still a girl, happens to be on the spot where New Westminster, the settlement known well to Richard Lane, once stood. As I enjoyed the view of the bay from her balcony, I could almost sense the presence of the puritans, adventurers, slaves and privateers whose paths had once converged at this exact spot so many centuries before. Miss Virginia has been honored by the Colombian government for her work and has hosted her own radio show, She frequently holds forth, from her verandah, before groups visitors and tourists who come to her door seeking knowledge of the island's past. Miss Archbold is a living resource of lore about the Old Providence's resident families, many of them descended from 19th century English slaves. She's also an authority on Captain Morgan, as well as the early Puritans. While sipping red wine on her second story verandah in the early evening, my wife and I were captivated by her tales for almost three hours. We learned how the island's people held on to their English ways long after Colombia gained control of the archipelago. She related how, in the years following World War II, the Colombian authorities tried to stamp out the English character of Old Providence, forbidding the language to be taught in schools and giving preference to those who chose to speak Spanish. Even the magnificent four-story citadel known as Morgan's fort, dating back to the conflict between Spaniard and Englishman, was dynamited by Colombia in 1957. This was the site where Richard Lane's family had huddled while he joined the island's other defenders in repelling a Spanish invasion in 1640. Today, the seniors of the island still retain their command of English but most of their children and grandchildren do not. I gave Miss Virginia a several copies of Lane family history and, later, mailed her a copy of Kupperman's Providence Island. I also promised her that I would spread word of her work to the descendants of Richard Lane, for Miss Virginia is writing her own history of the island (If you wish to support her in this venture, see the appendix). So consider yourself enlightened.

The Providence Island my wife and visited is a sleepy, little island far from the major currents of world affairs. However, three hundred years ago Providence Island was in the main stream as aspiring and determined men all over Europe were drawn to the New World. In the 17th century Providence become the focus of a powerful group of men in London known, collectively, as The Company of Providence Island. These men had a special charter granted by the Crown of England. Such “corporations” were more then just commercial and trading ventures, for they had almost unlimited powers over their jurisdictions. With this authority, they quickly became major forces for colonization in the Caribbean and North America. The largest investor in the company in the Company of Providence was Robert Greville, known as Lord Brooke. Richard Lane was a fortunate man for he was the protégé of Lord Brooke, who entrusted the young merchant with his investments in the colony. He was also Lane's powerful friend in the Company of Providence's councils. Brooke was a deeply religious man, a neoplatonist and a talented writer. John Milton, who compared his gentle and peaceful philosophy to the last words of Jesus Christ to his disciples, exalted him. During the English civil War, Lord Brooke discarded his serene ways and took command of the combined armies of Warwickshere and Staffordshire and later the Puritan army in Ireland. Brook was said to have supplied his soldier's upkeep with his own fortune. He came from a distinguished English family and his kinsman, Lionel Copley, would become the first acting Royal Governor of Maryland. This was the colony where Richard Lane's son, Samuel, would one day seek asylum.

In February of 1633, the Company of Providence contracted with Richard Lane to establish on Providence the valuable and highly profitable commodity known as Dyers Madder (Rubia Tinctorum), the roots of which yield a red dye for fabric. It originated in India and had recently been introduced into Richard's native Western England. The officers of the Company of Providence hoped it would help revive the moribund textile industry of England. As a merchant taylor, Lane would have been familiar with its properties before his trips to the West Indies. Richard's father would have used it in his profession as a druggist and doctor, for it had medicinal qualities as well. As a dye it is still valued for its versatility, but its drawback is a long maturation period of three years. The plant creates only a small amount of seed so the most effective method of propagation is to take cuttings at the beginning of the season, a time-consuming process. The roots are taken from the ground, dried and powdered. In Holland, large areas of madder were grown. Here the soil was sandy and the roots were relatively easy to gather. It was hoped the soil of Providence would be equally well suited for the crop.

In a letter dated August 31, 1632, Thomas Wiggins had mentioned to the company that he hoped Lane, in London at the time, could talk to a Mr. Humphrys about how to grow this “useful commodity” in Plymouth Colony. Wiggins also mentioned that Lane had previously been to the Caribbean area. Originally, Richard was engaged to sail a pinnace, a small sailing vessel, to the island of Fonseca and plant madder there as well. But first he was to arrive at Providence, where he would immediately receive lands of his choice to plant madder roots before they dried out and became useless. Lane was also charged with teaching the colonists how to cultivate madder. However, before Richard could do this, he was sent away on a second mission. The company, ignorant of the labor-intensive nature of raising madder, naively directed that Lane's servants (slaves?) “Shall clear ground, plant provisions, take care of the madder, and do all other things according to the usual custom of servants for their own maintenance and the profit of our selves and their said Master.” This is a good example of the ñtoo many irons in the fireî approach that doomed so many of early Providence's enterprises. Without Richard Lane's presence and expertise, the crop was doomed to failure. Evidently, the investors back in London believed that the rich soil of Providence, plus its warm Caribbean climate, made cultivation and processing effortless, a costly perception that was repeated with other experimental crops.

The Company of Providence Island had assigned Richard Lane eight additional servants (slaves?) for a proposed expedition to Fonseca. Today we known that this was a mythical island but in Richard's day it captivated the English, as well as the Spanish and Dutch. It was even rumored to harbor ñthe fountain of youth.î After some debate, the company's directors called off the voyage. Instead, they directed Lane to undertake another mission to Association Island where he was to pick up Captain Hilton and select expedition members for a special trade expedition. Association, known today known as Tortuga, which is north of Haiti, had previously cast its fortunes with Providence. The final form of the Company's directive to Lane read:

If Captain Hilton goes, ...accompany him, to Providence, and after planting his madder to depart with Capt. Hilton for managing the trade, an account of which is to be kept. Preservation, making inventories, and sending home the commodities procured; if of value, to be kept with all possible secrecy. To receive instructions from Capt. Hilton and the Governor and council of Providence and to accompany the goods home if he sees cause. ...in case Capt. Hilton does not go with him from Association to Providence. After having planted his madder, to take on board Roger Floud and other persons not to exceed eight, as the Governor and Council of Providence think fit. To go to the Bay of Darien, with goods for trade. To provide against fear of discovery by the Spaniards, and foul weather. To use means to ingratiate himself and company with the Indians.

Hilton refused command of the expedition thus placing Richard Lane in charge. Assisting Lane, as a guide and translator, was an Indian who had polished his English on an earlier visit to London. Lane took his band to explore the “Bay of Dureren (Darien) [which] lays Southeast by South from cape Catina not far from Porto Bello upon the continent of the West Indies.” One of the objects of this venture was to seek friendship with the Indians in the area, lubricated with the prudent dispersal of gifts. The business aspect of the expedition was to be low key and Lane was directed to determined what trade goods were available from the natives and what English goods they might desire in return. He was granted permission to leave a party of men behind to facilitate future trade and set up a trading post. Instructions to Lane made it clear that those under his command were to take no liberties with the native women and, further, that his men were not to ridicule the Indian's nakedness. The council went on to naively suggest that the expedition could hide in the lee of the “Island called Isle de Pinas” should the Spanish encounter the expedition or a storm threatens. The Company further instructed him to evoke the name of &ldquop;Don Francisco Draco” (Captain Drake) with the Indians, for the natives held Drake in great esteem as opposed to the Spanish whom they despised.

Captain Richard Lane's expedition remained in the area less than a year. The results were disappointing. Unfortunately, the Dutch had been there earlier and the native population was wary. The year before a Dutch Captain had pushed too hard in trying to negotiate the trade of a gold necklace hanging from a chieftain's neck. The Dutchman had been slain by the offended tribesmen. Though the project was a failure, Lane did receive compensation for his troubles. His wife Alice, residing in London, received 10 pounds from the Company on November 17, 1633 for a half year's wages due her husband. A year later, Richard would receive another fifteen pounds for his service at the Bay of Darien. Payment in currency was the exception rather than the rule, for the adventurers preferred to pay their men with indentured servants or slaves instead of coin of the realm.

In 1634 with nothing to show for his efforts, a disgruntled Richard Lane returned to London. Governor Bell had forbidden him to leave the island but Lane defied him and shipped out on as soon as he could. Lane and his friend, the minister Hope Sherrad, engaged in a bond in the sum of 200 pounds to cover his agreements with the Company of Providence. Upon meeting with the company, Lane was asked to return to Providence but he demurred, claiming the governance of the island needed reform. He furthered complained that the company and the colony were badly served. The company, taking the bait, asked Lane to draw up a report of needed reforms for the company to study. They made his return more palatable by agreeing to let Richard's family go with him. Reverend Hope Sherrad's fiancée was to go with the Lanes to bind the minister to the colony. Finally, Lane was also offered a role in any colony established on the mainland. If that event never took place, the company promised Lane that he could return to the England of his own free will. Not content with the company's generous offers, Lane insisted upon an extra 40 pounds to equip him for the return voyage. The company countered with a loan of twenty pounds to ready his family for the journey to Providence. Lane finally accepted.

On February 20, 1634 a special committee made an extensive covenant to Richard Lane, making him a Councilor. A promised was made to Lane that a new minister would be sent and that future costs would be covered. Two days late, the committee met again but this time John Pym, the company's treasurer, launched an attack on Lane. If one is judged by one's enemies, then Richard Lane's stature must have been lofty indeed. Pym was a powerful member of parliament and would, in less than a decade, lead the Puritans into war with the Crown. He so vexed Charles I that the King himself would one-day march into Parliament, accompanied by soldiers, to arrest him. Being previously tipped off, Pym took shelter with friends. Pym's untimely death in 1643 cleared the way for his protégé Oliver Cromwell to rise in the ranks of Puritan leadership.

Pym argued that Lane's demands were little more than blackmail and that sending such an insubordinate fellow back to Providence would be a slap in the face to Governor Bell who had ordered Lane to remain in Providence. Pym felt that the council should not be allowed to become too large and unwieldy and, in any case, only military men should be allowed a place on it. Pym implied that Lane would only increase the tensions building in the colony between the military and the settlers. Finally, he mentioned allegations that Lane had been drunk while on the island.

Lord Saye, the friend and ally of Richard Lane's sponsor, Lord Brooke, argued for Lane. Saye maintained that Lane was an “ingenious” man and would help to offset some of the baser parties on the island. He felt the charges of drunkenness were vague and misleading and insisted that Lane was a “reputedly godly” man. Brooke, Barrington, and Woodcock agreed with Saye. Pym groused that what they were not following the company's charter and at one point refused to have his opinions put into the record. Twice more the adventurers met and each time Pym repeated his accusations, especially regarding Lane's sobriety and his “extortion” of the office of councilor. Finally, he agreed to Richard Lane's appointment but only on the condition that Lane be given a stern admonition to be “an example of a wise and sober conversation.” The ordinary court readily acceded and Lane was called before them. He was then informed of the company's final decision and instructed to avoid all occasions of scandal and to serve as councilor in a fair and impartial manner.

The ship Richard Lane and his family sailed upon was “Ye Expectation,” owned by Woodcock and skippered by Nicholas Reiskimmer, appointed governor of Tortuga and a privateer. The cost to the company for the use of this 150-ton ship, including victuals and mariner's wages, was 110 pounds. On April 16, 1635, the newest counselor of Providence Island, age 38, conveyed his wife Alice, age 30; his oldest son Samuel, age 7; and sons John, age 4; and Oziell, age 3; to Providence. Minister Hope Sherrad's fiancZÿe was also on board. Accompanying the Lanes was a maid. “Ye Expectation” did not leave her first port of call in Saint Christopher's (St. Kitts today) until July 1635. Shortly afterwards she arrived at Providence Island. In August, Alice gave birth to her fourth child and only daughter. This made little Mary Lane a Creole and probably the first Lane born in the New World. She would later return to London and wed William Deny, who would become a prominent member of the powerful Grocers Livery Company.

Richard Lane's return to Providence was a tense trip. Lane and Reiskimmer argued during the outward voyage. Later, in February of 1636, the company made an inquiry into a complaint of Lane's that Reiskimmer had taken goods from him, by force, during the return voyage. To add insult to injury, the captain had struck Richard, threatening to pistol whip him, hang him, “and to make it a bloody day.” No matter how prominent their passengers, sea captains still regarded themselves as undisputed masters of their ships and this was not the first or last time a Providence colonist and a sea captain had such a conflict. The incident between Lane and the captain also mirrors the tensions between Providence's Puritan and military factions that underlay the short history of the colony.

Richard Lane carried with him a letter from the adventurers of the Company of Providence to be delivered to Governor Bell. The dispatch began by stating that the adventurers appreciated the governor's efforts to carry out the company's orders as he interpreted them, but that they approved of Lane's return to London and were now sending this ñhonest and industriousî man back to Providence. The message went on to say that Lane should be given any land of his choosing as long as it was unoccupied. Further, he could plant any crop he deemed suitable. Finally, several pages later, the adventurers dropped the bombshell that Lane had been chosen to be on the colony's council.

New Westminster, the crude settlement that greeted the Lane family, consisted of thirty wooden buildings and a brick church. In 1635 the colony's population was 500 English males, a few Dutch men, about 40 white women and children and 90 slaves. Besides the natural protection of the third longest reef in the world, there were forty cannon to defend the island. These guns were strewn across the island in seven strategic places. Most of these forts were clustered around the bay near New Westminster where the island was deemed most vulnerable. The artillery was definitely essential, for the Spaniards attacked the settlement soon after the Lanes' arrival.

Times were troubled on Providence. Soon after the Lanes arrived, an abortive raid by Spanish ships from Panama gave the company a good excuse to grant privateering licenses. This worried the Puritans who feared the Spaniards would become even more determined to extinguish the fledgling settlement. There were constant financial difficulties and continual friction between the devout Puritans and the more worldly members of the colony and between colonists and military men. The company's officers, who put the military in charge, giving the island's civilian leaders very little clout, compounded these problems. The company hamstrung the colony by insisting on reviewing every decision from far off London. Another thing that rankled the settlers was that there was no private ownership of land. Instead, allotments were made based on the Company's dictates. The thwarted desire for property among Providence's colonists led to an explosion of slave acquisitions. This led to all the problems that attend holding humans in bondage. The slaves of the various plantations were restless; indeed the first slave revolt in the Caribbean occurred on the island in 1639. Though at peace with the English in Europe, the Spanish were making ominous noises; in 1638 they had massacred most of the English colonists at Tortuga. To the Spaniards of the western Caribbean, Providence was “a den of pirates and thieves.” Being Roman Catholics, the Spanish in the area were also sworn enemies of the Puritans of Providence. It was no wonder the officers of the Company were nervous about their investments. So apprehensive in fact, that in 1637 they tried to sell the colony to the Dutch, an arrangement that was squelched by the King himself. Richard Lane, like the colony, was having his difficulties also.

In April of 1638, a large and valuable supply of goods entrusted to Richard by his sponsor, Lord Brooke, was the object of an investigation by the Company. It seems that Richard had not made an accounting of it in a timely fashion. If Lane was negligent, the island's councilors were ordered to seize his lands and property. In July the Company directed the Providence council not to pay him. Lane did write a letter of explanation to the company's officer but its contents have been lost. Perhaps these difficulties were due to a breakdown in communication, for Lane remained in the colony, relatively safe from conflict, for another one and a half years. The company was displeased with Lane for another reason. He had sold the servants allotted him, rather than produce a profitable commodity with their labor. The investors had little appreciation for the unique and difficult conditions in Providence and disappointment with the efforts of its colonists was a recurrent theme in the records of the company. .

Richard Lane was, at least at one point, on good terms with the island's leading military man, Captain Nathaniel Butler, who had replaced Philip Bell as governor. Early in Butler's tenure as governor, he wrote in his diary on March 15, 1639 that he had been a dinner guest at Lane's residence. Perhaps, before relations soured between the two men, there were other dinners, other nights, when Richard Lane's son Samuel may have overheard Butler recount his adventures and hardships on the Chesapeake Bay. Samuel's youthful eyes would have widened as he heard Butler recount his experiences with the Indians. Perhaps the eleven year old overheard recollections of scandalous behavior not fit for a young boy's ears. The conversations would have likely strayed to Butler's controversial relatives, the Claibornes, and their adventures on Kent Island in the Chesapeake Bay. It should be noted that, despite the many clashes between Lane and Butler, that their kin were to maintain connections in Maryland many years later. They moved in the same social circles, were associated by marriage, lived as neighbors and engaged in land transactions with each other. A seed may well have been planted in young Samuel's mind that would flower two decades later when fate would send him from England.

The conviviality of that March dinner was not to last. Later, Butler's diary would mention Richard Lane in less favorable ways, including naming him as the leader of the opposition against his governorship. Butler took special delight in chronicling news about escape attempts by Lane's and Reverend Sherrad's slaves and indentured servants. In letters to the company, he hinted that the two mistreated their workers, driving them to steal their master's boats in order to flee the island. However, Governor Butler did not mention Lane or Sherrad by name. Butler's diary also names Richard Lane, Henry Halhead and John Francis as his most disruptive detractors on the council. He scorned their efforts to participate in military decisions and belittled their martial insight. The views and actions of Lane and his cohorts mirrored what was going on in other colonies at the time and in England itself, where all levels of society had long distrusted a standing, professional army.

In the nine months that Butler was actually present among the colonists as governor, tensions sharply escalated. Butler refers to his enemies as the “Old Councilors,” the ldquo;Congregation” or the “Sherradian Councilors.” This last is a reference to the minister who Butler claimed inflamed the people against him. The governor asserted that Lane and his followers thwarted his efforts to properly fortify the island and build public works and that they had no competency in military matters. He also insinuated that they ridiculed the company's instructions, resisted taxation and plotted to remove him as governor. We do not have the Lane/Sherrad faction's side of the struggle, for only Butler's views were preserved. However, claims of persecution would have been high on their list. Another continual fear on their part was that the Spanish would seek retribution for the large military and privateering presence on the island. For his part, Butler felt that the company needed to give him more autonomy to run things as he deemed fit and the chance to select his own councilors. Lane, Sherrad and their allies also felt autonomy should be granted, but to them not to military men. History has shown that Lane's views were correct, for the only American colonies that endured were those in which the civilian government directed the military, not the other way around. In the end, the two camps ignored each other as best they could. Sherrad denied the sacraments to Butler and his allies and the Puritans simply stopped cooperating with the military. Governor Butler spent most of his time with matters of privateering, settling disputes among captains and dividing up the spoils of war. Finally in the winter of 1640, Captain Butler, without proper authorization, decided to leave the island in order to personally submit his case to the company in London. He chose Captain Andrew Carter, a fellow military man, to take his place.

To the “Congregation,” Andrew Carter proved to be even less palatable than Butler had been. Carter despised the members of Lane and Sherrad's group and was not as restrained as his predecessor had been. Carter, with the aid of his friend, Elisha Gladman, flouted the company's charter and did as he pleased. In one instance, he imprisoned a veteran colonist, named Robert Robins, without trial or charges. Captain Carter seized Robins's property and banished him from the colony. Lane was outraged at this affront to English law and led a determined protest against Carter that would eventually be heard in the House of Lords. However, a menacing event soon distracted the colonists' attention from Robins's plight.

May 30, 1640, an army of 300 Spaniards from Cartagena, the “choicest and stoutest soldiers in the whole [Spanish] fleet,” attacked Providence. It was a day twelve-year-old Samuel Lane never forgot. Richard Lane's family spent the battle huddled together in Warwick's fort, across the bay from New Westminster, as the deafening cannons roared and the struggle raged. This was one of the few times there was any unity among the islanders, for all participated in Providence's defense. Later, Lane, Halhead, Sherrad and Leverton wrote a report to the company describing the desperate fighting. At the time of their account, the colony's harmony had melted away. The three pointed out how God's intervention for his chosen, and not the skills of the military, had saved the day. There is historic evidence to support the puritans' claim. According to historian Karen Kupperman, Butler's fortifications were a credit, but his hand picked successor, Andrew Carter, proved inept and cowardly. Lane and his colleagues recorded a vivid recounting of Carter's slaying of Spanish captives, who had been promised their lives. The adventurers in London met this latter intelligence with great consternation. They suspected that Spain would not ignore such an atrocity for long.

Later that year, Lane and the other Puritan leaders disputed Carter's right to govern, claiming that the company's charter did not sanction Butler's appointment of Carter. Thus Butler's successor encountered a situation that many colonial authorities were to face in America during the next 135 years, namely a desire among the people to take part in their own governing, to exercise the “rights of Englishmen.” The colonists asserted, correctly as it later turned out, that it was their right to choose Butler's replacement in his truancy. Their selection was Richard Lane.

Andrew Carter ignored their arguments and secretly armed “some of the under sort” and had Lane and three others arrested. On January 1641, Carter and his allies formally expelled Richard Lane, Reverend Nicholas Leverton, Reverend Hope Sherrad and Henry Halhead (ñOld Hallyheadî to his enemies). They went as prisoners for “opposing Captain Carter in the execution of his place of Deputy Governor, to which he was appointed by Capt. Nathaniel Butler, who supposed himself authorized to do so...” Sherrad was the island's leading minister and a fiery preacher, and he was highly regarded by the company. Leverton, who was Oxford educated, had been an indifferent minister till he fell under the sway of Sherrad's example in Providence. Halhead had been a prominent merchant in England and he had been the mayor in Banbury, England, the epitome of the Puritan town. He had brought a group of colonists to the island in 1632 and had been a prominent player in the politics of the colony ever since.

After putting the prisoners aboard the Hopewell, deputy governor Andrew Carter took pains to send a message to the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. This missive said, in effect, that the prisoners were no friends of the Church of England or to the Archbishop's “reforms.” The future probably seemed bleak to Richard Lane. Did incarceration in the bleak Tower of London await or worse, execution? Lane, throughout most of his career had luck, and this proved to be the case when they finally reached England. The prisoners discovered that the Long Parliament had met, reversing Archbishop Laud's political fortunes. It was Laud, not Lane, who was locked away in the Tower of London. There he remained until his beheading in 1645 for crimes of high treason. When the company learned that the Hopewell had landed in Bristol, they immediately freed the prisoners and ordered them to come immediately to London to tell their story. The Company of Providence declared Governor Carter's charges to be unsubstantiated and dismissed them “...in favor of [the] considered, and the censure and restraint declared unmerited; they are discharged from all further attendance...” Though the company's officers supported Lane's and the other's position, they admonished them for actions that, in effect, left the colony without the guidance of a minister. The Company reminded the leaders that, rather than confront Carter, they should have communicated the problem to London where it would have been handled in the correct manner. The company interviewed Lane about Carter's execution of the Spanish prisoners and he testified to Warwick, Saye and Mandeville that Carter had put the unfortunate Spaniards to the sword. The investigators decided to order Carter's return for trial and declared that he must be punished if the deed proved to be true. In March of 1641, Lane, Leverton, and the new Deputy Governor, Thomas Fitch, returned to Providence at the expense of the “Company of the Island of Providence.” The adventurers chose Fitch, not Lane, to govern till the new Governor, Captain John Humphrey from New England, arrived on the island. Richard was restored to his former position as “a standing Council for the affairs of the Plantation, Admiralty and Council of War.”

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately as it turned out, Richard Lane's restored position and privilege were very short lived. Unbeknownst to Lane and the adventurers, Admiral Francisco Diaz De Pimenta of Cartagena had invaded the Colony. De Pimenta was outraged when the remains of the May fleet came limping back to Cartagena. He determined once and for all to end the depredations of Providence's privateers upon Spanish shipping. He assembled a fleet of seven large ships and four pinnaces and assorted long boats. These were manned by 600 sailors and conveyed 1,400 soldiers. The Spanish fleet reach it's destination off Providence on May 19, 1640. De Pimenta, learning from the mistakes of his predecessors, carefully scouted out a possible avenue of invasion, before holding a strategy meeting. Finding the east approach to the island impassable because of wind and surf, and discarding an attack on the southwest bay of the island because the English were obviously massing there, he chose to boldly sail right into the harbor under the guns of Warwick's Fort. He counted on strong westerly winds to carry him quickly past the gauntlet of cannon before the English could move their troops north to stop him. The smaller ships were sent in first, figuring that gun for gun, they could match the English. De Pimenta was right; he completely surprised the English with his tactics. After a stiff, initial resistance from the defenders collapsed, Spanish troops swarmed through the town. When the English saw the colors of Spain flying over the governor's house in New Westminster, most surrendered. However, some of the English and their slaves fled into the south where they were eventually rounded up.

Three hundred and fifty-nine years later, I contemplated this last desperate struggle of the English as I sat on the windy, sun-drenched summit of El Pico. My wife, Alison, and I had climbed to this vantage point, the highest elevation on the island, to admire its view of Old Providence. Our tenth anniversary present to ourselves had been a trip to the island my ancestors had once known so well. As I relaxed at the pinnacle, under a ceiling of dazzling blue, I studied the strait between Santa Catalina and the main island, visualizing the vanguard vessels of the Spanish assault. Then I turned to survey the southern beaches, near our cabaÐa, where the English had unwisely planned to thwart the Spanish invasion. My gaze next fell on the steep, forested flanks of the ancient, collapsed caldera that grips the middle of Providencia. The notion of panicky English fugitives scrambling through the bush there, futilely hoping to elude capture at the hands of the well-armed Spanish, made me shiver. The backcountry in Providence can be an unfriendly place for the careless and unwary. There is a species of Acacia plant, plentiful on the island, which is known to the locals as Cockspur. Inside the thorns of this plant reside colonies of tiny ants that swarm upon any unsuspecting intruder, who have the misfortune to brush against these barbs. These multitudes of red ants, cascade out, stinging savagely until they are killed. They must be brushed off quickly if one is to forego a tormenting experience. I had painfully encountered the Cockspur plant on a foray off trail, so I could empathize with any unsuspecting Englishmen fleeing before the Spanish who might have run afoul of this spiked fellow, and its pygmy champions.

The politically astute Admiral De Pimenta, perhaps aware of the eyes of other European powers, spared the English defenders. Even Captain Carter, who had ordered the slaughtered of Spanish prisoners earlier in the year, was not executed. The men were transported to Cadiz where they were allowed to pay for their transportation back to England. The colony's women and children were returned directly to England. The Spanish gained much valuable booty, including 381 slaves, who were later sold in Cartagena and Portobello. They found the island to be well provisioned with corn, beans, bananas and thousands of pigs. De Pimenta garrisoned the island with 150 men and kept the fortifications intact. Along the Spanish coast of the Caribbean, festivals of celebration were called when news came that Providence had finally fallen. As a reward for his leadership the King of Spain bestowed upon De Pimenta a Knighthood of the Order of Santiago.

In 1670 it was the Spaniards' turn to be evicted form the island when the English privateer, Sir Henry Morgan, ousted them. Thereafter, the island once again bedeviled the Spanish, as it became a fortified base for piracy for a century and a half. During that time, the English flavor of the colony was maintained and even the official transfer of Providence to Colombia in 1912 did little to alter this characteristic.

Of course, Richard Lane and his associates knew none of this when they sailed toward the harbor of New Westminster. When they arrived in the harbor, it was the Spanish flag they saw flying not their own. After a brief tussle, boats occupied with armed Spaniards, were driven back and Lane and his friends hastily departed. Leverton claimed, &ldaquo;They killed a great many of [the Spanish] and forced their armed longboats ashore.” Lane and Leverton afterwards composed a report of the colony's fall and sent it on to the company. What became of Richard Lane after 1641 is sketchy at best. The historian Karen Kupperman indicates that after the fall of Providence, Leverton and Lane “careered” around the Caribbean for another two years, surviving many hardships, including several ship wrecks, episodes of near starvation and fearsome storms. In short, they enjoyed luck that was “almost miraculous.” In 1643 Lane learned of the death of his patron, Lord Brooke, This was a devastating blow to Lane's prospects, for Brooke had been an influential friend in London.

The last effective act of the Company of Providence had been returning Richard Lane to Providence. After that, the company's records were closed. The Calendar of State does not mention Richard again till 1657, shortly after his death at sea. In that year, his widow petitioned Oliver Cromwell for recompense for Richard's sacrifices for England and “her great sufferings in the West Indies.” Did these sufferings included capture by the Spaniards or did she return to England in 1640 when Carter expelled her husband? Did Richard return to England before settling in the Puritan colony of Bermuda? After his two years of wandering in the Caribbean, did he join the Puritan forces in the Civil War? The 1640's were a turbulent time for any Englishman, especially in the Caribbean. Not only were the Spanish a threat, but also the strife between Parliament and the Stuarts was boiling intensely and it was reaching all the way across the Atlantic. Richard Lane's fate may well have been bound to that of the Puritan faction in Bermuda.

Harold Lane indicates that after Richard Lane lost the support of his late patron, Lord Brooke, he threw in his lot with the Puritans who attempting to colonize the Bahamas. Bermuda's Puritan settlers sent two ships south in 1644 and 1645 to scout for an island where the dissenters could settle and worship as they pleased. Captain Sayles, a former governor of Bermuda, became leader of this group. Given Richard Lane's earlier travels around the Caribbean and his knack of aggravating the representatives of the Church of England, there's an excellent chance his family and he were among the 70 dissenters and “adventurers” who landed in the Bahamas in 1646 to establish the new Puritan colony at Eleuthera. The following year “The Company of Eleutherian Adventurers” was formed with many of its shareholders being influential merchants and members of parliament. Many of these prominent Puritans had previously held stock in the Company of Providence and must have been known to Lane.

The exact place where the Puritans first landed in the Bahamas has been lost to history, but it is assumed to have been the Island of Eleuthera, then known as Cigatoo. A settlement christened New Providence was founded - a tantalizing reminder of Richard's earlier days. Though the island's setting was uncommonly beautiful and pleasant, the infant colony did not prosper. As early as 1650, some of the settlers, knowing that the Puritan's cause had prevailed in England, began returning to Bermuda. Sayles himself returned in 1657 and became governor once more. Sadly, Richard Lane's remarkable string of luck finally ran out in a violent storm off the coast of Eleuthera. He and his twenty-five year old son, Oziell, both drowned when their ship went down in a tempest, thought to have occurred in 1656 or 1657. I would imagine that the Lanes were residents of the colony, but perhaps they were only there on business for the colony or the family.

After the deaths of Richard Lane and his son Oziell, the Lane family returned to England. Richard 's widow, Alice, petitioned Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector, for the sum of 702 pounds, for recompense for her family's suffering and her husband's past services to England. This sum was not granted but she was given a monthly pension of 10 shillings, as was the precedent in such cases. She was probably grateful for that much. Alice Carter Lane evidently remained in London, where she survived the plague of 1665, an epidemic that sent 100,000 citizens, twenty percent of the population, hurtling into eternity. Perhaps she, as did people of means, fled the city in those dismal days. However, if circumstances had forced Alice to remain in London, she would have put her faith in such nostrums as tobacco, an amulet of toad poison, a sack of wormwood, or mysterious potions such as the “Universal Elixir” or “Sir Walter Raleigh's Cordial.” The next year she also endured the Great Fire which destroyed old medieval London, surrounded on its two hills by the River Thames and the old Roman Wall. Twelve years later she died in London and was buried September 4th, 1678 in the graveyard of All Hallows Bread Street, the church having been resurrected from the ashes of the “Great Fire.” Here she rested undisturbed for two centuries until the church was pulled down in the Victorian era to make way for warehouses. All traces of this historical burial ground have since vanished.

3
A Man of Great Sincerity And Exemplary Conversation

Richard's son, Samuel Lane, born in London in 1628, had accompanied his parents and two younger brothers to the New World in 1635 aboard “Ye Expectation.” He eventually returned to the United Kingdom where he became the Vicar at Longhoughton in Northumberland County, England. The “Commissioners for Four Northern Counties” appointed him to that post on February 4, 1652/53. If Samuel were like most Puritan ministers, he preached long sermons of fire and brimstone and may not have hesitated to point out sinners of the congregation by name. He would have felt it his duty to proscribe the deportment, garments, studies and diversions of his Longhoughton congregation. From his pulpit, Richard would have blasted poverty as a sin and a reflection of one's lack of character and fall from God's grace. He would have extolled prosperity as a virtue, but only if it were earned by hard labor. Several decades after Samuel Lane's death, the historian Edmund Calamy wrote that Samuel was “a man of great sincerity and exemplary conversation.”

During Cromwell's government, Puritan ministers like Samuel Lane had replaced the clergy of the Church of England. After Cromwell's death, regular Church of England clergy replaced these ministers. This is evidently what happened to Lane, for he ran afoul of church authority and was “ejected” in 1662. Two years earlier, Cromwell's Puritan republic had been replaced by the restoration monarchy of Charles II. The weariness of the dismal years of civil war, its cheerless aftermath, and Lord Cromwell's government, combined to create an environment in which Samuel and his outspoken views proved unpopular. Another reason for his defrocking in 1662 may have been a refusal to take the newly prescribed oath to abide by the Anglican Book of Common Prayer or follow the forms of the Anglican Church.

In contemplating his new lot in life, it is likely that Samuel Lane remembered the Chesapeake tales of his father's dining companion, Captain Butler. There was also family precedent for traveling that way, for one of Samuel's kinsmen, Ralph Lane, was the first governor of “Virginia” in the 16th century.³ Having experienced the New World as a youth and with nothing to gain by remaining in England, Samuel chose to immigrate to the Chesapeake Bay, perhaps landing first in Northumberland County, Virginia or possibly Kent Island in 1663. In 1664 Samuel appears for the first time in the records of the Puritan refuge of Providence, Maryland.⁴ He had been transported from Virginia to Maryland under the sponsorship of Thomas Vaughan.

Since 1643, Puritan exiles, known as “Independents,” had come to the Severn River in Maryland from Jamestown and other parts of Virginia. In October of 1649 the Governor of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley, and his Council, determined that Virginia's Puritans must either conform to the forms of the Anglican Church and the Common Book of Prayer or leave the colony upon the last ship of the year. This in spite of English Parliament's 1745 legislation decreeing religious independence in the colonies. Independents remaining in Virginia would face prohibitive fines and imprisonment. Berkeley purposely chose December as the deadline thinking this would sway many Puritans toward the Church of England. The Governor felt a sensible person would shrink from the prospect of banishment from Virginia in the dead of winter. Fortunately for the Puritan cause, Lord Baltimore offered the Independents a haven in Anne Arundel County in Maryland. Berkeley, an intelligent, capable and refined man, loved Virginia but he believed just as passionately in his King. He knew to the marrow of his bones that the ascendancy of the House of Commons could not last and the monarchy and the House of Lords would eventually return to set things right. Berkeley simply ignored the House of Commons. His implacable stance against the exercise of liberty and conscience by Englishmen would eventually flaw his fine record. It also put into motion events that deeply influenced the lives of my forebears who settled in Providence, Maryland - the Lanes and perhaps the Clarks.

Before his arrival in Providence, Samuel Lane had been married to Barbara Roddam, a minister's daughter. Though she died before Samuel's migration, she was still living when he was a minister in Northumberland. Barbara's birth date is not known but she is listed as “under age” in 1632 so it would have been after 1616. It is thought that her kinsman was Matthew Roddam, who was connected to the Butlers and Claibornes and a settler on Kent Island across the Chesapeake Bay from Providence, Maryland. Though Barbara evidently died before 1664, her family's presence in Maryland could have been another factor that drew Samuel to the colony.

Five years after his arrival in Providence, Samuel Lane married Margaret Mauldin, the widow of John Burrage. Samuel and Margaret had two sons and a daughter - Samuel, Dutton and Sarah. Margaret was connected to some of the leading families of the colony. Her daughter, Margaret (by first husband John Burrage), married Thomas Trench, who served as governor of Maryland from 1701 to 1704. After Margaret's father, Francis Mauldin died, her stepmother married twice, one of her spouses was Edward Lloyd. Lloyd was a colonel, active in the Virginia Company and a member of the Maryland's privy council. His family was prominent in Virginia as well as Maryland. Lloyd was a political opponent of Virginia's royalist governor, Berkeley. After the governor drove the Independents from Virginia, Edward and his brother became leaders of the Puritan colony centered in Providence, Maryland.

Samuel appears to have been “a person of quality,” and he rose quickly in the colony. Maryland records shown no mention of him as a clergyman but he is listed at various times as gentleman, surgeon, doctor, and doctor of “physick”. The esteem his contemporaries held him in is born out by the fact that he is listed as an administrator or witness in nine of his neighbor's wills, unusual for any time. Lane was selected to a number of civic offices, including “Commissioner of the new county called Providence.” He was also a Jurist and “Gentleman of the Quorum” and served his obligatory service in the militia as an officer. Samuel had no known medical training in England but his grandfather had been involved in the healing arts. After arriving in Maryland, Samuel seems to have been a protZÿgZÿ of Dr. John Stanberry. A close connection to the Stanberry family seems certain, since in 1671 Dr. Stanberry's father-in-law, Richard Wells, left Samuel the property known as “Breshy Hill on the Ridge.” Samuel was connected with several other physicians, namely Dr. George Wells, Dr. Francis Stockett (kinsman to his sister Mary Lane's husband, William Denne) and Dr. William Jones. Today I suppose one would say they had formed a “medical center.”

Professional, family and friendship ties to other influential families of Virginia and Maryland, including the Butlers and Claibornes, cemented Samuel Lane's place in colonial Maryland society. To illustrate the circles Samuel traveled in, one needs only take note of Lane's trusted friend and “next door neighbor” - Thomas Taylor (executor of Samuel's estate). In 1682 Taylor welcomed into his ridge top home, the likes of William Pitt and Lord Baltimore. The reason for their visit was to iron out border disputes between the colonies they governed. Taylor's father, Philip, had also been the chief Lieutenant of William Claiborne, the nemesis of Providence, Maryland. Claiborne's wife was the half-niece of Governor Nathaniel Butler, the Caribbean associate of Samuel Lane's father.

Samuel and Margaret Lane, their children and step children, lived on “Burrage,” “Burrage Blossom” and “Burrage's End.” These were properties Margaret inherited from her late husband John Burrage. Samuel also held an 800-acre plantation known as Browsley Hall, which he purchased from Francis Hutchins.

In Samuel Lane's day, the settlers of Southern Maryland settled on the edges of the many rivers and creeks that flowed into the Chesapeake Bay. Their frame houses were sheathed with clapboard. On their mud-splattered floors, the occupants spread pine needles that gave off a pleasant fragrance when crunched under foot. Besides his medical instruments, Samuel's most valued possessions were likely his gun, his dog and his dugout hunting canoe. He probably had a boat known as a shallop. This craft was employed for transportation, hunting and fishing, and was indispensable on the bay.

Samuel Lane held the rank of major in the colony's militia. Conflicts with Virginia such as the Kent Island border dispute, and skirmishes with Indians made the militia a vital part of the colony. On January 18, 1681, with war clouds looming, Major Lane made out his last will and testament. Soon the colonists were involved in a series of skirmishes with the ñSinniquosî or Seneca Indians, a blanket term the colonists used to refer to any of the five Iroquois Nations who used the Susquehanna as a route of travel. This conflict would become known as Lord Baltimore's War. Things did not go well. On September 13, 1681, somewhere up toward the head of the South River, west of Providence, Lane wrote the following lament to Lord Baltimore in St. Mary's City, Maryland:

The country of Anne Arrunall at this time is in great danger. Our men marched all Monday night, the greatest part of the South River had been most cut off. We want ammunition exceedingly, and have not the where-with-all to furnish half our men. I hope your Lddp. Will dispatch away Coll. Burgess with what ammunition may be thought convenient. I shall take all the care that lyeth in me, but there comes daily and hourly complaints to me...I am wholly imployed in the Countrys Service. In haste with my humble service, Samuel Lane..13 Sep 1681."

Soon after he wrote these words, Samuel was dead. One can only surmise that he died in a skirmish with the Senecas.

Many of the principles, for which the Puritans stood, bore fruit in Maryland and other American colonies. This did not occur in quite the way the ñIndependentsî envisioned, for the Godly nation they sought became far more diverse then they could ever have imagined. Nonetheless, the beliefs of our Puritan forefathers, convictions shared by Samuel and Richard Lane, created fertile ground for the growth of principles long cherished in American. Concepts such as freedom of religion, separation of church from state and greater freedom in government are rooted in our nation's Puritan past.

4
An Inheritance DispersedSamuel Lane's will divided his acreage at Browsley Hall between his two sons. Dutton Lane, the great grandfather of Wilkinson Lane, inherited 300 acres. To Dutton's older brother, Samuel, came 500 acres. In 1690 Dutton married Pretitia Tydings, the daughter of the planter Richard Tydings, who had died in 1787. Richard Tydings had been the master of Hazelnut Ridge Plantation in Anne Arundel County. In adjoining Baltimore County, Tydings also had owned a 375-acre tract of land known as “Najomie” and a 500-acre property on the Gun Powder River known as “The New Years Purchase.” The latter tract was bequeathed to his daughters Mary and Pretitia.

After Dutton married Pretitia, the couple moved to what their contemporaries dubbed “Ye Great North Woods.” Here they took possession of Pretitia's Baltimore County inheritance. According to the records of the West River Meeting, Dutton was a member of the Society of Friends - Quakers. His mother's family followed this religious path, as did her third husband, Job Evans. As a member of this faith, Dutton would not have believed in serving in the militia or in swearing an oath to any government. His religion would not have endeared him to the authorities at Annapolis. Perhaps distancing himself and his young family from these authorities was a reason for migrating to sparsely settled Baltimore County, Maryland.
Evidently, Dutton had a better than average education and had some connections, because he was a deputy surveyor after his arrival in Baltimore County. In the 1690's, when he arrived at the head of the bay, there would have been much work for a surveyor and his crews. It would have offered him an excellent opportunity to get a first look at the choicest new lands being opened by the colony. Perhaps Dutton surveyed the lands of his stepfather, Job Evans. Evans held a 1,000 tract, “Friends Discovery,” which was adjacent to a 300 acre grant, “Lane's Triangle,” that Dutton had received from the colony. Unfortunately, the promise of all this opportunity was to be marred.

In his thirties, Dutton faced serious financial and legal difficulties that greatly diminished the Lane prestige and fortune. In 1703, kin of his thrice married mother brought several suits against Dutton Lane, challenging his title to land that had belonged to his mother. It would seem that the arrow that may have ended Captain Samuel Lane's life also might have sealed the fate of the Lane estate. Had he lived perhaps his prestige and acumen could have prevented the loss of Lane property and wealth. As it happened, the law suits bled young Dutton and he eventually forfeited all his properties in Anne Arundel County. To add to his woes, he had incurred serious debts, perhaps while fighting his legal battles. Soon after, Dutton fled Maryland for the Carolinas. This is probably why he sold his entire personal estate to Benjamin Hooker on May 2, 1704. Perhaps Dutton was the victim of unfortunate speculations. It was not uncommon for planters to over extend themselves in those heady days or to incur financial difficulty because of bad luck, incompetence or the dishonesty of their factors (business agents) in London. Whatever the cause, Dutton evidently made good on his debts because he had returned to Baltimore County by 1708. In that year, Pretitia and he sold the 500-acre “New Year's Purchase” to Thomas Hooker and Richard Gist. In 1713, the official prejudices against Quakers had evidently eased, for Dutton Lane served as a deputy sheriff of Baltimore County. Though he was by no means a failure, the Lane prestige and wealth were greatly diminished during Dutton's life. It was a common occurrence of the times, for once eminent and influential families often withered and others rose to assume their place.

Dutton composed his will in 1716 but lived till October 1726 when he died at about age 59. Like his father, grandfather, and great grandfather before him, Dutton was to die early. The former two had died under tragic circumstances and Dutton's later years were marred by misfortune, including the loss of much of his property and the threat of financial ruin. At the time of his death, Dutton had only two tracts of land remaining - “Lane's Triangle” and “Hampton Court,” both near present day Towson, Maryland. “Lane's Triangle,” a 300-acre tract he had received from the colony in 1699, was divided among his sons Dutton, Richard and Samuel (father of Wilkinson Lane). “Hampton Court” was left to his daughters Margaret Merryman and Sarah Sweeting. Unknown to the Lanes at the time, “Hampton Court” would go on to become part of a milestone in American industrial and architectural history.
The name of Dutton lane's property - “Hampton Court” - provides genealogical clues. Twenty years after Dutton's death, his daughter, Margaret, and her husband William Merryman sold this property to Colonel Charles Ridgely, the founder of one of America's early dynasties. Ridgely combined the purchase of “Hampton Court” with two other estates to form the heart of a plantation that would, in five decades, become one of the most ambitious industrial and agricultural undertakings in the young United States. Using a huge fortune, gathered by the enterprising family during the American Revolution, Colonel Ridgley's son and grandson constructed a grand hill top mansion. Known as “Hampton,” the mansion is a superlative example of late Georgian architecture. This elegant edifice has been preserved at the Hampton National Historic Site, which is easily accessible from exits 27 and 28 on the Baltimore County Beltway (I-695). This site's 1948 creation became the impetus for the founding of the National Historic Trust. Descendants of Dutton Lane, the Merrymans, still remain in the area and were ardent backers of the estate's preservation. A farmhouse built in about 1730 by the owners who preceded the Ridgelys, possibly William and Margaret Lane Merryman, lies in a vale to the north of the mansion.

Dutton's use of the name “Hampton Court” may hold clues to family origins. At first glance, it would appear that Dutton was an Anglophile, for Hampton Court was a favorite palace and a full time construction project of Henry VIII of England. In the atmosphere of good feelings created by the replacement of the intolerant Stuarts by their Majesties William and Mary of Orange, Dutton Lane perhaps named his holding for a royal site from the “Old Country.” However, the significance of this name goes deeper.

Lynn Hastings, the historian and curator of Ridgely Manor, wrote that Dutton Lane named “Hampton Court” for family connections in England. Sir Ralph Lane, one of the Northhampton Lanes, was related by marriage to Catherine Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII. Perhaps Dutton christened his land “Hampton Court” in honor of this kinship tie. The name “Hampton Court” might also indicate a link between Dutton's branch and the Lane family of Hampton, England. The Hampton Lanes trace their English roots back to the Norman Adam de la Lane, who established a branch of the Lanes in Hampton, England in the 13th century. It has been claimed that they are distant kin to Dutton Lane's Hereford ancestors. Though these two branches of the Lane family appear to be connected, the two families seem to differ in several important ways. The Hampton Lanes counted many members of the gentry among their branch, whereas Dutton's Hereford Lanes tended to be professionals and merchants and were middle class.⁵The Hampton Lanes were disposed toward the Loyalists, or Cavaliers, during the English Civil War, whereas Dutton Lane's Puritan ancestors embraced a creed that the early Stuart Kings found abhorrent.⁶ This would have put Dutton's branch of the Lanes squarely on the side of Cromwell and the Roundheads at the time of this conflict. However to muddy up matters, Rebecca Clark (1842-1931), daughter of Horatio G. Clark and a descendant of Dutton Lane, recounted to her descendants the tradition that her paternal ancestors had been lords and ladies “back in England.” ⁷

5
Maryland to Pennsylvania

Several decades after civil war in the homeland of their forefathers, Dutton Lane and Pretitia Tydings married and began a family, four sons and three daughters. Richard, their third son, was the father of two prominent Baptist preachers. One of them, Tydings (Tidence) Lane, migrated to Virginia and subsequently to Jefferson County, Tennessee. In Tennessee he established the first permanent Baptist Church in that state. Some of Tidings' line immigrated to Arkansas and wore butternut and gray during the Civil War. Dutton and Pretitia's second born son, Samuel, was born in 1700, and was the father of my ancestor, Wilkinson Lane.

Samuel Lane, named after his grandfather, Captain Samuel Lane of Maryland, married Jane Corbin and ten children were born to them. The Lanes and Corbins were connected by marriage in 18th century Baltimore County, Maryland and in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania, two generations later. Kenyon Stevenson thought that Jane inherited parts of a large tract of Maryland land known as “Rochester” from either the Corbin or Wilkinson sides of her family. Stevenson conjectured that Samuel and Jane Lane spent her final years on this land. This land was later passed on to their children who remained behind in Maryland after the widower Samuel migrated to Pennsylvania in 1773.

1736 till about 1743. The Lanes disappear from Maryland records for these years. The granddaughter of their second son, Lambert Lane, claimed that Lambert was born in England during this period. Descendants of Samuel and Jane Lane's third son, Richard, claim he was also born in England at this time. Lambert's granddaughter went on to state that after their return from England, Samuel and Jane Corbin Lane settled near the Susquehanna River about 15 miles from its mouth. This would have been shortly before 1743.

Even then, the area was considered wilderness. Some of the Lane's neighbors were Indians. In the Susquehanna back country, there existed no schools for the children and their son, Wilkinson Lane, did not learn to write. However, he would have become adept at hunting and other outdoor skills, for all manner of game was abundant. In his father Samuel's time, buffalo had still come down from the mountains to seek the salt of the marshes.

Besides inheriting part of “Lane's Triangle” from his father, Samuel Lane acquired two other tracts of land - “Cross's Lot” and “Level Bottom” from William Cross on January 10, 1756. Samuel had the Cross-parcel and an additional 120 acres of vacant land resurveyed as “Lane's Bottoms and Hills,” selling 82 acres of it to Captain William Rogers on February 27, 1757. According to the Maryland archives in Annapolis, some of these properties were on the Gunpowder River, which today forms the boundary of Baltimore and Harford Counties. ⁸

In the early 1770's the Lanes, always restless, were again on the move. After Samuel Lane's wife, Jane, died in Maryland, he migrated to the Juniata River Valley in Bedford County, Pennsylvania in 1773. Many of his children joined him. Sue McElwee writes “Samuel Lane and several of his sons, including Reverend Samuel Lane, moved to the wilderness in Bedford County, Pennsylvania. The ‘highways’ the Lanes trod through Franklin County soon turned from bridle paths, barely wide enough for passage of a horse and rider, to Indian trails, passable only by foot. By the time the family reached Bedford County, the land about them was virtually unbroken wilderness.” After his journey north, the last record of Samuel is in 1779 when he deeded ”Miller's Gain“ to his son John, who had remained behind in Baltimore County. At the time, Samuel also deeded “Gill's Prospect” to his son-in-law, Joseph Hayes. Lane had acquired both properties in 1761 from John Gill.

Samuel and Jane's second child, Wilkinson Lane, had his birth registered in Saint John's and Saint George's Parish, Baltimore County in 1743. Wilkinson's name was chosen to honor his maternal grandfather, William Wilkinson (Wilkerson), an early Maryland settler.⁹In 1770, Wilkinson Lane purchased a farm, known as “John's Desire” from John Plowman in Baltimore County, Maryland. Plowman was no doubt a relative of Jane Plowman Lane, Wilkinson's spouse. Wilkinson's brother, the Reverend Samuel Lane, also had several land transactions with Plowman. In 1773, Wilkinson Lane migrated to Dublin Township, Bedford County with his father and brothers.¹⁰ A year later he sold his last Maryland property to John Williams. Wilkinson settled in Trough Creek Valley (originally known as Plank Creek Valley) west of Saltillo, Pennsylvania. Wilkinson Lane's growing family labored there for almost three decades, carving out a farm from 200 acres of Allegheny wilderness. Lane acquired a large tract of patent land in 1784 and added an adjacent 77 acres, purchased from John Taylor, in 1797. This land was in the hills about a half-mile from the bend in Trough Creek where the stream passes through the boundary between Todd and Cass Townships in Huntingdon County. Historian J. Simpson Africa writes that the Browns and the Lanes preferred the high lands to the low lands. “These [families] thought there was no place like the hills and became pioneers of the hill country, out of reach of the next flood.”

This new land of their adoption was quite different than the Maryland Coastal Plains they had come from. Huntington County, like all of Central Pennsylvania, is made up of long parallel lines of mountains, running from the northeast to the southeast. Deep, narrow valleys serrate these elevations. It was to these bottomlands that the Lanes might have first been attracted. The county was rich in mineral resources - coal, iron, fire clay, white sand and limestone. Though there were no large rivers, streams were plentiful and provided a ready source of energy for mills and early industries. The county seat, Huntingdon, namesake of the county, is beautifully situated among these hills on the Juniata River. The city was founded in 1767 by William Smith, the first Provost of the University of Pennsylvania, and named for the Countess of Huntingdon, a British patron of the University.

During the American Revolution, Wilkinson Lane was a private in the Bedford County Militia. In 1784 he was paid 3 pounds and 18 shillings for service as a member of Captain William Phillip's Company. The date of his tour of duty is not recorded. Thus, while some patriots enlisted in the Continental Army and went east to fight the British regulars, Wilkinson would have been part of the rear guard entrusted with the task of warding off assaults by the Indians. The tribesmen had allied themselves with his majesty's forces and the area's Tories. Wilkinson probably helped with fortifications and participated in an unproductive military mission to capture a fellow militia member who had become a turncoat. Private Lane no doubt was well aquatinted with the interiors of nearby Fort Shirley, near Three Springs, and Fort Standing Stone, ten miles to the north in Huntingdon Town.

In his Huntingdon County days, Wilkinson Lane adhered to the Baptist faith, which was quickly growing in popularity on the Pennsylvania frontier. In August 1794, Wilkinson, his brother the Rev. Samuel Lane, and John Cornelius purchased one acre of land from Colonel George Ashman. The price for the land was five shillings. The acquisition was made for a group known as the Regular Baptists and it was the intent of Wilkinson and his fellow purchasers to provide a site for a meetinghouse. This little church was west of Saltillo, near a stream known as Mountain Branch. It faced the road from Littleton to Huntingdon. Wilkinson's brother, a Baptist circuit-riding preacher, was named in deed as the shepherd for this flock. A cemetery was later dedicated on the site and the remains of several Revolutionary war veterans, including Ashman were interred there. Eventually, Wilkinson, with his extended family, migrated to Ohio. Probably many others in the congregation joined him, causing the church to eventually fold.

The Lane family was thriving in Huntingdon County as the 18th century turned. The first Federal census indicates that Wilkinson and Jane Lane had two sons and four daughters living with them there in 1790. Wilkinson's brothers, Samuel and Corbin Lane, and his nephews, Dutton Lane, Abraham Lane and Richard Lane, headed other Lane households in the area. Several of the Lane family attained fame in the 1815 founding Hopewell Furnace in Springfield Township. Lanes also started the Lemnos Forge in Huntingdon County. Today one can still glimpse this part of Lane family history, for the Hopewell Furnace has become a National Historical site. Two hundred years later the descendants of those the Lanes still people the pleasant valleys and ridges of Huntingdon Co.

6
The Clarks

Wilkinson Lane's son-in-law, Horatio Clark, was born on the Pennsylvania frontier in 1775 and died on his Royalton, Ohio farm in 1835. Horatio wed Rebecca, Wilkinson's first-born daughter. Family tradition has long maintained that the Clark family migrated to America from Ulster, Ireland and was of Scotch-Irish descent.¹¹

The Scotch-Irish settlers brought to America their heritage of political and religious beliefs derived from the ideas of John Knox and Andrew Melvile. Being primarily Calvinists, their ministers in Scotland and Ireland had taught this group the ideal of individual freedom. Endowed with fierce independence and equally adept at fighting Indians, Redcoats and the frontier wilderness, the Scotch-Irish were a major force in settling colonial America. In Ohio and Its People, George W. Knepper tells us...

They were characterized as bold, stout and industrious men, sharp at bargains, fond of religious and political controversy and not strongly attached to government, either of the royal or proprietary kind, and one might add of any kind which intruded on their self-asserted liberties. “In nearly every cabin,” wrote local historian Edgar Hassler, “three articles were to be found: a Bible, a rifle and a whiskey jug. A strong characteristic...was their intense hatred of the Indians for whose treatment the extermination policy...was generally considered to be the proper model.

Another tradition contends that there's kinship between the Fairfield Clarks and the Clarks of Albemarle County, Virginia, also of Scotch-Irish descent. It was the latter family that produced brothers General George Rogers Clark and William Clark. As every Ohio school child knows, General Clark secured the Northwest Territory for the young Republic. William Clark, of course, was the partner of Meriwether Lewis. It's tantalizing to note that three branches of the family of Cornelius Clark, Horatio Gates Clark's brother, have also handed down this tradition, down to the present generation. Likewise, this tradition has been passed on to the descendants of Rebecca Clark, the daughter of Horatio Gates Clark. Rebecca's descendants also tell of Virginia roots for the Clarks and ascendants belonging to English gentry. Rebecca's father, Horatio Gates Clark named his first-born son, “George Rogers” Clark. However, for the moment, this link remains to be established by research.

Horatio Clark, Sr. was the fourth of ten children born to Neal Clark and Margaret Fleetwood.¹² His parents were born in Maryland and it is likely they immigrated to Bedford County in the 1770's. Their journey into the wilds of Pennsylvania was probably much like this description from the pen of J. Simpson Africa:

Some of these pioneers came here from Maryland, over Indian trails that were not passable except on foot or with single animals. They brought their scanty effects on their backs, or on the back of horses and cows, and drove the few sheep and swine that, if spared by the wolves and bears, were to be the beginning of future flocks. They camped in the forest at night, and patiently toiled over the rugged paths by day, sustained by their hopes of future happiness and independence in the homes, which they were seeking.

Neal and Margaret's last child, Brison, died in 1892, thus the span of Neal Clark's children's lives, from the birth Thomas, the oldest, to the death of Brison, the youngest, was 128 years. The family memory is a long one. The obituary of Neal and Margaret's grandson, Brison Houck, relates that, “Neal Clark...being an early settler in the county, had many experiences with the Indians.” Most of those encounters are lost to us, dying with the passing of Neal's great grandchildren but some tales have endured.

One tale passed down from Brison Clark and his sister Sarah Houck, relates that the Clarks first settled in Plank Cabin Valley on what became known much later as the Week's farm. Pennsylvania records show that in 1794 Neal Clark applied for a warrant to have 324 acres surveyed. This was land located in Plank Cabin Valley on a broad sweeping bend of Trough Creek. If he did purchase this tract, he did not retain it long. Plank Cabin Valley is known today as Trough Creek Valley and is named for the stream that lazily meanders in two forks through the valley. The large plateau, historically known as Broad Top, bounds the “V” shape valley to the south. On the northern edge of Broad Top is a prominence known as Round Knob. It's in Todd Township on the Huntingdon County side of the plateau. Round Knob is the place where many of the Clarks are buried and is near the site of Neal's Patent. To the southeast of Round Knob, is the hamlet of Cooks and to the northeast is the village of Eagle Foundry, which is listed as the birth place of many of Neal's and Margaret's posterity.

Family tradition also holds that the Clarks returned to Maryland for several years during “a time of troubles” with the Indians. This is probably true. History records two periods when the tribes of the area were particularly threatening to white settlers. One was during the opening year of the American Revolution and the other was several decades earlier. The Indians of Western Pennsylvania resented the growing presence of whites in their domains. At both times, many settlers retreated from Bedford as the Indian violence escalated. One of these families that fled south was the family of Wilkinson Lane's sister, Ruth. She married Vincent Stephens, whose family was in what is now Huntingdon County as early as 1750.¹³ The Stephens also seem to have returned to Maryland only to migrate north again at a later date. Perhaps Neal's family was in Plank Cabin Valley as early as the Stephens family and both families fled Indian troubles.

A tradition among the descendants of Neal Clark's second-born son Hattush indicates that he was a relatively latecomer to the Trough Creek Valley. A 1979 letter from Dorothy Billet of Newark, Ohio indicates that Hattush was a professional musician, accomplished in violin and banjo. In the 1789, a rich East shore planter, John Musgrove, employed him to entertain at a house party. During the party, Hattush struck up a conversation with Arabella, Musgrove's 15-year-old daughter. She was quite smitten with the dashing 24-year-old musician and a relationship ensued, a match very much opposed by her parents. Despite their objections, the couple ran off to be married. Though they had strong misgivings, the Musgroves presented the couple with a generous dowry, consisting of slaves, silver and Dresden china. Hattush had been the name of the industrious and clever craftsman who built the mighty gates of Jerusalem during the city's reconstruction under Nehemiah. Unfortunately, young Hattush Clark did not exercise the same values as his illustrious Biblical namesake, for he was too fond of both drink and gambling. His irresponsibility soon led to the loss of the couple's fortune and her parents disowned Arabella. Although she had been accustomed to a life of leisure and privilege, she remained with Hattush, and mastered cooking, sewing, cleaning and all the other domestic arts of the day. She also had five children by him. By 1795, according to Pennsylvania land records, Hattush and Arabella had moved into the Trough Creek Valley near his father Neal and his brothers, Horatio and Thomas. Hattush became a carpenter and he remained in Huntington County till 1838, when Arabella and he migrated to Licking County, Ohio with their daughter, Delilah Barrick. ¹⁴

Hattush's father Neal return to Trough Creek Valley before his errant son. He eventually settled near his former lands but this time up on the Broad Top Mountain, west of Round Knob and overlooking the Trough Creek Valley (Plank Cabin Valley). 1779 Pennsylvania tax records inform us that Neal Clark paid taxes on one hundred acres, a horse and a cow. Since there was no land for sale in Bedford County during the previous four years of war, he was obviously in the area before 1775. Thirteen years later another assessment indicated that he had a log cabin, the same hundred acres, three horses and two cows. From 1792 till 1795, Neal was the constable of Union Township (Todd Twp. in 1838) in Huntingdon County. ¹⁵ In his youth, according to the oral tradition of the Clarks of Broad Top Mountain, Neal was a horse trader of note and being smitten by the daughter of a Delaware chief, he mustered together the considerable largess of six horses. These he gave to the chief in exchange for his daughter's hand in marriage. According to Neal 's descendant, Arline Clark, a local history reinforces this by indicating that his wife (He may have had two wives) was an Indian princess.

Neal Clark was one of the first settlers in the Broad Top Mountain area. For half a century and more, Neal farmed and lived on Broad Top Mountain near Trough Creek, close to the present-day village of Eagle Foundry. The Trough Creek Valley is girdled by Sideling Hill and Terrace Mountain. From the valley's southern side ñrises the amorphous and rugged Broad Top... like a mighty Colossus, lifting his platonic shoulders, surmounted by a huge head, with eyes proportionate, watching over...two counties, in each of which he has placed a foot immovably planted - his monstrous head, in unison with his somber aspect, blacked by the smut of countless coal beds...concealing a treasure not of his own begetting.î Descendants of Neal and Margaret Clark lived on the original farm until 1945. One of the old home places, now empty, still stands on Neal's original farm. Brison Clark's son, Algerson, built this farmhouse in 1862 but to later generations of Western Pennsylvania Clarks it was known as “Uncle Resh's Place.”

Uncle Resh (long “a” sound) was Horatio Grant Clark, the son of Algerson Clark and the great grandson of Neal and Margaret Clark. Perhaps he was named after his grandfather Brison's older brother, Horatio Clark, Sr. who migrated to Ohio in 1799. Though Resh Clark was only eight when his father Algerson Clark died, the home place eventually became his when his older brothers left for life-long jobs in area steel mills and coal mines. The home place was on a crest just a few rods up the mountain from the cabin that Neal had build for Margaret and his children in 18th century.¹⁶ Their son Brison was still living in the original cabin in 1880, almost one hundred years after its initial construction. Arline Jones Clark, a descendant of Neal and Margaret, describes the setting:

“[Uncle Resh Clark's place] had a porch on the front that was high off the ground, from which there was a beautiful view of the valley and also it could be seen if any company was coming up the very long lane leading to the farm. You parked your car [or buggy in a bygone age] by the gate and walked up to the house, passing the large barn to the right, where the mules, one gray and one brown, cows, chickens and etc. were kept. The mules were used for farming and ñgetting to town.î You also passed the spring, before reaching the back of the house, which had a small porch, at ground level. There was a stand for water, as it had to be carried from the spring.”

Neal Clark's farm provided a comfortable living for three generations of his descendants. In those years, Clarks who left the farm continued to be drawn back. According to Arline Clark, “Uncle Resh's” three brothers would leave their jobs and families and hike over Broad Top several times a year to help Resh with planting, plowing and harvesting:

Bruce [Clark] would walk over the mountain to his home place and help...Resh. He would get up some morning and say,ñI think I'll go over home today and help Resh. I'll be back in a week or so.î Off he would go to help with the cutting of hay, taking in crops or whatever was to be done at the time. Brice, did the same as his brother, Bruce, and went over home to help Resh with the farm work at various times of the year. Many times the three brothers Bruce, Brice and Ade would go together. They knew a trail over the mountain that was a short cut and came out right at Resh's door.

Clark albums are replete with many photos of family hunting expeditions and reunions on the farm and surrounding slopes. Strong tradition drew them just as surely as the farm's pleasing setting, beautiful view, excellent hunting and recreation. Today the property is owned by an absentee owner who resides in California but I imagine the old place still retains its powers to delight the senses and nourish the soul.

Until their deaths, Neal and Margaret Clark remained on Broad Top. By 1821 when Neal, now an octogenarian, made out his will, his youngest son, age 28, had taken over the farm. Neal made a bequest to him saying, “I do make and give to my son Brison Clark all my Estate, Real and Personal and for that he shall maintain me and my wife Margaret during life situation, in meat and drink and clothing...” Neal died on the homestead in 1824. Margaret's final fate is not known. Their final resting places are believed to be on the farm. A special monument to them was erected in Pleasant Hill Church Cemetery on Round Knob through the efforts of a number of their descendants, chiefly Mary Clark Stapleton. Many of their progeny live in the surrounding areas of Huntingdon and Bedford Counties to this day.¹⁷

I suspect that Huntingdon County Neal Clark is descended from one Neale Clark who was awarded a Maryland patent in 1658 by the “Committee of Inhabitants” for 100 acres of land in Broad Neck, which was located between the South and Severn Rivers of Anne Arundel County. Five years later, this same Neale received a patent of 150 acres nearby which was recorded as “Turkey Quarter.” ¹⁸ Neale Clark, probably single at the time, was one of the original 200 Puritan “adventurers” who left Virginia for Maryland December 1, 1649 upon “Ye Adventurer.” John Cole who is kin to the Coles of Baltimore County, Maryland, an allied family to be spoken of later, also came over on that expedition. So too did John Burrage, the second husband of Wilkinson Lane's great, great grandmother. The price they paid for their religious convictions was banishment to the Maryland wilderness.

A series of Neal Clarks exist in a chronological chain found in Maryland land records. In 1715, according to these records, one Neal Clark (Could this be the same Neale Clark mentioned above in the text or a son or nephew?) sold 200 acres from “Neal's Delight” to John Mobley. This patent, first surveyed in 1701, was located in Anne Arundel County on the north side of the Patuxent River above Patuxent Falls. In 1732 Neal transferred land in the same vicinity to Neal Clark, presumably his son. Horatio Clark's father, Neal, was born in Maryland in about 1740, perhaps the grandson or grandnephew of Patuxent Neal Clark.¹⁹

********************

Imagine Wilkinson Lane's extended family having spirited discussions about the Ohio Country. Perhaps, after the day's toil, they gathered before a hearth and talked well into the night, till glowing embers died. Wilkinson likely conferred with his family and neighbors about how the game was thinning and perhaps they suspected the earth of their farms would one day be thinning as well. The last frontier soil of Pennsylvania was being plowed by 1799 and her pioneer days were at an end. More neighbors were crowding into Huntington County, raising the question of where land for the next generation would be found. This talk would have led in but one direction - Ohio. The richness of the Ohio Country had become an oft-told tale among Pennsylvanians. Thanks to the Jay Treaty, General Wayne's victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, and the resulting Greenville Treaty in 1795 peace seemed to be finally taking hold in Ohio. The way was opening for the migration of a multitude of hopeful settlers such as the Clarks and Lanes. The star of American empire was rising and its direction was westward.

BOOK TWO

The Lanes and Clarks
Establish Themselves in Ohio

1799-1859

1
Early Days
In Fairfield County, Ohio

In the days of Wilkinson Lane's migration to Ohio, a trek from Western Pennsylvania to Central Ohio was a difficult, overland journey of a month or more. It was not taken lightly, and a man contemplating such an undertaking usually sought the company and mutual support of family, friends and neighbors. When one compares names in the 1790 Federal Census for Huntingdon County with very early Fairfield County, Ohio tax records, one discovers that Wilkinson Lane was central to such a trek. In 1799 he was accompanied by the families of his son, John Corbin Lane, and sons-in-laws James Kelly and Horatio Clark, Sr. it is quite likely that Clark, and possibly James Kelly or John Corbin Lane, had gone to Ohio in advance of the others to scout out good land.

Other citizens of Huntington County soon joined Wilkinson Lane's group. At about this time, Thomas and Broad Cole Sr. and William and Neal Clark also migrated from Huntingdon County to Wilkinson's “neck of the woods” in Fairfield County. It is also thought that Lane's son-in-law, Aaron Cole, accompanied the group. Another group of Huntingdon County emigrants was comprised of James Kelly's four brothers, who had some years before joined him in operating warehouses along the canal on the old Stackhouse farm. William Brown, a veteran of the Revolution and the husband of Wilkinson's niece Ruth Lane, brought his family along too. The Browns settled just to the west of Wilkinson Lane. Later, they would move west into Pickaway County.

The trek must have been memorable. Possessing horses, the Clarks and Lanes likely traveled west on the Forbes road through “The Glades,” in present day Somerset County, and on to Pittsburgh. After crossing the Ohio River at Wheeling, they would have traveled to Fairfield County on Zane's Trace, a crude “all-weather” pathway that pushed southwest through the unbroken Ohio wilderness to terminate across the Ohio River from Mayville, Kentucky. When their party broke out of the Pennsylvania forest and stood on the last high ridge of the Alleghenies, what they would seen has been described by author Conrad Richter,“...They looked down on...a dark, illimitable expanse of wilderness. It was a sea of solid treetops broken only by some gash where deep beneath the foliage an unknown stream made its way. As far as the eye could reach, this lonely forest sea rolled on and on till its faint blue billows broke against an incredibly distant horizon.”

The Clark brothers and Wilkinson Lane's family were the first settlers in Fairfield County west of Lancaster. They arrived in the Ohio Country in 1799, the year of George Washington's death. In this year, two out of three Americans lived within fifty miles of the Atlantic and only four roads crossed the Alleghenies. The U. S. Post Office was being established and President Adams was fretting about an undeclared naval war with France. Across the sea, Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of France, was beginning to butt heads with the powers of Europe and the Middle East. Beethoven was writing his first symphony. A perfectly preserved Mammoth was uncovered in Siberia and French troops discovered the Rosetta stone in Egypt. The population of whites, north of the Ohio River, was approaching 40,000. In the northeastern part of Ohio, the Indian tribes the Easterners were pushing aside were showing signs of discontentment, threatening to spoil the uneasy peace that had drawn the Clarks and Lanes to Ohio.

Two years earlier, Ebenezer Zane had eased the way for settlement in the area by blazing his eponymous trail. Zane, sensing the growing wave of settlers that would soon surge into Ohio, had negotiated with the United States government for the rights to establish three settlements along his trace. Zane located one of these sites at the point where his trail crossed the Hockhocking (now Hocking) River near the prominence of Standing Stone, today known as Mount Pleasant. At the time Zane began his enterprise, a mile southeast of Standing Stone resided the exemplary Wyandot leader, Tarhe, “The Crane.” Chief Tarhe, whom William Henry Harrison called “the noblest Indian of all,” had earlier adopted Zane's brother, Isaac, and this also helped to smooth the way for Ebenezer's new community. ²⁰ Lancaster, as it was to be known, was built about ten miles east of the section of land where the Clarks and Lanes were building their new life.

Wilkinson Lane and Horatio Clark, Sr. arrived in Ohio before the sale of Congress Lands. Therefore they would have been “squatters,” not exactly legal, but nonetheless a time honored tradition on the frontier. The squatter's objective was to occupy choice land with the hope of paying for it later when it opened for sale. There were conventions observed in such situations. Early Ohio Country settlers recognized the concept of “taking up land”, which meant a pioneer- built a crude lodging and then planted a grain crop. Another form of occupying land without legal formalities, was the “tomahawk right”, which was established by deadening or blazing trees and carving one's mark upon trees. Yet another form, the “cabin right”, was based upon a settler's construction of a cabin on the land he claimed. Subsequent settlers were expected to buy up the “rights” from the “owner” if they wished to settle on the squatter's land. However, these conventions began to change as the Northwest Territory Ordinance began to take hold.

According to Lancaster editor George Sanderson, a contemporary of Horatio Clark, Sr. and Wilkinson Lane, the two men and their families first chose land now on the boundary dividing Amanda and Bloom Townships in Fairfield County. One of Horatio's Clark brothers, Neal, settled a bit to the south in Amanda Township. Another brother, William, chose to homestead with Horatio on cleared land, or possibly prairie, near an Indian village. The settlers referred to the village as Toby Town, after a Delaware chieftain they had dubbed “Toby.” An early local historian speculated that the actual Delaware name was pronounced “Tomasch.” When the Clarks arrived, the Native American village was a forlorn place, a mere shadow of its former self. Crane Town, a larger Wyandot village, existed ten miles to the east on the site of present day Lancaster.

Horatio Clark's father-in-law, Wilkinson Lane, staked his first claim (now section eight of Amanda Township, Fairfield County) about two miles south of the Clarks' cabins in 1801. Thomas Cole, also from Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania, replaced Lane on this claim.²¹In that year Wilkinson Lane built a cabin west of the Clarks. Wilkinson's son, John Corbin Lane, would later purchase land near his father and the Clarks after selling land in Amanda Township. At about this time, Wilkinson sold his remaining lands in Huntingdon County. Courthouse records indicate that Horatio returned to Huntingdon to represent his in-laws in the matter in 1805.

These Pennsylvanians were well acquainted and would have provided support for each other through their difficult first years on the margins of the young nation's westward expansion. The raising of cabins and outbuildings would have been collective efforts among them and major social events in the bargain. In times of privation, they shared their last scraps of food. In times of plenty, they would have helped each other harvest and process their crops. Most importantly, they would have granted each other the solace of companionship in the lonely wilderness. Ian Frazier's tongue-in-cheek comment about this trait on the frontier was that “there was much solitude but little privacy.”

In the spring of 1800 after their first winter in Ohio, the Clarks noticed that three settlers, whose names have been lost to posterity, had arrived in their vicinity to break ground for corn. By doing this, their intent was likely to claim a tract of land. After planting seed, the newcomers returned south to Chillicothe, Ohio, the territory's seat of government. The men returned several times to weed and cultivate their crop. In the autumn, Horatio Clark offered to trade one of the men a horse for a one third share of the crop and the Chillicothian accepted. Considering the uncertainties of establishing a frontier home, this was probably a wise move. Extra corn would have given the Clark family a considerable advantage in gaining a toehold in the wilderness. This harvest obviously meant more to Horatio then a horse, which would have been of such significant value in those years that it was taxed as property.

2
Toby Town

Horatio and Rebecca Clark built their cabin within sight of the Indian village, Toby Town. This town had at one time been a much larger, native settlement. In fact, Clark planted an orchard on the ruins of the earlier town. Since the Clarks were the first settlers in the area, they were fortunate to inhabit a cleared area that may have been prairie but could well have been the abandoned fields of the village's former inhabitants. Though the men of the tribe would have been hunters, the women would have tended the fields and processed the grain. Land that had been cleared by Indians was often mistakenly referred to as prairie by Ohio pioneers. This presence of Native Americans obviously saved the Clarks much hardship in wresting a living from the Ohio wilderness. While plowing their fields in the years that followed, the Clark family found many relics of the area's former occupants. Such items as human bones, arrowheads, old gun barrels, knives, bullets, pipes, bits of silver and many other things were uncovered by several generations of the family as they turned the soil.

The Wyandot probably founded “Toby Town” in the 1750's. The Iroquois had driven the Wyandot out of Canada. The Wyandot, Delaware and Shawnee were, in a sense, the first frontiersmen in Ohio, for they emigrated to Ohio two or three generations before the Clarks and Lanes. One reason for their appearance in Ohio was the aggressive Iroquois, who drove them west. The second reason for their arrival was the westward expansion of British settlers from the middle colonies. Like the settlers who came afterwards, these tribes had to adjust to a strange land that imposed many new demands upon their culture. During this period, these tribes continued to face incursions by the Iroquois. They also had to maintain a delicate, diplomatic balancing act between the competing demands of the British and French for their loyalties. By the time the Clarks and Lanes appeared, Delaware Indians had joined the Wyandot in occupying Toby Town. Beside Chief Toby, the leaders of the two tribes the Clarks and Lanes knew were Billy Wyandotte, Cherokee John and Standing Stone. Unfortunately their Native American names have not been passed down to us.

Toby Town was located on Horatio Clark, Sr.'s property about 427 yards east of the line that split sections 32 and 33 of Bloom Township, and about 103 yards north of section 33's southern border with Amanda Township. A small stream, the upper waters of Little Walnut Creek, ran through the village. The humble stream's eastern bank was the principal site of the town. Before the final spasms of strife in post-revolution Ohio, and the Greenville Treaty that calmed them, Native Americans had thickly populated the area. It was said by early settlers of the Hocking Valley that a raiding party of whites from western Virginia sacked and burned the original village in about 1795. After the Greenville Treaty of 1796, most of the Wyandot nation withdrew northward to their traditional lands. Despite the village's destruction and the migration to treaty lands, some Indians remained or drifted back to the Clark's locality. A melancholy reality is that Small Pox and whiskey probably also played a role in the decline of Toby Town.

Trade was important on the early frontier, and lead for bullets were among the goods the Indians actively traded with the homesteaders. The Indians made short journeys eastward to obtain the lead and never revealed the source of the lead to the settlers. It was rumored to be near the falls of the upper Hocking River. Today at the falls a wonderfully dilapidated 19th century mill, Rock Mill, hugs the lip of a deep ravine, surrounded by woods. Above the falls, a small, picturesque covered bridge, once seen in the 1985 Hollywood film ñMischief,î spans the gorge. I've always been drawn to this beautiful spot and I suspect the Indians and the Clarks and Lanes probably shared this appreciation. Mills have graced this site since the autumn of 1799. Located a few miles west of Horatio Clark Sr.'s farm, it was likely the first mill Wilkinson and Horatio brought their grain to. The falls itself was thought by the Wyandot to resemble the shape a gourd and thus they dubbed the river flowing from it, “Hockhocking,” meaning gourd in their language.

As more and more settlers arrived, Toby Town faded. By 1807, most of the Native Americans had wandered northward, returning from to time to visit their old home. However, by the War of 1812 the county had begun to fill up with settlers and game was thinning considerably. The Indians did not returned during the war years or after that. For a time, the Wyandot gathered near present day Upper Sandusky, Ohio. There they had obtained, through diplomacy, a haven that would last until 1843 when they were forced to the West. The Indian village continued in spirit, however, as the neighbors of the Clarks and Lanes began to refer to their community as Toby Town.

Thomas Cole, a grandson of the Thomas Cole who succeeded Wilkinson Lane on his original Amanda Township land, contributed much lore about the Lanes and Clarks to Hervey Scott's 1877 History of Fairfield County. Scott described him as an Amanda Township farmer and Baptist minister of the “old style.” In this history, Thomas recounts how the widow Rebecca Clark told him the following tale a half century after it occurred. Rebecca also related this tale to the historian George Sanderson. She remembered that soon after the Clarks and Lanes arrived in Central Ohio, Horatio Clark Sr.'s brother, William, built his cabin near the deserted site of the 18th century Indian village. While digging clay and mixing it with moss or straw to daub the spaces between logs, William exposed the grave of what he took be an Indian chief. Interred with the skeleton were several large handfuls of silver rings, brooches and other ornaments. Horatio Clark's first-born son, Elijah, was captivated by what his uncle had unearthed. He proudly carried some of the bones to show his mother, who was in their cabin about one hundred and thirty yards away. Rebecca, mortified and imagining a disagreeable odor, insisted her son return the relics to their sacred resting palace. I imagine she later had a few choice words for her brother-in-law as well. The following Sunday the remains were disturbed again, this time by a pair of curious brothers named Wintersteen whose parents lived in section 32, a half mile to the west. Coincidentally their cabin was near the future site of the Clark Family Cemetery.

Rebecca Clark recited another story to Thomas Cole in the mid 1850's. Though the Wyandot and Delaware of Toby Town had been fierce warriors, they were a proud and honorable people. After the Treaty of Greenville, they kept their word and did not assail the new settlers. Thomas Cole stated that Rebecca Clark once informed him that, except for occasional drunken sprees, the Indian's relations with the Clarks were friendly and respectful. This might reflect the possible Delaware Indian heritage that Horatio might have claimed. However, Cole relates that once, when her children were small, a group of Indians came to the Clark cabin looking for whiskey. Rebecca found “prudence the better part of valor” and quickly whisked the children away to hide in the bush. The Indians searched the cabin but finding no liquor, grew bored and wandered off for greener pastures. Much later, a shaken Rebecca left her hiding place and returned to her cabin with her children.

Rebecca must assuredly have harbored distinct childhood memories of the bloody raids that occurred all along the Juniata Valley during the American Revolution. The valley's tribes had allied with the British and had been determined to push the newcomers back to East. Rebecca would have remembered incidents of death and captivity that befell unwary settlers in Bedford County, Pennsylvania in those dark days. Many settlers fled back to Maryland or eastward during that period. These memories could well have colored her reaction to the Indian party that came calling in the early 1800's.

Education and religion, were important to the settlers that poured into the Ohio frontier in the early 1800's and both came relatively soon to the neighborhood of the Lanes and the Clarks. This was thanks to the efforts of two brothers, Thomas and Broad Cole. The Cole brothers, like Wilkinson Lane's family, had migrated to Huntingdon, County from Baltimore County, Maryland in the 1770's. The Cole family of America has a family tree that has been traced back to 13th century England and was connected to Wilkinson Lane's family. The circumstantial evidence is strong that his daughter Mary Jane was the bride of one Joshua Cole, the brother of Broad and Thomas Cole. I suspect ties between the two families also reach back to Maryland on the Gun Powder River.²²

Thomas Cole, a neighbor of the Clarks, established the first school in the Toby Town area and paid his son, Abraham Cole, eight dollars to be its first teacher. Thomas's policy was lofty. He invited his neighbors to send their children and pay their portion of Abraham's salary if they were able. If they were short of money, they were allowed to pay when they could.

Thomas, a Baptist, had a brother, Broad Cole, who was a Methodist of strong conviction. All of Amanda and Bloom Township must have been ablaze with excitement at 3:00 PM one weekday afternoon in 1803, for Bishop Francis Asbury himself came on that day to preach in Broad Cole's cabin near the Clark and Lane farms. Asbury, “father” of Methodism in America, was on the first of his sixteen trips to the frontier. Broad's brother, Joshua, was married to Rebecca Clark's sister, so it is almost certain that the Clarks and Lanes crowded into that little cabin along with many other curious and devout souls. It would have been an important day in the fledgling community. Attending worship at our local United Methodist Church, I've picture that long ago day and reflected on how the long line of Methodists in the Clark family probably began.

Back then, the spiritual and fervent Broad Cole would have led religious classes between the widely spaced visits of the itinerant preachers assigned to this broad territory. Broad Cole's son, Shadrach, became a Methodist minister with a powerful regional reputation. Others in the area were inspired as well. George Bareis wrote that an early settler, from what became the village of Groveport, once struggled 12 miles through the uncleared forest to attend a Methodist meeting in Toby Town. After seeking advice from one of Toby Town's Indian residents, he blazed a trail to shorten his future journeys. Perhaps this was the beginning of Lithopolis Road.

The preceding anecdote is testimony to the importance religion held for most of Ohio's early settlers. In my research of this period, I've discovered this devotion to be almost universal among the pioneers. Our ancestors were literally on a first name basis with the people of the Bible. In their every day conversations, they talked about Bible personalities and occurrences as readily as most Americans do about today's celebrities and news events. Their everyday conversations were sprinkled with references from both Testaments. They named their children for individuals from the Bible. Whether the pioneer could read scripture or not, most would know many passages by heart. Religion permeated the way they looked at their place in society as well, to the point that it had a significant impact on the development of democratic ideals in the Northwest Territory. The scholar R. Douglas Hurt, asserts that the convictions of the Presbyterians and Congregationalists (the twin successors of the Puritans) and the new faiths of the Baptists and Methodists “helped foster the extension of republicanism to the frontier - that is, the concepts of representative government, congregational sovereignty, the abolition of hierarchy, [the growth of] personal discipline and the will to protect civil and religious liberties.”

The Clarks, Lanes and the Coles entered the Ohio country at the onset of the Great Awakening. This movement, which lasted almost four decades, witnessed legions of frontier settlers turn passionately to a new sort of Protestantism. The Awakening was more influenced by the New Testament, and its promise of salvation, then by the Old Testament that had so influenced the settler's Puritan ancestors. Remarkable camp meetings and revivals reverberated in the woodlands of Ohio. Entire communities turned out to camp in the woods, spending days listening to the sermons of numerous preachers, sometimes two at a time. The Baptists and especially the Methodists didn't rely on formally educated ministers as more established religions did, thus there were more preachers to meet the spiritual needs of the pioneers. Another reason for the widespread popularity of Methodism in Ohio was its use of far ranging circuit preachers who were able to reach even the most remote settler's cabin. The Methodist circuit rider's diligence became proverbial. During fearsome storms the settlers would say, “The weather was so bad that only crows and Methodist circuit riders were out.”

3
Prairie and Forest
Yield to Fields

There was another, less pious, side to life in the Clarks' and Lanes' neighborhood. The following tale recounts a distinctive Fourth of July observance that evidently occurred in Toby Town, for it is said to have taken place west of Lancaster in 1800. And “In those days,” as Thomas Cole Jr. reported in Scott's 1876 history of the county, “No tree had felt an ax” between Royalton - Toby Town's eventual name - and Lancaster, ten miles to the east. The pioneers of the area were proud of their young country and in 1800 the first celebration of July the Fourth in Fairfield County was held. At such a festivity, the fare may have been rough, but it was in good supply. Baked corn pone, Johnnycake, roasted bear, jerked turkey and other frontier foods were shared, potluck style. There were no toasts but all present shouted, “Hurrah for America!” Pennsylvania long rifles were discharged into the air and a target-shooting contest took place. This popular frontier competition usually saw wooden slabs smudged with ashes to make targets or a wild turkey was staked behind a log with only its head exposed for the marksmen to shoot. After all these diversions, the settlers returned to their cabins that night with hearts full of patriotism.

In 1802, another Fourth of July celebration saw the introduction of “John Barley Corn” to the festivities. A barrel was righted, the head knocked off and cups were hung from nails driven into the staves. In the middle of the festivities came a lone traveler from Virginia heading for the Scioto River bottoms, searching for good farmland. After welcoming him with many libations, the celebrants attempted to convince him that the Hocking was far superior to the Scioto and that the men were the strongest, the women the prettiest, and so on. The Virginian was of another opinion. One thing led to another and a contest to settle the matter was proposed. The champion for the Hocking boys was selected to fight the Virginian for the honor of the two respective valleys. They stripped their shirts off for the clash and began to grapple. The standard rules for such contests were observed, which is to say there were no rules. Striking, kicking, gouging, hair pulling, ear biting, and choking were permitted. The fight continued until the Virginian yelled “enough.”. The traveler's identity is unknown, but it is said that he returned to Virginia and brought back his family to settle in Fairfield County.

The use of whiskey as a social lubricant in the incident above underscores one significant element of frontier Ohio society - there was, by even today's standards, copious consumption of whiskey. For one thing, it was about the only form in which the frontiersman could conveniently move his surplus corn to market. It could be kept for long amounts of time and was more easily shipped the long distances to the East, costing one sixth less than grain to ship overland. Whiskey was often the most common means of exchange, given the scarcity of cash in early Ohio.

I have no record of Horatio Clark Sr.'s and Wilkinson Lane's personal opinions and habits in regard to strong drink. I tend to believe that Lane, descended from Quakers and Puritans, would have been less inclined toward imbibing then his Native American/Scotch-Irish son-in-law. It's been said of the Scotch-Irish that they not only appreciated good whiskey, but that many of them were quite adept at distilling it. Whatever Clark's and Lane's attitudes toward whiskey, they would have been affected by it, simply because the majority of the people around them consumed it. For instance, the reader has already witnessed how it caused friction between the Clark family and the neighboring Indians of Toby Town. Ian Frazier, author of Family comments on the frontier affinity for whiskey this way:

People said that some of the whiskey you got on the frontier - “squirrel whiskey,” one of its names - tasted fine. For years it was easier to find good whiskey there than good coffee. A traveler to Ohio and Indiana in 1827 reported that whiskey was drunk like water. An Indiana county history says that in those days people thought it was impossible for a man to work in the harvest field without the use of whiskey. People drank it from bowls, teacups, and gourds. Most preferred to take it straight, or “barefoot.” It was watered down and given to children. Schoolteachers were paid in it. Lake schooners were christened with jugs of it. Before elections, candidates for public office often left barrels of it in their names for customers at groceries to help themselves. It entered the most casual social encounters. Etiquette required that a person drink, wipe the mouth of the jug himself or herself, then pass. This may sound raffish and fun, but for many of the children who watched the effect of whiskey on their parents, it wasn't. The first generation to grow up on the frontier produced tens of thousands of anti-liquor reformers...

Perhaps this is how it was for the Clarks. When I recall my grandparents and great grandparents on the Clark side, I can't remember alcohol even being discussed, much less any evidence of it in their households. They seem to me, not too far removed, in time and spirit, from the second frontier generation whose cause blossomed into a nation-wide movement that eventually begot Prohibition in 1919.

In the first decade in Ohio, Clark and Lane gathered the money needed to legally acquire their land. In 1799 William Henry Harrison, the future President, had been selected to represent the Northwest Territory in the U. S. House of Representatives. Before this time, only speculators and an elite few could afford land in most of the Ohio Country. Harrison's goal was to make land in the territory more affordable for the common man. In 1800 he pushed through the Harrison Land Act, which went a long way toward fulfilling this aim. Under this act, the cost for a half section of land, consisting of 320 acres, was set at two dollars an acre, plus surveying and land office fees. A $330.00 down payment was expected and the rest was divided into four payments. This was a considerable amount of currency in a frontier economy driven by barter, not money.

Federal records indicate that on November 21, 1808, Wilkinson Lane, then aged 63, purchased the eastern half of section 32 of Bloom Township from the Federal Government. Horatio, around forty when he secured his land, obtained the western half of section 33 in 1811. This bordered his father-in-law's property. These “patents” would have consisted of 320 acres each, and were a half-mile square. A settler named Isaiah Driver had first applied for the patent on Horatio Clark Sr.'s farm, but Clark, possibly with his father-in-law's aid, scraped up the money to buy Driver out, thus preserving his home and land. Wilkinson's patent bore the actual signature of Thomas Jefferson and Horatio's that of James Madison.

Three years earlier, Wilkinson had finally decided he was in Ohio to stay. In the summer of 1805, he sent his son-in-law, Horatio Clark, to represent the Lanes in the sale of their lands in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania. County records name Horatio as the attorney of record in the sale of Wilkinson and Jane Lane's Trough Valley lands (now in Union Township). Wilkinson's original patent, plus the adjacent land he had acquired from John Taylor in 1797, went to Henry Barkstressor. Though it was August when Horatio represented his in-laws interests, and harvest was coming soon to Horatio's farm, he surely remained for a while in the country of his birth. He would have visited his aging parents up on their hilltop farm near Eagle Foundry. Horatio probably talked up the fine prospects of Ohio to his brothers, for several of them would soon immigrate to Ohio themselves.

As the years rolled by, new settlers streamed into Fairfield County. Roads were surveyed and built, villages sprouted, and the forest retreated. Gradually, the name “Toby Town” faded and the area became identified with the fledgling hamlet of Royalton, about one mile southeast of Horatio Clark's cabin. Royalton was the first community established in Amanda Township, Fairfield County, Ohio. The village was laid out in 1810 by Lemuel and Jedidiah Allen, the sons of Dr. Silas Allen, and named for their former home in Vermont. Royalton's first tavern appeared in that year and was run by Lemuel Allen. Stephen Cole, a cousin of Broad and Thomas Cole, who migrated to Royalton from Baltimore County, Maryland in 1811, operated the area's first gristmill and carding machine. In the next two years, three teachers would be employed there - Warren and Sabre Case and Henry Calhoon. Spiritual leaders in the early years of Royalton were Reverend Doctor Hoag, a Presbyterian, and in 1814 Isaac Quinn, a Methodist circuit Minister of local celebrity.

The first two or three years the Clarks and Lanes spent in Fairfield County would have seen them struggle to maintain a subsistence level of income. However, they would have needed to turn a profit to buy their land outright, so commercial success, not subsistence, would have been one of their goals in coming to Ohio. Converting grain to whiskey and hogs to pork would have been two likely ways to handle their surpluses during those early years. The years during the War of 1812 proved to be good ones for the Clarks and Lanes, for there was a ready outlet for whatever they could raise. There were large armies to be fed and clothed. Besides, New Orleans was clamoring for supplies as well.

However, there was another side to this coin. Many of the Fairfield County men folk were called away from their farms and shops to serve in War of 1812. Many citizens still feared the possibility that British supplied Indians would again attack the settlements and farms of the state. Another factor leading to support of the war, was that most of the older generation remembered the Revolution, some having born arms. This meant there was wide spread anti-British sentiment to fuel the flames of war. Horatio Clark served a stint in the war, for an “Oratio” Clark is listed as a member of Ensign Huber's Company of the Ohio Militia. Also serving in this company were area residents John and Thomas Long, Jacob and John Morehart, and Corporal Joshua Cole. The sergeant of the company was Horatio's neighbor, Robertson Fletcher, who witnessed Wilkinson Lane's will in 1813. After the war, the “Indian menace” was gone forever. The newly built military roads would lead many, including numerous children and grandchildren of Wilkinson Lane and Horatio Clark, into new lives. Many of the veterans had taken note of favorable spots to which they returned after the former Indian lands opened up at war's end. There was a down side, though, for a general economic decline in Fairfield County followed. Lucrative wartime markets dried up overnight and several years later the nationwide Panic of 1819 arrived, paralyzing Ohio's economy.

One way to compensate for economic adversity and raise scarce cash on the frontier was to sell land. To Wilkinson Lane and Horatio Clark Sr., land meant independence and security, but it also meant wealth. As they improved their farms, and as more settlers poured into Fairfield County, their land's value increased. This meant they could sell off parcels of their property to obtain cash when they needed it. The money could be used to settle a debt; it could be invested in better land or in other enterprises. Besides, given the technology of the time, a farmer could only productively utilize about fifty to eighty acres of land anyway.

The original size of Clark and Lane's government patents gave them a comfortable economic cushion. Deed records show that Horatio Clark Sr., Neal Clark (Horatio's brother), Wilkinson Lane and his son John Corbin Lane sold and purchased various tracts of land. In fact a Pennsylvania veteran of the American Revolution, David Wright (his son, James, would marry Horatio's daughter, Elizabeth) purchased the west 100 acres of Horatio Clark's original patent in 1812 for $200, so returning most of Clark's original down payment.²³ Another common way to profit from land ownership in frontier Fairfield County, was to rent or lease land. At the time of his death in 1814, Wilkinson was leasing two tracts of land to other settlers.

Economic depression was not the only source of malaise in those days. It was also a gloomy time because of prolonged cycles of community-wide illness when such diseases as Typhoid and Cholera became widespread. In 1820 the Clark family grieved the loss of their son William. The six year old was no doubt swept away by one of the many contagions that blighted the early settler's lives. Particularly burdensome to the Clark and Lane's community would have been the years 1823 and 1824. In the summer of '24 hardly a person in Central Ohio was untouched by an epidemic causing chills and a dead yellow pallor, probably Hepatitis. It was during that dreadful summer, that Rebecca Lane Clark's cousin Dutton Lane died, leaving four minor children to be “bound out.” Ague (a gyoo), a nasty little affliction consisting of fever, usually malarial and marked by regularly recurring chills, was so universal that the Clarks and Lanes wouldn't have considered it a disease, merely a routine part of life. Ian Frazier writes the following about this condition that the Clark and Lane families would have known all too well:

Many of the settlers were pale yellow. Fevers sometimes turned whole families the same malarial hue. Every summer brought fevers of several varieties - dumb agues, which made the jaw muscles clench, and cold chills, which produced shivers, and shaking agues where the sufferer shook until the walls rattled, and intermittent fevers which came and went so predictably suffers could plan around them.

After the Panic if 1819 subsided, the economy began to gradually improve. By 1820, Ohio was the third leading state in the Union for manufacturing and this was reflected in the prosperity of Lancaster, the county seat. The population of the state went from 231,00 people in 1810 to 581,00 in 1820. The county and private investors, thanks to liberal charters granted by the state government, improved roads. Wetlands were drained. An economic boom came to Fairfield County with the birth of the Ohio and Erie Canal and its sisters, the Hocking Canal and the Lancaster Lateral Canal in 1828-32.

4
The Passing
Of the Frontier

With the advent of the canal era, came the true end of the frontier period in Fairfield County. An abundance of new jobs, related to the construction of the canal, provided plenty of work and cash wages. The opportunities for entrepreneurs appeared unlimited. It was a Godsend for Horatio Clark, for the price of his wheat rose immediately from 25 cents a bushel to $1.00. Prices for other farm products increased in the same ratio. The nearby canal communities of Canal Winchester and Carroll thrived and provided easy access points to new markets for the excess wheat, corn and cattle raised by the Clark and other area farmers.

While subduing their new land and working to make a comfortable niche for themselves, nine children were born to Rebecca and Horatio Clark, Sr. - four daughters and five sons. Eight lived to maturity and married, unusual for the frontier. Three of their four surviving sons - Horatio Gates (Horatio Jr.), Wilkinson and Elijah - lived out their lives in Fairfield County. Their son Cornelius (Neal) Clark migrated from Fairfield County to Hancock County at the age of sixty. Their daughters, Elizabeth, Mary, Hannah, and Rebecca all married local men and still resided in Fairfield County in 1835. Mary married George Weaver in 1820 and they migrated to Kosciusko County, Indiana where she died in 1872. The fate of Horatio and Rebecca's other three daughters is unknown.

Wilkinson Lane died early in the winter of 1814 at the age of seventy. Lane, obviously a pious man, devoted a good part of his will declaring his confidence in the Hereafter. Lane then went on to thank God for the good life he had been blessed with. He referred to the following children in his will: his sole surviving son, John Corbin Lane and daughters Rebecca Clark, Rachel Barr and Elizabeth and Mary. Wilkinson also refers to Horatio Clark and James Kelly as sons-in-law and trusted friends, selecting them as executors of his estate. Horatio Clark, Sr. died in the spring of 1835, in his mid-sixties. Sixteen years later, Lancaster editor, militia leader, Fairfield County Sheriff and Ohio legislator, George Sanderson wrote the following about Clark and his father-in-law, words that would have been fitting obituaries: “...they lived long lives of usefulness, not only to themselves and community, but to the new country of their adoption...”

Horatio Clark, Sr. and Wilkinson Lane's final journeys were probably on the same sturdy Conestoga wagons that had once brought them to Fairfield County. After the tailgate was let down, their caskets, made from simple planks of walnut or cherry, doweled together and lined with cambric or muslin, would have been lifted high onto the wagon bed. Deceased and mourners alike would have ridden the half-mile to the Clark Cemetery. The coffins would have been varnished or oiled and would have cost about $6.00. The last duty of the loved ones was to order an inscription of appropriate sentiments upon a smooth limestone marker and then await its delivery from the carver.

In his will, Horatio Clark, Sr. bequeathed two hundred and seventy acres to be divided among his widow Rebecca and two of his four sons, Wilkinson Clark and Horatio Gates Clark. Sons Elijah and Cornelius are also mentioned in the will, along with daughters Elizabeth Wright, Mary Weaver, Rebecca Cherry and Hannah Fickle. That Horatio and Rebecca Clark realized their dream of prospering on the frontier is evident in the inventory of Horatio's estate, a complete record of their holdings in the spring of 1835. It is not only a fascinating look at the worldly goods of the Clarks but also an intriguing glance at the life-style of rural Ohio in the 1830's. By the standards of the time, they would have been considered well off. According to the estate listing, they had already sown 21 acres of wheat and 6 acres of rye. The Clarks owned 46 hogs, 3 sows with 10 piglets, two mares with colts, a dun horse, 4 yearling steers, two yearling heifers, one yearling bull, 3 cows with calves and two goats. Their smoke house was replete with 14 bacon hams, 15 bacon shoulders, 2 bacon fllitches and a small lot of beef. The granary still held 30 bushels of wheat and also “pieces” of rye and corn. The larder contained one barrel each of potatoes, pickles, and vinegar.

When Rebecca and Horatio Clark, Sr. first came to Bloom Township, a visitor to their cabin could have taken in all their possessions with one fleeting glance. There would have been no cupboards and only a few pieces of hand-made furniture. In 1835, according to the Horatio's estate inventory listing items Rebecca requested for personal use, she could have proudly shown visitors a corner cupboard with china and a fall leaf table with Windsor chairs. She also had two spinning wheels, the small one for flax and the larger for wool. Upon these, she would have toiled many hours practicing the elegant, now long vanished, textile art. Rebecca also kept a cobbler's bench upon which she would have fashioned footwear from cowhide or calfskin treated by the local tanner. Though Rebecca's husband and sons held sway in the fields and in hunting and fishing, she would have been mistress of the home and responsible for clothing and shoeing her family. There was a rocking chair she occupied when she took up her needles and yarns in the evenings. In her bedchamber, was a large bedstead with feather mattresses and colorful quilts, a chest, a bureau and a small stand. In addition, the appraisers also decided to put aside for Rebecca, “two beds and bedding...two kettles, one cow, fifteen dollars worth of kitchen furniture, one tub of meat, ten bushels wheat in stack more or less, one barrel with vinegar, one third of nine acres of wheat on the east side of the meadow of Pratt's sowing, also twenty-five dollars for other necessaries such as tea and coffy leather shoe making and hireing a girl and likewise four hogs.”

One of the more intriguing entries in Horatio Clark's estate inventory is the listing of “one old windmill” It was portable enough to be regarded as a possession rather than an outbuilding. I suppose a mill of that size was considered nothing more than a machine with a covering. It may have been employed to saw wood, or possibly grind grain during the dry spells of summer when more conventional mills in the area were useless because of low water. Windmills to draw up water were popular in America only after 1850. I suspect this devise was fashioned by Horatio in the early days of settlement. Conceivably, it owed its existence to a provision in the Harrison Land Act of 1800 that gave squatters, such as Clark had been, the “preemption” right to purchase the land they had improved, if they had built a mill. Such a windmill, with its wooden cogs, gears and vanes, would have definitely required great skill. The eclectic collection of tools put on the auction block indicates that Horatio Clark was a skilled jointer. Perhaps he passed on a love of craftsmanship, as well as his genes, to his great grandson John H. Clark and John H. Clark's son Fred. Both were accomplished carpenters.

In the two and a half decades that followed Horatio Clark's death, the remainder of his generation passed from this life as Central Ohio lost all vestiges of its pioneer past. Neal Clark, Horatio's brother, died in Amanda Township in 1844.²⁴ Horatio's brother-in-law, neighbor and friend, John Corbin Lane, preceded Clark in death a decade earlier. Horatio's brother-in-law, James Kelly, survived him by only two years. What became of Horatio's brother, William, is not certain.

There is no mention of William Clark in Fairfield County records after 1816. He may well have died at about this time, for Fairfield County records show that in 1817 a child named William Clark, perhaps a son, was bound out to a Daniel Hutson. In the parlance of the day “bound out” meant to give away one's child to a farmer. Destitute widows, with large families, some times had to resort to such desperate decisions. In return for their labor, the child would receive room and board. A widow named Eliza Clark is listed as a neighbor of Horatio Clark in the 1820 census. It is probable that she is William's widow.

Rebecca lived on over two decades more, surviving most of the early pioneers of the area and assuming an esteemed position in her community. Her longevity is probably one of the reasons so much of the Clark and Lane story has come down to us from their early years in Fairfield County. When George Sanderson prepared the first history of the county, he evidently interviewed her. She must have been an energetic woman well into her sixties, because one of the items she held back from her husband's estate auction, for her personal use, was a women's riding saddle. The last mention of Rebecca is in her son Wilkinson Clark's will, probated in 1859. Rebecca's name is not found in the 1860 census, when she would have been about eighty-nine. Perhaps she was living with her late son's widow, Mary Clark. The true date of Rebecca's death lies obscured on a weathered headstone lying in a ditch a half-mile west from where her cabin once stood.

The Clark Family Cemetery had vanished according to Lancaster journalist Charlie Goslin, an authority on such matters in Fairfield County. After my conversation with Mr. Goslin, I decided to try to find the graveyard during a 1977 visit to Canal Winchester. I browsed through maps at the Court House and consulted several county histories before starting out. With some good luck, I managed to locate it at my first stop - the Bloom Township farm of Barney Rager. As I eased my Ford into the lane of his prosperous farm, Mr. Rager, easily in his seventies and still working the soil, emerged from one of his barns. He didn't seem surprised by my inquiry, as if he knew some pilgrim would eventually turn up to ask about the long neglected little cemetery on his property. Yes, he said, there had been an old graveyard on his farm, though he couldn't guess who lay buried there. Mr. Rager went on to say that in the 1950's a pair of youthful vandals, whose parents rented a house nearby, had knocked all the tombstones to bits. The Ragers later moved the stones to an adjoining ditch so the ground could be plowed.

On that bright August day, Barney Rager led me, brimming over with expectancy, to the final resting place of many Clarks and Lanes. It was on a gentle rise of land covered with a robust corn crop in what would have been the southeast corner of Wilkinson Lane's patent. How appropriate, I thought to myself, corn would have been the first thing they would have planted all those years ago! Among the confusion of broken and abandoned slabs in the ditch, I immediately saw Horatio Clark's marker. It was completely intact with his name still legible, though the dates couldn't be read. A tracing with crayon and paper might have helped decipher the legend, but I never returned to do this. Heaped next to Horatio's tombstone were those of his infant granddaughter, Ruth, and his young son, William. After failing to find the markers of Wilkinson Lane or his daughter Rebecca Clark in the debris of illegible and damaged tablets, I grew pensive and I walked away from the dismembered stones.

As we returned to my car, Mr. Rager recalled that many years previous, several elderly ladies from Ashville, a village ten miles to the west in Pickaway County, would occasionally come to pay their respects at the cemetery. It meant little to me then, but now I understand that these women were probably descendants of Cornelius and Eliza Clark. A number of them settled in Ashville before the Civil War. As I drove back to Canal Winchester, a plan began to form in my mind.

So it was that the next day, my curiosity whetted and my time in Ohio almost finished, I stopped in Royalton. Playing a hunch, I asked at the general store for the name of the oldest citizen in town. Finding him to be living a few yards away, I walked over and knocked on the door of Mr. Walt, a bantam of a man in his eighties, spry, with an erect posture and a lively intelligence in his eyes. After I introduced my genealogical interests, and myself he informed me that he could recall no Lanes and only one Clark family from his youth. The Clarks of whom he spoke were Van Buren Clark and his son John. Walt went on to say that in the early 1900s, the pair operated a confectionery store and billiards parlor in Lithopolis, which he frequented. It was quite popular with the youth of town, he said with a smile. Mr. Walt suggested I contact John Wilson, the historian of Lithopolis. Wilson's parents, I was to discover, had purchased the Clark farm from the last descendant of Horatio Clark to own it, Van Buren Clark. John Wilson put me in touch with Van Buren Clark's granddaughter, Helen Self of Columbus, Ohio.

When I reached Helen by telephone, she recalled crossing fields with her mother, Myrtle Tipton Clark, to visit the fenced Clark cemetery in the 1920s. She emphasized that at that time, all the headstones were standing with their inscriptions still legible. Helen also mentioned that there was another family (possibly her mother's kin - the Hickles) graveyard on a rise known as Nigger Hill, about a mile and a half due east. It's located on the west side of Amanda Northern Road across from College View Estates. At the time of my conversation with Helen, it was tucked between two properties owned by the Speakmans.

Helen Self, the great granddaughter of Cornelius Clark, was immensely helpful to me in straightening out the relationships of the Clark family. Helen confirmed that “Neal” was the accepted nickname in the family for Cornelius, and that “Resh (long “a”)” was the nickname used for Horatio. Cornelius married Eliza Stephens and they lived on the farm adjacent to Cornelius's brother, my ancestor Horatio Gates Clark. It appears that Cornelius and Eliza had holdings in Amanda Township as well, including a single lot in Royalton.

In 1864, Cornelius and Eliza Clark sold their farm to Andrew Peters, who would later gain local prominence as a breeder of cattle. They joined many of their children in migrating to yet another Amanda Township - this one in Hancock County, Ohio. Cornelius and Eliza purchased the farm of Daniel Beck, an early settler of Hancock County. Eighteen years later in December of 1882, Eliza died. Cornelius, an intelligent and vigorous octogenarian according to one contemporary, passed the farm on to his son, Reverend Luther C. Clark. Cornelius then took up residence with his widowed daughter in Van Lue. After living a long life, covering most of the 19th century, Cornelius died August 3, 1892 at the age of 88. He was laid to rest in Zion Bloom Cemetery beside Eliza, his wife for almost sixty years.²⁵

Reminders of the Clark legacy still survive as the 200th anniversary of their migration to Fairfield County approaches. In a 1979 conversation with me, John Wilson remembered his parents recounting that the kitchen of John's boyhood home had originally been the Clark's cabin. According to Helen Self, the larger structure was eventually demolished. The Clark cabin that formed the kitchen, however, was carefully taken apart and reassembled at a campground on Groveport Pike, west of Canal Winchester. My sister, Nikki Hoffman, informed me recently that the property upon which the cabin now stands is up for sale, so perhaps its days are numbered.

One can easily find the original half section of Horatio Clark by proceeding southeast from Lithopolis on Lithopolis road. Take a right at Sitterly Road and follow this north/south road until it hooks into a dead end. There one sees a house once owned by Clark descendants standing in the middle of Horatio Clark's original 1811 patent.

Branches of the families of Horatio Clark Senior and Wilkinson Lane still live in the Fairfield County area. Wilkinson's grandson John Lane, a Bloom Township barrel maker, had descendants who resided in nearby Canal Winchester. These Lanes numbered among their ranks attorneys, bankers, businessmen, a mayor and even a would-be thespian.²⁶ A number of second and third generation Clarks married Wrights, who were an early pioneer family of Canal Winchester. Numerous third generation Fairfield County Clarks and Lanes moved to the northwestern part of Ohio, especially Hancock County, as did their cousins from the Brown and Cole families.

Many later generations migrated west to the plains, and some on to California. Wilkinson Lane's grandson, Jesse, moved from Central Ohio to Shelbyville, Illinois where he might have rubbed elbows with an up-and-coming lawyer who rode the Seventh Illinois Judicial Circuit, stopping often in Shelbyville. His name...Abe Lincoln. Toward the end of our nation's pioneering period, Jesse's son, Samuel Clayton Lane, became one of the founding fathers of Carson City, North Dakota. In this way, the Lane saga paralleled the course of our nation's westward expansion, beginning with its 17th century origins on the east coast and ending with the frontier's waning as the 19th century closed.

In succeeding volumes, brief accounts will relate what happened to many of those mentioned above as well as their kinsmen. Their life histories are by no means always brimming over with accomplishment and felicity. At times, their stories contain war, financial ruin, divorce, and other calamities. Having experienced several “calamities” in my own life, I can empathize with their foibles and failings. I've come to understand that their imperfections in the past, and ours in the present, bind us together in humanity, as well as family.

List of Appendices

A. The Clark Patent Passes to the Descendants of Cornelius Clark (son of Horatio Clark, Sr.)

B. The Siblings of Wilikinson Lane

C. Lane Origins - Another View

D. Will of Cornelius Clark, Father of Horatio Clark, Sr.

E. Will and Inventory of Horatio Clark, Sr.'s Estate

F. Clark Deed Records for Fairfield County, Ohio

G. The Will of Wilkinson Lane

H. Tidence Lane - First Cousin of Wilkinson Lane - (A Southern Branch of the Lane Family)

I. Samuel Clayton Lane Great Grandson of Wilkinson Lane

J.ÊSamuel Clayton Lane Great Grandson of Wilkinson Lane

Appendix A

The Clark Patent Passes To the Descendants of Cornelius Clark
(Son of Horatio Clark, Sr.)

As to how the original patent of Horatio Clark, Jr. passed from Clark hands, I'll give a brief, but I hope not to convoluted, account. You may want to skip this section if reading legal documents give you a headache! Remember Horatio Clark, Sr.'s 1835 will? He divided his land between his widow and two of his sons, Horatio G. and Wilkinson. In 1874, Horatio G., recently widowed, willed his part of the 1835 bequest to his children. One of the children was my great, great grandfather - the newly minted Civil War veteran - George R. Clark. He was mentioned in the introduction. George and his sibling's children sold their inheritance within the year to their cousin, Ervin Clark.

Ervin and Van Buren Clark

Ervin Clark first appears in the 1840 Federal census as part of his grandmother Rebecca Clark's household. She was then sixty-nine. Ervin was the son of Elijah Clark, Rebecca's youngster who was a central figure in the tale of the Indian burial ground. In 1850 the Federal census lists Ervin as a part of his Uncle Wilkinson Clark's household.

After examining wills, marriage and census records, two things seem likely. One scenario is that Ervin's father, Elijah Clark died in the 1839 (the last record of him is a deed from that year) and his widow, Polly Drake, remarried and moved west. Ervin Clark, then a teenager, chose to remain behind with his grandmother, Rebecca Clark, who lived, adjacent to Wilkinson and Mary Clark. Second, perhaps Polly and her husband Elijah both died prior to the 1840 census, leaving Ervin an orphan.

Shortly before 1850, as Rebecca Clark neared eighty, she evidently turned her share of the farm over to her son Wilkinson Clark. At that time Ervin and she also moved in with Wilkinson and Mary. In 1859, Ervin inherited a part of his Uncle Wilkinson Clark's 1835 share of the original Clark patent. In 1864, the bachelor Ervin turned to his twenty-six year old cousin, Van Buren Clark, known as “Van,” to help him run the farm. By that time, Van had married Mary Hickle and had two sons - Ervin and Daniel. The family had also moved to Hancock County, but Van returned to help his cousin for almost a decade. Eventually in the 1870's, Van's growing family obliged him to moved back to a small farm in Hancock County, where many other sons and daughters of Cornelius and Eliza Clark had migrated. This was about the time that Ervin bought Horatio Gates Clark's 1835 share from my great, great grandfather and his siblings. In effect, Ervin had restored the old Clark patent to about its original size.

The Farm Passes from Clark Hands

Ervin Clark did not forget his cousin, for in 1883, at Ervin's death at the age of 59, he willed the old Clark spread to Van Buren. Upon hearing of the bequest, Van loaded his family and possessions into a wagon and headed back to Fairfield County. Twenty-seven years later, Van Buren's wife, Mary, died. This prompted Van, now seventy-two, to quit farming and, as we have seen, sell the land to John Wilson's parents. Consequently, the original land passed from Clark ownership after 111 years.

After selling the farm, Van Buren Clark became partners with his son in the confections shop and pool parlor in which Mr. Walt consumed some of his youthful hours. The partnership between Van Buren and his son John was short lived. John died soon after the formation of the business and Van Buren continued on as sole proprietor. Van eventually married John's widow, Myrtle Tipton Clark, who was the mother of the previously mentioned Helen Self. Van Buren retired to Columbus, where he died in 1926 at the age of 84. He was buried in Amanda Township Cemetery in Fairfield County.

Appendix B

The Siblings of Wilikinson Lane

For readers who are among Wilkinson Lane's descendants, I've included this brief treatment about his brothers and sisters. Wilkinson's parents, Samuel and Jane Lane, followed the Biblical injunction and were fruitful, as were many of his siblings. It would have interrupted the flow of Wilkinson Lane's story to talk of all his siblings in the main text. So for those of Wilkinson's line to understand his life in an episodic manner, I removed this information to this appendix. I've noticed in other branches of my family that right about Wilkinson's time, the trend is for very large families. Quite possibly the arduous and dangerous work involved in first coming to this continent and establishing a toehold had slackened enough to permit these windfalls of children. One caution though, there are no actual church or Bible records verifying these individuals as children of Jane and Samuel Lane. However, familiar family names such as Dutton, Richard, Samuel, or Corbin, land records and migration patterns indicate a definite sibling/parental relationship.

Reverend Samuel Lane and Descendants:

“Go, Labor On; spend and be spent,
Thy joy to do the Father's will;
It is the way the Master went;
Should not the servant tread it still?
Toil on, faint not, keep watch and pray,
Be wise the erring soul to win;
Go forth into the world's highway,
Compel the wanderer to come in.”

The words from this old hymn by Horatio Bonar describe the principles of Reverend Samuel Lane quite well. He spent most of his adult life as a preacher and missionary on the Pennsylvania frontier, launching at least five churches in his lifetime. Rev. Lane was born February 8, 1736 in Saint Paul's Parish in Baltimore County, Maryland, the first son of Samuel Lane, II and Jane Corbin. He may be the most prominent of Wilkinson's siblings; he was certainly the most prolific, having sired 21 children in his long wife.

Reverend Lane first put down roots in what is now Lawndale, Maryland. At the time, Lawndale was in Baltimore County. Today Lawndale is on the Carroll County side of the boundary between the two counties. In 1770 he and several others were deeded “General Baptist Purchase” by John Plowman so that a church might be established. It is thought by this time, he was already a Baptist preacher. In the next four years he acquired six more tracts of land, totaling more than 223 acres. A pattern of buying and selling Baltimore County, Maryland holdings persisted up until 1799, even after he moved to what became Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania in 1773. His first home in Bedford County, Pennsylvania was located between Three Springs and Saltillo. Today this is in the very southeast of Three Springs. The farm itself is known today as Fikes Hill and may be reached by going up a dirt road. There is still a Baptist Church nearby.

Reverend Lane is first mention as a minister in Bedford County, Pennsylvania. In Ethian's Journal for Sunday August 27, 1773, it was noted that Samuel was in charge of the flock of the Shirley Baptist Society. Samuel settled in an area where two other communities besides Three Springs would arise, Shirleysburg and Orbisonia. Shirleysburg had been the site of a French and Indian War era fort that also saw service in the American Revolution. Orbisonia, founded by William Orbison of Huntingdon, became the site of several furnaces and a forge and had large supplies of ore and excellent sources of waterpower.

As well as clearing land and building a log home, Rev. Lane blazed trails through the unbroken wilderness to preach the Gospel to pioneers all through the area. According to historian, J. Simpson Africa, Lane preached in homes and clearings in visits that were ‘cordial and sincere interchanges of heartfelt civilities...anticipated with pleasure and remembered without regret.’ By 1775 he had organized a church on a small wooded knoll about two miles south of Rockhill Furnace, near the Aughwick Creek, a branch of the Juniata River. Lane continued to be the leader of this flock but eventually turned his energies toward the direction of the Trough Creek Valley.

Here, west of his first church and across the ridgeline that boasts Broad Top and Terrace Mountains, Samuel Lane established the Huntingdon Baptist Church. Initially the congregation met in the home of Jacob Dean. This would have been about 3 miles from Cassville. M. S. Lytle writes in History of Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania that Lane “was a man of more than ordinary energy and public spirit, giving several lots of land in and adjacent to the township for church and burial purposes, some of which are still used in accordance with his design. From him are descended the Lanes of Springfield, Clay and Shirley Townships.”

The Pennsylvania Archives series indicates that during the Revolution, Reverend Samuel served with the Bedford County Militia. This would indicate that the Quaker roots of the Lanes were evidently shed by the time of Samuel's majority. Samuel, if he was like his brother Wilkinson, could not read or write. However, the Baptist Church did not require its preachers to be educated and often permitted a ‘gifted brother’ to carry the word into the wilderness.

One Rufus Lane, who lived in a cabin several miles from Rev. Lane's first church near Rockhill Furnace, claimed that its cemetery, called the Jordan Cemetery, contained the grave of Samuel's slave. This slave appears in the household of Rev. Samuel Lane in the 1790 Federal Census. The slave, whose name is unknown, accompanied Samuel on his circuit, as he preached throughout the countryside. Reverend Samuel Lane's slave may have formerly been the property of a Mr. Hawn, who was a neighbor of the Lanes. According to one family tradition, Hawn's daughter was willed the slave upon the death of her mother but did not wish to be a slave owner. However, rather then free her slave, she traded him to Samuel for a horse. Another tradition claims that a neighbor, one Dorcas Vandevender Jacobs, owned the slave. The story goes that the slave was part of Dorcas's dowry. Dorcas did not care for the slave's disposition and traded him to Rev. Samuel for a horse and a saddle.

Despite the aversion many frontiersmen held toward slavery, this institution took root in western Pennsylvania and lasted longer there than in any other part of the Keystone State. Even so, most western Pennsylvanians could not afford slaves. Slavery simply did not “turn a profit” in frontier Pennsylvania and many of its slaves were servants of the relatively affluent. Reflecting on the Reverend Lane's calling and his status as a slave owner, it has been claimed that in the late 18th century, the Pittsburgh area had six ministers who held slaves, as did the majority of the church elders and officers. In 1780 the Pennsylvania state legislature declared that all Negroes and mulattos born of slave mothers should be set free when they reached the age of 28. In 1788 a state law was passed declaring that all slaves brought into the state must be freed immediately. However, the laws were ineffective, and even as late as the 1840's there were still slaves in Western Pennsylvania.

The morality of slave owning was not to be an issue for the white population, it seems, till long after the frontier era ended. However, before we pass judgment, we should be cautious about appraising our ancestors outside the context of the times in which they lived. The commercial and industrial vigor of the Alleghenies did not depend upon slavery but rather the influx of indentured servants, apprentices and wage laborers who, at the turn of the 19th century, followed on the heels of the settlers.

In the late 1780's, Reverend Lane moved to the central east part of Huntingdon County where the county tapers. His farm was in sight of Jacob's Mountain near Mill Creek, Henderson Township (later Brady Township). Again he cleared land, built a log home, and continued to devote much of his time to missionary work and riding the circuit. He also built a sawmill. During this time, he still found time to help his brother, Wilkinson, and others establish a Baptist Meeting House near Saltillo in 1794. Three years later, according to J. Simpson Africa, Samuel established a “tub mill” for grinding grain. It stood in the bend of the creek in the Borough of Saltillo, near where the railroad would one day pass. In Africa's time, about 1883, Henry Hudson owned the land.

Reverend Samuel Lane's new farm was located about five miles southwest of the town of Huntingdon in Mill Creek. In 1790 he established a church that was connected to his Trough Creek Valley congregation, where he continued to preach. Services at Mill Creek were held in the open air and in Lane's home. One preaching spot, a pleasant grove graced with two magnificent oaks, was a favorite of the Reverend. As the south end of the Kishacoquillas Valley was becoming more populated, Samuel began to urge new settlers, regardless of their religious beliefs to build a permanent house of worship. In 1800, a log meeting house was built on Mill Creek about two miles from its mouth. The congregation began with 11 baptized members and today, almost two centuries later, the church still exists.

Reverend Samuel Lane was married three times, first to Mary Corbin, then to Mary Wiley and finally to Keziah (or Cassia) Sias. He had twenty-one children with two of his spouses and most of his offspring had large families too. One of Samuel's grandchildren, known as “Miss Ella,” was living in Milesburg, Pennsylvania as recently as 1940. Some descendants say that Samuel died on his Mill Creek Farm on March 12, 1812, age 76. However, Keziah (Greenland) Shanafelt of Clarion Co., Pennsylvania wrote to her son her son, Thomas. “Keziah Sias married a Baptist preacher at Millcreek, old uncle Samuel Lane. She was his third wife. He was struck with palsey while preaching in uncle Jacob Dean's house in Trough Creek Valley. Father was present at the time.” ²⁷ Lane was buried in the churchyard adjacent to his log meetinghouse. In this neglected little cemetery, behind today's Fousetown Bible Church, no markers remain for Rev. Samuel and his loved ones.

Two Daughters of Reverend Samuel Lane

Ruth Lane Brown: One of Reverend Samuel Lane's daughters, Ruth, married William Brown, who is recorded on a deed as being born in Maryland. Brown served 8 months during the Revolution with the 3rd Pennsylvania Line as a member of Robert Cluggage's Company. He was sent north into Sinking Valley to protect miners who were extracting lead from a deposit there. Brown helped build the “Lead Mine Fort” also known as Fort Roberdeaux near present day Culp in Blair County, Pennsylvania. After 1800, Ruth and William migrated to Ohio and established the Brown Family of Ashville in Pickaway County, Ohio. Their farm was just west of the present day hamlet of Cedarhill and only a little more than three miles from her Uncle Wilkinson Lane's farm. Many of their descendants would migrate to Hancock County, Ohio and on to Indiana. A correspondent informed Bobby O. Brown, a descendant of Ruth Lane and William Brown, that Ruth was buried on her farm in Walnut Township, Pickaway County January 19, 1840. After her death her husband is thought to have taken up residence in Hancock County with their son Joshua. In the 1890's, Ruth's remains were removed to nearby Reber Hill Cemetery.

Elizabeth Lane Prigmore: Another of Rev. Samuel's daughters, Elizabeth, married Basil Prigmore and migrated with him from Huntingdon County to Pettis County, near Sedalia, Missouri during the early 1800's. Joseph Prigmore, Basil's father, came to Louisiana with his father and brothers, Theodore and Daniel. This was during the early British occupation of French Arcadia, so perhaps the Prigmores were disaffected Arcadians seeking the cultural familiarity of New Orleans. From Louisiana, the family migrated to Massachusetts, then to New Jersey, where Joseph married Christine Moore in 1746. In the eighteenth century, other Prigmore descendants of the original immigrant settled in Kentucky and married into the family of Abraham Lincoln. The young couple moved on to Bedford County where their son Basil met and married Wilkinson Lane's cousin Elizabeth. Joseph Prigmore's life spanned a good part of the 18th century and 27 years in to the 19th. He lived to the venerable age of 107 and his wife, Christine, to the age of 99.

Joseph and Christine's grandson, Daniel, the grand nephew of Wilkinson Lane and the son of his kin, Elizabeth Lane, was a colorful fellow. In 1846, when Daniel was in his forties, he took leave of his family in Bates County, Missouri to join the patriotic struggle against Mexico. After the war, the restless Prigmore departed for the California gold fields. After becoming one of the fortunate few to realized their dream, he returned to his family in Missouri by taking ocean passage around Cape Horn to New Orleans. On the voyage, he dressed the part of a down-on-his-luck forty-niner, concealing the fact that a great deal of gold dust was sewn into the linings of his shabby clothes. A decade later as war clouds loomed over the Republic, pro-Union guerrillas, commonly known as Jayhawkers, torched Daniel Prigmore's elegant house. This prompted a hasty departure from Missouri to Collin County, north of Dallas, Texas.

It's ironic that the leader inspiring these Jay Hawkers that plagued the Prigmores was actually a kinsman, one James Henry Lane. He may have been the grandson of the Rev. Tidence Lane (Richard > Dutton > Major Samuel > Captain Richard > Roger), who was the first Baptist minister to establish a permanent church in Tennessee. “Bloody Jim” Lane, also known as the “Grim Chieftain,” was one of American history's more colorful characters. He was an associate of John Brown, and the erratic, charismatic leader of the Free State and Anti-slavery movements in Kansas before the Civil War. He, as much as anybody, led our nation into the cauldron of civil war. His branch of the Lane family tree is brimming with politicians and preachers alike and has many family historians recounting its stories

Amidst this atmosphere, two of Daniel Prigmore's sons fought for the South during the Civil War. One of them was said to have possessed the healing powers that folklore attributes to seventh sons. In celebration of this power, Daniel and his wife bestowed upon this seventh born son the name of “Doctor Henderson Prigmore.” After serving in the Civil War, Doctor removed to the Indian Territory and took part in many cattle drives. No doubt the other cowpunchers referred to him as “Doc.” His children would one day swear that Doctor could affect cures simply by touch and that he possessed this ability all his life, even into his eighties. One of Doctor's offspring, a son named “Pink,” didn't marry till he was 84. Pink claimed the reason was that his new bride was the first to ever say, “Yes.”

Doctor's brother, Theodore Prigmore, was also a Confederate veteran of the Civil War. He was a Methodist until 1903 when he became a Christian Scientist. His descendants affirmed that for the last twenty-three years of his life in that faith, he was never ill a day in his life and never had need of spectacles. Furthermore, Theodore passed away in Fort Worth, Texas with a complete set of his own teeth at the advanced age of eighty-nine.

A branch of the Prigmores was also connected to Wilkinson and Rev. Samuel's brother - Richard Lane. These Prigmores settled in Muskingum County, Ohio near Zanesville.

Lambert Lane

Lambert was the second son of Samuel and Mary Jane Corbin, born around 1737 or 1739. He married Nancy Anderson. At the time of their marriage, the part of Baltimore County where both their parents lived was just starting to be tamed and they still lived among the Indians. Lambert's granddaughter related the following to historian William E. Lane:

“My grandparents, Lambert Lane and Nancy Anderson, were immigrants from England (Note that early writers invariably underestimate the passage of time between themselves and their true immigrant ancestors). They were both young when their parents arrived in this country. Their parents settled on the Susquehanna wild woods and amongst the Indians. While living there, my grandparents were married in the quaint old style. My grandfather wore a blue cloth coat cut 'claw-hammer' style with no lapels, ornamented with large brass buttons, which closely buttoned his coat; his pantaloons were white linen, buckled with large silver buckles. Grandmother wore a white cambric dress, with nice hand embroidery on the skirt. In a few years they moved to Virginia and lived there about four years; then they moved to Tennessee on the Holston river and remained there a few years, after which they moved to Shelby county, Kentucky, about 55 miles form Shelbyville. In 1777 he was a soldier in an expedition against the Cherokee Indians sent out from the Holston settlement. In 1795 he appears on the first tax list of Shelby County, Kentucky. After Lambert's death in 1804, leaving 12 children. His widow, Nancy, married Henry Johns. Johns survived her and later moved to Boone County, Indiana, in the late 1820's.”

A descendant of Lambert Lane's son Richard, Kenyon Stephenson, of Cleveland, joined forces with genealogist A. Russell Slagel, another descendant of Major Samuel Lane. They did the lion's share of research that makes up the heart of the Lane story. Stephenson, a precise genealogist, also passed on the family tradition that Samuel and Jane took their family to England for a short time around 1740.

Donald Lane of Kingsport, Tennessee suggests that Lambert Lane may possibly be the father of Ann Lane. Ann was born in 1758 and married Samuel Looney and Elijah Cross in Sullivan County, Tennessee. According to Donald, she is reputed to have been half Indian and did not go on to Kentucky with the remainder of the family.

Ruth Lane Stephens

Ruth Lane married Vincent Stephens, who claimed in his Revolutionary War pension application of 1832 that his family came to Bedford County from Baltimore County, Maryland in 1750. This would make the Stephens among the very first settlers to come to that part of Bedford County. They must certainly have encountered problems with the Indians, especially during the French and Indian War. The Stephens may have been forced to flee back to Maryland during that conflict, for another account has Vincent and Ruth accompanying Samuel Lane to Bedford in the 1770's. Ruth and her new husband settled in Plank Cabin Valley before the American Revolution.

Vincent Stephens was a private in the Bedford Militia. This is likely the same company his brother-in-laws Wilkinson Lane and Rev. Samuel Lane had joined. In Stephens's successful pension application, he related that in 1779 the Bedford County Militia built a blockhouse in Three Springs. Within the fort's walls, local citizens could seek protection. Some settlers also erected cabins near it during the conflict. Several of the militia's members were killed near Ullery's Mill in Morrison's Cove. In an expedition to Kittanning Town connected to this event, the local militia attempted to capture Captain McGee, whose company had gone over to the Indians and Loyalists. The Bedford Militia narrowly escaped disaster and failed to capture the turncoat. In the spring of 1779, Stephens enlisted at Shirlysburg as a private in the Bedford County Militia and served as a spy and guide.

"We erected a blockhouse at the Three Springs in Springfield Township, now Huntington County, families fled there and some erected houses there...Indians killed some men under arms, near Ullery's Mill in Morrison's Cove and some other depredations that gave alarm so applicant had to get out a party...had to get out a party to take Captain McGee into custody (he had taken his company to join the Indians against his own country supposed to be Kittanning town) but on being disappointed owing to some misunderstanding that took place in their first interview, himself and men escaped narrowly and returned, but our party did not succeed and returned without finding him."

Richard Lane

Richard Lane's descendants make the claim that he was born in England in 1740. However, I doubt this tradition though it is possible that his parents, Samuel and Jane, spent the late thirties and early forties in England. He married Catherine Groom. Two histories of the Baltimore County area imply that Richard served for three years in a regular Maryland line regiment. Records show that he was a private in the 3rd company of the 3rd Maryland Regiment. Lane was enlisted by Lt. Nathaniel Kinnard Jr. and received his final OK for service from William Henry on July 26, 1776. In 1778 Richard Lane purchased part of “Rochester” from his uncle John Corbin. In 1810 they sold “I Will & I Will Not” and “Peter's Choice” in Baltimore County, Maryland and migrated to Ohio. They settled in Muskingum County on property Richard had purchased there. On a clement day, their cabin would have been less than a day's ride from the home of Richard's brother, Wilkinson Lane. The Lanes probably would have ridden down Zane's Trace to Lancaster and then would have taken a bridle path west toward Toby Town. Richard Lane died on the farm near Zanesville in 1813, survived by his wife and eight of his children. He was buried in a field 100 yards from where he settled on the Frazeysburg Road. This was near the farm of John M. Lane, known as the Butler farm. Catherine lived to be over 100 years of age and was blind at the time of her death in 1842. Richard's will is dated September 10, 1813.

Corbin Lane

Corbin Lane was one of the younger children of Samuel and Jane Lane, probably born in Maryland from 1745 to 1750. He doesn't appear in Baltimore County records but does show up in Bedford County on the 1773-1779 tax rolls. He migrated to Washington County, North Carolina (later Tennessee), where from 1781 to 1783 he contributed materially to the patriot cause. Research by the Daughters of the American Revolution indicate that he received payments from the North Carolina military for goods and services rendered to the American cause. He is often mentioned as a soldier in that struggle but no proof has been found that he joined a regiment. The D. A. R. has designated him a ñPatriotî of the American Revolution.

In about 1800 he migrated to Virginia with his family, including his daughters who had married two brothers named Williams. Donald W. Lane speculates that because of the discrepancy in their children's ages Fanny Prock was the Corbin Lane's second wife. At the time of his death, Corbin was living near Red Hill in Scott County, Virginia, near his son Abraham. Corbin's will granted his land to Abraham and names another son, Samuel. Corbin and Fanny Lane were apparently living with Abraham at the time of Corbin's death. He was buried either in the old Vineyard Cemetery on his land or in the Lane-Wisley cemetery which was said to be on Abraham's land. The two cemeteries are equidistant form Corbin's old farmhouse. Corbin's descendants are planning to put a D. A. R. marker, commemorating his role in the American Revolution, in one of the two cemeteries. Corbin Lane died in 1816, the year of worldwide frigid weather caused by a huge volcanic eruption. There were frosts, snows and below freezing temperatures that summer. As a result, crops failed and many people actually starved on the frontier. Perhaps Corbin suffered unduly because of this and it hastened the old gentleman's death.

Dutton Lane

Details on Dutton's life are sketchy and speculative. He is some times confused with his 3rd cousin Dutton Lane, the son of Tidence Lane (Tidence founded the first permanent Baptist Church in Tennessee). Dutton was one of Samuel and Jane Lane's middle children, and was born in Maryland in about 1745. He appears in the tax lists of Bedford County in the 1770's His first wife was a woman named Mary. She is thought to have died in Maryland or Pennsylvania prior to his departure for Green County, Tennessee. It is also likely that Mary was the mother of Dutton's son Samuel.

Dutton next married a woman named Kesiah, who had been born in Pennsylvania.

After Dutton and Kezia married in Bedford County, they migrated to Green County, Tennessee, where two children might have been born to them, Kezia and Dutton, Jr. A Dutton Lane is listed on the Greene County, Tennessee records as a witness to the marriage of Joseph Lane in 1791. In about 1800, Dutton is thought to have gone to Southwestern Virginia with his younger brother Corbin Lane. In 1828 on a deed to Benjamin Lane, both Dutton and “Kesear” signed their names. Dutton is believed to have died shortly after that. Kezia died in September 1749 in Scott County, Virginia

Charity Lane Baxter

Charity was born to Samuel and Jane in the early 1740's, the birth being registered in Saint John's and Saint George's Parishes. She married Greenbury Baxter of Baltimore County, Maryland. As did others of the Lane family, the couple migrated to Muskingum County, Ohio near Zanesville. Samuel Baxter, her oldest son, married Sarah Chenoweth and they moved to Muskingum County also. Other children were John, Mary, Sarah (married William Chenowith) and perhaps a daughter who married Philip Franke.

Sarah Lane Hays

Sarah was born on November 8, 1746, her birth being registered at Saint John's and Saint George's Parishes. She was spouse of Joseph Hays to whom her father deeded over “Gill's Prospect” in 1779. She evidently remained behind in Baltimore County, Maryland when her father and other siblings migrated north into western Pennsylvania. In 1801 Joseph was appointed the guardian of the children of his brother-in-law, John Lane.

Abraham Lane

Abraham married Rachel Mannon in Baltimore County where he apparently lived all his life. He is shown there in 1790 as the head of a family of one male and five females. The Ohio descendants of his siblings claim that he had a son named John D. Lane, who had the nickname “Bunyan.”

John Lane

One of the younger Lane siblings, John is though to have lived all his life in Baltimore County. In 1799 he was deeded “Miller's Gain” in Baltimore County by his father, Samuel. This property was on the south bank of the Patapsco River. John died previous to 1792, for that is when his heirs were deeded 137 acres of a tract of land called “Rochester” by Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland (Carroll County is named for the family of Charles Carroll). Many other Lanes have been involved in this tract and the Corbin or Wilkinson side of Mary Jane Corbin Lane probably owned it originally. She, of course, is the mother of John Lane. A study of this tract in 1778 seems to indicate interrelationships of the Lanes, Corbins, and Staines. This connection persisted into their grandchildren's generation who lived in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania.

Appendix C

Lane Origins
Another View

Some genealogists have maintained that Richard Lane was not the son of Roger Lane but of Thomas Lane a member of the English gentry (Sharon Lapp Irby for instance). I maintain they were cousins of Richard's family for reasons to be noted below. These genealogists maintain that Captain Richard Lane's paternal line is as follows:

Adam De La Lane was born in 1272 in England and lived in Hampton, England during the reign of Edward I. Given his French surname, Adam De Lane's father was evidently one of the Norman invaders who mingled their bloodlines with the Angles, Saxons and Norse, who had invaded before in earlier times. Races that commingled to create the English people. His son was...

Richard De La Lane was born in England who was living in 1307. His son...

Andrew De La Lane was born in England. His son...

Richard Lane was born in England. He was from Hampton and married Elizabeth Hyde. His son...

John Lane of Hyde and Bentley was born in England. In 1432 he married Margorie Egerton of Wrimre Hall. His son...

Ralph Lane who was born in England and married Joyce Cresset. He died in 1477. His son...

Richard Lane who was born in England and married Anne Harcourt of Raunton. His son...

John Lane of Bentley who was born in England and died in 1577. He married Margaret Katherine Partrich, the daughter and heir of Thomas Partrich of Kings Bromley Hall. His son...

Thomas Lane who was born in England and died in 1590. He married Catherine Trentham the daughter of Richard Trentham of Rochester. Thomas had three sons: Thomas, Richard and John Lane.

John Lane of Bentley was born in England and married Jane Littelton of Pillston. She was the daughter of Sir Edward Littelton. His son...

Thomas Lane of Bentley and Hyde who was born in England and died in 1660. Thomas was a Royalist and assisted in the preservation of king Charles II after the battle of Worcester. He married Anne Bagot the eldest daughter of Walter Bagot and sister of Harvey Bagot. They had the following children:

1) John Lane was the eldest son of Thomas Lane of Bentley and Hyde. He had been a colonel during the English Civil War, which began in 1642. He was instrumental in saving King Charles II after the battle of Worcester in 1651. At Worcester, Charles's Scottish Army was routed by Cromwell and finally decimated by Harrison's cavalry. Lane sheltered his Majesty at the Lane manor in Bentley. From here, in disguise, he was escorted by John Lane's sister, Jane Lane, to a Mrs. Norton's at Abbot's Leigh near Bristol. From here they went to Colonel Wyndham's at Trent in Somerset. Eventually the King escaped to France. For her service to the King, she was decorated with an ñespecial Badge of honor.î Colonel Lane was offered a peerage for his services but he declined the honor. He married Athaliah Anson and died in 1667 leaving issue of eight daughters and one son, Sir Thomas Lane, Knight of Bentley.

2) Walter Lane born about 1611

3) William Lane of Shelton

4) Richard Lane, a Groom of the Bedchamber, born 1597

5) Jane Lane died September 9, 1689, married Sir Clement Fisher, second brother Pakington Fisher. It was she who aided King Charles II after the battle of Worcester. 6) Withy Lane married John Petre of Horton Bucks

7) Anne Lane married Edward Birch of Leacroft

8) Mary Lane married Edward Nicholas, who was an advisor to King Charles II. He was the son of Sir Oliver Nicholas who had been the cupbearer to King James I and Charles I.

Some researchers believe Richard Lane of Providence Island to be the same as Richard Lane, the “Groom of the Bed Chamber” mentioned above. Though it would be pleasant to claim such a long and noble lineage, the facts of Richard of Providence Island's life don't agree with this view. It is simply too long a stretch to think that a Cavalier with such a loyalist pedigree could suddenly cast off his allegiances, become a Puritan dissenter and migrate to the Americas. This being said however, I do think it probable that Richard Lane, of the Island of Providence, was descended from the above line before the time of Colonel Lane, the rescuer of Charles II. I believe this because Dutton Lane named his Towson, Maryland property “Hampton Court.” The historian of the Hampton National Historic site wrote that the pre-Ridgley owners (including Dutton Lane and later his daughter) of Hampton named their properties for family connections in England. The place name of Hampton is strongly associated with the Lane family profiled above, thus implying a connection at some point. Oral tradition offers another hint. As stated in an earlier chapter there is an interesting story that exists among the descendants of Rebecca Clark, who was the sister of my great, great grandfather, George Clark, and great granddaughter of Wilkinson Lane. Her daughter, Magdalena Wright claimed that her ancestors on her mother's side had long before been “Lords and Ladies in England.”

Kenyon Stevenson and Mrs. F. C. Montgomery also questioned the lineage of one of the Lanes. Stevenson tentatively suggested that Major Samuel Lane was not the son of Richard Lane of the Island of Providence but the son of John Lane of Hammersmith, England, near London. Montgomery repeated his claim in her family history of the Lanes. A. Russell Slagel worked with Stevenson for many years and extended the latter's research. In a major article in 1976, Slagel refuted his late associate's original conclusion with a meticulously documented case. He used extensive legal documentation and kinship explanations to link Richard and Samuel Lane together as father and son. A reading of this article, listed in the sources section, should put any rests to doubt.

In this monograph Slagel brings up other noteworthy points about Lane family relationships. He wrote that John Lane, grocer of London and nephew of Roger Lane, used the coat of arms illustrated on the second page of this book. It has been traced back to early 15th century Northampton, England. William Lane of Orlybere, County of Northhampton who died in 1546, was the first possessor on record for this coat of arms. He had four sons, Ralph, William, John and George. Ralph inherited the coat of arms. He married Maud Parr who was the first cousin of Katherine Parr, the last wife of King Henry VIII. Their son, Sir Ralph Lane, is thought to be the first European to sail up the Chesapeake Bay. Slagel points out that many branches of the Lane family bore this coat of arms. In County Bucks we find the Wycombe Lanes, in County Dorset the Allhallow-Gussing branch of the Lane family. Herefordshire claims the Lane family of my ascent. In Northhampton the following places are associated with the Lanes: Courteen Hall, Hanler Twinden, Horton and Walgrave. There were also branches of the family in Sumersetshire and Yorkshire.

Appendix D

Will of Cornelius Cark,
Father of Horatio Clark, Sr.

Will recorded in Will Book 3, pages 119-120, Huntingdon Co., PA

The Last Will and Testament of Neal Clark, Decd.

In the name of God amen this twenty first day of January in the yeare eighteen huntred & twenty one I Neel Clark of Union twnship Huntingdon County Estate of Pensylvania being Week in body but of Perfect mind and memory thank god in his mircey calling caling unto mind the mortality of my bodey and Knowing that it is apindet for all men onts to day to make and order this my last will and Testament that is to say prinsably and firs I reoment to be buryet in a Cristan like mannor at the direction of my Executor and tushing this worley Eastate wherewit god has pleaset got to bless me in this life I give demise and dispose of it in the folowing mainer and form-. First all my Just Debts and Crashes Shall be paid and Satisfite by my Executors and I do make and give to my Son Prisen clark all my Estate Real and personall and for that he Shall mentain me and my Wife Margrad turing life Sufition in meed and trink and Clothing ant I do order and apoind Prison Clark to be my sole Executor of this my will and testament and I do hereby Tisanoll all former Wills and Testaments wills legsees by me heretafor willst and I ratifite confirment confirming this my last will and testament in Wittness my hand and Seal this day and first Written-Sealed Signet pronounced deliveret by the Said Neal Clark as the my last will & testament In the Present of us Philip Schnerr (Jacob Kabler in German)

Neal X Clark (Seal, mark)

Huntingdon County.

Before me Thomas Kes, Deputy Register for the Probate of Wills and granting letters of Administration in and for the Said County of Huntingdon personally Appeared Philip Schnerr and Jacob Kabler the two Subscribing Witnesses to the Within Instrument of Writing Who upon their Solemn Oaths do say that they were personally present and did see and hear the Within named Neal Clark Sign Seal publish and declare the within Instrument of Writing as and for his last will and testament and that they Subscribed their names thereto and Witnesses in the presence of the Testaor and at his Instances and request and in the presence of each Other and further that the Said Neal Clark the Testator was at the Same time of sound & disposing mind memory and Understanding to the best of their judgements and belief Sworn & Subsribed the 31st day of Augt 1824 Before me

Philip X Schnerr (his mark) Jacob Kabler (in German)

Brice Clark Exor of Neal Clark Decd

Memorandum.

Letters Testamentory on the Estate of Neal Clark Deceased Were this day granted to his Son Brice Clark. Inventory to be Exhibited on or before the 1st day of October next and a true and Just account calculation and reckoning of his Said Administration on or before the 31st day of August AD 1825 or When thereto legally required.

Given Under Seal of Office 31st Aug. AD 1824 Thomas Kes Depy Reg.

Appendix E

Will and Inventory of Horatio Clark, Sr.

THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF HORATIO CLARK SEIGNIOR

I Horatio Clark seignior of the County of Fairfield in the State of Ohio do make and publish this my last will and testament in manner and form following that is to say; First it is my will that my funeral expenses and all my just debts be fully paid, Second I give devise and bequeath to my beloved Wife Rebecca Clark in lieu off her dower, the plantation on which we now reside, situated in the County and State aforesaid in Bloom Township in Sections No. 32 and 33 containing two hundred and seventy acres more or less for her to have the one third during her natural life, Third I give and devise to my sons Horatio Clark and Wilkinson Clark all the lands before mentioned to have and to hold forever and also to their heirs and assigns forever, the said Horatio Clark and Wilkinson Clark is to pay Elizabeth Wright, daughter of Horatio Clark seignior one hundred Dollars likewise Elijah Clark Son of Horatio Clark seignior one Dollar likewise Mary Weaver Daughter of Horatio Clark seignior Neal Clark son of Horatio Clark seignior one hundred dollars likewise Hannah Fickle Daughter of Horatio Clark seignior one hundred dollars likewise the said Horatio Clark and Wilkinson Clark doth agree to maintain and appoint my Wife said Rebecca Clark and my said sons Horatio Clark and Wilkinson Clark to be executors for this my last will and testament, revoking and annulling all former wills by me made, and ratifying and confirming this and no other to be my last will and testament. In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal this nineteenth day of March A. D. 1835.

Horatio (X his mark) Clark

Signed published and declared by the above named Horatio Clark as and for his last will and testament in presence of us who at this request have agreed to witness to the same

Attest: James Wright

Wendel Fosnaugh Will Written March 19 1835

Ransom Pratt Will Probated April 23, 1835

Appendix F

INVENTORY OF HORATIO CLARK

A true and accurate inventory of the goods and chattles of the estate of Horatio Clark senr late of Bloom Township Fairfield County Ohio deceased, presented to us the undersigned appraisers of said estate, by Horatio Clark junr the administrator thereof, the twelfth day of May A D 1835.

One peace of wheat 6.00

One peace of wheat 8.00

One peace of rye 3.00

One crop hatchel 0.25

One bull plough 3.25

One barshear plough 2.50

Two stretcher chains taken by widow 1.75

Four yearling stears 16.00

Two yearling heifers and one yearling bull 12.00

One red cow and calf taken by widow 10.00

One speckled cow and calf 11.00

One white cow and calf 10.00

Thirty bushels of wheat 15.00

One cutting box and knife taken by widow 1.00

One scoop shovel and basket 0.12 & 1/2

One mattock 1.00

Twp pitchforks 0.75

One old windmill taken by widow 2.00

six old barrels 1.00

One half keg of tar 0.50

Fourteen bacon hams two of same taken by widow 14.00

Fifteen bacon shoulders one of same taken by widow 11.25

Two bacon flitches 1.50

One small lot of beef 0.75

One pare of steelyards taken by widow 0.80

Two iron wedges taken by widow 1.00

One grindstone taken by widow 1.50

One kettle and bale 0.50

One fourteen gallon kettle taken by widow 2.00

One copper kettle taken by widow 12.00

One pot taken by widow 0.75

One bake kettle without a lid 0.25

One skillet taken by widow 0.25

One Dun horse 65.00

One bay mare and colt 50.00

Three corn hoes taken by widow 1.12 &1/2

One set of horse gears taken by widow 1.62 & 1/2

One sow and four pigs 1.50

One sow and three pigs 3.00

Thirty nine head of stock hogs 59.00

Two gotes 0.62 & 1/2

One fro 0.25

One iron square and chisel 0.62 & 1/2

Three augers taken by widow 1.25

Three augers and two chisels 0.25

One pair of sheep sheers and currycomb 0.37 & 1/2

One log chain taken by widow 3.00

One crosscut saw 1.50

One axe 1.25

One mans saddle 2.25

One clevis 0.12 & 1/2

One lot old irons 1.00

Five sickles 1.00

One bucket taken by widow 0.25

Two tin buckets taken by widow 0.37 & 1/2

Two washing tubs taken by widow 0.50

Grain shovel and spade 0.75

Four halter chains and collars taken by widow 1.25

One lot of chains 0.37 & 1/2

Brickbands and hipstraps taken by widow 2.25

One scythe and hangings 0.50

One pot 0.25

One old barrel and potatoes 0.75

Old hames and singletree 0.12 & 1/2

One waggon and cover taken by widow 1.25

One set of horse gears taken by widow 40.00

Twelve bags taken by widow 3.12 & 1/2

One table taken by widow 0.37 & 1/2

One stand taken by widow 1.50

One bureau taken by widow 3.00

One cooking reflector 0.75

Two boxes taken by widow 0.12 & 1/2

One cockle sieve taken by widow 1.00

One rocking chair taken by widow 1.25

One bedstead bed and bedding taken by widow 7.00

One chest taken by widow 0.50

One womans saddle taken by widow 0.50

One corner cupboard taken by widow 4.00

One set windsor chairs taken by widow 3.00

Three old chairs 0.37 & 1/2

One table taken by widow 0.50

One bottle with spirts of turpintine taken by widow 0.37 & 1/2

One coffy pot taken by widow 0.25

One coffy mill two servers 0.50

One lantern and mousetrap 0.50

Three bottles and one sausage stuffer taken by widow 0.37 & 1/2

One watch 4.00

One clock and case 6.00

One rifle gun and implements taken by widow 10.00

One bereau taken by widow 4.00

One fall leaf table 2.00

One pair of _irons taken by widow 4.00

One briole and half bushel 0.75

One wire corn meal sieve taken by widow 0.31 & 1/4

One spike gimblet 0.12 & 1/2

Do seven hogs 10.75

Amount of bill of appraisement 510.11 & 1/4

John Courtwright

______ Glick<

James Wright

Appraisers

Horatio Clark, Senior's original will and inventory are filed together at the Fairfield County Courthouse in Lancaster, Ohio

Appendix G

Clark Deed Records Fairfield County, Ohio 1812-1893

"Unconverted Image" HEIGHT="643" WIDTH="527": hope to obtain and post in future.

Appendix H

The Will of Wilkinson Lane

In the name of God amen The Twenty Ninth day of November one Thousand Eight Hundred and thirteen I Wilkinson Lane of Bloom Township Fairfield County and state of Ohio Being at this present Time Weak in Body but of perfect mind and Memory thanks be given unto God Therefore calling unto mind the mortality of my Body and that it is appointed for all men once to Die Do make and ordain this my Last Will and Testament That is today Principally and first of all I give and Recommend my Soul into the Hands of Almighty God that gave it and my Body I recommend to the Earth to be Buried in decent Christian Burial at the discretion of my executors nothing Doubting but at the general Resurrection I shal receive the Same a gain by the mighty power of God as touching such worldly Estate as it hath please God to bless me with in this life I give devise and dispose of the same in the Following manner and form First I give and bequest to Jane my Dearly beloved wife the use and benifits of the one third of My real Estate to gether with two thirds of the rents and profits of both Leases During the term of time she continues to be and remain my widow Secondly I give and bequeath to Jane my dearly beloved wife one Horse kind value Forty Dollars and one Coad milk Cow one Bed and Beding one Spining Wheel and all her wearing apparrel and the one third of my household furniture to be her real property and to be at her own Disposal and use and further I give and bequeath unto Jane my dearly beloved wife the residue of my Household Furniture being _____ ____ ___ her use and profit during the full term of time she continues to be and remain my widow. Thirdly I give and bequeath to my only son John for his use and profit Thirty six acres of Land of my real estate being and laying adjoining Lands with Horatio Clark sixty perches [16.5 feet - ed.'s note] from the williams line across the half section to gether with one Third part of the rents and profits of both Leases to remain in the Care of the Executors and to be sold for his support at their discretion during his life time if any of this Land remains after his Death to be sold and Equally divided among his surviving sisters Fourthly I give and bequeath unto my dearly beloved Daughter Elisa both the ____ of seventy four acres of Land at the Death or marriage of my beloved wife _____ ______ ___ ____ Section 32 Township and range 20 to her use and profit forever Fifthly I give and bequeath unto my Dearly Beloved daughter Rebeckah the full of Fifty acres of Land Lying and being part of said Half section adjoining with Sholl, Clark and Harrison to her use and Profit forever Sixthly I give and bequeath un to my grandsons James Cole and Elisha Cole to their only proper use and profit for ever sixty acres of Land Lying and being part of said half section adjoining lands with Clark, williams and Baldwin Seventhly I give and bequest unto my Dearly beloved Daughters Mary, Rebeckah and Elizabeth all my farming utensils Horses Cattle and Stock which is not otherwise willed or Bequeathed to their only proper uses and profits to be Equally divid among them Eigthly I give and Bequeath unto my Beloved Grandson and Grand Daughter son and daughter of Rachel Barr, Wilkinson and Nancy Barr, one milch Cow Each to their only proper use and profit ___________ and Lastly I do Constitute and ordain my Trusty Friends and sons in law Horatio Clark and James Kelly Executors of this my Last Will and Testament and I do hereby utterly disallow revoke and Disavow all and every other Former Testaments wills Legacies and Bequests and Executors by me in any ways before Named Willed and Bequeathed Ratifying and confirming this and no other to my Last will and Testament for witnesses where of I have hereunto to set my hand and seal the Day and year above written Signed sealed Published pronounced and Declared by the said Wilkinson Lane as his last will and Testament in the presence of us his subscribers

Wilkinson Lane - X (his mark)

Att.

John Serle

Robison Fletcher

Jeremiah Williams

Recorded in Will Book No. 2, page 20

Fairfield County, Ohio (February __, 1814)

Appendix I

Tidence Lane -First Cousin of Wilkinson Lane

(A Southern Branch of the Lanes)

David Wilson transcribed this article from the Dictionary of American Biography. Volume 5, Part 2, Page 582.

Lane, Tidence (Aug. 31, 1724-Jan. 30, 1806), pioneer Baptist minister of Tennessee, was born near Baltimore, Md. the son of Richard and Sarah Lane. He was the great-grandson of Major Samuel Lane, an officer in the King's service, who was in Maryland as early as 1680; his paternal grandparents were Dutton and Pretitia (Tidings) Lane. At his christening he was given his grandmother's maiden name, Tidings, but in some way or the other this was changed to Tidence. The Lanes were typical frontiersmen. They migrated first into Southwestern Virginia, then pushed down into the Yadkin River country, North Carolina. Here, apparently, May 9, 1743, Tidence married Esther Bibben (or Bibber). Sometime about 1754 Shubael Stearns [q.v], a Separate Baptist evangelist with all the zeal and methods of the New Light persuasion, came into what is now Randolph County, N.C., and established the Sandy Creek Church. What Lane's religious connections up to that time had been is not known except that he had been christened in St. Paul's Church, Baltimore. From what he had heard of Stearns, he had not formed a favorable impression of him, but curiosity led him to make a forty-mile journey to hear him. Stearns had a magnetic influence over his audiences and an eye that exerted almost magical power. He fixed it on Lane, and Lane succumbed. He tried to quit the place, but was drawn back. "Shunning him," he said, "I could no more effect than a bird can shun a rattlesnake when it fixes its eyes upon it: (Burnett, post, p. 319). Lane underwent a thorough conversion and was thereafter an effective Baptist preacher after the pattern of Stearns.

The defeat of the Regulators at the battle of Alamance, 1771, led many of the North Carolinians to seek relief from oppression by pushing through the mountains into what is now eastern Tennessee. Among these was a considerable number of the Sandy Creek Church, who settled on Boone Creek, in the present county of Washington. Lane went thither about 1776, and by 1779 at the latest had organized the recent comers into the Buffalo Ridge Baptist Church. By so doing he became the first pastor of the first permanent church body of any denomination in Tennessee. A few years later he moved still farther westward and established himself on Bent Creek, near the present town of Whitesburg, Hamblin County. Here with Rev. William Murphy he organized the Bent Creek Baptist Church in June 1785, which he served as pastor for the remainder of his life. When the Holston association was instituted in October, the first ecclesiastical association to be formed in Tennessee, Lane became its moderator. He was "much sought in counsel" by the churches. He was not so hard in doctrine as some of his brethren, his doctrinal belief being a modified Calvinism" (Burnett, pp. 321-22). He had seven sons and two daughters. Four of the sons were in the battle of King's Mountain, three of them under Col. John Sevier [q.v.].

Burnett, J. J. Sketches of Tennessee's Pioneer Baptist Preachers. (1919).

Riley, B. F. A History of the Baptists in the Southern States East of the Mississippi. (1808).

North Carolina Baptist Hist. Papers, Vol II (Oct. 1897-July 1898)

Williams, S. C. "Tidence Lane -Tennessee's First Pastor," The Baptists of Tenn. (1930).

Appendix J

Samuel Clayton Lane
Great Grandson of Wilkinson Lane

Mary Melissa Danielson, the great granddaughter of Samuel Clayton Lane, contributed the information for this appendix. The facts below are compiled from the obituary of Samuel Clayton Lane and a newspaper clipping noting Mr. And Mrs. Samuel Clayton Lane's 50th anniversary.

After their marriage in Wisner, Nebraska, Mr. and Mrs. Lane made their home at Winside, Nebraska. After seven years, they moved to Wayne, Nebraska where they resided until March 1906 when lane, along with several other Nebraska men, came to North Dakota. They arrived in Sims in a terrific snowstorm on the 18th of March. Among those who came with him were Clark Mossman, H. B. Emch, N. C. Emch (with his sons Roy and Frank), Herman Honey, Ed Honey, Otto Kuhl and Bob Anderson. All were from near Wayne, Nebraska. J. W. Evens from Illinois met them in Chicago. They all came to what is now Grant County and took up land and started their homesteads. Mrs. Lane, their children and the families of the other men arrived there in April to take up their various duties of helping to make homes out of what seemed bare wild country.

Mrs. Lane taught school for several years, having taught in the first school built in Carson and many of the rural schools, including the consolidated school. She was a charter member of the Presbyterian Church in Carson and was an untiring worker in the ladies aid society and Sunday school. She was also very active in the social life of the community, having been a charter member of the fortnightly club, a member of the homemakers club and the royal neighbor lodge.

Beside an active business career, Mr. Lane was active in the community. He was a trustee of the Presbyterian Church for a number of years. He was a charter member in the Knights of Pythias lodge and took an active part in its work. He was also affiliated with the Highlander Lodge and the Modern Woodman Lodge of Wayne. The lanes had six children, two passing away in infancy. In 1940 they had 12 grandchildren.

On the occasion of their 50th anniversary on December 11, 1940, they observed that 50 years of married life seems a short time; that their lot had been cast in the most pleasant places and the things most worthwhile in life. They enjoyed friends, work, books, love and religion.

Samuel suffered a stroke in March of 1938 and was confined to his home for some time. Regaining his health, he was able to carry on with his work at his real estate office. He spent much time in his garden - a hobby that he loved and which kept him busy until the day he became ill on about June 23, 1945 when he suffered a second stroke. He lingered another week, dying 5:00 am Saturday morning June 30, 1945 in Elgin hospital in Carson. For a time, it was thought he would improve but he gradually grew weaker. Funeral services were held that Tuesday with short services at the home at 1:30 and at the Presbyterian Church at 1:45. Rev. Bachman of Bismarck officiated. Interment was made in Carson Union Cemetery.

Line of Descent From Wilkinson Lane

Wilkinson Lane (1742-1814) m.
Jane Corbin (abt. 1840-aft. 1814)

John Corbin Lane (1782-1825) m.
Rachel Harold (1782-1875)

Jesse D. Lane (1816-1899) m.
Matilda Loofborough (1820-1892)

Samuel Clayton Lane (1867-1945) m.
Anna Martha Johnson (1870-1962)

Waldo Myron Lane (1898-1963) m.
Althea Ethel Watts

Mary Alice Lane m.
Charles Edward Danielson

Mary Melissa Danielson m.
Edward Stanley Kumian, III

Sources

I have chosen not to footnote this work's sources. However, all sources used in this chapter are listed below. Where direct quotes are made the source is referred to by the author's name in the text. Often notes are added in this Bibliography to guide the reader, especially in situations when the application of a reference may not be obvious.

Introduction and Book One

Africa, J. Simpson. History of Huntingdon and Blair Counties. 1883, 755pp., p362. (Detailed history which includes earliest settlers of these two Pennsylvania counties, also their assessment records, militia Rolls, marriages, etc.)

“Apocathary.” Encyclopedia Britanica. Encyclopedia Britanica, Inc.: Chicago, 1960.

Archives Of Maryland. Vol. 15, pp. 37, 678, 99, 124, 130, 323 and 325 (Major Samuel Lane 1628-1682

“Annapolis, Maryland.” Encyclopedia Britanica. Encyclopedia Britanica, Inc.: Chicago, 1960.

Barnes, Robert W. Baltimore County Families, 1659-1759. pages 391-393. (Gives information on Major Samuel Lane, his ancestors and some of his descendants. Gives references numbers to volumes of Maryland archives series and mentions other sources in periodicals and notes at the Maryland Historical Society.)

“Bahamas.” Encyclopedia Britanica. Encyclopedia Britanica, Inc.: Chicago, 1960.

“Bermuda.” Encyclopedia Britanica. Encyclopedia Britanica, Inc.: Chicago, 1960.

Brown, Bobby. “Genealogical and Family Records Relating to the Brown Family of Pickaway County, Ohio and the Lane Family of Huntingdon Co., Pennsylvania and Fairfield Co.,” Ohio. Orange Park Florida, 1997.

Brown, Clark. “Genealogical and Family Records Relating to the Lane Family of Baltimore County, Maryland, Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania and Fairfield County, Ohio.” Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1997.

Calamy, Edmund. An Abridgment of Mr. Baxter's History of His Life and Times, two vols. London, 1713. (reference to character of Major Samuel Lane)

Carroll, Lillian M. and Steube, Francis S. Canal Winchester-The Second Ninety Years. Central Press: Lithopolis, Ohio, 1995. (information about the Canal Winchester Lanes)

Clark, Arline. The Clark Family - Brison and Rebecca -1800-1989. Privately Published by the Author: Saxton, Pennsylvania, 1989. (This is a well done 44 page family history of the descendants of Neal Clark's and Margaret Fleetwood's children, Brison and Sarah. Brison was the youngest brother of Horatio Clark, Sr. Most of the men and women mentioned in this volume lived their lives in Huntingdon and Bedford Counties near the plateau-like Big Top Mountain. There are many personal recollections and photos included. Particularly helpful is a cemetery listing for all deceased Clarks of this branch and copies of their obituaries. Also included are news articles and transcripts of wills.)

Clint, Florence. Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania Area Key. Denver: Area Keys, 1977. (This paperback publication, obtained through Everton, had several maps that helped me keep track of the many changing boundaries in Bedford and Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania.)

Danielson, Melissa. Genealogical Records of Fairfield County, Ohio Lanes and Their Descendants. Willow Grove: Pennsylvania, l997.

“The Deaver, Orndorf, Peterson Families of Maryland and Ohio”. World Family Tree Maker, Vol. Two. Pedigree #1456. Broderbund software, Inc., 1996. (Gives information on the descendants of Ruth Lane (sister of Wilkinson and Rev. Samuel Lane) and Vincent Stephens. It also gives genealogical information from Stephens's American Revolution pension application.)

Deed Records, Fairfield County Recorder's Office. Lancaster, Ohio. (Abstracted from 1812 to 1898 for Clarks and Lanes by the author in 1975 and 1976.)

Deed Records, Huntingdon, Huntingdon County Court House, Pennsylvania.

Deed Book H1, p. 565: “John Taylor to Wilkinson Lane, Sr. for 5 shillings 77 acres 71 perches in Plank Cabbin Valley, Union Twp., Huntingdon Co. adjacent land to said Lane...”

Deed Book D, p. 318: “George Ashman to Samuel Lane, John Cornelius and Wilkinson Lane, farmers, for 5 shillings 1cacre of land in Springfield Twp., Huntingdon Co. on Mountain Branch for use of a regular meeting house of the Regular baptises on the road from Littleton to Huntingdon, Samuel Lane being pastor...”

“Duplantis, Romeo and Smith Families of Louisiana and Texas, 1447-1995.” World Family Tree Maker. Pedigree #1521. Broderbund Software, 1995. (contains family tree information on the Prigmore family, descendants of Rev. Samuel Lane's daughter, Elizabeth)

Durant, Will and Ariel. The Age of Reason Begins. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961. (for Durants' perspective on the Puritans, pp 190-194)

“Episcopal Church.” Encarta Encyclopedia 96. Microsoft Corporation, 1996.

The First Families of Anne Arundel County. (Under the listing for William Burgess, a letter dated ___, 1681 from Major Lane concerning troop morale and supplies is excerpted.)

Frazier, Ian. Family. Farrar, Straus, Giroux: New York, 1994.

GENDEX -- WWW Genealogical Index. Pedigree for descendants of Neal Clark of Huntingdon Co., PA. http://www.a1pro.net/~kb6dj/d0000/g0000079.html#I317

Genealogies of Virginia Families. Baltimore, 1981, p. 552. (Concerning death of Richard Lane).

Harmon, ________Mrs. An incomplete letter exists in Bobby Brown's records, dated November 7, 1985, which refers to a letter received from Mrs. Harmon of Fostoria, Ohio concerning portions of text in the Pennsylvania Archives that refer to the Revolutionary War records of the Richard, Wilkinson and Samuel Lane. It also refers to the father-in-law of Elizabeth Lane, Wilkinson Lane's daughter, as James Kelly, and of a connection to Broad or Thomas Cole in that family. This needs to be verified since it may be Aaron Cole not the former two.)

Hastings, Lynn Dakin. Hampton National Historic Site. Historic Hampton, Inc: Towson, Maryland, 1986. (Gives details on the Ridgely family, the gardens, the plantation and its buildings and the mansion with its history and decor. Hampton Court's acquisition is mentioned on page 3 but the Merrymans and the Lanes are not mentioned by name.)

“Hereford and Herefordshire.” Encyclopedia Britanica. Encyclopedia Britanica, Inc.: Chicago, 1960, Vol 11, pp 496-498. (Referenced for Richard Lane)

Huelin, Gordon. Vanished Churches of the City of London. Guildhall Library Publications: London, U. K., 1995. (Relates the story of All Hallows Bread Street and St. Mildreds Poultry)

History of Bedford, Somerset and Fulton Counties, Pennsylvania.

History of Franklin and Pickaway Counties, Ohio. Williams Brothers: Columbus, Ohio, 1880. (from this text came the mention of the Indian version of “Toby” as Tomasch”)

“Huntingdon, Pennsylvania.” Encyclopedia Britanica. Encyclopedia Britanica, Inc.: Chicago, 1960.

Hurt, Douglas R. The Ohio Frontier. Indian University Press: Bloomington, 1996. (See “Further Reading” section. This lent valuable insight into the Fairfield County, Ohio portion of this work)

Hutton, Mary Louise Marshall. Seventeenth Century Colonial Ancestors of Members of the National Society of Colonial Dames of the 17th Century. Baltimore Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc.: Baltimore, Maryland, 1987. Library of Congress No 83-80251. (page 151, marriage of Margaret Burrage to Samuel Lane).

Index of Pennsylvania Archives, Third Series, Volumes 11-26.

Lane, Wilkinson: Vol. 22, pp. 11, 190, 225, 356; Vol. 25, p.561

Cole, Broad: Vol. 22, pp. 347, 353

Lane, Richard: Vol. 22, p. 356

Clark, Cornelius (Neal): Vol. 22, pp. 178, 225, 304, 352

Jackson, Doris Christine Blummer. Adjusting Branches of the Lane, Slack, Bush, Chaney, Dodson, Williams, Grace and Blummer Family Trees. Annapolis, Maryland, 1988, pp. 3-9. (Includes details about the Hampton Lanes and Charles II)

James, Larry A. The Ancestors and Descendants of Major Samuel Lane. p. 18. (Samuel Lane b. abt. 1700)

James, Larry A. The Lane Family: Part I, 1986. p. 9-12 (Major Samuel Lane and son Dutton Lane).

James, Larry A. The Lane Family: Part II, 1986.

Iscrupe, William L. and Iscrupe, Shirley G. M. Pennsylvania Line. A Research Guide to Pennsylvania Genealogy and Local History. Laughlintown, PA: Southwest Pennsylvania Genealogical Services, 1990. (I used this volume to straighten out boundaries in Huntingdon County as they changed before and after its creation. This is an indispensable guide for the Pennsylvania researcher. It summarized the following history and genealogical resources for that state: books, genealogical quarterlies, microfilm, maps, services, government addresses, county formation data, types of records available, etc.)

Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Providence Island, 1630-1641, The Other Puritan Colony. Cambridge, U. K.:Cambridge University Press. 1993. (23 Index References to Richard Lane: 86, 91, 94, 100, 160, 179, 216-217, 244, 287-288, 264, 265, 270-271, 285, , 293, 294, 299-301, 323, 340 )

Lamberson, J. L.. The Lamberson, The Lane, The Brown Families of Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania. 255 Tulane Ave., Daytona Beach, Florida, 1971. (Dutton Lane fled to North Carolina in 1704 due to debt.)

Lane, Harold. “The Colony of Providence.” Unpublished manuscript, 13 pages. Topeka, Kansas.

Lane, William E. Early Life and Times in Boone County, Indiana. Harden and Spahr, 1887. (reports comments of Lambert Lane's granddaughter regarding the birth place of Lambert and the residence of his parents from about 1743-1756)

Lee, Dawn Foster. Genealogical Records pertaining to the Fairfield County, Ohio Clark and Lane descendants. (Many primary sources assembled by her grandmother Freda Lane Feucht). Brunswick, Maine, 1997)

Leverts, Philip. Combination Atlas of Franklin and Fairfield Counties. T. Gates Co.: Detroit, Michigan, 1875.

“Livery Companies.” Encyclopedia Britanica. Encyclopedia Britanica, Inc. Chicago, 1960, pp 235- 237, Vol. 14. (Referenced for Richard Lane and Humphry Carter)

“Madder.” Encyclopedia Britanica. Encyclopedia Britanica, Inc.: Chicago, 1960.

Matthews, A. G. Calamy Revised, Being a Revision of Edmund Calamy's Account of the Ministers and Others Ejected and Silenced, 1660-1662. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934. (Samuel Lane is mentioned on page 313 as Vicar of Long Houghton, Northumberland)

Marck, John T. Maryland, The Seventh State, A History. Creative Expressions: Glen Arm, Maryland, 1996. (Background on Maryland state and county history)

Maryland Historical Magazine, Winter 1976. pp. 549-550. (Concerning lives of Richard and Roger Lane)>

Maryland Rent Rolls: Baltimore and Anne Arundel Counties. Baltimore Genealogical Publishing Company, Inc. p. 147. Library of Congress No. 76-1421. (Browsly Hall - July 20, 1669 along with James Butler)

Mauldin Carl. “Mauldin Genealogy.” Genealogical Forum. January 6, 1999. http://genforum.familytreemaker.com/mauldin/messages/124.html. (pertains to the family of the second wife of MajorSamuel Lane of Anne Arundel , Maryland, the son of Richard Lane of Old Providence)

McElwee, Susan. “Rev. Samuel Lane: Portrait of a Pioneer Settler-Preacher.” The Daily News: Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, September 6, page 6. (Tells of the Lane's migration from Maryland to Pennsylvania)

Moss, James E. Providence Ye Lost Towne at Severn in Mary Land. Maryland Historical Society: Baltimore, Maryland, 1976. (Gives 40 years worth of research detailing the history and lives of the early settlers of the Severn River area. Gives information on the status of Neale Clark [possible ancestor of Horatio Clark] and Thomas and Priscilla Cole as colonists in the first Puritan expedition to Maryland from Virginia. References to Edward [step father of MajorSamuel Lane's second wife] and Cornelius Lloyd. Gives sources and primary records pertaining to Puritan exodus from Virginia to Maryland and the early history of Providence, Anne Arundel County..)

“Maryland.” Moore, Mrs. John. Drop Stitches in Southern History - a Family History, p. 211. (Marriage of Christine Moore to Joseph Prigmore. It also traces the Prigmore branch of the Lane family line down to the present.)

Morris, Travis Dee. World Family Tree, Vol. 2. Pedigree # 1189: “Combs, Morris, Martin Family of Texas and Tennessee.” Broderbund Software, Inc. 1995. (well documented sources on the Lane Family)

“Out of a Wilderness - A History of Saltillo, Pennsylvania.” (This little work can be found at the Huntingdon County Library. It mentions Wilkinson Lane's share in the purchase of Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania meeting house land in 1794.)

Pennsylvania Archives. Third Series, Vols. 11-26.

1) Wilkinson Lane: Vol. 22, pp. 11, 190 ), 225 (1783 Supply Tax for Hopewell Twp., Bedford Co.), 356 (188 Taxable Property - Hopewell Twp., Huntingdon Co.); Vol. 25, 561

2) Neal Clark: Vol. 22, pp. 178 (1779 Return of Property - Hopewell Twp., Bedford Co.), 225 (1783 Supply Tax), 304 (1784 Return of Lands), 355 (1788 Taxable Property - Hopewell Twp., Huntingdon Co)

3) Also mentioned on p. 190 of Vol. 22: Dutton Lane, Corbin Lane, Samuel Lane, William Kelly, Broad Cole, Thomas Cole, Thomas Clark, John Kelly

4) Also mentioned on p. 11 of Vol. 11 (Tax of 1773): Corbin Lane, Broad Cole, William Cole

Pennsylvania Archives. Fifth Series, Vol. 4, p. 234. (Wilkinson Lane paid for service in Bedford Militia under Military Loan of 1st April 1784, War Record #479804)

Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Application of Neal Clark for Warrant (#215) for 400 acres in the Trough Creek Valley of present day Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

Application of Wilkinson Lane for Warrant and Patent on 287 acres of land the Trough Creek Valley of present day Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania. Survey Book C1116-177; Patent Book P18-67. Porter, Stephen.

The Great Plague. Sutton Publishing, 2000. (background information on what Alice Lane probably faced in her years in London after Richard Lane's death)

Prigmore, Myles. History of the Prigmore Family. (more on the Prigmores who are descended from the Lanes)

“Providencia Island.” hhtp//www.iep.com/providencia.html. (This web site gives historical and tourist information about Isla de Providencia, the Providence Island associated with Captain Richard Lane.)

“Puritans.” Compton's Online Encyclopedia. America Online, 1996.

Ray, Worth. Tennessee Cousins. pp 443 and 476. (History of the Prigmores descended from Rev. Samuel Lane)

Renninger, Donna L. History of the Descendants of Horatio Clark, Sr. Published Privately in 1968. (Information from many primary sources assembled by her kinsman Freda Lane Feucht about the descendants of Horatio Clark, Sr. and Rebecca Lane of Fairfield County, Ohio, through the line of their son Neal Clark. Dawn Foster Lee, a Clark genealogist mentioned above, is also a kinsman of Mrs. Renninger (husband is a descendant of Horatio and Rebecca)

Rupp, J. D. History of Huntingdon County. Southwest Pennsylvania Genealogical Services: Laughlintown, Pennsylvania. (description of Broad Top)

Saint Paul's Parish Book. Baltimore Co., Maryland. Vol 64, pg. 29. (Birth of Rev. Samuel Lane, 1736)

Sainsbury, Noel W. and Fortesuce, J., et. al.; editors. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and the West Indies, 1574-1737, London, 1860 - . (There are 43 volumes in this series to date. This source was mentioned in Slagel's excellent article connecting Richard and Samuel Lane.)

Shirley, John W. &ldquopBiography of Sir Ralph Lane (ca 1740-1795).” Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, Volume 4 (Edited by William S. Powell). Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, pp.14-15. (gives a summation of the life of Ralph Lane, son of Sir Ralph Lane, Sr. of Devonshire)

Slagel, A. Russel. “Major Samuel Lane (1628-1681): His Ancestry and Some American Descendants.” Maryland Historical Magazine. Vol. 71, No. 4. Winter 1976. (This contains much of the information used in this chapter on Roger Lane, Richard Lane and Major Samuel Lane. It is very well documented. All Lane genealogists owe a great debt to Slagel and his associate Kenyon Stephenson. Their work is the defining source of much Lane lore in America. He is descended form Rachel Lane who married Alexander Russell in 1798.)

Steele, Fannie Lane. Country Roads and Lanes: The Ancestry and Descendants of General Jackson Lane and Allied Families. pp. 8-12. (Includes material about the Hampton Lanes and Charles II)

Stephenson, Kenyon. “The Lane Family.” Genealogy and History. Washington D. C. May 15, 1944 (Call Number CS42.G5) (Stephenson was assisted on this article by Slagle, who was mentioned earlier. Stephenson had a special interest in the children of Samuel Lane, the son of Dutton Lane. He goes into quite a bit of detail about land ownership and his documentation is excellent. His assertion that Samuel's great, great, grandfather was John Lane of Hammersmith, rather than Roger Lane, was refuted some twenty years later by his protege, Slagel. He also discovered the suit against Dutton Lane by his mother's family. Kenyon Stephenson was a descendant of Lambert Lane, a brother of Wilkinson Lane.)

United States Census Records. Huntingdon Co., Pennsylvania, 1790: Clarks, Coles, Lanes (Lain), Kellys, p. 124.

United States Pension Record of Vincent Stephens, American Revolution. (In his application, Stephens, who was the husband of Wilkinson Lane's sister, Ruth Lane, who he had married in Baltimore County, Maryland, tells some incidences about the history of the local company of militia in which Wilkinson Lane would have served during the Am. Rev.)

“Virginia.” Encyclopedia Britanica. Encyclopedia Britanica, Inc: Chicago, 1960.

“William Laud.” Encyclopedia Britanica. Encyclopedia Britanica, Inc.: Chicago, 1960.

Will of Neal Clark. Recorder's Office, Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania. Will Book 3, page 119. (Neal gave his wife's name as “Margred” and names a son “Brice.” Neal gave all his assets to Brice and indicates that Brice is to maintain his wife and he during their lifetime.)

World Family Tree, Vol. 1. Pedigree # 1521. “Lane Family.” Broderbund Software, Inc. 1995.

Wright, J.E. and Corbett, Doris S. Pioneer Life in Western Pennsylvania. University of Pennsylvania Press: Pittsburgh, 1977 (culture, traditions and everyday life of frontiersmen in Pennsylvania)

Book Two

Bareis, George. History of Madison Township. Franklin County, Ohio. George F. Bareis, publisher. Canal Winchester, Ohio, 1902.

Brown, Bobby O. “Genealogical and Family Records Relating to the Brown Family of Pickaway County, Ohio and the Lane Family of Huntingdon Co., Pennsylvania and Fairfield Co.,” Ohio. Orange Park Florida, 1997. Bobby is descended from the daughter of the Rev. Samuel Lane, Wilkinson Lane's older brother.

Brown, Clark. “Genealogical and Family Records Relating to the Lane Family of Baltimore County, Maryland, Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania and Fairfield County, Ohio.” Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1997. Clark is descended from the Rev. Samuel Lane's daughter, Ruth.

Carroll, Lillian M. and Steube, Francis S. Canal Winchester-The Second Ninety Years. Central Press: Lithopolis, Ohio, 1995. (information about the Canal Winchester Lanes)

Danielson, Melissa. Genealogical Records of Fairfield County, Ohio Lanes and Their Descendants. Willow Grove: Pennsylvania, l997.

Deed Records, Fairfield County Recorder's Office. Lancaster, Ohio. (Abstracted from 1812 to 1898 for Clarks and Lanes by the author in 1975 and 1976.)

Deed Records, Huntingdon, Huntingdon County Court House, Pennsylvania.

“Wilkinson and Jane Lane of Fairfield County, Ohio, by Horatio Clark, their attorney, 14 August 1805... Deed Book K, 2 Sept. 1805 for $500.00 187 acres in Union Twp. granted by 9 Nov. 1786 by patent in 1794 (Patent Book 18, p. 670 plus the John Taylor land to Henry Barkstresser).”

Frazier, Ian. Family. Farrar, Straus, Giroux: New York, 1994.

Genealogies of Virginia Families. Baltimore, 1981, p. 552. (Concerning death of Richard Lane).

Goslin, Charles R. Correspondence concerning Fairfield County land records. September 6, 1976. (Land patents of Wilkinson Lane and Horatio Clark Sr.).

Goslin, Charles R. Interview concerning Clark Family Cemetery. August, 1976.

“Huntingdon, Pennsylvania.” Encyclopedia Britanica. Encyclopedia Britanica, Inc.: Chicago, 1960.

Hurt, Douglas R. The Ohio Frontier. Indian University Press: Bloomington, 1996.

Kerr, Laura, E. Campfire to Courthouse, An Early History of Fairfield County. North End Press Incorporated: Columbus, Ohio, 1981. (This 47 page booklet, available from the Fairfield County Heritage Association, covers nicely the early Wyandott presence in Lancaster, Ohio and Ebenezer Zane's role in the settling of Lancaster.)

Knepper, George W. Ohio and Its People. The Kent State University Press: Kent, Ohio, 1989.

Lane, Harold Jay. Genealogical Records pertaining to the descendants of William Lane, son of John Corbin Lane and grandson of Wilkinson Lane, who migrated to Kansas from Fairfield County in the 1870's. Topeka, Kansas, 1998.

Lee, Dawn Foster. Genealogical Records pertaining to the Fairfield County, Ohio Clark and Lane descendants. Brunswick, Maine, 1997) (Many primary sources assembled by her grandmother Freda Lane Feucht).

Leverts, Philip. Combination Atlas of Franklin and Fairfield Counties. T. Gates Co.: Detroit, Michigan, 1875. (pp. 59 & 93)

Miller, Charles C. History and Biographies of Fairfield County, Ohio. Richmond - Arnold Publishing Company: Chicago, Illinois, 1912.

Platt, Carolyn V. “Conrad Richter and the Big Trees.” Timeline. September-October, 1995, pp. 2-15.

Rager, Barnaby. Interview Concerning the Clark Family Cemetery. Marcy, Ohio. (Bloom Township, Fairfield County, Ohio) August, 1976.

Reese, Elizabeth S. Marriage Records, Fairfield County: 1803-1865. DAR: Lancaster, Ohio.

Renninger, Donna L. History of the Descendants of Horatio Clark, Sr., Published Privately, 1968.

Roster of Ohio Soldiers in the War of 1812. Ohio Historical Society. Columbus, Ohio, Vol. 1, page 91. (May be accessed at http://www.ohiohistory.org/Exe/ZyNET.exe)

Rupp, Betty. “Pioneers Celebrated 4th With Vigor.” The Times. Canal Winchester, Ohio. Vol. 106, Number 26. (Includes information concerning July Fourth celebrations in frontier Fairfield County)

Sanderson, George, Esq. A Brief History of Early Settlement in Fairfield County. Wetzler: Lancaster, Ohio, 1851.

Self, Helen. Interview about descendants of her great grandfather Cornelius Clark. Columbus, Ohio, 1976.

Scott, Hervey. A Complete History of Fairfield County: 1776-1876. Siebert and Lilley: Columbus, Ohio, 1877. (Information from Thomas Cole, Jr. about the Clarks and Toby Town. Information about the Barr Family, pp 272-273.)

Tuttle, Ralph E. Some Descendants of John Cole Born 1669 In Maryland and Wives Johanna Garrret and Dinah Hawkins. Privately published: 475 Ursa Ave., Meritt Island, FL 32953 ([407] 452-4132), 1996 (244 pages).

United States Census Records. Huntingdon Co., Pennsylvania, 1790: Clarks, Coles, Lanes (Lain), Kellys, p. 124.

United States Census Records. Fairfield County., 1820: Horatio Clark, page 107A (Bloom).

United States Census Records. Fairfield County., 1830: Horatio Clark, page 165 (Bloom).

United States Census Records. Fairfield County., Ohio. 1840:

Horatio Clark, page 424 (Bloom).

Cornelius Clark, page 424 (Bloom).

Elijah Clark, p. 306 (Amanda).

Rebecca Clark, p. 424 (Bloom).

United States Census Records. Fairfield County., Ohio. 1850:

Horatio Clark, page 229, # 1464 (Bloom).

Cornelius Clark, (Amanda).

Rebecca Clark, # 1466 (Bloom).

Wilkinson Clark, (Bloom).

Walt, __________. Interview concerning Van Buren Clark and his son John Clark. Royalton, Ohio, August, 1976.

Wagner, Carl W. Cemetery Records of Fairfield County.

Williams Brothers. History of Franklin and Pickaway Counties, Ohio. Williams Brothers: Columbus, Ohio, 1880. (from this text came the mention of the Indian version of “Toby” as Tomasch”)

Wills of Fairfield County, Ohio...Probate Office

Ervin Clark, 1883, Case #5987.

Horatio Clark, 1835. Case # 979. Will Record # 2, p. 449.

Horatio G. Clark, March 1874, Case # 5025. Appt. C., Sale Bill D.

Neal Clark, 1844, Case #2077.

Wilkinson Clark, 1859, Case #377 (?), page 91.

John (Corbin) Lane. June 11, 1834, Case #917.

Wilkinson Lane, 1814, Case #196, Will Record # 2, p.91

“Windmills.” Microsoft Encarta 96 Encyclopedia. Microsoft Corp., 1996

Wiseman, C.M.L. Pioneer Period and Pioneer People of Fairfield County, Ohio. F.J. Heer: Columbus, Ohio., 1901.

Wright, J.E. and Corbett, Doris S. Pioneer Life in Western Pennsylvania. University of Pennsylvania Press: Pittsburgh, 1977. (Gives information on squatters)

Wilson, John. Interview concerning Clark family home and land. Canal Winchester, Ohio. 1976.

Appendices

Appendix A

How The Clark Patent Passed To The Descendants Of Cornelius Clark

Deed Records, Fairfield County Recorder's Office. Lancaster, Ohio. (Abstracted from 1812 to 1898 for Clarks and Lanes by the author in 1975 and 1976.)

Goslin, Charles R. Correspondence concerning Fairfield County land records. September 6, 1976. (Land patents of Wilkinson Lane and Horatio Clark Sr.).

Goslin, Charles R. Interview concerning Clark Family Cemetery. August, 1976.

Leverts, Philip. Combination Atlas of Franklin and Fairfield Counties. T. Gates Co.: Detroit, Michigan, 1875.

Self, Helen. Interview about descendants of Cornelius Clark. Columbus, Ohio, 1976.

United States Census Records. Fairfield County., Ohio. 1840:

Elijah Clark, p. 306 (Amanda).

Rebecca Clark, p. 424 (Bloom).

United States Census Records. Fairfield County., Ohio. 1850:

Horatio Clark, page 229 (Bloom).

>Cornelius Clark, (Amanda).

Rebecca Clark, (Bloom).

Wilkinson Clark, (Bloom).

Walt, __________. Interview concerning Van Buren Clark and his son John Clark. Royalton, Ohio, August, 1976.

Wills of Fairfield County, Ohio...Probate Office

Ervin Clark, 1883, Case #5987.

Horatio Clark, 1835. Case # 979. Will Record # 2, p. 449.

Horatio G. Clark, 1874, Case # 5025. Appt. C. Sale Bill D.

Wilkinson Clark, 1859, Case #377 (?), page 68.

Wilson, John. Interview concerning Clark family home and land. Canal Winchester, Ohio. 1976.

Appendix B

The Siblings Of Wilkinson Lane

Africa, J. Simpson. History of Huntingdon and Blair Counties, Pennsylvania, 1883. pages 219, 250. (gives a profile of the life of Rev. Samuel Lane)

Barnes, Robert W. Baltimore County Families, 1659-1759. pages 391-393. (Gives information on Samuel Lane's descendants. Gives references numbers to volumes of Maryland archives series and mentions other sources in periodicals and notes at the Maryland Historical Society.)

Brown, Clark. “Genealogical and Family Records Relating to the Lane Family of Baltimore County, Maryland, Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania and Fairfield County, Ohio.” Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1997. (Relates information concerning the establishment of Aughwick Church and Rev. Samuel Lane's slave.)

“The Deaver, Orndorf, Peterson Families of Maryland and Ohio”. World Family Tree Maker, Vol. Two. Pedigree #1456. Broderbund software, Inc., 1996. (Gives well documented information on the descendants of Samuel and Jane Corbin Lane)

Garn, Jana Lee. “Genealogical Records of Jana Lee Garn.” (contains research on the descendants of Samuel and Jane Corbin Lane's son Richard, through his son Samuel and grandson Richard Samuel of Muskingum County, Ohio)

Horton, Thomas (Mike Horton). Genealogical Records of Thomas Horton. New Port Richey, LF. (Corbin Lane family)

James, Larry A. The Lane Family: Part II, 1986.

Lane, Donald W. “Genealogical Records of Donald W. Lane.” Kingsport, Tennessee. (comments on Lambert, Dutton and Corbin Lane)

Lane, William E. Early Life and Times in Boone County, Indiana. Harden and Spahr, 1887. (reports comments of Lambert Lane's granddaughter about Lambert Lane and Nancy Anderson)

Lytle, Milton Scott. History of Huntingdon County, 1876.

McElwee, Susan. “Rev. Samuel Lane: Portrait of a Pioneer Settler-Preacher.” The Daily News: Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, September 6, page 6. (Biography of Rev. Samuel Lane)

Rupp, J. D. History and Topography of Northumberland, Huntingdon, Mifflin, Centre, Union, Columbia, Juniata and Clinton Counties (1847). Lauglintown, Pennsylvania: Southwest Pennsylvania Genealogical Services. (information on Shirley Township)

Stephenson, Kenyon and Slagel, A. Russell. “The Lane Family” Genealogy and History. Washington D. C. May 15, 1944 (Call Number CS42.G5) (Stephenson was assisted on this article by A. Russell Slagel, who was mentioned earlier. Stephenson had a special interest in the children of Samuel Lane, the son of Dutton Lane. He goes into quite a bit of detail about land ownership and his documentation is excellent. His assertion that Samuel's great, great-grandfather was John Lane of Hammersmith, rather than Roger Lane, was refuted some twenty years later by his associate, Slagel. Kenyon Stephenson was a descendant of Lambert Lane, a brother of Wilkinson Lane.)

Appendix C

Another View

Hastings, Lynn Dakin. Hampton National Historic Site. Historic Hampton, Inc: Towson, Maryland, 1986. (Gives details on the Ridgely family, the gardens, the plantation and its buildings and the mansion with its history and decor. Hampton courts acquisition is mentioned on page 3 but the Merrymans and the Lanes are not mentioned.)

Irby, Sharon Lapp. The Lane's of Muskingum County , Ohio, 1986. (This volume may be found at the Family History Center in Salt Lake City, Utah and probably in Zanesville, Ohio. Irby cites the work of research of Donald Crabtree for information on the line of Adam De La Lane)

Montgomery, Mrs. F. C. “The Wells Family of Baltimore County, Maryland.” (an unpublished typescript history on file at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore, Maryland.)

Slagel, A. Russel. “Major Samuel Lane (1628-1681): His Ancestry and Some American Descendants.” Maryland Historical Magazine. Vol. 71, No. 4. Winter 1976.

Stephenson, Kenyon. “The Lane Family.” Genealogy and History. Washington D. C. May 15, 1944 (Call Number CS42.G5).

THE DESCENDANTS OF HORATIO CLARK, SR. AND REBECCA LANE

¹ The plate contained a depiction of the Lane coat of arms. According to Slagel (see this chapter's bibliography), several branches of the Lanes claimed this crest besides the family of John, Roger and Richard Lane, including the Lanes of Herefordshire and Northumberland, places associated with Richard's life. In 1695 The Lord Mayor of London, a Lane claimed the same crest.

² Sir Robert Rich, a colonial administrator and admiral, was much involved in schemes to exploit the New World, especially the New England colonists. His brother Henry and he were recognized as heads of the Puritan movement in England. The Warwicks share Northumberland roots with the Lanes. The chief officers of the “Company of Providence” included Warwick's brother Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, Governor; John Pym, Treasurer; and William Jessop, Clerk of the Council of State as Secretary.

³ According to Slagel, Ralph Lane (ca. 1530-1603) was the son of Sir Ralph Lane of Devonshire, who married Maud Parr of Northhampton. He was the grandson of William Lane. Maud Parr was a cousin of Katherine Parr the last wife of Henry VIII and the mother of Edward IV. This Lane family used family arms mentioned above which were identical to Samuel Lane's family. Some genealogists claim that Sr. Ralph Lane, Jr. is a cousin of Richard Lane. Besides being a colonial governor, Ralph Lane was a bold soldier, an adventurer and a bureaucrat in Elizabeth I's government. Ralph was invited by Sir Walter Raleigh to head an expedition to America. Ralph Lane became governor of the Wococon/Roanoke Colony in 1585. His cousin, Sir Walter, selected Sir Richard Grenville to be the naval commander of the expedition's seven ships. Grenville and Lane soon quarreled and history has favored Grenville. Ralph Lane has been credited as (without much proof) introducing tobacco to England and of being the first white man to sail up the Chesapeake Bay. After problems with the Indians, and with starvation a very real possibility, the Colony returned to England with Drake. This was days before the arrival of Grenville with a relief expedition. In 1594, Ralph was badly wounded in an Irish rebellion. He never regained his health or vigor and lived out the rest of his life in Ireland, an ineffectual, disappointed man. The judgment of history seems to be that he was a better soldier than administrator.

⁴ Providence had been founded on the eastern bank of the Severn River in 1749. In later years, on the opposite side of the river, at a settler's dock known as Proctor's Landing, grew slowly into Anne Arundel Town. Providence would be eclipsed in 1794 when political machinations witnessed the selection of Anne Arundel Town as the capital of colonial Maryland. Its name was changed to Annapolis in honor of Princess Anne, the great granddaughter of James I of England. For a century, it was one of the major ports of the American colonies and was, for a time, the capital of the United States.

⁵ In fairness, the gap between merchant and gentry was not necessarily all that wide during this period. The stigma of being a merchant did not exist for the gentry at this time. That came a century later in English history. Aristocratic sons, not first born, often became merchants, clerics or soldiers. Actually, many rich merchants found there way into the gentry because of their economic and political power. Indeed, the Kings of England were politically astute enough to become members of various powerful London liveries and guilds. Nevertheless, I haven't found evidence of any “sirs” or “ladies” in Samuel's immediate family. However, Samuel “rubbed elbows” with gentry.

⁶ The Hampton Lanes actually helped Charles II survive to eventually gain the throne lost by his father, Charles I. Young Charles declared himself King after his father's beheading in 1649. After some timely political negotiations, he was declared King of Scotland. He gathered an army of mostly Scottish forces and marched on London. Cromwell at Worcester, north of England, besieged him in 1651. The King proved to be brave but an inept general and his army was decimated by the Round Heads.

This initiated an amazing set of adventures leading to Charles Stuart's escape to France. Charles was whisked to the Thomas Lane manor in Bentley. Here the Lanes cooked up a disguise for the endangered monarch. He assumed the name of one of their laborers and acted the role of a servant to Miss Jane Lane, the daughter of Thomas Lane and the sister of Colonel John Lane. Miss Lane traveled with the royal fugitive for much of the hazard-filled journey to the coast. Forty-two days after the battle, Charles finally made it to Brighton and sailed to France where he spent his time in gentile poverty, waiting for the appropriate time to return to England. When fate finally smiled upon Charles II and he assumed the crown of England, Charles did not forget the Lanes, bestowing upon them titles, honors, land and generous gifts.

Some claim that Richard Lane, the brother of Colonel John and Miss Jane, was the father of Major Samuel Lane, the forefather of the Maryland Lanes. I think this unlikely. I find it hard to understand why a Cavalier would seek out a new life in a haven for Puritans such as the Anne Arundel County, Maryland of 1664. And, as we've seen, Puritans were not exactly sympathetic with the Loyalist view. Nonetheless, the above story was well known in both England and the colonies. Miss Jane Lane was a favorite subject for Loyalist toasts for many decades to come. The Lanes of Dutton's descent would have known the episode well.

⁷ Rebecca was the daughter of Horatio Gates Clark and Ruth Cherry and thus the great granddaughter of Wilkinson Lane. She told her daughter and granddaughter that her father had often shared the story above with the family. Rebecca, named for her paternal grandmother Rebecca Lane, was the sister of the civil war soldier, George Rogers Clark, whose pension papers launched my avocation as a writer of family history. She married Samuel Evans Wright, the brother of George Rogers Clark's wife, Minerva Wright, making her my double cousin.

⁸ Today the 11,000-acre Gunpowder River State Park preserves some of the wilderness Samuel and Wilkinson Lane would have known. The river received its name in the late 1640's when traders were the only white men traveling the waters of the upper Chesapeake. These backwoods entrepreneurs bargained for pelts, which small hunting parties of Indians would bring to shore's edge. During one such encounter, a trader tossed some gunpowder into a campfire to demonstrate its potential. After the trader left, the Indians planted the grains of powder, thinking this would lead to a bonanza harvest of gunpowder. When this group of disappointed Indians next encountered the trader, they informed him that his gunpowder was no good because it would not grow from seed. The story quickly spread among the small fraternity of traders on the bay. From then on, the spot of the trader's impromptu fireworks demonstration became known as Gunpowder River.

In Samuel's time, a sea going port known as Joppa Towne was situated on the Gunpowder, the waters at its mouth being deeper then. As Samuel was well into middle age, Baltimore County's seat, Joppa Towne, was beginning to lose trade to its up-and-coming rival, Baltimore Town. In 1752, at about the time Samuel moved into the area, the latter village had 25 houses, one church and two taverns. Eventually, Joppa Towne's harbor silted up and the town disappeared. In the 1960's a modern subdivision was built on the old site and renamed Joppa Towne.

⁹ Being a fan of Gore Vidal's novel Burr, I've wondered if Wilkinson Lane may have been kin to the duplicitous Maryland general, James Wilkinson, whose ambition and lust for power drove him to conspire with, and then betray, Aaron Burr. Further research is needed.

¹⁰The area the Lanes settled in became Huntingdon County on September 20, 1787. The original townships carved from Bedford County at this time were Tyrone, Barree, Huntingdon, Shirley, Hopewell and part of Dublin. These townships have change boundaries many times since the Lanes and Clarks migrated to the area, causing the appearance of movement on their part where none may actually have occurred. When Wilkinson first entered what was then Bedford County in 1773, Dublin, and Barree were the only townships existing. Before the area was Bedford it was part of Cumberland County and before that Lancaster County.

¹¹ The Scotch-Irish, who would have simply been called “Irish” by their contemporaries, were so named by scholars because they had migrated from Scotland to northern Ireland two or three generations before their exodus to the America colonies. This notable migration from Ireland was ignited by restrictive British policies, which had closed non-British markets. As a result, seaports closed, industries were strangled, and land values were depressed. Many tenants in Northern Ireland faced the grim prospect of foreclosure and poverty. Seeking cheap land and an end to indigence, a large number of the Scotch-Irish could only make the passage to America as indentured servants.

¹² Neal Clark was enumerated in the 1790 Pennsylvania Federal Census by a back woods tabulator, with a talent for phonetic spelling, as “Nail” Clark. Neal, no doubt, had a bit of a Southern drawl. This particular census helps link Neal to the Fairfield County, Ohio Clarks. It indicates that Neal had three sons who would have been about the same ages as William, Horatio, and Neal (Cornelius) Clark, who migrated to Fairfield County, Ohio in 1799. Richard Clark, who is thought to be Neal Clark's brother, is close by as well. In the census index, it appears that Neal Clark lived close to his son Horatio Clark's father-in-law, Wilkinson Lane. Wilkinson's sister Ruth and her husband Vincent Stephens also lived in same general area. Wilkinson lived in the vicinity of Saltillo, which is east by northeast of Eagle Foundry by several miles. Lane was also mentioned in '87 and '89 tax records as a resident of the same township as Neal Clark. Another circumstance that cements a connection of Neal Clark to Horatio Clark, Sr. is that the name Cornelius (Neal) is the most common Christian name of the various branches of the Fairfield County, Ohio Clarks. Neal was also listed as “Cornelius” in tax records. Margaret Fleetwood Clark's maiden name has also been listed as ñBensonî (a first marriage?). The children of Neal and Margaret Clark of Broad Top, Huntingdon Co., Pennsylvania are thought to be as follows from oldest to youngest: Thomas (1764-1853), Hattush Clark (1765-aft 1850), Elijah Clark (born before 1774), Horatio (1775-1835), Neal Clark (1779-1844), Sarah Clark (1780-1861), William Clark (Bef. 1785-aft 1816), Fleetwood Clark (1788-1850), Elizabeth Clark (1790-1867), Brison Clark (abt 1792-1880). William, Horatio and Neal migrated to Fairfield Co., Ohio in 1799. Hattush, and Fleetwood migrated to McKean Twp. (just north of Grandview), Licking Co., and Ohio. Sarah, Elizabeth and Brison remained in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania. Elijah's fate is unknown.

¹³ This is revealed in Vincent Stephen's testimony when he applied for a pension in 1832 for service in the American Revolution. According to sworn testimony, his parents moved to what became Huntington County, Pennsylvania in 1750. This would make them among the very first settlers in the area and quite vulnerable to Indian hostilities, which arose there in the 1750's, aggravated by the French and Indian War. Vincent's family evidently returned to Maryland, for he and his wife, Ruth Lane, made their way to Plank Cabin Valley, Bedford County, Pennsylvania in 1773. This is significant because Rebecca Lane's father and brothers did not come north from Baltimore County, Maryland to Huntingdon till 1773. This would imply that Ruth met her husband in Maryland since the couple is thought to have married in about 1770. If the Clarks followed the same pattern as the Stephens family, they could have been in Huntingdon County as early as 1748 and later removed to Maryland, only to return to Pennsylvania about the same time as the Lanes. More research is needed.

¹⁴ “The Ancestors of William R. Iseminger Home Page,” http://www.familytreemaker.com/users/i/s/e/William-Iseminger/index.html

¹⁵ In 1838 Union Township was carved up into smaller townships. One of these was Todd Township, which was the area where the Clarks settled.

¹⁶ The Neal Clark homestead is located about one half mile north of Mt. Pleasant Cemetery (take a left up the mountain) where the Clarks are buried. The cemetery is a half hour east of Saxton, Pennsylvania.

¹⁷ Arline Jones Clark, whose research has yielded much information on Neal and Margaret Clark and their descendants, is one of many descendants of Neal and Margaret Clark still in the area. Her line of ascent is as follows: Arline Jones, 6th generation; Golda Rebecca Clark, 5th... Robert Bruce Clark, 4th...; Algerson Clark, 3rd...; Brice Clark, 2nd...; Neal Clark, 1st generation. Mrs. Clark remembers fondly many visits to the original Neal Clark farm when it was owned by her granduncle, Horatio Clark.

¹⁸ Today these properties would be in a section of Annapolis occupied by newer homes and one very large mall. Other Maryland Clarks obtaining land holdings at about this time were Matthew and John Clark, who shared a tract of land with John Brown. The Browns were to be a family associated with the Clarks and Lanes later in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Neale may have been connected to the Virginia Clarks who produced William and George Rogers Clark. Since the family was in Virginia shortly after the founding of Jamestown, this could bring some credence to the family tradition mentioned earlier in the text.

¹⁹ Another scenario about Clark origins comes from Arline Clark of Saxton, Pennsylvania. In her family, there is an oral tradition that Neal Clark, Sr., the father of Brison, Horatio and their siblings, was one of three brothers. According to this tradition, one of Neal's brothers was named Arnold and the other Richard. Their roots, it was said, were in County Cork, Ireland. The family settled in Maryland and afterwards migrated twice to the Bedford County, Pennsylvania area. First, the brothers came to Plank Cabin Valley, only to return to Maryland to escape Indian troubles. After several years, the Clarks returned to Bedford and settled on Broad Top Mountain. Arnold is supposed to have walked to Harrisburg to secure a warrant to the land on Broad Top. An Arnold Clark did indeed apply for a land warrant on Broad Top Mountain but not until 1852. Neal Clark applied for a warrant to have 357 acres surveyed near the Raystown Branch of the Juniata River in Plank Cabin Valley. However, that was in 1795, long after the Indian tribulations. There is also a Richard Clark, probably Neal Clark, Sr.'s brother, in the record. He is recorded as having applied for a 1795 land warrant on Broad Top and is enumerated in the 1790 Federal Census for Huntingdon County.

²⁰ The settlement, laid out by Zane in 1800, was first named New Lancaster. It served as the county seat of Fairfield County, which was so named by its early white citizens because of the area's rolling hills and fertile soil. This new county was formed on December 9, 1800, the sixth county established in the Northwest Territory. It originally included the present day counties of Knox, Delaware, and Licking, plus large chunks of present day Franklin, Pickaway, Perry and Hocking. The first settlers of Lancaster were primarily Pennsylvanians, and most were of German descent. In 1805 the Ohio Legislature changed the town's name to Lancaster. The wealth and opulence of Fairfield County's canal era lingers today in the many fine historical homes throughout the county and on Wheeling and Main Streets in Lancaster. Many men of national stature came from early Lancaster. General William T. Sherman and his brother U. S. Senator John Sherman were born here. Calling Lancaster home was General Sherman's father-in-law, U. S. Senator Thomas Ewing, who served in several Presidential administrations. Other distinguished residents of the city were U. S. Attorney General Henry Stanbery, the defender of President Andrew Johnson at his impeachment trial, and three governors of Ohio. For decades the early legal establishment of Lancaster was known as the foremost in the state, rivaling any in the young nation. These barristers may have needed that expertise to settle the numerous land disputes that arose on the early Ohio frontier.

²¹ Thomas Cole purchased the patent on this land in 1805. Thomas's brother, Broad Cole also settled in this section of Amanda Township in 1801. The Coles had lived in the same general neighborhood as the Lanes and Clarks back in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania. According to Harold Lane of Topeka, Kansas, his ancestor John Corbin Lane also settled adjacent to his father's property in 1799.

²² “Joshua Cole was born about 1760 in Baltimore County, Maryland, and possibly married Polly Lane, daughter of Wilkinson Lane, about 1790 in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania. Wilkinson Lane named grandsons James Cole and Elisha Cole in his will, and that proved that his daughter married a man named Cole. A Polly Cole married Jeremiah Ricketts in Fairfield County, Ohio, about 1805 and it is assumed that Polly was a widow of a man named Vole. A circumstantial case can be made that Joshua was the Cole who married Polly Lane in Huntingdon County, and that he died about 1804 in Fairfield County, Ohio. The 1840 Census for Ridge Township, Hancock County, Ohio, lists Jeremiah Rickets, age 20 to 30 and a female 70 to 80 years of age. If that female was Polly, it would place her date of birth between 1760 and 1770.” Tuttle, Ralph E. "Some Descendants John Cole Born 1669 In Maryland and Wives Johanna Garrret and Dinah Hawkins. Privately published, 1996, p. 161.

A Lane descendant, in a letter to Bobby Brown, claims that Wilkinson had a daughter Polly (Mary Jane) who married Aaron Cole and both had accompanied Lane and Clark form Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania to Fairfield County, Ohio in 1799. Perhaps Aaron was a brother or cousin to Thomas Sr., Broad and Josuah Cole were brothers, perhaps cousins. The circumstantial evidence points to Joshua Cole who died in Fairfield County

²³ David Wright, Sr. enlisted in Quemahoning Township, Bedford County (later Somerset County), Pennsylvania in 1775. . At the time, this was the very edge of the Pennsylvania frontier. He was either the brother or the son of Samuel Wright of Quemahoning Township in Somerset County, Pennsylvania and was born in York County, Pennsylvania in 1751. David served with Col. Hand's regiment of the Pennsylvania Line in Captain Cluggage's Bedford County Company. He participated in the sieges of Boston and New York. After his one year enlistment was through, he scouted in western Pennsylvania as a part of Col. Hand's campaign against Indians loyal to the British.

David Wright moved to Clark and Lane's Fairfield Co., Ohio vicinity in about 1801 or 1802. He had four sons: Joseph, John, David and James, who married Horatio Clark's daughter. The sons of David Wright moved to Madison Township at about the same time another family of Wrights, this one from Maryland, moved to the area. These Maryland Wrights were Joseph Wright, Jr. (my ancestor) and his brother John.

In about 1838, David Wright received a pension for his service in the Revolution and moved to the Canal Winchester farm of his grandson, John Wright, Jr. This was probably near Blacklick Creek on the northern edge of Madison County.

²⁴ This Neal Clark (1779-1844) is the brother of Horatio Clark Sr., and should not be confused with Horatio's son Neal and several of Horatio, Sr.'s grandsons of the same name. Fairfield County historian and journalist Charles Goslin listed this Neal Clark as an original Fairfield County patent holder. Neal was also listed as a taxpayer in Fairfield County in 1806. His farm was in Amanda Township about two miles south of Horatio and Rebecca Clark's place. Among his heirs in 1844 were Fleet (wood) Clark, Neal Clark, William Clark, Elijah Clark and Mrs. Joseph Swisher. The 1820 census shows he was a widower with children at that time.

²⁵ The children of Cornelius and Eliza Clark, who remained in central Ohio, settled near Ashville in Pickaway County. These Clarks are buried in the Reber Hill Cemetery, as are many Browns who are descended from Wilkinson Lane's brother, Reverend Samuel. Bobby O. Brown relates that the Browns had been connected to the Lanes dating back to the years in Pennsylvania (perhaps Maryland as well) and were linked to the Fairfield Lanes and Clarks through William Brown's marriage to Wilkinson Lane's niece, Ruth Lane. William and Ruth Lane Brown migrated form Huntingdon county in 1805 and settled in Walnut Township in Pickaway County, about three miles, “as the crow flies,” southwest of cousin Wilkinson Lane's farm.

²⁶Carroll and Steube tell us in Canal Winchester - The Second Ninety Years that the would-be actor, Gordon Lane, was “thwarted from attaining an acting career by family disapproval.” Since this would have been after the death of his father, William H. Lane, I would presume that his mother, Alberta Lane might have been the family member who pressured Gordon to give up his dream. Harold Jay Lane of Topeka, Kansas relates that Waldo Lane, a vaudeville musician, originally from Kansas, was a cousin of William H. Lane. Waldo often stayed at the Lanes when he played Columbus. Perhaps there is a connection with Waldo Lane's visits and young Gordon Lane's aspirations.

²⁷ Letter, dated 19 Jun 1858, from Keziah (GREENLAND) SHANAFELT of Clarion Co., PA, to her son, Thomas. Keziah is a granddaughter of Benjamin & Sarah (SIAS) CORBIN. The letter is in the possession of Laurel Shanafelt Powell of Colorado, and Lorinda Clendenon Greenland generously posted a transcription at her web site

A Reminiscence Sung By Frederick V. Schultz

A Reminiscence Sung

1559-1999

A Reminiscence Sung

The Ancestors Of Wilkinson Lane1559-1779

With Notes About the Family Of His Son-In-Law Horatio Clark

1 RICHARD LANE“A Merchant Taylor Of London”

2Pirates and Planters

3A Man of Great Sincerity And Exemplary Conversation

5 Maryland to Pennsylvania

The Lanes and ClarksEstablish Themselves in Ohio1799-1859

1Early Days In Fairfield County, Ohio

2Toby Town

3Prairie and Forest Yield to Fields

4The Passing Of the Frontier

Book One

London by Edward Rutherford

Pioneer Life In Western Pennsylvania by J. E. Wright and Doris S. Corbett

Providence Ye Lost Towne At Severn in Mary Land by James E. Moss

Book Two

The Frontiersmen by Alan Eckert

Family by Ian Frazier

The Ohio Frontier by R. Douglas Hurt

Ohio and its People by George W. Knepper

The Trees, The Fields, The Town a frontier Ohio trilogy by Conrad Richter

The Scotch-Irish - A Social History by James G. Leyburn

Forest Rose - A Tale of the Frontierby Emerson Bennett

The Clark Patent Passes To the Descendants of Cornelius Clark (Son of Horatio Clark, Sr.)

Ervin and Van Buren Clark

The Farm Passes from Clark Hands

The Siblings of Wilikinson Lane

Reverend Samuel Lane and Descendants:

Two Daughters of Reverend Samuel Lane

Ruth Lane Stephens

Charity Lane Baxter

Sarah Lane Hays

Abraham Lane

John Lane

Lane OriginsAnother View

Will of Cornelius Cark, Father of Horatio Clark, Sr.

The Last Will and Testament of Neal Clark, Decd.

Huntingdon County.

Memorandum.

Will and Inventory of Horatio Clark, Sr.

THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF HORATIO CLARK SEIGNIOR

INVENTORY OF HORATIO CLARK

Clark Deed Records Fairfield County, Ohio 1812-1893

The Will of Wilkinson Lane

Tidence Lane -First Cousin of Wilkinson Lane

(A Southern Branch of the Lanes)

Samuel Clayton Lane Great Grandson of Wilkinson Lane

Line of Descent From Wilkinson Lane

Introduction and Book One

Appendices

Appendix A

How The Clark Patent Passed To The Descendants Of Cornelius Clark

The Siblings Of Wilkinson Lane

Another View

The Ancestors Of Wilkinson Lane

1559-1779

1
RICHARD LANE
“A Merchant Taylor Of London”

2
Pirates and Planters

3
A Man of Great Sincerity And Exemplary Conversation

5
Maryland to Pennsylvania

The Lanes and Clarks
Establish Themselves in Ohio

1799-1859

1
Early Days
In Fairfield County, Ohio

2
Toby Town

3
Prairie and Forest
Yield to Fields

4
The Passing
Of the Frontier

The Clark Patent Passes To the Descendants of Cornelius Clark
(Son of Horatio Clark, Sr.)

Lane Origins
Another View

Will of Cornelius Cark,
Father of Horatio Clark, Sr.

Samuel Clayton Lane
Great Grandson of Wilkinson Lane