Welcome!

Just north of "Mericle Run" ...

...and over an imaginary line in the sand--the famous Mason-Dixon Line--is where our people would have conducted their lives and business in the 1700s and 1800's.

On an elevation of land along Dunkard Creek and Wades Run is Mt. Morris.

Mt. Morris was a "major town" just north of Morgantown, West Virginia.  It is just east of Blacksville (also West Virginia).

In reading its earliest history we find "Chief Bow Legs" holding council with Mason and Dixon as they surveyed the area and we can imagine our ancestors in a thickly wooded region trying to understand each others' language and actions in the dampness of shaded and rocky terrain.


A famous Turkey Foot Rock with petroglyphs?

Mysterious French "plates" buried in the land to demarcate boundaries of the Lousiana Purchase?

French supplies hidden in caves?

Having been reading some local color works about Connecticut of late my mind flashed to northern caves, Enfield's "Red Hills" Indians and the country of the "Pekatoos" and even "Regicides" or judges hiding in caves as the King's loyalists searched through farm and field for exiles, beligerents, and traitors.




North and South in the folds of history we find clues and souvenirs...and stuff for our Quilt for Mama.

I don't find "Chief Bow Legs'" "reservation" listed in my Visitor's Guide to Indian Reservations, in fact I don't see any "Indian lands" at all in Pennsylvania or West Virginia in this book (ed. Veronica E. Tiller, Council Publications [copyright Council of Energy Resource Tribes], Denver, Colorado, 1992).  There were some Pennsylvania lands owned by Connecticut...those have been, for years, in an ongoing process between states.  But it looks like Native American land in Pennsylvania ISN'T reservation.


I was surprised to find mention of Native American bones on some of the local farms...

the Margaret Bodlye farm in the Pine Grove
the Walter Dulaney farm
the Samuel Lemley farm
and the Floyd Kiger farm

Some of these findings seem to date back to the 1930s when it was "trendy" to be an "Indianologist" and/or to contribute to the museumification of the Native Americans.

I was thinking of this as I stumbled upon mention of the last Indian seen in the area, who spoke in sign language and did not hurt anybody on his way west.  And was last seen at the farm of John L. Long.

Long!

The maiden name of my Clarissa Fox.

I had been trying to conceive of where Clarissa came from before joining Henry in marriage and living in Miracle Run.

Doing this research on the web is sometimes much like using sign language!


Why we find ourselves in Mt. Morris...


Here it is then, we hear of record of an old Native American trail, handed down to the writer E. E. Harley who bothered to write down the news.

it went to the top of the hill, followed that ridge

...might just as well be a lyric of some epic ballad not yet written about Native Americans "moving on" from where they hunted, fished, and made "pappooses."

...the trail went over to Claughton Chapel and on to Wheling, the website says.


This was at the farm of Walter Dulaney.


The evolution of name Dulaney to Delana and Delaney is much like this trail, I imagine.

And it's not exactly the same trail that we follow over to the Lemley farm, but both trails may provide us with insight into a leg of the actual Underground Railroad.

There in the heart of America, an artery to freedom...
the homeland of the children of the fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence...


   MT. MORRIS


Is this where we find our family????

More settlers first...

If I could draw I would most certainly be inspired to draw a brother Ackerman camping inside a large hollow Sycamore tree, the smoke of his campfire more detectable by its scent of home rather than by the sight of plume.

The smoke came out of a knothole.

And in this tree Ackerman remained safe for just a little while until hunger played its part in fate yet again.

mtmorrishistory.org tells us what happened...

"He was lured to his death by an Indian who discovered his tracks in the forest.  The Indian imitated the gobble of a wild turkey, then when Ackerman, hearing the gobble, went to kill the turkey, he was shot by the Indian in hiding."

This sort of local lore is why we are also told that Louis Wetzel could load his musket while running at full speed.

In story and lore people were processing the harsher brutalities of life by memorializing their relatives and other action figures in their landscape.


While the stories of bravery (some myth) need to be remembered, so does the rough stuff of life.  Stories teach us about reality of life and the world.

So we can easily imagine Wetzel running with his musket (which tells us something of the time period too) and our minds are also running to keep up with the reason of the story, right?!


Some of these early stories tell of fighting and making up.  Before good fences made good neighbors (Robert Frost), there was John Glassgow (in 1765) in a fist fight with a giant of a man named "Scott."  Duking out a sort of duel, a dance of argument concerning property, and more to the point...squattor's rights versus claim to having built something so it's "mine," right?!

The story of the fight conjures otherwise peaceable men covered in dirt and sweat and blood and bruises...and a Mrs. calling from the sidelines hoping to interject in the escalation and remind the fighters of common sense.

A handshake and a decision to be neighbor rather than killer of fellow man in order to possess.

And so another day or two brought (exaggerating, exaggerating) the settlement of "Scott's Run." 

When we hear about or read "legend" this is how simple it all sounds.  Really the REALITY was much more complicated but because people want to remember the important parts and want to incorporate something about the story into their traditions, people highlight the sparse details and maybe add a moral or two to the story along the way. 

It's fun to tell story, so it gets passed around and embellished with sometimes outlandish story-details.  Sometimes just the kernel of the original happening and/or/story remains as the stories make their way around and get told from different points of view and in various "versions."

We come sneaking up on Mt. Morris in our family tree research...upon people in the past and a world that was different and similar to the world of the 21st century.

You can imagine walking through a heavy canopied forest, stepping on leaves and twigs and maybe avoiding a heel slip in the moss.

Way back there weren't many clearings in the woods, but there were smooth paths because of the Native Americans and because woodland creatures naturally gravitate to streams and rivers.

Like in New England, the White Settlers had been through years and years of ongoing fighting and rough living on the land.  In the way back times in the midsection of America there was something else going on too.  There was a more organic equality amongst people who knew themselves to be pretty little in comparison to the old growth and wildlife and the vast distances of the land.  Women as well as men were tough and children grew into serious and survival-minded grown ups right quick.  The middle lands of America had an older history of a diversity of people being just people before they were this or that color-wearing soldier.  And frankly, before the "missionaries" flooded "the west" people were more 'personally spiritual' than church-going.  Of course, Native American dances and ceremonies and traditional rituals were the Native American ways of "religion."

The Native Americans for thousands of years had been living and making home in the middle of America.  While people traveled to the seaboards and some tribes lived there all along, the majority of the Native Americans were a dense population in the middle of America as if the womb of Mother Nature on the Continent was towards the middle.  In the middle was where they gathered and assembled to work out all the problems of their "nations" and dwelling together on the same continent.


I haven't found yet in Mama's family where we are directly connected to Native American families, so we've been making our way through history and mostly slipping into "White" family life in these websites.

Coming from New England and West Virginia we land for a spell in Mt. Morris.


Where we go, at first, amidst the smells of pork, beans, and corn bread to find wool being carded and spun into yarn.

What's "sorguhm molasses"?

I think I read about that in something from FOXFIRE, stationed farther south than here but just as much part of the American story as ox carts and sheepskin.

Pull that top tight over my calash there and let's get out and look around.