Re: Robert Campbell & Nancy George
CAMPBELL, GEORGE
Posted By: Alice Daniels (email) In Response To: Re: William H Campbell & Nancy George,Kate Archer Davis (Laura Guhse)
Date: 1/9/2012 at 18:34:30
Moulton Weekly Tribune
September 30, 1937Around About America
BY J. R. BAKLEYThis summer I sat on the veranda of my son's home on William Penn Avenue in Pittsburgh, as I closed my eyes I saw a ghostly procession
of old fashioned pioneer people going past on horseback. This avenue is the oldest road in western Pennsylvania. In that first procession of ghostly riders was my grandfather, Robert Campbell, then a boy of ten, whose family was on their migration to the new state of Ohio which
was rapidly filling up with eastern people. My grandfather had seen George Washington, and was a lad who sat straight on his horse as he
rode pat, and that was about 137 years ago.
Time does not mean a thing in ghostly parades, and although it was ten or twelve years later when my grandmother rode by, it was in my
imagination only another second until I saw another curious bunch of men, women and children moving down that big hill into the smoky
iron town of Pittsburgh, then only a town of ten thousand souls.
From there they moved on into Ohio and as they settled down in Muskingum County near Zanesville.
My grandfather eventually met Nancy George, my maternal grandmother and they were married. She only a girl of eighteen, and he some ten years older.
Only a little over a hundred years ago, but in my vision I followed them to Ohio and from there in the forties across Indiana corduroy roads,
and the prairies of Illinois to lowa, where they settled down in Davis County about 1849. Then in my vision I began to count the grandchildren and
Their children and the count became astonishing. As near as I can now estimate, there are over 250 of the grandchildren, great and great great grandchildren living. That suggests a problem which no mind can solve. If two people uniting in marriage 100 years ago can produce 250 descendants in 100 years, how many will this country have in population 100 years hence?
But that is not all. I saw in my ghostly fancy, for my mind went backward as well as forward. My grandmothers people were emigrants from northern Ireland, as well as my father's people - Protestant Irish.
Their families dated back to the religious wars between the Protestants and the Catholics. The old Covenenter Presbyterians who signed an oath
in their own blood that they would be true to death to their faith, when Charles the II reigned, were some of their ancesters. On the other side of that old procession, my grandfather came down from Virginia stock,
before the Revolution. My Scotch ancestor, John Campbell, hating slavery, and yet living in Virginia, a slave state, vowed that none of his children would ever hold slaves. He met and married Peggy Fullerton, the great ancester of the Moulton Fullertons, whose people lived in Virginia before the Revolution.
They moved to western Pennsylvania not far from Pittsburgh, before the Revolution. Some of the family joined the Revolution under that dashing
cavalry officer, Francis Marion.
Once two of the boys had a furlough and rode home on their horses, but the journey consumed so much of the time that they only had 72
hours to visit. When they arrived, they were worn out, and literally in rags. When they left 72 hours later they were clothed from head to heel in new uniforms with extra mittens and socks. The clothes and garments were growing on the backs of the sheep when they arrived, but as soon as the first greeting was over, the girls and women who were skilled in weaving, went out and robbed the sheep of their wool, right in the winter.
Then they washed and scoured, carded, spun, wove, cut out the garments, shrunk and dyed the cloth, cut it and sewed, fitted and finished even
to the buttons. They knit and worked every hour two nights and two days to accomplish the feat. Those were real days in American history.
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