Chapter XV: Neal – Shake – Davis

It is to the Neal¹ family itself that we finally turn now, to see what surprises it may have in store for us. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, CHARLES M. NEAL, my grandfather, was born on April 13, 1878, probably at his parents' farm in Hamilton Township of Sullivan County, Indiana. He first appears on the 1880 census (as a two-year-old identified as "Charly," the name by which he would be known by friends and associates through most of his adult life as well). At the time of the next available census, in 1900, he was a farm laborer, age twenty-two years, living with William J. and Almira Bledsoe in Haddon Township of Sullivan County, Indiana.² Bledsoe was a relative, but only by marriage. Charles Neal's widowed grandfather, William Neal, married a second time after Charles's father (Thomas Neal) was born; William's second wife was Charlotte G. {Moore} Bledsoe, herself a widow, and William Bledsoe was her son from her first marriage.³ Bledsoe's wife Almira was a closer relative: the sister of Charles Neal's mother, Mary Ellen {Shake} Neal, she was Charles Neal's aunt.

Judging from my grandfather's personal records, by mid-1902 he (with help from his older brother, Ed) was running a Golden Rule general store in Caledonia, Indiana. (Perhaps it was actually Charly who was helping Ed.) This place was a small coal-mining settlement northeast of Sullivan, Indiana, that had a reputation as being a rather rough town. Caledonia would eventually be obliterated by the extensive strip mining for coal that would begin in Sullivan County within a few years.⁴

But in 1900 my grandfather was on the verge of embarking on another career: the ministry. He had been baptized in Busseron Creek on August 7, 1896.⁵ One important early influence was a young school teacher and neighbor named Stanford Chambers, with whom my grandfather attended services at the Deckard School House. Chambers would go on to become an eminent Fundamentalist preacher and editor, and as such he would publish many of my grandfather's early essays on religious issues and themes. By 1899 Charles Neal and his brother Ed were helping to lead church meetings all over southwestern Indiana, and my grandfather later recalled that he gave his first sermon in that year. His journal for 1899-1902 describes his preaching (sometimes in partnership with Chambers) and the results. In 1900 Charles Neal enrolled in the Correspondence Bible College, but until this point he was primarily self-taught.⁶

As we have also seen earlier in an earlier chapter, Charles M. Neal married Glenn {Vanderpool} Neal on April 9, 1905, and my father was born in April 1906. After my grandmother's death – perhaps, in part, because of it? – my grandfather sold the Golden Rule store for $5,000, left my father with his Vanderpool grandparents in Hymera, Indiana, chose a Bible school to attend, and set off to become a full-fledged preacher. Exactly how he selected what was then called Potter Bible College in Bowling Green, Kentucky, is not known, but sometime in 1906 or 1907, probably in the latter year, he enrolled in its full-time program of study for the ministry. Charles had completed his studies by September 1909. The short-lived Potter Bible College, founded in 1901, would cease operations in 1913.⁷ Despite its rather small faculty, it had an ambitious curriculum of courses.

At about this time, my grandfather met and married his second wife, a woman named Anna Winifred {Bottorff} Neal.⁸ The fact that she was born in Kansas makes one wonder if they had first met in that state, perhaps even at a different Bible college. The two also may have gotten acquainted while they were both students at Potter Bible College in Bowling Green, but it is possible they had known one another before then. Anna's was a long-time Indiana family, and so an education at a college in Kentucky would have made sense for her. Family lore suggests that my grandfather had met Anna at a revival meeting in Indiana, so perhaps she had been just visiting her family in that state when she got to know my grandfather at such a meeting there. It seems most likely that she accompanied my grandfather to Bowling Green (and enrolled there) after they were married, and the fact that Anna is listed in Potter's records under her new married name supports this explanation.

However and wherever they met, Charles and Anna were married on September 6, 1908. Their marriage presumably took place in her home state of Kansas, but that is only a supposition. My grandfather and his new wife then went off to Bowling Green – where they lived, Anna liked to say, in a former chicken house. With his second wife, my grandfather had six more children (one son and five daughters) between 1909 and 1929, so my father ultimately had one half-brother and five half-sisters – and a stepmother. My father's reminiscences, which he wrote out and then recorded on tape in 1976, furnish some interesting details about his family's life and his own experiences in Indiana and Maine. They also shed light on aspects of his life from the time he migrated to Michigan during the mid-1920s up to the point when he married my mother in 1927. Without these reminiscences, reconstructing those years would have been much more difficult and probably impossible.⁹

On the 1910 census, my grandfather and his family were enumerated in Linton, Indiana, which at that time was right in the middle of Indiana's coal-producing area.¹⁰ Charles M. Neal, thirty-two years old and a clergyman, is shown renting a residence at 589 Third Street, N.W., in that town. Here, my father was living – none too happily, he tells us in his reminiscences – with his father and stepmother. My grandfather thus was in his first ministerial position: the pastor of the recently established (1906) Linton Church of Christ on Fourth Street, N.W., the only church of that denomination in Linton. Presumably he had accepted a call to this church soon after finishing his schooling in 1909. My grandfather served in Linton until July 22, 1911, when he became the minister of the Church of Christ in nearby Dugger, Indiana.¹¹

Dugger was another coal-mining town, but it was larger than Linton. The Neals' first house in Dugger is not identified in my father's reminiscences, but according to his and his half-brother Stanford's descriptions elsewhere it was located three streets further from downtown than the church was. In 1913, after having served two years as minister, my grandfather designed and helped to construct a new church building for the Dugger Church of Christ. This structure and its adjacent parsonage (built in 1922) still stand at Third and Clark Streets in the town.¹² Details about church life and activities in Dugger can be found in issues of a regular newsletter, called The Sower, that the Dugger Church of Christ published at least into the late 1920s.¹³

At the end of August in 1916, my grandfather wound up his ministry in Dugger and moved the family to Portland, Maine, where he became minister of another Church of Christ congregation. A history of Dugger suggests that Charles might have arranged to remain – nominally, at least – the minister of the church in Dugger while he was in Portland, during which time two men served as substitutes for him back in Indiana, but his son Stanford did not recall such an arrangement. My grandfather's own account, recorded in the minutes of the church in Dugger, states only that he was "absent from Dugger" between March 1917 and January 1922, language that also hints there might have been some understanding about his eventual return there.

I have never learned how my grandfather came to the attention of the church in Portland, and vice versa, except that his hiring there was engineered by a prominent businessman and member of the church. His name was William Houston.¹⁴ My grandfather evidently had never preached at this church, or even visited Portland, because when the Neals first arrived in Portland Charles did not know Houston by sight. It is possible that my grandfather's cousin, Claude Neal, who had been the minister of a church in Westbrook, Maine, near Portland, had played a key role in bringing my grandfather to the attention of the church in Portland.

The Neals arrived in Portland following a train journey by way of Canada. They lived temporarily in a ground-floor flat in a new building across the railroad tracks from Deering Park¹⁵ for a month or so until my grandfather could find a house for the entire family. Confirming this, the Portland city directory for 1917 lists my grandfather in a rooming house at 8 Surrenden Street, near the park.¹⁶ Soon the whole family was living in a modest house at 399 St. John Street, not far from the railroad station and my grandfather's equally modest little church at 867 Congress Street.¹⁷ The 1920 census shows my grandfather (then forty-one years old) and his family renting at this St. John Street location, and the city directory describes him as a minister of the Church of Christ.¹⁸

Oddly, my father remembered his father's church as having been on Valley Street, a one-block street not far from St. John Street and the Church of Christ building at 867 Congress Street, but there was no such church on Valley Street. According to the same city directory for Portland and to a detailed contemporary map of the city in the Library of Congress, at that time Portland had just the one Church of Christ – and it was at 867 Congress Street near the corner of Weymouth Street.¹⁹ None of the other churches on Congress Street seem to be plausible candidates to have been my grandfather's church, especially since they were mainline denominations. Evidently my father's memory of the church's location a half-century later, the only inconsistent element in the entire picture, was faulty in this instance.

In order to supplement his growing family's meager income and get out of debt, my grandfather also managed a small A&P grocery store in South Portland, a long trolley ride from home. Later, Charles took over running the main A&P store on Bramhall Square (and close to his church) in downtown Portland.²⁰ My father was proud of the fact that his father was so good a manager that A&P offered him a full-time career with the company, which he declined. While the Neal family lived in Portland, my father attended Nathan Clifford Grammar School and then the new Portland High School. He also held a variety of part-time jobs, including helping at a leather shop,²¹ working in a fish market, and toiling on a farm. My father genuinely enjoyed living in Maine and had many happy memories of his short time there.²²

Sometime in 1921, my grandfather decided to return to the Church of Christ in Dugger; I do not know the circumstances of this decision any more than I do those that had taken him and his family to Portland. Early in January 1922, the Neal family rode the train back to Indiana, this time traveling by way of New York City and Washington, D.C.²³ In the nation's capital, they stayed for several days at the Senate Hotel at 101 D Street, N.E. (at the corner of First Street), between the U.S. Capitol Building and Union Station. While in the capital city they saw some of its sights, including a whale suspended from the ceiling at a Smithsonian Institution museum. My grandfather's account, also recorded in the Dugger church's minutes, states that he became pastor there again on January 17, 1922, "at which time his second ministry with this church began."

During this second stay at the church in Dugger, my grandfather served there about another three years. By November in 1925, though, he had become the minister of the Main Street Church of Christ in Winchester, Kentucky. His cousin Claude Neal had previously been the minister of this church, which had been founded in January 1918. Claude had recommended my grandfather as his successor, which strengthens our belief that he had played a similar role in getting my grandfather the Portland position as well. The Neals lived in a succession of rental properties in Winchester during the next three decades. The first we know about from the 1930 census: Charles M. Neal and family are shown renting (for $40 per month) at 126 Belmont Avenue in Winchester. Exactly how long they lived on Belmont is uncertain.²⁴

During his years in Winchester, my grandfather, who had entered the ministry just as the religious movement called Fundamentalism was rapidly attracting new adherents among Protestants, became increasingly active in promoting this point of view in opposition to what he saw as threats from liberal theology, science, and secularism. Beyond his duties as pastor at the Main Street Church of Christ, he engaged in numerous spirited and highly publicized printed and public debates with those who held different points of view. He also traveled widely to speak at churches and revival meetings. According to one scholar, Charles M. Neal was one of the first religious thinkers to develop a theological concept called Dispensationalism, which emphasizes the teaching of prophecy and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In Fundamentalist circles, he gained a national reputation.

After his retirement from the Main Street Church of Christ (in 1940, it would appear), my grandfather and his family (the last child had been born in 1929) lived in at least six other places we know of in Winchester. They were 111 West Lexington Avenue (in 1935), Apartment 2 at 416 Lexington Avenue (in 1940), 214 South Burns Avenue (until the end of May 1946), 72 Fitch Avenue (for less than two months in 1946), 32 French Avenue (during 1946-48), and then 24 French Avenue. All of these were within several blocks of one another and also within comfortable walking distance of Winchester's Main Street Church of Christ. Charles M. Neal and two of his daughters purchased the last of these residences, the house at 24 French Avenue, in February 1948; he sold his share to his son, Stanford, just two months later. It seems to have been my grandfather's only experience with home ownership, and reportedly it was not a happy one.²⁵

Charles M. Neal could never quite retire completely from preaching, though. During the 1940s, when he no longer had a regular church of his own, he continued to travel as an evangelist and preacher not only all over the Midwest but as far as Florida and the Great Plains. He typically stayed with members of the local churches and accepted free-will offerings. (One church's account book, for instance, notes that in 1943 Charles M. Neal had received $7 for preaching a sermon.) During these years, he was affiliated with the Bible Truth Society and the Biblical Research Society. My grandfather thought deeply about the Scriptures, studied them intently all his life, and regularly published his views about them. Having heard him preach numerous times, I can say that he was also a powerful preacher.

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The parents of Charles M. Neal were THOMAS NEAL and MARY ELLEN {SHAKE} NEAL. Thomas was born in Paxton, Haddon Township, Sullivan County, Indiana, on September 1, 1832. Mary Ellen was born, probably also in Haddon Township, on January 11, 1835, assuming we accept as accurate the statement on her grave marker that she was 44 years, 11 months, and 4 days old when she died (from cancer) on December 15, 1879.²⁶ Thomas and Mary Ellen were married on December 7, 1854, probably by William C. McBride, a blacksmith who may have served as the pastor of Thomas Neal's church. She is buried in the Neal-Paxton Cemetery in Paxton, Indiana, where so many other early Neals and their spouses are also buried.²⁷ My grandfather was the thirteenth and last of Thomas Neal's children with Mary Ellen {Shake} Neal. Charles M. Neal was not yet two years old when his mother died.

After having been listed on the 1850 census as a young male in his father's household in Haddon Township of Sullivan County (he was described as seventeen years old and a laborer that year), Thomas Neal made his first appearance as a head of household in 1860. In that year, and on the censuses for 1870, 1880, and 1900, he was described as a farmer in Hamilton Township of Sullivan County, Indiana.²⁸ Mary Ellen, listed in her parents' household through 1850, was enumerated as his wife in 1860 and 1870. In one account, my grandfather described his father's farm as being four miles northeast of Paxton; in another, he said it was four miles southeast of Sullivan. Both descriptions are accurate for Thomas Neal's farm, which straddled the boundary line separating Hamilton Township and Cass Township of Sullivan County.²⁹ The house in which the Neal family lived seems to have been in the eastern portion of Section 12 of Hamilton Township, for that is the township in which the census recorded them and where they received their mail. The remainder of the farm was in the western portion of Section 7 of Cass Township.³⁰

Thomas Neal's first recorded land purchase, 40 acres in Section 7, had come on August 18, 1856. In subsequent years, he had steadily added additional property not only there and in Section 12 across the line separating Cass Township and Hamilton Township but in three nearby sections as well. These acquisitions occurred on December 10, 1860; on August 3, 1870; on December 6, 1870; on November 22, 1872; on July 17, 1876; on June 2, 1881; and on June 3, 1892. The total was approximately 380 acres, not including some small lots (two in Dugger) Thomas had also purchased. Most of his farmstead would later be subjected to intensive strip mining, which saw the removal of all structures as well as the topsoil. In its present "reclaimed" (and mostly uninhabited) condition, it resembles parkland, with numerous hills and small lakes regularly stocked with fish. Unfortunately, there seem to be no contemporary images of the Neal farm's appearance prior to the strip mining.³¹

After Mary Ellen's death in late 1879, Thomas Neal married another woman bearing the same two given names. She was Mary Ellen {Dunbar} Neal, with whom he would have four more children. The date of their marriage, which took place in Sullivan County, Indiana, was October 16, 1881.³²

A newspaper account states that Thomas Neal died on February 3, 1905, but his grave marker in the Neal-Paxton Cemetery gives his date of death as February 4, 1905; the year inscribed on this marker appears to be a corrected one, presumably because of an error on the original carving, but there is no sign of a similar correction to the day of the month.³³ His death notice in the local newspaper says that Thomas Neal died at his farm near the Deckard School House in Cass Township of Sullivan County.³⁴ The newspaper states that his cause of death was "the diseases peculiar to old age and asthma" and observes that the deceased had been a life-long member of the Church of Christ. According to my grandfather, Thomas Neal's farm passed out of the family in 1905, so it seems likely that his children sold it following his death. I have been unable to find either a will for Thomas Neal or a copy of the partition agreement determining the future of his property, so the details about how his estate was settled are unknown.

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As usual, we will explore the lines of the female member of the couple first. Mary Ellen {Shake} Neal was the daughter of DAVID SHAKE³⁵ and ARTEMISIA³⁶ {BLEVINS} SHAKE. Information contributed to the LDS and other sources both indicate that David was born in Kentucky on July 3, 1800. His grave marker in Snyder Cemetery in Haddon Township of Sullivan County, Indiana, states that he was 72 years, 1 month, and 7 days old when he died on August 6, 1872 (a date confirmed by IHS records), so either his reported birth date of July 3, 1800, or the grave marker for him is a few days in error and should read June 30, 1800.³⁷ Depending on whichever census one is willing to believe, Artemisia was born in Jefferson County, Kentucky, in 1807 (the 1850 census), in 1808 (the 1860 census), or in 1810 (the 1870 census).³⁸ A history of the Shake family gives her date of birth as June 7, 1810, but the source and validity of this information is not known. Artemisia's grave marker in Snyder Cemetery states that she was 68 years, 8 months, and 4 days old when she died on February 14, 1878 (a date also confirmed by IHS records), which works out to a birth date of June 10, 1809, the one year that does not match any of the census information.³⁹ Measuring the life spans of David and Artemisia Shake clearly is an inexact art.

Our first glimpse of David Shake is his name on the Jefferson County, Kentucky, tax roll in 1823. Then, on September 24 in that same year, he purchased two 80-acre portions of public land in Owen County, Indiana, for which David received his patents on April 15, 1824. Meanwhile, in January 1824 he had sold to two of his brothers the 195 acres on Harrod's Creek in Jefferson County that he had inherited from their father. David may have gone to Owen County in early 1824 in order to start his farm, then returned to Jefferson County on May 8, 1825, in order to marry Artemisia, because he does not appear on the Jefferson County tax rolls in 1824 or 1825. Alternatively, David might have purchased the land in Owen County but did not live on it right away and worked for someone else in Kentucky for about a year until he got married there. The young couple evidently began their married life in Owen County, Indiana, since David is on that county's tax roll in 1827.⁴⁰ This county is the farthest place north that anyone in our families would ever live in that state, and it was quite a distance from the Shakes' previous home in Kentucky. This county is the farthest place north anyone in our families would ever reside in that state, and it was quite a distance from the Shakes' previous home in Kentucky. How David chose Owen County is not known; nor is it clear whether Artemisia had been a party to the decision to live there.

Tracking David and Artemisia during the next few years is a challenge. No later than 1830, they had moved back to Kentucky. The only David Shake listed on the census in Indiana or Kentucky in that year resided in Oldham County, Kentucky, on the Ohio River just upriver from Jefferson County (the Louisville area). Based on the states that two of this couple's children later reported as their birthplaces, as well as a later published history of Sullivan County (which profiled David Shake, evidence of his later economic and social standing) and other evidence, we can postulate a move for David and Artemisia from Owen County back to Kentucky in 1828 or 1829 and then a return to Indiana sometime after the 1830 census was taken.⁴¹ We know that David and Artemisia were living in Sullivan County when they sold their Owen County land (both made their marks) on August 1, 1832, because the deed was signed in Sullivan County and sent to Owen County; about two weeks later, David bought his first property in Sullivan County. It is likely that in 1832 he and Artemisia had been absent from Owen County for at least several years. Why did they leave Owen County, never to return? Was it too far from any family? Was the land or the area not to their liking? Did they move back to Kentucky so they could care for Artemisia's father, Lemuel, before his death in late 1829, or for her mother afterwards? The apparent simultaneity of the young couple's move south in 1829 with Lemuel's death makes us wonder if that was indeed the reason, but Artemisia in particular may have felt isolated in Owen County and the couple decided Sullivan County was a better choice.

It is somewhat puzzling to see that David Shake is listed in the wrong age column on the 1830 census (he was placed in the one for 15 to 20 years old when he was actually twenty to thirty years of age), but this is probably nothing more than a recording error: David's wife was accurately recorded in the category for 20 to 30 years old, and the person listed just above David Shake was Artemisia's mother. We can dismiss the notion that David and his wife might have been living with a Shake relative in 1830, for none of the Shakes in Kentucky had an extra male David's age (thirty years old). The preponderance of evidence, then, suggests that we have the right David Shake in our sights, whatever the 1830 census says his age was.

Thus when the Shakes returned to Indiana from Kentucky, sometime after the 1830 census had been completed, they moved not back to their property in Owen County but to Sullivan County – in all likelihood so Artemisia could continue to be nearer her mother, who probably moved to Sullivan County at about the same time.⁴² In addition to the two adjoining half-quarters of public land (together, 160 acres) David entered on August 16, 1831, he would he would patent another 80 acres of public land during the next decade. Like Thomas Neal, David Shake steadily added to his holdings with land purchases from both individuals and, in David's case, from the Wabash and Erie Canal Company as well. These purchases were dated October 1, 1852; March 9, 1863; December 13, 1865; and January 15, 1872. All of these properties, which taken together were somewhat larger than the total acreage of Thomas Neal, are located in Haddon Township. (On May 8, 1875, Artemisia, who had received 49 acres as the widow's share of her late husband David's estate after his death in 1872, bought an adjoining 21 acres of what he had left to one their daughters.)⁴³

David and Artemisia Shake were correctly enumerated in Sullivan County on the 1840 census. Based on the sequence and ages of their children, Mary Ellen was one of their two daughters who were between five and ten years old that year. Three later censuses, those for 1850 through 1870, show David and Artemisia continued to live near Carlisle in Haddon Township of Sullivan County – although in 1870 they are said to have been receiving mail at Merom in Gill Township, many miles distant. Our Mary Ellen is on the first of these censuses, after which she would leave the Shakes' household to marry Thomas Neal in 1854. (Unlike three of her younger siblings, Mary Ellen is not shown having attended school in 1850, when she was fourteen years of age.) David was an increasingly prosperous farmer during these three decades, fitting of inclusion in the county's history.⁴⁴ Both he and Artemisia had died before the 1880 census was taken.

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David Shake's parents were CHRISTOPHER SHAKE and ELIZABETH {DAVIS} SHAKE.⁴⁵ A Shake family history states that Christopher was born in Germany in 1760, married Elizabeth there, and had three children before emigrating to America. We will examine Christopher Shake and his origins later, after we do the same for Elizabeth Davis. Research into where the Davis family lived has established that she was actually born in Pennsylvania or Maryland between about 1758 and about 1763. Elizabeth evidently died in Jefferson County, Kentucky, sometime between 1820 and 1824: she is listed there with her second husband, Philip Boyer, on the census in 1820 but is not referred to in Boyer's 1824 will.

For years, Shake researchers guessed that Elizabeth's father was a man named Shrader, probably since the two families seem to have been closely associated over the years. This is not so. Her father was, in fact, a man named HANOVER DAVIS. This we know because a petition to an Orphan's Court in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, in 1811 and an 1820 deed there both show conclusively that Elizabeth Shake was one of the daughters of this man. Conveniently for us, in one document she is identified as the wife of Christopher Shake and in the other as the wife of Philip Boyers. Despite the name Davis, the evidence is also persuasive that hers was a German family in heritage and orientation – originally Devis or Dewess, perhaps – whose name became anglicized in America.

According to the 1800 census, Hanover Davis was born prior to 1755, but logically he must have been born by the mid-1730s or so in order to have had a daughter by about 1758 to 1763: we estimate Elizabeth would have to have been born by then in order to have reached the normal child-bearing age by 1780, as she did. Hanover Davis died sometime prior to December 22, 1809, when letters of administration for his estate were issued. Since he was not enumerated on the 1810 census, he must have died prior to the official census year, which began on August 1, 1809. That Hanover is on Westmoreland County's tax rolls for Hempfield Township through 1809 but not on those for 1810 would seem to support this conclusion. In 1810 the rolls indicate that the tax on this land was due from another man – Hanover's son-in-law.⁴⁶

The name of Elizabeth's mother is entirely unknown to us, but there is speculation among Davis researchers that she might have come from the Marchant family, another family with which the Davises were closely associated in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, and before. This unknown woman (born before 1765, according to the 1800 census) evidently died sometime after Hanover did, because his widow is mentioned on the 1811 Orphan Court's petition.

Our first potential sighting of Hanover Davis comes in 1757, at a time when his presumed father, whom we will meet presently, is known to have resided in the Conococheague Settlement (near Greencastle) in Peters Township, Cumberland (now Franklin) County, Pennsylvania. It is possible that young Hanover lived there as well – or else just over the border in Maryland. Since this border area was then being disputed by the colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania, whose royal grants overlapped here, there was confusion over where the border fell and many residents can be found in the records of both colonies; the Davises are among them. There were even occasional armed clashes between Marylanders and Pennsylvanians, primarily as former sought to drive out the German settlers filtering down from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. We do not know if the Davises were among these settlers, but it seems possible. The dispute between the two colonies was finally settled by an official survey, begun in 1750, that was conducted by men named Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who would give the final boundary line their names.

Thus it is not so strange, whichever side of the border he actually lived on, that Hanover Davis served twenty days in a Maryland militia unit during the French and Indian War, in 1757. This unit, led by Captain Moses Chapline, was drawn from the northern part of the Antietam Hundred. Between 1762 and 1768, moreover, Hanover Davis was mentioned in four legal cases in Frederick County, Maryland, and in 1765 he administered a will in that same county, which then included the entire western part of that colony. By 1770, however, Hanover evidently had moved to the Brush Creek Settlement in what would become Hempfield Township of the new county of Westmoreland, in western Pennsylvania (just east and a bit south of Pittsburgh), once that county was organized in 1773. The area was in Cumberland County in 1770 and in Bedford County between 1771 and 1773.

Hempfield Township was heavily populated by Germans from eastern Pennsylvania and Maryland, some of whom (originally from Northampton County, Pennsylvania) had been recruited as road builders by General John Forbes during his successful campaign in 1758 to capture from the French the Forks of the Ohio River and their Fort Duquesne there. The Forbes Road, a major undertaking given the terrain of central Pennsylvania, was vital to the British campaign – just as it would be to the thousands of those who would subsequently use it, first as the only road across Pennsylvania and then as the principal route for many years thereafter. A number of these German road builders had evidently marked choice property in what would become Westmoreland County and returned there as soon as this became feasible; other settlers arrived as a result the ineluctable westward movement through western Pennsylvania and Maryland. The Brush Creek Settlement itself dates to 1769. A later history reports that Dr. David Marchand, who seems to have been related to the Davises, settled on Little Sewickley Creek in August 1770. The Davises are also mentioned among the early settlers of this area.⁴⁷

Both Hanover and his presumed father, Hanicle, were recorded as taxables on Hempfield Township's rolls in 1772 and 1773, although we have no evidence that Hanover owned property in that township at that time. It was not until March 1, 1774, when Hanover purchased 300 acres from Hanicle Davis, that he is known to have owned property in Hempfield Township. The precise location of this 300 acres is not clear from the deed, but we learn from evidence we will consider next that the property was near Cribbs Station on the West Newton Road, four miles west of Greensburg, in a small community called Millersdale along Little Sewickley Creek. This area, part of the Brush Creek Settlement, was not far from Fort Walthour (a refuge for settlers during the French and Indian War) and, later, the Brush Creek Meeting House.⁴⁸

It was here, according to family tradition, that Davis family members in October 1773 became victims of coordinated Indian attacks on a number of settlements in Westmoreland County – one of numerous such attacks that occurred between 1769 (when eighteen persons were killed or captured) and the 1780s. Several families were affected, including one in Millersdale whose "nearest neighbor," one source states, was our Hanover Davis family. According to the lore about the attack, while Hanover was out working in a potato field Indian raiders captured his wife and three children at the family's farmhouse. They scalped the two youngest children – boys who were four and two years old – and took Hanover's wife and daughter, Barbara (age nine years), away with them to Canada. Hanover, having escaped the raiders, returned to his home to find the older boy fatally wounded; the younger one was already dead, having been killed instantly, in the Indian manner, when raiders smashed his head against a tree.

Meanwhile, Hanover's wife, having been forced to walk the entire distance to Canada, carried young Barbara most of the way to prevent her from being abandoned by the Indians. A posse of settlers from Westmoreland County chased the Indian marauders but could not rescue their captives. Several years (some accounts say two, others say six) passed before the Indians would liberate Hanover's wife, but she again would not abandon her daughter, whom the tribe had adopted. She confided in a trader, who gave her some jewelry with which to purchase her daughter Barbara's freedom. The two Davis females then were sent down the St. Lawrence River and eventually made their way to Philadelphia, where Hanover Davis was reunited with them.

How much of this story is accurate we cannot say for certain, but the lore passed down in several other families who were living near the Davises in Westmoreland County at this time contains similar accounts of this raid and its fatalities. Moreover, we know that Hanover described this incident to a well-known visitor, Bishop Francis Asbury, some years later. Asbury, the first superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States, stayed with the Davises on July 18, 1789, during one of his many missionary trips. Afterwards, he recounted in his journal Davis's narrative of the events in substantially the same form as they are related here. (Asbury wrote that Davis's three sons were killed by the marauding Indians.) Bishop Asbury observed that Davis was a man with "trouble and conviction," certainly an intriguing choice of words.

No records confirm such an Indian raid in October 1773, but several details from other known attacks may match the events described in the Davis family's oral tradition. One is the raid in February 1769 mentioned earlier, when a group of Senecas passing through Westmoreland County attacked German settlers at Brush Creek and killed or captured eighteen of them. Another incident occurred in 1781, when the Brush Creek church was burned, and a third attack came at Fort Walthour in April 1782. On July 13 in that same year, another group of Senecas (along with several dozen French-Canadians) led by Guyasuta sacked and burned the Westmoreland County seat at Hannastown; on that same day, a smaller party of this group raided Miller's Station, where the Davises lived. Finally, in March 1783, several persons – including a man identified as Davis – were slain or captured at Brush Creek. We will return to a couple of these incidents later.

Which of these events might have been the attack the Davis family remembered as occurring in October 1773 we cannot say, but it does seem probable that at some time during this turbulent period the Davises did suffer the losses described in their family tradition. An inadvertent transposition from 1783 to 1773 in lore passed down through the generations can easily be accounted for, and a year or two of imprisonment of captives in Canada, from the early 1780s until peace was fully restored and most Indian captives were released after the American Revolution (about 1785), seems more likely than one lasting a full decade longer. Furthermore, since we know (as shown below) that Hanover's presumed father, Hanicle Davis, died between February 1782 and August 1783, it can be theorized that he was killed by raiding Indians in any of these incidents: in April 1782, in March 1783, or on July 13, 1783. If it was the one in March 1783, the report of the raid (written not first-hand but at distant Fort Pitt) may simply have gotten his unusual given name wrong and he was mistakenly recorded as James instead of as Hannicle.

I am of the opinion that the raid remembered by the Davises actually occurred in 1783, probably in July of that year, and that in the attacks Hanover's wife and daughter were captured and his two sons and father Hanicle were killed, perhaps in separate incidents. The two female captives would have returned to Pennsylvania from Canada about 1785, as many others did then. We probably will never discover what really happened, and when, but such an explanation is in harmony with the known Indian attacks during this period, with family lore, and with Hanicle's date of death.

We should pause to note that it was during this period of frequent Indian attacks, during the spring of 1774, that Fort Allen was built in Hempfield Township. The location was in an area called "Good Purchase," a mile or so from the Brush Creek Settlement. It was to this fort, and to other forts and blockhouses like it (there was also a blockhouse on the Marchand property), that residents could flee for sanctuary in case of threatened Indian incursions. Near it, too, the Lutheran and Reformed congregations eventually built their churches and a school – reportedly the first one in western Pennsylvania. The commander at Fort Allen was a man named Christopher Truby, whose unit probably included the man who would marry Hanover Davis's daughter, as we shall see in due course.

Sightings of Hanover Davis from 1772 onward place him in Hempfield Township until he died sometime in 1809.⁴⁹ In October 1779, both Hanover and his father were parties in a felony case involving a young relative, Frederick Marchant, who stood accused of stealing a shovel, a pot, and some pot hooks; it is noteworthy that David Marchant, perhaps the young man's father, also signed the complaint. There is no record of what happened to Frederick, who may have fled the county, but he would be involved in two later violations of the law.

In June 1782, Hanover Davis was among a number of Brush Creek residents who petitioned General William Irvine, commanding the rather meager United States Army forces based at Fort Pitt. The petitioners asked Irvine to dispatch some of his soldiers to protect the Brush Creek area from the continuing Indian attacks. These attacks were themselves the Indians' response to a military offensive, led by Colonel William Crawford, into the Delaware country on the upper Sandusky River in what is now Ohio. They had been particularly incensed by the butchery in March 1782 of Delaware Indian men, women, and children – converts to Christianity – at an Indian village called Gnadenhuetten in what is now northeastern Ohio. Losses among the resident defenders in Westmoreland County from these attacks had already been significant enough, it appears, that some Continental troops stationed at Turtle Creek (between Fort Pitt and the Brush Creek Settlement) had had to be sent to reinforce them, but the attacks continued.

Not long after, General Irvine responded to the residents' petition by sending some additional soldiers to the area. This temporary solution did not prevent further raids, however. As we have seen, on July 13, 1782, the county seat at Hannastown was burned and a smaller war party continued on a few miles south to Miller's Station, home for Hanover Davis and his family, where a wedding celebration was in progress. The small fort at Miller's Station was also burned, half a dozen persons were killed, and fifteen more were captured. This is the raid that sounds most like the attack remembered in the Davis family oral tradition.

Tax records in Hempfield Township in 1783 and 1786 show Hanover with 300 acres, three horses, five cattle, and five sheep. The latter list states that he lived in the South Portion of Hempfield Township, which included the area near Millersdale. In 1787 Hanover Davis was deemed delinquent in his land taxes, but this might have been a simple technicality: he was the tax collector in South Huntington and Salem Townships in that year, and presumably he was short in the tax receipts he was obligated to collect and then submit under the taxation system then in use; three years later, in 1790, a court order gave him credit for the uncollected funds. Also that year, Hanover was involved in a court case involving conflicting claims to a tract of land. A "caveat" (objection) to his patent ultimately reached Pennsylvania's Board of Property, which dismissed the case when Davis presented testimony that the challenger had obtained another tract of land instead. The 1790 census shows Hanover in Hempfield Township with two males over sixteen and one male under sixteen years of age, along with three females.

In that same year, 1790, Hanover patented 424 acres south of Adamsburg, a short distance north of Millersdale, and tax records began to show him with 400 acres instead of his previous 300. These 400 acres, though, were far to the south of Adamsburg in the new county of Fayette, which had been created out of Westmoreland County. Hanover had had these 400 acres surveyed on February 23, 1785.⁵⁰ These circumstances suggest that Hanover might have had to surrender his previous 300 acres owing to the dispute over the shortfall in tax receipts – he was never taxed on that property again – and so later patented new land elsewhere, but this is only a supposition.

We have some rare and unusually detailed information about Hanover Davis's property in 1798, which comes from the new (and short-lived) direct tax the federal government was imposing that year. This levy was dubbed the "window tax" because it was calculated in part on how many glass-filled windows a person's buildings possessed, presumably a reflection of that person's wealth and thus the basis for a tax on that wealth. (The 1798 U.S. tax lists and the information they collected have not survived at all in most of the states and exist only as fragments in the others; Pennsylvania is the only state with a complete set of the lists.)

There are actually two of these tax lists on which Hanover Davis appears. One describes houses of a certain value ($100), and the other shows property of more than two acres that was being farmed. On the first list, Hanover Davis is shown owning a wood house thirty feet by seventy-seven feet. It had two stories and a cellar, twelve lights (ten with glass panes and two without), and two acres of land. There was, too, a small satellite building that may have been used for storage of hams and grain. The total value was $200.50. On the second list, Hanover's 400 acres are recorded, with a value set at $1,200. But there were also three structures here, including two residences. One was a cabin twenty-four feet by twenty feet (valued at $30) and the other residence was a cabin eighteen feet by sixteen feet (no value shown). One of these might have been the farm's original log cabin and the other a later residence. The third structure was a large (fifty feet by thirty feet) barn. The tax lists also identify Hanover Davis's neighbors.

The circumstantial evidence we have reviewed so far in this chapter strongly suggests that Hanover's father was a man named Hanicle Davis, who was married to a woman we know only as Elizabeth, and family tradition among Hanover's descendants confirms this. Hanicle was a kind of nickname for Hans Nicholas or Nicolaus, and several references to this man use both his name and his nickname. We do not know Hanicle's date of birth, but he died after February 16, 1782, when he served as a witness, and prior to August 16, 1783, when letters of administration for his estate were issued. As we have seen, it is possible that he was killed in the Seneca Indian attack of July 13, 1782, or else in one of the two attacks near Fort Walthour in 1783.⁵¹ His wife, Elizabeth, whose date of birth is also a mystery, died in 1794.

During the 1750s, Hanicle was a resident in the Conococheague Settlement, and like Hanover he may have been a member of the Maryland militia in 1757. (It seems possible, however, that this Hanicle Davis in the militia was the senior Hanicle's son of the same name, though a man did remain eligible for the militia until the age of sixty years.) A Hanicle Davis served under Captain Alexander Beall from October 9, 1757, to November 9, 1758. Beall's unit may have formed part of the Maryland force that was created in the military buildup surrounding the capture of Fort Duquesne (but was never paid by the colony). More likely, Beall's recruits were organized to counter the Indian raids in the Conochocheague area that recurred sporadically from mid-1755 until mid-1757, and then again during 1763 and 1764. Many settlers in this part of Cumberland County abandoned their homes during both periods, but we have no evidence the Davises did so.

Hanicle ("Honekill" here) Davis is on the tax list in Peters Township of Cumberland (now Franklin) County, Pennsylvania, in 1768. He had two horses, two head of cattle, and six sheep. He was taxed for 200 warranted acres, 40 of them cleared. He is in the tax book again in 1769 (though with just a single head of cattle) but not again. In addition, although he is shown owing a tax, Hanicle Davis is not listed among the freemen for the county. Could he have been renting the land on which his family was living? On the last day of 1770, though, a man with this name had 20 acres surveyed in Cumberland County; on April 1, 1773, he had an additional 50 acres surveyed there. (Actually, the area in question was no longer in Cumberland County, since it had passed to the new Bedford County in 1771 and then to the even newer Westmoreland County in 1773; it would ultimately end up in Fayette County, which was created out of Westmoreland County in 1783.) One supposes that Hanicle Davis moved to southwestern Pennsylvania at about this time, as we believe our Hanover did, but I can find no record – in deeds or otherwise – that Hanicle ever bought or sold property in Westmoreland County, except for the single sale of 300 acres to Hanover Davis in March 1774 mentioned earlier. How Hanicle obtained that 300 acres remains a mystery.⁵²

The mystery of the early, surveyed 70 acres may be explained by references we find to "Hannaniah" Davis in the court record of the short-lived Yohogania County, Virginia – an area that overlapped the new counties Pennsylvania had been busy creating in what would become the southwestern corner of the latter state once it and Virginia ultimately resolved their boundary dispute (described in detail in a previous chapter). These records show that Davis warranted 20 1/2 acres on December 31, 1770, and another 50 acres on the same date. Despite some inconsistencies in the dates shown in the records of the two counties, we are probably correct to think the Yohogania County, Virginia, records refer to the same transactions that we find in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, records.

This reasoning is supported by the fact that an "Annaniah" Davis was a witness to a deed in the similarly short-lived Ohio County, Virginia, in August 1775 and took an oath of allegiance there sometime during the period 1777 to 1779. Ohio County was west of Yohogania County, in what is now the West Virginia panhandle adjoining the western border of Pennsylvania. Significantly, perhaps, Hanicle Davis is not on the tax lists for Bedford County, Somerset County, or Westmoreland County during the early 1770s, except for the Westmoreland County tax list mentioned earlier – which could have been an error.⁵³

What all this suggests to me is that Hanicle Davis pulled up stakes in Peters Township of Cumberland County during the early 1770s and then probably resided in the largely uncharted western portion of the new county of Westmoreland for several years. Indeed, we discover that in late 1773 and early 1774 two deeds in Pitt Township of that county mention the adjoining property of Hans Nicholas Davis. Pitt Township was a vast original township of Westmoreland County including not only what is now the northwestern portion of that county but most of present Allegheny County, Beaver County, Fayette County, Greene County, and Washington County as well – an area, that is, coextensive with that of Virginia's two short-lived counties called Yohogania County and Ohio County. One of the deeds places this property near Turtle Creek, which is quite a distance from the Davis properties in Westmoreland County we have been discussing here. On the other hand, the two warranted or surveyed properties – 20 1/2 acres and 50 acres – can be located today in the Georges Creek area of Georges Township and Springhill Township of Fayette County, Pennsylvania, which after being formed in turn from Westmoreland County incorporated much of the former Yogohania County, Virginia. It is notable, however, that although Hannicle warranted these properties they were not surveyed or patented until after his death. Where Hanicle Davis actually lived during these years of the early 1770s is not exactly clear, therefore, and neither do we know whether Hanover was living with him or nearby.

It seems odd that Hanicle Davis disappears from contemporary records after having sold the 300 acres to his son Hanover in 1774, except for two documents. In one, in February 1782, he was a witness; in the other, in October 1782, Hanicle's property is mentioned in a deed as adjoining the property being transferred by that deed. What is particularly striking is that from 1773 onward Hanicle Davis was not taxed for property. One possible explanation for this is that Hanicle sold the totality of his property near Millersdale to Hanover in 1774 and, perhaps, went to live with his son. The fact that the Davis-to-Davis deed was signed in 1774 but not filed in the courthouse until early 1787 would seem to support this conclusion: the 1782 deed that mentions Hanicle's adjoining property was written while Hanicle Davis was still the official owner of record, even though he had already deeded it to his son Hanover. It is also possible that Hanicle continued to live on land that he owned elsewhere (unknown to us) but was exempted from property taxes on it due to his advanced age or physical disability. Or, if Hanicle Davis was not in good health during the 1770s and 1780s, this also may explain why he would have sold all of his property to Hanover in 1774.

Our only other definite sighting of Hanicle Davis in Westmoreland County comes in the histories of that county, which state that the early German immigrants to Hempfield Township met for worship at "Davis's house." We can imagine that Hanicle served as a kind of elder spiritual leader for them in lieu of a regular pastor. An itinerant minister first began coming to the Sewickley Creek area in 1772, and a combined log schoolhouse and church was built before 1782, when it was burned by the Indians. A permanent church, Brush Creek Salem Church, was established a few years later.⁵⁴

Where did Hanicle originate, and who were his father and mother? All this is still unknown. It is not possible to link him definitely to any of the Palatine arrivals in Philadelphia, so perhaps Hanicle or his father came to America before these Palatines began to be recorded in 1727, arrived at a different port, or traveled on a ship whose passenger lists have not survived. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the Davis or Devis family may have been among the Palatines who arrived in New York around 1710, and some descendants of Hanover Davis believe that a Hans Nicholas DeWeiss was born in Germany in 1705 and came to New York with his parents in 1710. Other theories are that the DeWeiss or DeWesse family was either Dutch or Huguenot in origin. But until we can find an immigrant from Germany or elsewhere to whom we can definitely link Hanover and Hanicle Davis, or else other documentary evidence to verify this information, we will have to guess about the origins of our Davis family.

The fact that Hanover was given this unusual name may itself provide a clue to the family's early years in America, however. It could suggest that his parents had recently arrived from the then-independent Kingdom of Hanover and recalled their homeland with his name, which in turn would argue for their arrival in America during the 1730s. Alternatively, since the church the Davises attended at the time Hanover was born was served by pastors from a church in Hanover, Pennsylvania, maybe he was named to honor that town. Or, our Hanover may have been born to a Henderich Dewiss family that lived in Hanover, York County, Pennsylvania, as early as 1741 and 1742; presumably this is the same couple as the Heinrich and Maria Barbara Dewis who had a daughter baptized in the northeastern portion of Adams County, Pennsylvania, in 1749. From these two locations, going to live in the Conococheague Settlement would have been a logical next step. This York County couple's estimated ages were about right for the parents of our Hanover Davis, but there is no documentary evidence to link him to them and researchers familiar with this couple and their children have no record of a son named Hanover.

Another dead end for us, it would seem, is a Heinrich Davies who was born in 1730 and was baptized at Trinity Lutheran Church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in April 1731; he was the son of Henry Davies, whose presumed brother Samuel was a witness to the baptism. There is nothing to suggest that this child was our Hanover (who could have been born about then), or that the father was our Hans Nicholas, but it is possible that both "Henry" and Samuel Davies were brothers of Hans Nicholas. To date, therefore, our search for Hanicle's origins have been inconclusive. Perhaps additional evidence to aid us will come to light someday.

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With the known ancestry of Elizabeth {Davis} Shake fully explored, insofar as possible with the information at hand, we shift our attention to that of Christopher Shake. Unfortunately, we do not know for certain when and where he was born, nor when he came to America (if he was not born here), nor who his father was, but we have some good theories about these things. At least through 1776, there is no definite sign in passenger arrival records of any Christopher Shake who would have been the right age to have fathered David Shake; however, an immigrant boy named Christopher who was younger than sixteen years old and who arrived with his parents in an earlier year would not have been mentioned by name in these records and so would have eluded us.

The Shake family history states that Christopher arrived in Philadelphia aboard the Rosanna (James Reason, captain) from Rotterdam and Deal on September 26, 1743. A man named Georg Christophf Schoch, age unstated but over sixteen years, was indeed among the passengers on that ship – passengers the officials in Philadelphia described as coming from Württemberg and Durlach in Germany. Probably based on how he heard the name pronounced, Captain Reason or one of his officers recorded this man's name as Christaf Shake. He is worth a close look, even if he was too old in 1743 to have been our David Shake's father (this Georg Christophf Schoch would have been at least seventy years old when David was born in 1800) and obviously also could not have been the man the Shake history says was born in 1760.

But might this Georg Christophf Schoch who arrived in 1743 have be the father of our Christopher Shake, whose son David was born in 1800? Some circumstantial evidence supports the idea that Christopher's father was named George, although he may well have used his middle ("calling") name, Christophf, as was common among Germans. We know that our Christopher Shake named his first son George – by German naming conventions a likely name for his own father.⁵⁵ In addition, when Christopher Shake's land in Kentucky was sold after his death in 1803, the indenture suggests that it might have been owned originally by a George C. Shake – perhaps Christopher Shake's full legal name.

Circumstantial evidence also seems to connect this George C. Shake in Kentucky to the Georg Christophf Schoch who arrived in 1743, and through him to a Schoch family in Europe. At least one other man who migrated from eastern to western Pennsylvania at about the same time the Shakes evidently did can be traced back to an ancestor aboard the Rosanna and to a family from the same region of Germany that Georg Christophf Schoch was from. As a matter of fact, this ship had numerous passengers from several villages in that same region of Germany. It seems quite possible, therefore, that Christopher Shake's father (and our David Shake's grandfather) was indeed the Georg Christophf Schoch who migrated to America in 1743 aboard the Rosanna and later moved from Pennsylvania to Kentucky. Until more definite evidence turns up, this connection must remain conjectural, but certainly we are justified in taking a closer look at this man.⁵⁶

Georg Christophf Schoch was probably born in early 1704, as he was baptized in Gailsbach, Neckarkreis, Württemberg, on April 14 in that year. His wife, a woman named Anna Dorothea Knapp, apparently was born on January 26, 1705, to David Knapp and Eva Magdalena {Glueck} Schoch. David Knapp was the son of Johann Georg Knapp and Barbara {Kirchner} Knapp, who like the Schochs were from the Schwäbisch Hall area of the Neckarkreis region in Württemberg, northeast of Stuttgart in southern Germany, but there our knowledge of the Knapp line is extinguished.

For the Schochs we have considerably more information. Georg Christophf's father was Jakob Schoch, born on December 2, 1666, in Gailsbach. Jakob's wife was Catharina Müller, whom he married in Mainhardt, Neckarkreis, Württemberg on May 10, 1696; her father was named Jacob Müller. Jakob Schoch's parents were Georg Schoch and Regina Stoecklin, whose father was Vitus Stoecklin. Georg Schoch's parents were another George Schoch and Margaretha Wolff. The Wolff line can be followed back through Margaretha's parents, Jacob Wolff and Barbara Walther, to the parents of both of them: Michael Wolff and Catharina Kimmerler for Jacob Wolff, and Georg Walther and a woman named Barbara (family name unknown) for Barbara Walther.

Returning to the Schoch line, the elder Georg's parents were Gilg Schoch and Wandelbar Knapp. Gilg's father was yet another Georg Schoch, but we do not know the name of this man's wife. Wandelbar's parents were Hans Knapp and Genoveva Koppenhoeffer. The fathers of both of them bore the given name of Lienhardt (Knapp and Koppenhoeffer, respectively), but again the mothers' names are lost to us. Most of these people came from Gailsbach, but some lived in several other villages in the area: Schoenhardt, Jagstkreis (Schoch, Knapp, Koppenhoeffer); Buchhorn, Jagstkreis (Walther); Lachweiler, Jagstkreis (Stoecklin); Pfedelbach, Jagstkreis (Walther); and Buechelberg, Jagstkreis (Koppenhoeffer). The Wolff and Kimmerler families also lived in Ettenheim, Offenberg, in the nearby state of Baden.

Although we seem to have a likely antecedent for Christopher Shake in the Georg Christophf Schoch who arrived in 1743, enough other adult males named Shake (or some variant of that spelling) were present in America by 1760, including several Shockeys who lived near the Davises in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, that we cannot consider our search for Christopher Shake's father closed.⁵⁷ More troublesome is whether our Christopher Shake (David's father) was born early enough to have been the son of Georg Christophf Schoch and his wife. Although we do not know Christopher's exact birth year, we can estimate that he was born during the 1750s, judging from the birth of his own oldest child in 1778. We know that the emigrant Georg Christophf Schoch and his wife had at least four children baptized in Germany between 1733 and 1740, which ties in nicely with evidence of their arrival in America in 1743 but leaves one wondering if Georg and his wife could have been the parents of our Christopher Shake as much as a decade later: a birth that much later makes it only barely plausible that Anna Dorothea {Knapp} Schoch, born in January 1705, could have been his mother sometime during the 1750s.

Could it be possible that Christopher was, instead, the child of one of the three sons of the 1743 immigrants Georg Christophf and Anna Dorothea {Knapp} Schoch? Of these three sons, only Johann Jakob Schoch had a name, Jakob, that was used in the later generations of Christopher Shake, but he was born in 1737 – hardly early enough to have fathered our Christopher during the 1750s.⁵⁸ A more likely solution to this conundrum is that Christopher too was actually born during the 1740s and was simply older than we imagined when he married Elizabeth Davis during the 1770s. If we accept this possibility, I think we have to consider as well the possibility that Elizabeth was actually Christopher's second wife.

Taking everything that we know into account, I think the chances are significantly better than even that there is a link of some kind between our Christopher Shake and Georg Christophf Schoch the 1743 immigrant, and I am inclined to think that they were father and son. Christopher could have been born in Germany before the Schochs sailed for America, or soon after they arrived in Pennsylvania. Until we learn more, we can only accept this as a promising hypothesis and see where it leads us.⁵⁹

Whenever and wherever our first Shakes came to America, they eventually made their way across Pennsylvania or perhaps Maryland, as the Davises did, before continuing on to Kentucky, evidently during the 1780s. We find ourselves tantalized by various Shake or similar sightings during these years between the 1740s and the 1780s. For instance, Pennsylvania church records in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1774 for another family intermarried with the Davises (Shrader) refer to a Christoph and Anna Marie Schack with a child, Samuel (another given name often found in our Shake family). From his age, this child could have been the Samuel Shake who lived in Kentucky and Indiana some years later, but this particular "Shake" also could have been the son of the well-researched Christopher Shockey who lived first in central Pennsylvania and western Maryland, then in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, after arriving in Philadelphia in 1737. We will encounter the Shockeys again in our search for the Shakes.

Especially tantalizing is the "Christian" Shake who, according to information in Pennsylvania, served in the Westmoreland County rangers – under Captain Truby at Fort Allen, about a mile from the Davis family's residence and even closer to the church and school the Davises probably attended – sometime during the period 1778-83, again with members of the Shrader family with whom the Shakes were associated. We know from first-hand testimony that these rangers were stationed near Fort Allen in 1778, and one can hardly help but underscore the fact that 1778 would seem to have been exactly the time when Elizabeth Davis married her husband, Christopher Shake, after which the couple migrated to Kentucky. Christian and Christopher are easily confused, especially since both are often abbreviated "Christ." or "Chr." Without a marriage record we cannot go further, but this circumstantial evidence is quite compelling. In 1778, Christopher would have been in his thirties and Elizabeth would have been about twenty years old or possibly in her late teens.⁶⁰

Christian Shake (here Sheak) was listed in Hempfield Township of that county as early as 1775 (when a son, Samuel, was baptized there); Christian's wife, however, is identified as Anna Maria, not Elizabeth. The odds seem high this was the same Shake threesome who had been in Lancaster County the year before. We should, again, allow for the possibility that Anna Maria died soon after 1775 and that Elizabeth was the later, second wife of Christopher Shake; there is no inherent contradiction, therefore, in this man's having had a wife named Anna Maria in 1775. This explanation also would fit with our suspicion that Christopher Shake was somewhat older than Elizabeth Davis. Christian Shake is listed in that township again in 1783, when he had no land but had two horses, one cow, and one sheep. This "Christian" Shake could have been David Shake's father, the Christopher Shake we are seeking, as he would have been about the right age for military service in those years and, probably, not very well established. Once again, though, he could have been the Christopher Shockey we have already run into. (Some Shockey researchers believe that he was a member of that family.) It is also quite interesting that a Christopher Stakes was in a militia unit in neighboring Washington County, Pennsylvania, in 1782-85 – a time and place that might indicate our Shake family's first step toward Kentucky, where we first find Christopher in 1789, but we must be aware that there was a Stakes family in York County, Pennsylvania, to which this Washington County militiaman may have belonged.

Perhaps the biggest barrier to our emerging theory is the Shockey family known to have been living in Westmoreland County at the same time our Shakes were there. Our best hope for separating our Shakes from the Shockeys is to look for evidence of a Shake, however, spelled, whose first name was George, as the Shockey family does not appear to have had an adult male who bore that given name during this time period, whereas our Shakes certainly did: the 1743 emigrant from Germany. In western Pennsylvania we find a George Shake or Shackley in Bedford County, Pennsylvania (just east of Westmoreland County), in 1771 through 1780 and in 1783; this area, part of several townships in succession, later became part of Somerset County. Could this have been our Christopher's father, the 1743 immigrant? And could he have been the Georg Schock who had purchased 100 acres in Hanover, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in January 1769?⁶¹ There is also the Georg Schack who, with his wife Margaretha, sponsored a baptism in September 1784 in western Loudoun County, Virginia – not so far from Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania.⁶² And it is not out of the question that the George "Sharp" whose name the transcriber had questions about in Washington County, Pennsylvania, in 1786 was in fact a George Shake.

Looking further east, we spot several adult Shake males who were still in Frederick County, Maryland, during the 1770s and 1780s, even after the Shockeys had departed there for Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. Conceivably they were the sons of Georg Schof, who with his wife Anna Maria (could this have been a mistaken hearing of Dorothea, the name of Georg Christoph Schoch's wife?) lived in that county in 1759 – which was some years before the Shockeys would live there. The fact that one of these Shake males bore the same given name (Lenhart, probably an Americanization of Leinhardt), as did both of the maternal grandfathers of the Georg Christophf Schoch who came to America in 1743, makes us wonder if we have sighted our Shakes here in Frederick County. An Adam Shate who was also in Frederick County in 1780 is interesting to us because the name Adam, like Christopher and George, was a common given name in our particular Shake family. The Adam Shaak seen in Baltimore in 1768 may have been the same man mentioned above.⁶³

One cannot help but wonder, too, if the Shakes and the Shockeys (whose name was often written Shoke, Schaak, Schacke, Shaky, or something else similar to Shake) crossed paths in western Maryland and perhaps even Westmoreland County during the second half of the 1700s. It is even possible these two families were related somehow before coming to America, although the two names – which sounds so much alike in English – appear to be distinct surnames in German. In any case, separating the two families with the evidence available is a formidable task, and we cannot be sure that some of the Shakes we have looked at here were not actually Shockeys.

In sum, whereas we often have too few possible ancestors of the persons we are trying to identify and trace, in the case of our Shakes during the late 18th century (as with our Rickabaughs) we perhaps have too many. What we can be sure of is that David Shake's father Christopher must have married Elizabeth Davis during the late 1770s, more than likely in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, and that the couple migrated to Kentucky a few years later during the 1780s. Whether the Shakes and the Davises had ever been associated before then cannot be determined with the information at hand, but there is ample evidence that the two families were living in the same part of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, at about the same time. It may be that the man identified as Christian Shake in Captain Truby's ranger unit in 1778, perhaps recently widowed and with at least one motherless child (the Samuel baptized in 1775), took a liking to Elizabeth Davis, who lived not far from Fort Allen, and from that encounter would come our Shake family of Kentucky and Indiana. If Georg Christophf Schoch and his wife, the 1743 emigrants, were still alive they might have accompanied Christopher and Elizabeth (and others in the larger Shake family in Westmoreland County) westward toward Kentucky, but it is also possible that the younger Shake couple decided to move on only after his parents (and hers) had died in Westmoreland County.

We move now to Kentucky. The first evidence our Shakes were present there comes when we learn that in 1786 Christopher Shake and George Shake, Sr., volunteered to fight Indians. In the campaign that followed their enlistment, some 1,200 Kentucky militiamen led by the Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark went off to attack Indians on the upper Wabash River near Vincennes in what would later become Indiana. The campaign came to a dismal end in August 1786 when about 300 of the militiamen mutinied in Vincennes and deserted back to Kentucky because they had inadequate provisions – and insufficient confidence in Clark as well. Since those who balked were principally the militiamen from Lincoln County, Kentucky, the two Shakes presumably were among the others, who remained loyal to Clark. The Shakes might also have been part of a smaller, detached force of 800 men, led by Benjamin Logan, that had been dispatched to attack the Shawnees in Ohio at about the same time. It is also noteworthy that a Sergeant George Shake was a mounted Kentucky Volunteer in General Anthony Wayne's army from September to November, 1793.⁶⁴

We have much more to learn yet about the time the earliest Shakes spent in Kentucky, but we do have some good leads to follow. The fact that a tributary in eastern Jefferson County was by the 1790s called Shake's Run does indicate that the Shakes lived in this vicinity.⁶⁵ (This tributary, off Long Run, a part of Floyd's Fork, still bears that name.) In that county, a George Shake is listed on the tax rolls – not far from our Christopher Shake – in 1789, in 1793, and in 1795. In addition, we know that a George "Shrake," very likely a misspelling of this family name apparently so troublesome to non-German ears, purchased a plot of land in the town of Jeffersontown, in Jefferson County. We have no date for this purchase, but it had to have occurred after 1797.⁶⁶

Although it was a man named George Shake, Sr., who is listed as a private among Clark's soldiers, we are right to doubt that Georg Christophf Schoch the 1743 immigrant lived long enough to be the man in this and the other sightings in Kentucky we have just reviewed, and it is patently absurd to picture a man born in 1704 as a private in Clark's militia force. Who, then, was this George Shake, Sr.? In my opinion he was quite possibly another son of Georg Christophf Schoch the immigrant, born a year or two after Georg and Anna Dorothea had arrived in America.⁶⁷ This would position young George to have been the brother of our Christopher Shake.

Presumably it was this same George Shake we subsequently find in Clark County, Indiana, just across the Ohio River from Louisville. This man is referred to in a deed in 1804 and then died intestate in 1811. When his land was sold by his heirs, the heirs mentioned were George Shake, Jr., Samuel Shake, and Sarah {Shake} Owens. Some of the land had been awarded to the deceased George Shake in recognition of his service in Clark's Illinois Regiment; the rest he had acquired from former colleagues in the militia who also had received land for their service. We can only speculate about the relationship between this George Shake and our Christopher Shake, but in my opinion the evidence strongly suggests that the two were brothers. For now, this is as far as we can go on the larger question of the Shakes in Kentucky, and so we will focus on what we know about our Christopher Shake there.

As we have seen, our first documentary evidence that Christopher Shake had settled in Kentucky is a tax record in Jefferson County dated April 29, 1789. (He could have arrived in Kentucky considerably earlier, of course.) Although there are no censuses for Kentucky in 1790 and in 1800, Christopher Shake is listed in the (incomplete) Jefferson County tax records again from 1793 through 1801.⁶⁸ He purchased 195 acres of land on the South Fork of Harrod's Creek in Jefferson County in 1796, and these tax records consistently show he was residing on this land, probably the property on Shake's Run. He is mentioned as a witness in 1795 and recorded his earmark for livestock in January 1801.

Within two years Christopher had died, however – sometime between November 8, 1802, when he made his will, and October 3, 1803, when it was probated. Our David Shake, born in 1800, had been the last of his nine children.⁶⁹Christopher's having fathered a child so recently before his death would seem to be consistent with our hypothesis that this man, born during the late 1740s or the early 1750s, had a wife (Elizabeth) who was only around forty years of age in 1800.

Christopher Shake's death makes it rather difficult to determine where our David Shake might have been living in 1810 and 1820, before he reached his majority. In order to resolve this issue, we must look at the whereabouts of Christopher's widow, Elizabeth {Davis} Shake. In November 1804, about a year after her husband's death, she married a widower named Philip Boyers in Jefferson County, Kentucky. She is identified in the records as Mrs. Eliza Shake.⁷⁰ On the 1810 census for Jefferson County, a man called Philip Buyer was the only man in that county who might have been the second husband of David's mother. Philip had a woman forty-five years old or older in his household, and this was certainly our Elizabeth (who was in her late forties or early fifties that year). There were seven young males in Philip and Elizabeth's household, including three who were not yet ten years old. David, just about to turn that age, was undoubtedly one of these three males. This profile matches what we know from other sources about the children that made up this newly consolidated household.⁷¹

In 1820, when David Shake was about to turn twenty years of age, there was no one with that name listed as a head of household in Kentucky or in Indiana, which suggests that he was still living with a family member.⁷² The only Shake in the region with an extra male the right age to have been David was Samuel Shake of Clark County, Indiana, just across the Ohio River from Oldham County, Kentucky. This extra male could have been our David.⁷³ A better hypothesis, though, is that in 1820 David was still living in Jefferson County, Kentucky, with his mother and stepfather, who in 1820 is identified as Philip Boyar. Once again this man had a female forty-five years old or older in his household, doubtless Elizabeth, who was perhaps in her sixties that year and would live into the mid-1820s.⁷⁴ Philip and Elizabeth's household also included one male in the age category for 16 and 26 years old. Judging once more from what we know about the children the couple had brought to their marriage from their first marriages, this male was probably David Shake, who was nineteen years old when the census was taken in 1820. Because the male in question was not listed in this particular census's special column for males 16 to 18 years of age, we can narrow the range of that male's age in 1820 to eighteen to twenty-six years old. This has the effect of increasing the odds he was in fact our David.

Because David Shake first appeared on the tax rolls in Jefferson County in 1823, we may be correct in thinking that his mother had died in that year or the year before and David was now living apart from any other family members. The will of Philip Boyers supports the idea that Elizabeth was deceased by 1823: when Boyers prepared it in 1824, he made no reference at all to her. It could be, though, that David's departure from the household of Philip and Elizabeth between 1820 and 1823 was unrelated to her death, which could have come anytime between the 1820 census and 1824.

At this point we have finished with what we know, or think we know, about the antecedents of David Shake, the father of Thomas Neal's wife Mary Ellen {Shake} Neal. Next we will examine the family of Mary Ellen's mother, Artemisia {Blevins} Shake.

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rev. 8/14/10

Notes

¹Because this chapter concentrates on families other than the Neals, we will defer a discussion of the Neal name until we study that family in greater detail in a later chapter. By the time of our Thomas Neal, the name was fairly consistently spelled Neal, the spelling we will employ in this chapter.

²The 1899 land ownership atlas for Sullivan County, Indiana, clearly shows the Bledsoe property of 80 acres in Section 17 of Cass Township, but I cannot find William Bledsoe (who is not listed in the index of the atlas) living in adjacent Haddon Township; it is possible the census enumerator was confused and simply listed Bledsoe – and my grandfather – in the wrong township. Also see the USGS map for Dugger/Indiana. The Bledsoe property was very near that of the Shakes, so there is no mystery about how Thomas Neal met Mary Ellen Shake.

³The 1860 census shows that William J. Bledsoe was living with William Neal and his second wife, Charlotte. She was the daughter of Robert Moore and Drucella {Miles} Moore. For a view of the property Bledsoe was farming, see slide 12006, taken in 2006. Return to text

⁴There is no trace of Caledonia (sometimes spelled Calidonia) today. See the USGS map for Dugger/Indiana for its approximate location. See also the photograph in my album of my grandfather and father, taken in front of the store in Caledonia; the date is difficult to read but seems to be June 1907, about when my grandfather sold the store. Return to text

⁵Charles M. Neal was baptized in Busseron Creek about three miles southeast of Sullivan, Indiana. He recalled the location as follows: at an old flatboat boatyard and swimming hole near where the Dugger-to-Sullivan road entered the creek bottom and turned to the northwest. Away from the road, at an angle west of north, there was the stream and a large cleared area used for swimming parties and baptisms. The site was apparently just south of an Illinois Central railroad bridge. Because much of this area has since been reworked for flood control and does not resemble what it did in 1896, it is no longer possible to reach or even view the baptismal site. See the USGS maps for Dugger/Indiana and Sullivan/Indiana and slide 11997 (2006) for a view of Busseron Creek not far from the swimming hole.

⁶ See my album for my grandfather's journal, which includes a record of his travel, expenses, and income as well as his preaching, baptisms, and other activities from 1899 through 1902. Some of the places at which he preached still existed as of 2006, when the following slides were taken: Taylor's Ridge Church and Koleen (USGS map for Koleen/Indiana and slide 12060 for the former); Pleasant Grove Church (USGS map for Sandborn/Indiana and slide 12054); Bethany Church (USGS map for Scotland/Indiana and slide 12058); Riverton (USGS map for Merom/Indiana); and Palestine, Illinois (also the USGS map for Merom/Indiana). I have also identified three of the schoolhouses, two of which were in Cass Township: Deckard, at the junction of Sections 9, 10, 15, and 16; and Houk (actually, Houck), in the northwest corner of Section 32. The third schoolhouse was Brodie, in Section 13 in Hamilton Township. (For all of these schoolhouses, see the USGS map for Dugger/Indiana.) See slide 12005, taken in 2006, for a view of the site of Deckard School, lost to strip mining. I have not been able to locate specifically other places my grandfather mentions in his journal: River Bottom, the "Little Brick" Church, Gravel Ridge Chapel (where he preached the most), Gray's Ridge School House, and Phelp's Ridge School House. My grandfather also preached at a place he called "Buel[l]," the early name of the village of Cass, which is located just northwest of Dugger, and in relatively distant Holton, in Ripley County, Indiana. One of the places at which he also preached, but is not listed in his journal, was Berea Church, which our Neal family had helped to bring into existence on January 24, 1892. This was the church located in Cass Township of Sullivan County (see the USGS map for Dugger/Indiana and slide 11996, taken in 2006), where the family customarily worshiped. The Correspondence Bible College in which my grandfather enrolled was probably that operated by Ashley S. Johnson in Tennessee, since the "Cyclopedia" to which my grandfather refers in his journal was a Johnson publication. Return to text

⁷Potter Bible College later transformed itself into what is now called Potter Children's Home. The records of the former college were lost in two fires in 1940, so we cannot determine exactly when Charles M. Neal was enrolled or what he studied there. The college did encourage my grandfather to study the Bible intensively, and he would go on to write a number of extended essays based on his life-long studies. See slide 12944, taken in 2008, which shows the site, now a vacant lot, where the main building of Potter Bible College stood at the time my grandfather was enrolled there. It is likely that in Bowling Green my grandfather worshipped at the 12th Street Church of Christ, but we cannot confirm this because the membership records of that church do not go back that far. Return to text

⁸A letter from my grandfather implies that Anna was born in Harper, Kansas, and information from her children confirms this. Her parents, Miles Leander Bottorff and Nancy Emma {Beckett} Bottorff, had been born in Indiana; the Bottorff family was German and had come to Indiana by way of Kentucky, Berks County, Pennsylvania, and the Hudson River area of New York – and so may originally have been Palatines. Anna was born on February 6, 1884. The 1900 census lists Anna with her parents in Wellington, Sumner County, Kansas. Wellington is not far from Wichita, where a school for aspiring ministers could well have been located. I was unable to find any record of my grandfather's second marriage in vital statistics in the IHS, so it is likely they were married in Kansas; one source gives the date as September 6, 1908, and the place as Harper. According to my father's half-brother, Stanford Neal, my grandfather (his father) spoke of having hunted deer in Oklahoma; since Sumner County is on the Oklahoma border, it may be that my grandfather did this hunting at the time he was in Kansas for his wedding in 1908. The fact that the first child of Charles and Anna was born in Linton, Indiana, in September 1909 seems to indicate that my grandfather had finished his studies in Bowling Green and taken the post at the Linton Church of Christ by then. Anna {Bottorff} Neal died in Ford, Kentucky, on October 29, 1975. It is interesting not only that my grandfather's two wives were born only three months apart in 1884 but that as infants they were briefly living (with their parents) quite close together in – of all places – Kansas. As we have seen in a previous chapter, during the winter of 1884-85, when Anna Bottorff was a baby in Sumner County, Glenn Vanderpool was a slightly younger infant two counties east in Chautauqua County, where her parents were staying with Sarah {Chastain} Vanderpool before they moved further north in the state.Return to text

⁹My father had intended to continue his reminiscences but was unable to. Return to text

¹⁰See the USGS map for Linton/Indiana.

¹¹The Linton Church of Christ demolished its original building many years ago, and the building on this site in 2006 (see slide 12016) has now been superseded by an adjacent one. For views of the site of the Neal residence on Third Street, N.W., see slides 12014 and 12015. The Dugger Church of Christ was founded in 1885. The original structure was built on land donated by the Dugger and Neal Coal Company. (The Neal who joined Dugger in founding this company was from an unrelated family. In fact, there were quite a few unrelated Neals in Dugger, most of them coal miners from England.) Dugger was not an area where my Neal family had ever lived before my grandfather went to be a pastor there, although Thomas Neal evidently did purchase two lots there in 1892. Return to text

¹²The new church was built on the site of the original one. See slide 07159, taken in 1994, and slides 12037, 12039-40, and 12050-53, all taken in 2006. The brick on the parsonage was added after my grandfather and his family had left the town for good. For the parsonage, see slide 12038 (2006). My father was quite fond of Dugger, general views of which in 2006 are in slides 12041 through 12049.

¹³I donated my father's collection of copies of the Dugger church's newsletter to the Disciples of Christ Historical Society in Nashville, Tennessee, so that they would be available for research purposes. A deed in Greene County, Indiana, suggests that my grandfather might have purchased two lots (93 and 94) there in August 1911, just before taking the position in Dugger (where the church had no manse). He and his family may have lived here – just a few miles east of Dugger – until they obtained the house in Dugger to which the text alludes, but in my judgment the Charles Neal who purchased these two lots was probably another man.Return to text

¹⁴Houston operated a company that manufactured hats. He lived at 545 Cumberland Avenue. Return to text

¹⁵Later this park was named Deering Oaks Park, the name it continues to bear today.

¹⁶A 1914 city map of Portland in the Library of Congress shows just three houses on Surrenden Street, with empty lots where several more houses – including the one at 8 Surrenden Street – would soon be constructed. This matches my father's recollection that the rooming house was a new one. The Deering mansion was across an unoccupied square.

¹⁷I saw and photographed this house on St. John Street in 1953 (see my album), but it has since been razed. Although the house itself was not significant, the railroad station was, and preservationists in Portland still complain about the fact that it was demolished and the entire area was "redeveloped." In 1953 the house displayed as its number 399 1/2, and so it probably had been divided into two apartments sometime after 1921.

¹⁸As noted in an earlier chapter, the column on the 1920 census showing the birthplace of my father's mother gives Glenn {Vanderpool} Neal's birthplace as Kansas. It may be that the census taker was confused by the fact that Anna {Bottorff} Neal was born in Kansas and assumed Glenn had been born there as well. Or it may be that someone in the household – probably Anna – incorrectly assumed that Glenn was also born there because Samuel Vanderpool and his family were living in Kansas at about the time Glenn was born. An interesting sidebar: when I was advancing the microfilm reel holding images of the 1920 census sheets for Portland and paused to see what page I had reached, I suddenly realized that I was looking at my grandfather's (to me) distinctive handwriting. A little research confirmed that he served as a census enumerator in that year, doubtless in order to pick up a little extra income. He did not collect the information for the district in which he lived, however, (doing so was probably against census regulations), so he was not responsible for the error about Glenn's state of birth. The 1920 census shows Charles Glenn Neal was attending school. The 1917 Portland city directory misidentifies Charles M. Neal as Charles F. Neal. Return to text

¹⁹I photographed this building in 1987, when it was still in use as a church. By 1996, it had become a residence. (See slide 02322, taken in the former year.) Stanford Neal also remembered the church having been at 867 Congress Street. The Neal Street that is near the church in Portland was not named after anyone in our family. Return to text

²⁰During the years my grandfather and his family lived in Portland, there were apparently three A&P stores in South Portland – at 95 High Street, at 310 Sumner Street, and at 420 Preble Street. I cannot determine which one my grandfather managed. The 1914 map of Portland does not show any of these sites as A&P stores, so they must have been fairly new when the family arrived in town. This map also does not show exactly which structure on Bramhall Square the A&P store there then occupied, but I have determined by other means which one it probably was. This store, which was actually closer to Longfellow Square, is now a pharmacy. Stanford Neal remembered that it had a basement-level door on the side street, which may help us to confirm its identity.

²¹Run by a Jacob Slosberg, the leather shop was located at 220 Federal Street. This site was obliterated when the street was widened.

²²One of the happiest of these were his visits to a friend whose father was the keeper of the Two Lights Lighthouse on Cape Elizabeth. The father was the subject of a later biography. Return to text

²³My father said that the family lived in Portland five years, and the city directory for 1923-1924 remarks "moved from city" after my grandfather's listing. William Houston died while my grandfather and his family were en route back to Indiana. My grandfather angered the Houston family by refusing to leave his own family during their trip home to Indiana and return to Portland for the funeral. Houston died on January 12, 1922, so we can date the Neals' return trip rather precisely. In addition, my father graduated from high school in Indiana in 1924. His reminiscences state that he had spent at least two years at that high school; it was actually one year and part of another. Return to text

²⁴My first record of my grandfather's having been in Winchester is dated April 1927, but Stanford Neal remembered his arrival there was in November in 1925. See slides 12874-75, taken in 2008, for the house at 126 Belmont Avenue. Return to text

²⁵ For these Neal residences in Winchester, see my 2008 slides 12984 (214 South Burns Avenue), 12985 (72 Fitch Avenue), 12877 (32 French Avenue), and 12876 and 12878 (24 French Avenue). It was at the last of these where I occasionally spent a week or so visiting my grandfather, without my parents, while I was in my teens. By the 1950s, four of Charles M. Neal's daughters and their husbands also lived in Winchester (one of these couples at 24 French) or in nearby Lexington. The Winchester Cemetery, where my grandfather is buried, is not far from these several residences, or from the Main Street Church of Christ for that matter. My grandfather suspected that the Neal family had passed through this part of Kentucky, but of course he had no idea how deep his (and his first wife's) roots in that area were. Stanford Neal, incidentally, lived in Schenectady, New York, a place close to where some of Glenn's ancestors had lived – but not his own, as Glenn {Vanderpool} Neal was not his mother. My grandfather, having lived for so long on French Avenue, would have appreciated the fact that Glenn also had a healthy percentage of French blood – and French Huguenot blood at that, but he probably never knew this. The circumstances of my grandfather's departure from Main Street Church of Christ evidently were not harmonious, and it is not clear whether he left voluntarily because of opposition to his views or was forced to resign. Return to text

²⁶Many sources say that Mary Ellen Shake was born on July 11 in 1835, but arithmetic produces the date of January 11. Neither date yields the forty-six years given in the so-called mortality schedule of Indiana deaths for June 1, 1879, through May 31, 1880, in which she is listed, and so the age in that document is probably incorrect. It should be possible to use the fact that the censuses from 1850 through 1870 were taken as of June 1 in order to determine whether she was born in January or July. Unfortunately, one of them supports January (1860, when she is shown as twenty-five years old), another July (1850, when she is said to have been fourteen years old), and the third is wildly off: in 1870 the census says she was only thirty years of age. The 1860 census information was recorded in June of that year and the 1850 census information was recorded in August of that year, which may have complicated things. It is my belief that the error of thinking Mary Ellen's birth was in July came about when someone years later misread the numeral 1 for a 7 in some handwritten document that used a number to designate the month, or else confused the monthly abbreviations of "Jan." and "Jul." Either of these errors would have the effect of transforming a birth that had actually been in January into one described as having taken place in July. Matching the sequence of her parents' children with the ages shown on the 1840 census also supports January 11, 1835 as the correct birth date for Mary Ellen.

²⁷For general views of the Neal-Paxton Cemetary, which our family should venerate as its principal burying ground, see slide 07146 (1994), slide 12027 (2006) and the USGS map for Sullivan/Indiana. Photographs of individual grave markers there are cited in the appropriate places throughout this narrative. Return to text

²⁸The age for Thomas Neal is erroneous on the 1860 census: he is said to have been twenty-three years old when he was actually twenty-seven. His age in 1870 (thirty-six) is closer to accuracy but still incorrect. His age in 1880 (forty-eight years) is approximately correct and in 1900 (sixty-seven) it is finally exactly right. There was a Thomas Neal who registered for the Civil War draft in mid-1863, but he is listed as having been living in Vermillion County, Indiana, and as twenty-six years old, when our Thomas Neal was thirty years of age – and never lived in that county. This registrant was likely another man with the same name. There is no draft registration for our Thomas Neal. Southern Indiana was full of persons who were Southern sympathizers during the Civil War (the "Copperheads" were strong in this area), and Thomas Neal's failure to register for the draft may be a clue about his opinions regarding the war.

²⁹The 1896 directory for Sullivan County lists Thomas Neal's farm as 197 acres in size even though his purchases totaled twice the acreage. (See a later footnote in this chapter.) It is possible Thomas Neal rented out much of the land he owned and the 1896 directory credited him only with what he himself was actually farming. The censuses show the following values for Thomas Neal's real estate and personal property, respectively: $560 and $200 in 1860 and $2,000 and $200 in 1870. In 1900, the census notes that he owned his farm free and clear. The agricultural census for 1860 shows Thomas Neal with 74 acres, 25 of them improved. Cash values were $600 for the farm, $15 for implements, $190 for livestock, $12 for homemade manufacturing, and $28 for slaughtered animals. He owned two horses, two milch cows, one other cattle, four sheep, and twenty swine. The previous year, Thomas Neal had produced (presumably for sale, not home use) 15 bushels of wheat, 250 bushels of Indian corn, 6 pounds of wool, 12 bushels of Irish potatoes, 50 pounds of butter, and 2 tons of hay.

³⁰Section 12 is in Township 7 North, Range 9 West. Section 7 is in Township 7 North, Range 8 West. Return to text

³¹The properties mentioned in this paragraph were, in the chronological order of Thomas's acquisitions, as follows: the southwest quarter of the northwest quarter of Section 7, Township 7 North, Range 8 West (40 acres); the southeast quarter of the northeast quarter of Section 12, Township 7 North, Range 9 West (40 acres); the northwest quarter of the northwest quarter of Section 7, Township 7 North, Range 8 West (44.59 acres); the northwest corner of the northwest quarter of the southwest quarter of Section 7, Township 7 North, Range 8 West (four lots); the east quarter of the southeast quarter of Section 12, Township 7 North, Range 9 West (40 acres); the southeast and southwest quarters of the southeast quarter of Section 3, Township 7 North, Range 8 West (80 acres) and the northwest quarter of the northwest quarter of Section 10, Township 7 North, Range 8 West (40 acres); part of the southwest quarter of the northeast quarter of Section 12, Township 7 North, Range 9 West (11 acres); and the east half of the northeast quarter of Section 17, Township 7 North, Range 8 West (80 acres). In addition, as mentioned earlier Thomas Neal evidently purchased lots 62 and 63 in Dugger on November 29, 1892. The total of his holdings was approximately 380 acres. A sampling of 2006 views of Thomas Neal's properties in Sections 12 and 7 can be seen, respectively, in slides 11998 through 12000 and 12001 through 12004. See Appendix II for a description of how public lands were surveyed and sold by the United States government. Return to text

³²Born in Ohio to Alexander Dunbar and Susannah {Wellington} Dunbar, Mary Ellen Dunbar lived from January 18, 1847, to March 18, 1920. She died in Cass Township of Sullivan County, Indiana, and is buried in the Neal-Paxton Cemetery. The 1880 census confirms that Thomas Neal was a widower that year. The marriage in 1881 was performed by Elder John Willington. Return to text

³³See slide 07145, taken in 1994, and slides 12024-26 and 12035, taken in 2006. Thomas Neal actually has two grave markers, an original and a later one, presumably erected after the death of his second wife in 1920. The latter stone erroneously lists his year of death as 1904.

³⁴The Neal family evidently attended church services at the Deckard School House. The congregation there later developed into a church that took the name Berea, a name that was suggested by Charles M. Neal's stepmother. Thomas Neal remained a member of this congregation all through his life. Return to text

³⁵The name Shake may be an Americanization of the German name Schacke, although as the text describes alternatives ranging from Schaick to Schoch are also possibilities. Almost all of the evidence indicates that the Shake family was from Germany, although one of the children of the first Shake we know for certain, David's father Christopher, stated that his father was born in the Netherlands. The best guess is that the Shakes, like so many other Germans and Swiss we are related to, originally came from southwestern Germany and traveled down the Rhine and through Rotterdam as so many of these other families did.

³⁶This given name was sometimes spelled Artimieia, Artimesia, or Artimecia. Because her name was inscribed as Artemisia on her grave marker in Snyder Cemetery in Haddon Township of Sullivan County, Indiana, that is the spelling I have used throughout this narrative. See the USGS map for Sullivan/Indiana for the location of this cemetery.

³⁷The Shake family history mentioned in the text says that David died on September 6, 1872. David Shake's ages as reported by some of the later censuses do not clarify this discrepancy (indeed, they compound it): he is said to have been fifty-three years old in 1850 and seventy-two years old in 1870. Only in 1860 was he described as his correct age, sixty years old. For views of David Shake's grave marker in Snyder Cemetery, see slides 12010 and 12013, taken in 2006.

³⁸Artemisia's age on the 1860 census is difficult to read but was almost certainly written as 52. None of the information contributed to the LDS states her birth date. For views of Artemisia's grave marker in Snyder Cemetery, see slides 12011 and 12012, taken in 2006.

³⁹Artemisia's birthday, which was in mid-June, might account for some of the variations in her reported age: depending on when the census taker was in the neighborhood and how strictly he or she applied the official date of June 1, Artemisia might have been recorded as being one age or another. The Shake family history gives a different day for her birth as well: February 11. Return to text

⁴⁰David Shake's properties in Owen County were the east half of the southeast quarter of Section 26, Township 12 North, Range 3 West (80 acres) and the west half of the adjoining southwest quarter of Section 25, also in Township 12 North, Range 3 West (also 80 acres), for which he paid $100. (The evidence indicates that an agent named Robert M. Wooden made the purchase for the Shakes, another clue that David may not have lived in Owen County until after he and Artemisia were married in May 1825.) The line between Taylor Township and Harrison Township divided these two 80-acre portions, with the former being in Taylor and the latter in Harrison. See slides 12093 through 12096 (2006) for views of David Shake's properties. A history of Owen County states that David Shake was an early resident of both Taylor Township and Harrison Township. When David Shake returned to Kentucky sometime after 1827, he must have lived in Oldham County: he is not on the tax rolls for Jefferson County there. Return to text

⁴¹The movements mentioned in the text are confirmed by a Kentucky document dated December 1819 and the 1824 patents, all of which describe David Shake as being "of Jefferson County, Kentucky." He is not listed on the 1820 Indiana census for Owen County, nor in 1830 either, which is consistent with his arrival and departure from Owen County between those years. Return to text

⁴²One report says that David Shake lived in the Shaker Prairie section of Knox County when he first came to Indiana. This area is just below the Sullivan County line. There is no record of his having resided there, but it is worth noting that his mother-in-law did live in Knox County. Perhaps they all lived together for a time on the property she continued to inhabit in that county before David and Artemisia went up to their new property in Sullivan County in mid-1832.

⁴³David's initial patents (received on December 31, 1831) were for the west half of the northeast quarter of Section 36, Township 7 North, Range 9 West and the adjoining east half of the northwest quarter of the same section; this 160 acres had cost him and Artemisia $200. David Shake's later purchases were made on January 5, 1837, and on July 16, 1839. These were two more parcels of Section 36, each another 40 acres: the northeast quarter of the northeast quarter (patent dated September 1, 1838) and the southeast quarter of the northeast quarter (patent dated May 25, 1841); these later two parcels cost $50 apiece. For a sampling of how these properties appeared in 2006, see slides 12007 through 12009. The other purchases referred to in the text were as follows, in the chronological order of David's acquisition of them: the northeast quarter of the southeast quarter and the southeast quarter of the southeast quarter of Section 25, Township 7 North, Range 9 West (80 acres); the southwest quarter of the southeast quarter of Section 18 and the northwest quarter of the northwest quarter of Section 19, Township 6 North, Range 8 West (80 acres); a part of Section 19 in Township 6 North, Range 8 West (20 acres); the north half of the southwest quarter of the southeast quarter of Section 18 (23 acres); and the southwest corner of the northeast quarter of the northwest quarter of Section 36, Township 7 North, Range 9 West (21 acres). The total was nearly 500 acres. See the USGS maps for Dugger/Indiana and Sullivan/Indiana. In the partition of David Shake's estate, dated December 3, 1872, his widow Artemisia received the southwest corner of the southeast quarter of the northwest quarter of Section 36 (see slide 12009, taken in 2006). This might have been the location of the couple's residence. Her purchase in 1875 was the southwest corner of the northeast quarter of the northwest quarter of that section. In the partition, David's daughter Mary Ellen {Shake} Neal received 22 acres: the northeast corner of the northeast quarter of the northeast quarter of Section 36, Township 7 North, Range 9 West. (See slide 12007, also taken in 2006.) Artemisia's will, prepared on February 3, 1873, and proved on July 27, 1878, left her dower in land to her four unmarried daughters, $12 each to the other children, and any residue to the daughters. Return to text

⁴⁴The 1850 census valued David Shake's real estate at $1,500. The agricultural census for 1850 shows him having 250 acres, 150 of them improved. Cash values were $800 for the farm, $80 for implements, $400 for livestock, $60 for homemade manufacturing, and $70 for slaughtered animals. He owned eight horses, five milch cows, ten other cattle, twenty-eight sheep, and fifty swine. The previous year David Shake had produced 80 bushels of wheat, 600 bushels of Indian corn, 300 bushels of oats, 80 pounds of wool, 60 bushels of Irish potatoes, 300 pounds of butter, 9 tons of hay, 50 pounds of flax, and 2 bushels of flaxseed. The 1860 census valued his real estate at $4,800 and his personal property at $2,000. The agricultural census that year said he then had 350 acres, but still only 150 of them were improved. Cash values were $150 for implements, $726 for livestock, $60 for homemade manufacturing, and $400 for slaughtered animals. He owned ten horses, six milch cows, sixteen other cattle, thirty-five sheep, and fifty swine. The previous year, David Shake had produced 223 bushels of wheat, 20 bushels of rye, 1,000 bushels of Indian corn, 100 pounds of wool, 2 bushels of peas and beans, 20 bushels of Irish potatoes, 25 bushels of sweet potatoes, $25 worth of orchard products, 150 pounds of butter, and 10 tons of hay. In 1870 David Shake's worth had increased to $6,000 (real estate) and $3,900 (personal property). Relatively speaking, David Shake was well off, and he was an economic success despite his inability to read and write. Artemisia could not read and write, either. Return to text

⁴⁵Some Shake family members believe that David was the son of Jacob Shake, a son of Christopher Shake, and Nancy {Donaldson} Shake, but this Jacob was born in 1786 and married Nancy in 1806. Return to text

⁴⁶In addition, the 1797-99 account book of a Westmoreland County merchant shows that Hanover Davis purchased nails from this man's mercantile in 1798. As we shall see, Hanover's father had problems with his unusual given name, but even Hanover suffered in this respect: on these tax rolls, for instance, he is listed as "Stanover," "Harmover," and "Hammer." Return to text

⁴⁷Other families who were attracted to this little settlement included the forebears of both Herbert Hoover and John J. Pershing. Return to text

⁴⁸See the USGS map for Irwin/Pennsylvania for Millersdale and the surrounding area and slides 10787-88 (taken in 2004) for views of the area where Hanover Davis owned property. The tax rolls for 1773 are actually part of the Bedford County assessment, which states that Hempfield Township would become part of the new Westmoreland County and directs payments to that county. Return to text

⁴⁹It should be noted that two deeds in neighboring Huntingdon (later North Huntingdon) Township, one in 1778 and the other in 1796, mention Hanover Davis's adjoining property. It remains possible that Hanover owned property there before he purchased the 300 acres from Hanicle Davis in 1774 and continued to own it for years afterward. I have found no evidence in deeds that Hanover did own property in that township, but both of his known properties – the one near Millersdale and the other near Adamsburg – are not far from the boundary line separating Hempfield Township and Huntingdon (or North Huntingdon) Township, and this might be the explanation for the apparent mystery. Return to text

⁵⁰The exact location of Hanover's patent near Adamsburg is south of U.S. 30 near Shady Lane, west of Bucktown Road (T548), about one mile southwest of the location of the Brush Creek Meeting House. West of a mine called Edna No. 1, Bucktown Road runs north and south but then makes a 90-degree turn to the east. Hanover's patent was in the area west of the north-south portion of Bucktown Road. The Pennsylvania Turnpike today passes through Hanover's land just south of the Irwin exit. See the USGS map for Irwin/Pennsylvania and slides 11651 and 11652 for views of this area in 2005. A deed in 1820 tells us that Hanover's property adjoined the area Pennsylvania had granted for the town of Adamsburg. Return to text

⁵¹None of the court records pertaining to Hanover's estate make any reference to his having died in the Indian attacks, it should be said, but there would be no reason to make such a reference – even more so if his cause of death was common knowledge at the time. Return to text

⁵²We should note, though, that some of Westmoreland County's earliest records were burned with the county seat, Hanna's Town, in 1782. Davis's 20-acre property almost abutted that of the young Albert Gallatin, who would later become the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Return to text

⁵³There was also an "Azariah" Davis who from about 1770 through about 1783 was in court cases, on juries, and a mill owner in Virginia's Ohio County and elsewhere in the area to the south and west of Westmoreland County. Was this in actuality our Hanicle Davis? That this man does not seem to have been in the area in other years makes him even more interesting to us. A Pennsylvanian of that name did move to Kentucky during the mid-1770s, and it is possible that he had left a father or son of the same name behind in Pennsylvania. Return to text

⁵⁴A Nicholas Davis is listed as a "court martial man" in David Marchant's company of the Second Battalion of the Westmoreland County militia in 1778, but we cannot be sure whether this was Hanicle Davis or (probably) his son named Nicholas. Christopher Truby's company was also in this battalion. Return to text

⁵⁵There are other men, not discussed in this chapter, who might have been connected to, or progenitors of, the Shake family we are studying. They include Johannes Shaak in Pennsylvania in 1731; J. Georg and Vincents Schacke, who were thirty-six and thirty-four years old, respectively, in 1736; Christiper Shake in Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, in 1737; Christiper Shakey in 1737; George Shaky in Pennsylvania in 1736; Vincent Shaky in Philadelphia County in 1736; and Michel, Jacob, and William Shaak or Schack in 1749. Undoubtedly some of the men listed were the same persons, judging from their given names, and others can be identified as someone other than the ancestor of our Christopher Shake. (Christiper Shakey, for example, apparently was the progenitor of the family that used the name Shockey.) Undoubtedly, too, there were many other men whose names were even more garbled, or whose arrival is unknown to us, from whom our Shakes might have come. In addition, some German immigrants arrived at ports other than Philadelphia – Annapolis and Baltimore, for instance. Return to text

⁵⁶A Christian Schreyack who arrived on the Harle in 1736 might have been Georg Schoch's brother, and he might also have been the Christian Sheak who was in Hempfield Township of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania (home of the Davises at the time) in 1783. Return to text

⁵⁸The couple's other two sons were Johann Philipp Schoch and Thomas Schoch. Return to text

⁵⁹Information contributed to the LDS is of little help for our Shake family. The only possible candidate in this information is a Christopher Schuck who was born in Berks County, Pennsylvania, in 1766. Return to text

⁶⁰Truby had moved to Hempfield County from Northampton County, Pennsylvania, in 1772; this might be a clue as to the Shake family's origins, but no sign of such a family there has been found to date. There is nothing in the National Archives to suggest that a Christopher Shake was part of any national military unit during the Revolutionary War, but these records are hardly complete and of course in most instances would not have included the state-run militia units. A pension application from Truby's son does provide a few details about the activities of his ranger detachment, to which Christopher Shake might have belonged. Documents in the Pennsylvania State Archives show that Truby's militia company was on duty throughout 1777; during the months of February, April, May, July, August, September, October, and December in 1778; during February, March, and October in 1779; and during ten days in September 1781. Unfortunately, the details of the unit's service, and where it was on duty, are scanty. In addtion, these may not be a complete accounting for the times when Truby's company was on active duty, only the times for which documentation has survived. See Chapter XII for information about the Pennsylvania militia units were structured and called into service. Return to text

⁶¹Perhaps it is noteworthy that a Georg and Eva Scheck had a daughter baptized in Hempfield Township of Westmoreland County Pennsylvania, in March 1778. This Georg could have been a brother to our Christophf. Another brother might have been Ludwig Schack, whose daughter was baptized there in 1775. Return to text

⁶²This couple's daughter married in Loudoun County, Virginia, in 1790, but it is not clear whether her parents were present at that time. A Benjamin Shake was also living in Loudoun County as early as 1777. Return to text

⁶³A George Shake was born in Maryland in 1760, but the evidence indicates that he remained in Maryland. This man may be the George Shakes who served from Kent County in the Maryland militia (Fifth Company, Thirteenth Battalion) during the American Revolution. There are indications too this man also remained in Maryland. Given his age in 1774, he is unlikely to have been the George Shake who was a prisoner in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, in 1774, when he petitioned the General Assembly of Maryland for relief – probably from debt. Nor is he likely to have been the George Shakely who served in the militia during Dunmore's War in 1774, as he would have been too young that year. Shakely was on the lists of Major John Connolly (mentioned in a previous chapter in connection with the dispute between Pennsylvania and Virginia over the area around the Forks of the Ohio River) and Captain George Astor. A lieutenant in this unit was the notorious Tory Simon Girty, a person we will encounter in a later chapter. Return to text

⁶⁴Neither of these Shakes is included in lists of the militiamen who fought for Clark from 1778 to 1784, but those recruited in 1786 were a different group than the former militiamen. A Christian Shade was a private in the First U.S. Regiment (Harmar) from 1785 to 1790. Sergeant Shake served under Captain Robert Floyd and Lieutenant Colonel John Adair in Major General Charles Scott's command. He was mustered on September 23, 1793, and served until November 11 in that year. Shake saw service at Fort Washington (now Cincinnati), marched north with Wayne's forces, and helped to build Fort Greenville in what is now Ohio. Return to text

⁶⁵See the USGS map for Fisherville/Kentucky for Shake's Run. It is just north of Floyd's Fork proper. For views of this area in 2008, see slides 12917-20.

⁶⁶In 1789 Christopher owned one horse and George Shake owned three. Four years later both were doing better: George had two horses and thirteen cattle and Christopher had four houses and nineteen cattle. Christopher was on Francis Ransdale Slaughter's tax list (taken in mid-1789), which covered the area west of Floyd's Fork up to the main road to Louisville. Men from several families related to the Shakes are also on Slaughter's list. The Jeffersontown property is now at 10320 Watterson Trail. See slides 12934 and 12935, taken in 2006, for the George Shake house at that site. Return to text

⁶⁷The use of "Sr." after his name does not necessarily mean that George was an older man, only – as we have seen in other chapters – that there was also a younger George in the area, perhaps his son, perhaps not. It is possible that the man called George, Sr., on this list had an adult son of the same name who was also a soldier. Return to text

⁶⁸Nor, unfortunately, is a Shake on the 1784 land ownership atlas for Jefferson County, Kentucky. Return to text

⁶⁹Christopher Shake's will left all his land to his wife, Elizabeth, but it would appear she passed at least some of it to our David (perhaps when she remarried), for in 1824 or 1828 David is said to have sold property he inherited from his father. Christopher asked that each of his minor children, a group that would include David, receive a horse. In April 1809, the county court ordered a division of the 195 acres of Christopher Shake; his widow, now remarried, received one third of his property. It is intriguing to see that there was a Michael Shaag in Fayette County, Kentucky, at about this time. Could the name Shake have derived from Shaag, or was that yet another rendering of Shake? If so, was Michael related to our Shakes? Return to text

⁷⁰This man is listed as "Bowyer Philip," obviously a simple transpositional error by the clerk because Philip Boyers is listed (under various spellings) in Kentucky from 1790 through 1820. The 1820 census shows Boyers owned a female slave between twenty and forty-five years of age.

⁷¹The only Shake in Kentucky in 1810 was a William Shake in Casey County. He had two males under ten years old and two more between ten and sixteen years of age. It is possible that one of them was our David, but Casey County is a long distance from where we would expect him to have been living. Alternatively, David might have been living with a member of his father or mother's family who had already moved to Indiana, for which there is no census in 1810. I think it most likely, however, that he was living with his mother and her second husband, Philip Boyer. Return to text

⁷²As we have seen, David was not living in Owen County, Indiana, (the county where he would patent land in 1824) in 1820.

⁷³In fact, there were only males in this household, which suggests that it was a working farm that did not yet house any families. A Jacob Shake of Jefferson County, Kentucky, also had an extra male but this male was too old to have been our David.

⁷⁴The fact that Christopher Shake's surviving children sold his tract of 4,000 acres on the south side of Harrod's Creek on December 30, 1819, could suggest that their mother had recently died, but to me the interpretation in the text seems more plausible. David's share of the proceeds of the sale of this valuable property probably supplied him with much of the capital he must have needed to purchase the large amount of land he would acquire later in Indiana. Return to text

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