The Clark Side of our Farrell Line

Salem Wallace Clark was my great grandfather, the father of Emma Allie Clark Farrell, mother of my dad, Ottis R. Farrell.  He successfully farmed land a few miles north of Madison, Missouri. (I have visited the farm.) Salem appears to have had a good deal of influence  on my dad who called him "Pap" and mentioned him often, especially as dad taught me to make primitive toys  - sling shots, willow whistles and so forth. "Pap said this ... showed me how to...etc."

Salem was the son of Meredith Clark (b. 1809 in Garard County, Ky. and died 1894 in Monroe County, Mo.).  He was the grandson of  William Clark.

William left us with a recorded will, a rare revelation hinting at how some of our people lived. (I find almost nothing similar from the Farrell side.) William's Find-A-Grave entry reads:

William purchased 150 acres of land in Garrard County, KY in 1816. The land was located on the water of the White Lick Fork of Paint Lick Creek. It appears that this land was eventually sold by the heirs of William Clark in 1839. William made a will dated June 2, 1822 in which were mentioned his father John Clark, his mother Milly Clark, his wife Sarah, and his sons John, Meredith, George and William. The will was recorded in July, 1822.

The will left his father John and his mother Milly the plantation where they lived including the farm with 40 acres of land, also half of the horse mill, likewise the sugar camp that they now make use of during their material lives. To his wife Sarah the balance of his plantation during her material life and after her death the property to be sold and equally divided among all his children except his oldest son John who is to only have $10 of his estate. His wife is also to have all his cattle, hogs and sheep, but the colt his son Meredith is to have. His wife is to have the household and kitchen furniture and at her death it is to be sold and divided among all his children except John. His son George is to have all his smith tools, and his son John is to have his whip saw. After the death of John and Milly Clark the 40 acres of land should be sold and William's two youngest sons, Meredith and William, should have $15 each more than the rest as an extra, the balance of the money to be divided equal with them and all the rest of his children. His wife is also to have one log cabin, two axes and one iron (?). The witnesses to the will were Coleman Haley and John D. Stephens. Burial site unknown, but buried in Garrard County, Kentucky.

It is clear that William died young in 1822 even though we have no recorded birth date. This explains the anomaly of his leaving part of his estate to his parents.  His father outlived him by about 14 years. We have nothing to account for the (insulting?)  pittance he left his oldest son, John.

ABOUT WILLIAM'S  FATHER,  JOHN CLARK

John Clark, like our John Farrell, was seven generations back from mine. In Kentucky, he lived only a few miles from our Farrells around Boonsboro. Each served as Revolutionary War fighter in the Virginia Continental Line. They remained neighbors after the large Kentucky-to-Missouri  migration  in the  late 1820s and/or '30s. Details below are from Find-A-Grave.

The family moved to Madison County, KY by 1795 as evidenced by a deed dated Nov. 27, 1795 in which John purchased 502 acres of land from Robert Daniel. The land was located on the east fork of Sugar Creek, and was bounded in part by the land of Abraham Stephens. Apparently, this part of Madison County became part of Garrard County when it was formed in 1796.

John served as a regular soldier in the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War. John's application for a military pension in 1818 stated that he enlisted at Goochland County Courthouse in VA, in March, 1775, and that he served as a private in Capt. Samuel Woodson's Company of the Ninth Virginia Regiment on the state line commanded by Col. Thomas Fleming, and after Col. Flemings death that he continued to serve in this regiment until Col. George Matthews commanded it and until July, 1777. In 1776 the regiment was taken on Continental pay and establishment, and he served upwards of 18 months in the Continental line. John was in the battles of Brandywine and Germantown, and at Germantown was taken prisoner by the British and detained for 8 months and 12 days. He had a discharge afterwards from the hands of Gen. Muhlenberg at the Valley Forge of Pennsylvania, having served 4 months over the period of his enlistment. His discharge was "burnt up" with his house after he moved to KY.

John was 62 years old at the time his pension application was filed in 1818. His pension papers state that John was a house carpenter by trade, but from old age and a complaint called the gravel or an obstruction in the bladder, he was unable to do "little or no manual work labor". His wife was also 62 years old and incapable of labor from a disease called the leprosy. Clark Burial site unknown, but buried in Garrard County, Kentucky.

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Geography note: Garard County adjoins Madison County in Kentucky. The region is just south  and southeast  (10-40 miles)  of Lexington and is partially "blue grass" country, partially the western fringe of the Appalachians. This makes it easily conceivable that the Farrell and Clark families were friends or acquaintances as far back as the 1790s, well before each migrated to Monroe County, Missouri.

I'm preserving this slightly disorganized post for the sake of the picture and the raw information. For a clearer narrative of these relatives, see the next post up. (jf Aug 4 2019)

Family of Salem Wallace Clark ca. late 1920's in Monroe County, Missouri

Clark is seated. Emma Allie Clark standing, third from left. (more)

Salem 

Wallace Clark is the grandson of on William Clark whose will was recorded as follows from his entry on Find A Grave.Among other things, it suggests that our Clark side people earned a certain amount of prosperity not evident on most of our Farrell side.

William purchased 150 acres of land in Garrard County, KY in 1816. The land was located on the water of the White Lick Fork of Paint Lick Creek. It appears that this land was eventually sold by the heirs of William Clark in 1839. William made a will dated June 2, 1822 in which were mentioned his

Kentucky Secretary of State
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John 1 (repost to restore lost material)

Caution:  With this the TMR becomes quite personal, a series of reports and speculation on ancestry. It's a family thing I wish to do, and for technical reasons this old and dusty blog is the most convenient way.

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John Farrell is our first known ancestor, a Scots-Irish man born in1763 in Kilkinney, Ireland. From there he disappears from written history until midnight of July 15/16, 1779. He appears then at the Battle of Stony Point  on the Hudson River, some 40 miles north of New York City.  We meet him as a 16-year-old soldier of the Virginia Continental Line, serving as a drummer to Captain Robert Gamble's  8th Company of the 7th Regiment of Virginia Volunteers.  As a drummer, essentially a signal man,  he would have ranked as a junior staff non-commissioned officer, perhaps just slightly above a corporal.

How he made his way from his Irish birthplace to the  Battle of Stony Point on the Hudson River  is unclear. Family lore,  plausible but never documented, holds that he arrived in colonial America with seven brothers. All we know firmly, beyond the obvious Atlantic crossing,  is that John landed here after 1763 and before 1779 as part of the very large 18th Century Scots-Irish immigration from Ireland, primarily Ulster.

The most typical of these emigrant families landed at Philadelphia and trekked inland to the east slope of the Appalachians in southern Pennsylvania. Many, perhaps most, sooner or later drifted southward to high lands of Virginia and beyond. Only a relative few settled along the coast,  tidewater country, where the land and culture already belonged to earlier English colonists, an English aristocracy supporting the state-sponsored Anglican church and not welcoming the crude Scots-Irish. 

It is probably safe enough to imagine our John as solid member of these hill people or,  as I once heard it said by a prominent journalist in the region,"...a good old Piedmont boy, not no low-country snob." In any case, he was there somewhere, growing from boy to young warrior to Kentucky land owner and direct progenitor of nine generations (and counting) of American Farrells.

John would have been 12 or 13 when the Revolution broke out, 1775/76.  As said, we don't know exactly where or how he lived  
before he  joined the anti-English Virginia army. One hint, however,  points to the Piedmont country of the northern Shenandoah Valley. His rifle company, the 8th  Co. of the Seventh Continental Regiment, was apparently raised on that Virginia frontier by Captain Gamble.

If we care to reasonably speculate more about John, we need a quick review of general history.

THE SCOTS-IRISH

The Scots-Irish are, loosely, just what the name suggests, a mixture of the two Celtic nationalities.  Importantly, they also include a north-English population, also more or less Celtic, who, over the centuries, refused to kneel before the Crown of England and its feudal-system nobility.

The Scots were generally Celtic lowlanders, clans around  the western reaches the old Hadrian Wall, begun by Roman Legions around 122 A.D to fortify the loose border between themselves and the untamable lowland Celts to the north. Unable to conquer them,  Rome chose a Plan B; wall them out, harassing them occasionally in a way reminescent of rattling the zoo cage of a dangerous carnivore.   

For some 15 centuries more, until the 18th Century, the lowlands were scarred by back-and-forth war. Both shifting alliances and bitter combat flourished among northern English clans and the nearby, often intermixed,  Scottish tribe and clans. They are often known as the "Lowlanders," recognizing they were not quite Scots nationals, beholden to the nobility further north, nor quite English, loyal to royal fops in far-off London.  It was probably this defiance of distant aristocracy that led to them to become a separate and testy  group, a nation without home.

The Scots-Irish also refused organized religion as it existed in feudal times, declining rule by the Popes of Rome or, after Luther and the Reformation,  Rome's Protestant offshoots, primarily the established Church of England  and its counterpart, the Church of Ireland.  As Jim Webb has it, they simply refused to follow secular or religious leaders who were not intimately connected to their local or regional clan groupings. Webb, revealingly, calls his history of the Scots-Irish Born Fighting.

Anyone insisting on an oversimplified explanation of these ancestors of ours can safely use the term "anti-authority."

It is a mistake to understand Irish history as strictly Catholic versus Protestant, but that centuries-long cat fight is useful context. And it gives us a shorthand way to broadly distinguish our Farrell line, Protestant, from the other and much larger group of Catholic Farrells. If you meet a Protestant Farrell the odds suggest a person associated with the Scots-Irish immigration to colonial America in the pre-Revolution1700s. A Catholic Farrell is more likely to be part famine-driven migration of the 19th century.

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Back to our John 1 of Kilkinney.  "Farrell" has been a native Irish Roman Catholic name for some 11 centuries. It often occurs among the war-like revolutionaries opposing English colonization, English theft of Irish property, and anyone's Protestant faith.  But, since our John 1 was almost surely a Protestant (if he was anything at all), and probably a Calvinist of one stripe or a other, how did the conversion happen?  

The simple and, I think, probably correct answer is "lust." We can pretty safely rely on a common folk observation that when two societies collide, "First they fight, then they (fornicate)." 

The Lowlanders crossed the narrow Irish Sea and settled in the Irish north, among the native, Catholic, Irish with whom they often battled.  

But then on one soft spring evening a svelte immigrant lass espies a handsome young Irish stalwart of the Farrell clan. In the immortal womanly way she schemes to win his notice. A  twitch of tidy hips as she passes him on her way to the village well may do it. Her's does. Jaw agape, he will have her and no other. He leaps from his horse, approaches, and whispers in her ear. She smiles.

"Aye Sir, but ye must abandon Rome if ye would hope to enter here."

He asks himself what the Hell the Pope has done for him lately. A  Protestant Farrell line begins.

We don't know when this -- or something with the same result -- happened. It could have been John's father, grandfather, or earlier, likely during the centuries of  heavy Scots-Irish presence in Ireland. My personal guess would be somewhere in the1600s.

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A few years after the Revolution our John 1 married Cristina Pursley and sired several children.  One was William who married Mariah Hayes and fathered my great-great grandfather, Richard, who fought for the Confederacy in the War Between the States. Among Richard's sons were John  Richard Farrell who died young, about 29, never having seen his son, John Ray Farrell, my grandfather. John Ray and his wife, Emma Allie Clark,  were parents of my dad, Ottis Rollin Farrell.

Geography: Our direct-line family lived in Virginia, then near Boonsboro, Kentucky from about 1783 until about 1835. John was awarded land there (Kentucky Land Warrants numbers 885 and 886 totaling 300 acres) for his three years of service in the Virginia Continental Line. Most of his children moved to Monroe County, Missouri in the middle 1830s.  About 1930 our direct line moved to northwest Iowa (Luverne et al. then Fort Dodge)  until the 1960s and 1970s. At present it is scattered around Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota. It might be said we arrived and lived as hardscrabble country people for nearly two centuries in this nation and are only recently emerging as somewhat civilized city people. I would not strongly contest that viewpoint.

John 1 died about 1824. His William, migrated to Monroe County, Missouri in the early 1830s along with most others of that region, fleeing hard economic times.

(This all remains a draft and a work in progress.)