Almost Heaven

The Cheat River in Preston County in the Allegheny Highlands.

I got an invitation to join a gathering of descendants of William Hebb.  I'll quote here from an earlier blog post I made about him:

 Among my ancestors was one William Hebb.  Born in England in 1755, he came to America in 1776 as a soldier in the British Army to fight the revolutionary colonists.  But he had no love for the King and felt sympathy for the Americans' cause and deserted.  He then joined  the Third Continental Light Dragoons, aka Lady Washington's Dragoons, which formed the life guard of George Washington, serving under Lt. Col. George Baylor.  

He fought at Germantown,  Brandywine, and survived the so-called Baylor Massacre at Tappan, New Jersey, in 1778.  This latter was a night ambush in which 67 of the regiment's 116 men were killed or wounded and Baylor was captured. Hebb was seriously wounded in this action and he was discharged and returned to Virginia to recuperate.  While there, he married a cousin of George Washington, the widow Jemima Washington Jenkins.    

The regiment was reformed under Lt. Col. William Washington and sent to the Carolinas where, after recovering from his wounds, Hebb rejoined his regiment, which had amalgamated with the First Continental Light Dragoons due to the heavy casualties it had sustained, and fought at Cowpens, Santee River and Eutaw Springs. Hebb was wounded at Gilford Court House and returned to Virginia, but recovered in time to participate in the siege of Yorktown.   

After the Revolutionary War, he became an active abolitionist and was forced to leave Virginia and settle along a tributary of the  Ohio River.  For his service during the war, he received a pension of $8 a month.  He died in 1833 at the age of 78.  His son, Thomas Hebb, fought in the war of 1812, serving in the Virginia militia. Five of William's grandsons fought for the Union in the Civil War.  

Dunkard's Bottom is in the center of the map.

The tributary of the Ohio River he settled on was the Cheat River in what is now West Virginia, so the meeting will be held in that area, Monongahela County or thereabouts. While I'm in the area, I want to visit Dunkard's Bottom along the Cheat in Preston County.  The Germanic Dunkards were the first whites to settle west of the Allegheny Mountains. I have a lot of Dunkards in my ancestry and I've been engrossed in learning about them lately.  Among the things I've learned is that there was a settlement of about three dozen Dunkards, men, women and children, established in 1756 at this spot -- it's where Camp Dawson is today.  They bought their land from the local Lenni Lenape Indians, who were mostly farmers working the river bottom lands, with whom they traded horses, and converted to Christianity. 

One day, two of the men traveled to For Pleasant for supplies.  They were arrested there by the British, who thought the Dunkards were spies for and in the pay of the French.  They were forced to lead a force of British soldiers back to their settlement, where the Brits planned to hang the leaders and arrest the rest.  

Dunkards were Schwarzenau  Brethren.

But when they arrived at the settlement they found it burned to the ground and no soul alive. What had happened was that the French thought the Dunkards were spies and in the pay of the British and had sent a force of Ottawa Indians to seize the leaders and bring them back to Montreal.  What the French intended the Indians to do with the rest of the Dunkards is not clear, but what the Indians did was kill them all, men, women and children, steal all their horses, then burn the settlement to the ground.  

While I'm in the area, I'd also like to visit the site of the Battle of Rowleburg. That was what has been described as a "pivotal engagement" in April, 1863, in which a small force of Union troops defended the strategic B&O Railroad bridges crossing the Cheat River, called Lincoln's lifeline, from a larger Confederate force. After fierce fighting, the Confederates, led by General W.E. Jones, were repelled. General Robert E. Lee, in sending General Jones to destroy the bridges, told him their destruction would be worth an army to him.

I would like to walk the ground, see what the land looks like, think about all the history, much of it quite terrible, that our people went through to create this country.  That these United States would come to exist was never a sure thing, never guaranteed.  

Plus I'd like to eat some buckwheat cakes and country sausage for breakfast.  Wouldn't you?