ON THE BACKS OF HORSES, leading other horses on whose backs were packed all their worldly possessions, came the
pioneer Boones to Pike county in 1822. Thus had the Boone family, for three-quarters of a century in America, traveled
from place to place, pursuing the receding frontier. Thus had Squire Boone and his family moved from Pennsylvania
to the banks of the Yadkin in North Carolina in 1750. Thus had Dinah Boone, first Boone ancestor in Pike county,
moved from Virginia to Kentucky in 1775; thus, doubtless, had she moved with some older married brother or sister
from the banks of the Kentucky to the banks of the Green in the latters 1770s (her father, Jonathan Boone, appears
not to have moved to the Green river until some time subsequent to 1783); thus, perhaps, had she traveled, following
her marriage, to Boone county, Kentucky, on the banks of the Ohio, thence back to Warren county on the Green, then
to the banks of the Wabash, and, last of her wilderness journeyings, from the Wabash to the settlement here between
the Mississippi and Illinois rivers, site of the traditional camp of her uncle, Daniel Boone.
When a Boone married, it was customary for him and his young wife to set out on horseback, leading a pack animal
carrying their belongings, to found their new home on some remote frontier. Typical of these Boone honeymoons is
that of Nathan, youngest son of Daniel, bringing his young wife, Olive Van Bibber, into these western wilds in
1799.
Nathan Boone and his older brother, Daniel Morgan Boone (comrades in arms with the great Pike county pioneer, John
Shaw, in the Indian troubles on the Pike county border in 1812-15), started with their mother, Rebecca Bryan Boone,
from the mouth of the Great Kanawha (in what is now Mason county, West Virginia) in a boat called a pirogue, while
Colonel Daniel Boone started with the stock by land, assisted by a young man named George Buchanan and D. M. Boone's
negro, Sam. This was when the Daniel Boone family was moving to Upper Louisiana or Missouri Territory in 1799.
At Limestone (now Maysville, Kentucky), Nathan Boone got his marriage license and returned (75 miles) to Little
Sandy, where Mr. Peter Van Bibber then lived, and September 26th was married to Miss Olive Van Bibber. (Could this
have been the same Peter Van Bibber who was living with the Lewis Allens in Pike county in the early 1820s, and
was Lewis Allen's wife chloe a sister of Olive Van Bibber Boone?) Nathan Boone and his bride, following their marriage
at the mouth of the Little Sandy, started out and went all the way by land via Lexington, Louisville, Vincennes
and St. Louis.
The above data is from Mrs. Hazel Atterbury Spraker's book, "The Boone Family," as is the following statement
of Mrs. Nathan Boone regarding her honeymoon, which is recorded in the handwriting of her daughter-in-law, Mrs.
John C. Boone:
"On the 1st of October, without any company but my husband, I started to Missouri or Upper Louisiana. We had
two ponies and our packhorse. After being on our journey for some time were overtaken by a man and woman who traveled
with us to Vincennes. Remained there nearly three weeks, in consequence of getting one of our ponies crippled.
Traveled alone the rest of the way, arriving in St. Louis last of October. My husband was offered 80 acres of land
(in center of what afterwards was the city) for one of our ponies. He laughed and said he would not give one of
the ponies for the whole town. He went to St. Charles county and located about 20 miles above St. Charles. We crossed
the Missouri river at St. Charles by placing our goods in a skiff. My husband rowed and I steered and held the
horse by the bridle. It was rather a perilous trip for so young a couple. I was just 16, my husband 18."
These two youthful adventurers into the wilderness are buried in the farm graveyard of the old farm two miles north
of Ash Grove, in Greene county, Missouri. As they came to the St. Charles county (Mo.) frontier in 1799, so came
Dinah Boone and her family, and Jonathan Boone Allen, Lewis Allen and Joseph Jackson and their families to Pike
county, Illinois, in 1822.
The Pike county Boones were partisans of John Shaw and intensely anti-Ross. Shaw received valiant aid from the
Boones in his attempts to wrest the seat of government from Atlas and establish the justice seat for the then vast
county in the town of Coles' Grove, the home of Shaw.
Early historians of the county derived most of their material from sources friendly to the Ross family and it is
possibly because of this fact that the earlier histories have contained but the briefest mention of the Boones
and Shaws.
John Shaw, as we have seen, was intimately associated with the family of Daniel Boone, whom he first contacted
on the St. Charles county border in 1808. With Daniel's sons, Daniel Morgan and Nathan, he campaigned on these
frontiers in the war of 1812-14. Shaw was knit to the Boone family and they to him by bonds forged in the heat
of border war. So it was that in the great county seat wars of 1822-24 in Pike county, John Shaw found ready and
vigorous adherents among the Boones who had made settlement here.
Foremost among the Shaw partisans in what is now Pike county was Lewis (Boone) Allen, early Baptist minister of
the gospel. In the fiercely contested slavery and county seat election of 1824, Lewis Allen was named by the Shaw
commissioners as a judge of election in Franklin election precinct, which coincided with Franklin township, one
of the first three far-flung townships erected in January, 1824. This vast voting precinct in which Lewis Allen
was elected judge included the present sites of Pittsfield, Martinsburg, Pleasant Hill, Nebo, Time, Pearl, Milton,
Detroit, Newburg, Valley City, Chambersburg, Griggsville, New Salem, Baylis, Perry, Fish Hook, Mt. Sterling, Rushville,
Carthage, Macomb, Monmouth, Rock Island and Galena, embracing territory from which 11 Illinois counties and portions
of counties have since been erected.
The polling place for this vast election precinct was one and one-half miles southeast of present Milton, where
Charley Batley's house now stands. Here, a century ago the long-vanished town of Franklin, named for Ebenezer Franklin,
first comer to that region.
My Lord Coke Whitney's records of the proceedings of the early commissioners' court at Atlas show that the Shaw
commissioners, Ebenezer Smith, James Nixon and William Mettz, sitting in the log courthouse at Atlas, June 8, 1824,
ordered that "Lewis Allen be and he is hereby recommended to the Governor of this State as a fit and proper
person to be appointed and commissioned a Justice of the Peace of this county." This was at a time when Pike
county included all that part of Illinois north of the junction of the Illinois and Mississippi rivers and west
of the Fourth Principal Meridian.
At this same session the Shaw commissioners appointed Joseph Jackson as a constable for this vast region for the
ensuing year. Joseph Jackson was the husband of Malinda, daughter of Peter and Mary (Boone) Scholl, the latter
a daughter of Edward (Neddie) Boone, a younger brother of Daniel. The Jacksons had come to Pike county in the same
pack train with the Boone Allens.
The statement of Dinah Boone's grandson, Nathan Allen Thornton, from which flows so much that is new to Boone genealogy
in America, was made in 1906, being an elaboration and correction of a biographical sketch of N. A. Thornton that
had appeared in Captain M. D. Massie's "History of Pike County" shortly before. Mr. Thornton had at the
time considerable data bearing upon his ancestry, both on his mother's or the Boone side and on the Thornton side,
including a rudely sketched family tree or chart. What became of these records following Mr. Thornton's removal
to the Pike County Home in 1912 is unknown to relatives. Mr. Thornton's statement based upon these records is as
follows:
"I was born in Detroit township, Pike county, Illinois, Christmas day, 1839. My parents were Larkin and Polly
(Allen) Thornton, who were among the early settlers of Warren county, Kentucky. My mother was named after grandmother
Boone, wife of Jonathan Boone.
"My paternal grandparents were Aaron and Sarah (Evans) Thornton, who settled in Warren county, Kentucky, about
1800, and afterward removed to Pike county, Illinois, becoming pioneer residents of this locality. They contributed
to the early development and progress of the community, and continued residents of Pike county up to the time of
their death. My paternal great grandparents, John Thornton and his wife, became pioneer settlers in Texas, removing
from North Carolina and Virginia to the Lone Star State, living there under the rule of Governor Sam Houston when
Texas was a separate republic under its own flag, and became known by the name of the Lone Star State, which has
since clung to it.
"My maternal grandparents were Zachariah and Dinah (Boone) Allen, who came to Pike county, Illinois, in 1822,
when Pike county was all that vast region from the junction of the Illinois and Mississippi north to the Wisconsin
line and including the present site of Chicago. They came in the mode of the day, riding horseback and leading
pack animals that carried all their worldly goods. With then came a Mr. Jackson, who had married my grandmother's
cousin, a daughter of Daniel Boone. (Note: Mr. Thornton was mistaken as to this relationship, Joseph Jackson, here
referred to, having married Malinda Scholl, a daughter of Dinah Boone's cousin, Mary Boone Scholl, who was a daughter
of Edward, brother of Daniel. It was Joseph Scholl, Malinda's father's brother, who married Daniel Boone's daughter,
Levina.)
"My grandparents on my mother's side had become residents of Boone county, Kentucky, when that state was a
vast wilderness inhabited mostly by Indians, who were so hostile that the white settlers were obliged to live in
block houses and to be constantly alert in order to protect themselves from the invasions of the red men. My grandmother,
Dinah Boone Allen, was a niece of the noted hunter and explorer, Daniel Boone, who was the first to visit Kentucky
and make extensive explorations there. (Note: John Finley visited Kentucky before Boone and it was his stories
of the land beyond the Cumberlands that kindled the zeal of Boone for western adventure.) With her father, Jonathan
Boone, and his brother-in-law and her uncle, Mr. Callaway, she left Virginia at the age of 17 years, the family
home being established in the neighborhood wherein Daniel Boone achieved world-wide fame, contributing so greatly
to the world's history by his explorations in the Blue Grass State. It was Jonathan Boone and his wife who were
the parents of Dinah Boone. In Kentucky she became the wife of Zachariah Allen, in the early spring of her fourth
year in that wild land. She was born about the turn of the year 1758 or first of 1759.
"Zachariah Allen, my maternal grandfather, was a Revolutionary soldier, who served for seven years in the
War of Independence, and was one of Marion's men. He fought also in the Indian wars when Washington was President
and was with Daniel Boone in his great adventures in Kentucky. He was a native of the Carolinas and was growing
old when he came to this county after breaking up housekeeping on the Wabash river. He died in Pike county, near
Milton, at the age of 71 and was buried in what is now known as the French cemetery near the town, two years after
his wife, who died at 64 in the next year after she came to the county."
Mr. Thornton had no record, apparently, of the name of the Callaway mentioned as the brother-in-law of Jonathan
Boone. This kinsman, in the light of known circumstances, must have been Colonel Richard Callaway, who in late
1775 led out a party from Virginia to Daniel Boone's fort on the Kentucky.
Squire Thornton was a justice of the peace in Detroit, his native township, and was later police magistrate in
Milton village. He died in 1912 and is buried among his ancestors in French cemetery.
Dinah, the given name of his grandmother, Dinah (Boone) Allen, was a favored name in the Boone family. We find
a daughter of the fourth George Boone, son of the third George, brother of Squire and uncle of Daniel and Jonathan,
named Dinah; also a daughter Dinah in the family of Benjamin Boone (son of the third George), who married a Benjamin
Tallman and became the mother of 14 children. Her grandchildren, according to Mrs. Spraker's book, remembered this
Dinah Boone as always clad in the gray garb of the Friends, with a small shoulder cape of the same. She and her
husband are buried in Pickaway county, Ohio, having moved there from Pennsylvania about 1810.
In October, 1826, there came to Boone Settlement in what is now Montezuma township another daughter of Dinah Boone,
through whom the widely disseminated Garrison family traces its Boone lineage. She was Sarah (Sally) Boone Allen,
eldest daughter of the Zachariah (Boone) Allens, granddaughter of the Jonathan Boones, and wife of Elijah Garrison,
flaming Christian exhorter of the early days, dead now for near a century.
Sally Boone Garrison, wife of Elijah, was one of the outstanding characters of the early Montezuma settlement.
She has been dead for 90 years but her name still lingers in the memories of early settlers in that region, who
often heard it from their forebears.
With the Elijah Garrisons came their children, Elizabeth, Zachariah A. and Enoch W., all born in Posey county,
Indiana, from which place the family came to Pike county, Illinois. In a wagon, drawn by a yoke of oxen, came these
early Garrisons, following John Garrison, who had come the year before. At Joel Meacham's ferry, where now is the
town of Montezuma, they paid fifty cents to have their wagon and ox team ferried from the Scott to the Pike county
side of the river. Then they drove four miles inland and settled in the then deep timberlands near the site of
present Cross Roads school house, south of modern Milton. Indians roamed the region in large numbers; wild game
was abundant on every hand. In the forests sang birds that are no longer known and at times the skies were darkened
by wild pigeons. The son Enoch, then eight years old, becoming a great Pike county hunter, told in his latter years
of the deer and wild turkeys and other wild life that abounded about their early settlement.
Elijah and Sally Garrison were both natives of Kentucky. Following their marriage they had settled in Posey county,
Indiana, whence they came to Illinois, following her parents and brothers and sister Polly, and his brother, John
Garrison, another Christian minister, who was in the Montezuma neighborhood as early as 1825.
Settling near the present Cross Roads school house, one mile south of Milton, the Garrisons there built a rude
log house; Milton was yet unborn. Here Elijah Garrison acquired directly from the United States the SW quarter
and the west half of the SE quarter, and from James Mason the east half of the SE quarter of Section 9 in Montezuma
township, a total of 320 acres embracing the entire south half of the section, at the southwest corner of which
is now Cross Roads school.
In acquiring this property Elijah Garrison entered into a mortgage contract with James M. Seeley, early Pike county
sheriff, and in the end, having obligated himself too deeply and having lost heavily in various speculations, he
was reft of all his land. He then moved into the Illinois river bottoms, where he died January 30, 1840. His wife
Sally, elder sister of Polly Boone Thornton and Jonathan and Lewis Allen, died in 1846. She had administered her
husband's estate, the records of her administration being on file in the office of the Pike county clerk.
From these records it appears that this widowed daughter of Dinah Boone had a bitter struggle meeting the demands
of creditors of her husband's estate. Her son, Zachariah A. Garrison, was her surety as administratrix. In September,
1840, before Probate Judge Parvin Paullin, one of the creditors, Richard C. Robertson, from whom Elijah Garrison
had borrowed money at 12 per cent interest, in a petition to the court, represented that Sally Garrison's security
was insufficient and that there was danger of the estate being squandered to the prejudice of the creditors unless
the administratrix be required to give additional and sufficient security. Whereupon a citation was issued and
she was haled into court to furnish additional security or show cause why letters of administration issued to her
should not be annulled. She thereupon furnished as additional security her kinsmen by marriage, William and Joseph
Gale and Thomas Davis.
Elijah Garrison had left real estate consisting of one lot in the town of Williamsport, Scott county, three lots
in the town of Glasgow in Scott county, and one lot (lot No. 5 in block 2) in the town of Middleton, a long-vanished
Pike county river town that stood on the bank of the Illinois about half way between present Montezuma and Bedford.
Elijah Garrison acquired this lot from James and Olive Daniels for $30, August 12, 1837. The estate also included
an equal undivided one-sixth part of the east half of the SW quarter and the SE quarter of Section 23 in Montezuma
township.
Like her illustrious kinsman, Daniel Boone, who, outlawed of his estates in Kentucky, hunted and trapped in his
old age throughout this region until from the sale of his pelts in St. Louis he was able to go back to Kentucky
and pay off the last farthing of his indebtedness, Sally Garrison appears to have struggled until her death to
satisfy the creditors of her husband's estate. Times were bitterly hard. There was little money. The sound of the
auctioneer's hammer, knocking off unredeemed property, was heard in the land. The period was the darkest in the
history of the early settlement.
