janemason

LAWRENCE COUNTY ARKANSAS GENEALOGY TRAILS

THE FAMILY OF JANE MASON

By
Pat (Milligan) Sproat & Thomas L. Milligan

Introduction:
I have been searching for my (5th) Great Grandmother. Her name was Jane
Mason. She was commonly known as living her outstanding life north of Batesville,
Arkansas in the small settlement of Mt. Olive and although much has been written about
her by the hands of her grandson, J. J. Sams and her great grandson, Ambrose Jeffery
of her early life in the 1816 Missouri Territory, not much at all had been written about her
life prior to her arrival there. There has only been the mention of clues that we were able
to follow to come to our conclusions in this document.
The James Jeffery Family of the Mt. Olive Community located 3 miles or so north
of Batesville, Arkansas has handed down stories of the birth of James and Jane’s first
born son, Jehoiada Jeffery and that he was born in Rutherford County, North Carolina in
1790. There is also a hint that she and James were married in Alexandria, Virginia in
1789, the year prior to the birth of Jehoiada. This is where currently acceptable
information about Jane Mason and James Jeffery seems to stop. The early history of each
of these two people is being lost due to the natural decay of history over time.
One reason for this is because there are many researchers and historians in the
Jeffery family who are still hoping to connect Jane Mason with the American Royalty of
the George Mason Family of Gunston Hall. This man, the neighbor of George and
Martha Washington, in the years of our American Revolution and with the help of a
committee set up by the Virginia House of Burgesses, had drafted the Virginia Colony’s
Bill of Rights Document that our own National Bill of Rights was modeled after to be a
companion Document to our Declaration of Independence that was presented to the
Congress of the United Colonies in America on July 4th, 1776 from Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania.
Then secondly, there was a book written by a man name of Snyder Roberts, “The
Roots of Roane County Tennessee” where, in the first paragraph of his story about a man
name of Daniel Mason, stated that, “George Mason of Gunston Hall was synonymous
with many of the Mason Family lines in Virginia but that “a connection to Daniel
Mason, had “NOT” been proven”(1) to the George Mason of Gunston Hall Family
lines. Well, if everyone continues to keep waiting for some magical document to
suddenly turn up from the 1760’s, proving that Jane Mason or Daniel Mason are
connected to the Gunston Hall Mason Family line, their wait will be an exercise in futile
effort in the genealogical world while Jane’s “Real” history gets lost to time and decay.
This connection to the Gunston Hall Mason line simply does NOT or ever will exist.
These good people are simply looking in the wrong direction for Jane Mason’s real
family and the history of her childhood years.
So with the enormous help of a very fine research partner, she and I have
embarked on a fresh look into this research and rediscovery of the times, the places and
events that shaped the life of this fine Virginia Family born and bred woman.
___________________
(1) The Roots of Roane County Tennessee by Snyder Roberts, p. 1.

___________________

JANE MASON
The discoveries of the early history of Jane Mason has been a challenge. She hails
from a very large, very wealthy and very politically prominent family of the mid -1700’s
Southside Sussex County, Virginia Plantation Society prior to and through our American
Revolutionary War. There have been many people we had talked with that have been
trying to connect Jane Mason with the political magnet of early Revolutionary War
Society, George Mason IV of Gunston Hall. Searching toward Gunston Hall for a family
connection will lend no results. However, this does not mean that Jane Mason’s family
was no less politically important as you will discover from the facts of her family’s lives
that this research has discovered and is presenting to you within the realm of this document.
It seemed to us that whenever anyone did any kind of genealogical research into
their families, the concentration has always been into the life of the male partner. Not this
time. Jane Mason was a very fine, self aware person early on in her life and we are going
to write her story and that of her own birth family. Everyone in the new Missouri /
(Arkansas) Territory of 1816 and later years who knew Jane Mason found her to be “A
breath of fresh air” in the early days of recorded Ozark Mountain History.
Perhaps her greatest attribute is that she was a very driven and gifted mid-wife.
On their Pioneering Trail History to the Missouri Territory and later on in all the years of
her life, many, many women who needed her help with bringing “New Life” into our
world went to seek her out; White, Slave and Indian alike. There are some people that
claim she hung out a shingle as a Medical Doctor and there are even stories of people
bringing men to her who had been gun shot for one reason or another, seeking her help in
pulling out a bullet and dressing their wounds. Jane made herself available to everyone
that needed her help.
According to the Wellness Directory of Minnesota, in their article, "The History
of Medicine in America 1800-1850" much attention is given to mid-wivery. Also in
another of the Wellness Directories articles “The History of Medicine, Revolutionary
War”, mention is made that during the Revolutionary War years, the country was reeling
through a horrible Small Pox epidemic of staggering proportions (when Jane Mason was
a young growing child then living in Williamsburg, Virginia) and mid-wivery was of
extreme benefit to the general public because all of the men doctors (who knew little
about medicine anyway), were drafted into military service not only to deal with a
soldiers wounds from the various battles of course but also to deal with the epidemic and
to deal with local medicines that were found to be tainted with arsenic by the British
physicians hoping to put down a few more of Washington’s injured troops. The first of
Washington’s men that were allowed into Boston after the British left The Siege of
Boston were those who already had the Small Pox.(2)
________________________
(2) The History of Medicine, The Revolutionary War by The Wellness Directory of Minnesota. Copyright
2003. www..mnwelldir.org.
____________________________

To discover this for yourself, I would direct your attention to the George
Washington Revolutionary War Letters(3) he sent to his commanders. These can be
accessed through the Library of Congress or the National Archives web site. Washington
devoted a lot of time to having the men of his Continental Army inoculated against Small
Pox. Whenever the commander of a Military unit went out to recruit soldiers, their first
order of business was to march the men off to an inoculation center, always trying to
avoid the places where the Pox had been on their route. Not only was General
Washington worried about the Small Pox on a very large scale but he had thoughts that
the disease was used against his army, started by the British as a weapon that was
transmitted on letters and their envelopes or by other means of transmission. This was
potentially the first use of Germ Warfare against an American Army.
So, with the kind permission of The Wellness Directory of Minnesota, I have
quoted a few paragraphs from their Article of Medical History in America where they tell
us of mid-wivery and its use in early American history. We want to thank the Wellness
Directory of Minnesota as this story applies directly to those of us readers that want to
know more about what Jane Mason brought to those who knew her personally. Their
Article is as follows:
The History of Medicine in America 1800-1850:
“Despite the push of the regulars to monopolize, you still had options during at the start
of the 19th century. One option, which is egregiously overlooked in most history books,
was to attend a midwife. Midwives of the time did a lot more than just help deliver
babies. They practiced a form of medicine that had been handed down for centuries from
mother to daughter, family to family.
Midwifery thrived during times of war because doctors were conscripted into military
service. In fact, were you to take a course in women’s studies today, you’d learn how
women have always progressed during times of war when the men are off fighting.
World War II brought many women into the workforce; some of them even became pilots
who ferried planes about the country. It was during the Vietnam War that women moved
into management positions for the first time. It was during the Civil War that women
were first allowed to nurse the sick and wounded. It was after the Civil War that one
female physician was decorated with the Medal of Honor.
Nursing during this period, for the most part, was a male vocation. An interesting
historical side note is that during the Yellow Fever epidemic in the late 1700s, black
slaves were hired out as nurses, because those who had lived in Africa were immune to
the disease. [http://www.geocities.com/bobarnebeck/children.html ]
One learned midwifery either from her mother or as an apprentice to a midwife. During
the Revolutionary War, midwives performed every service any physician of the period
could offer, and though the end of the war reined in many midwifery practices, it

(3) George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress 1741 – 1799. The American Memory Collection,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gwhtml/gwhome.html. You can
search or browse from here to: George Washington to Col. David Mason, Sept. 21, 1777.

wouldn’t be long before England attacked the US in the War of 1812 and again their
services would be required throughout the cities and countryside. However, Gail Collins,
in her book America's Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and
Heroines, points out that with the end of conflict, the influx of doctors back into society
left midwives with little to do beyond delivering babies. Doctors set out to build up their
practices, and offered new life saving techniques, such as delivering babies with the help
of forceps that had been popularized in England. As the population of doctors grew, so
did their desire to put midwives out of business and take over their practices. Collins tells
us that in, “Philadelphia, twenty-one women listed their professions as midwife in the
1815 city directory; by 1824 there were only six.” [In our References and Further
Reading section at the end of this article is a link to a superb paper on women in
medicine.]
Ironically, if you read up on midwifery, you’ll hear that doctors and modern hospitals
could guarantee a sterile environment where babies could be successfully delivered with
little chance of infection to the mother. However, it was midwives of this period whose
personal hygiene and habits of washing before a delivery that separated their practices
from those of the physicians.
Anytime a hand or instrument was inserted into a woman’s body, she was in danger of becoming
infected, with fatal results. Childbed, or puerperal fever became epidemic at times in the
nineteenth century, particularly in hospitals, where a single doctor could carry infection from one
patient to the next. Hospitals were the delivery rooms of the urban poor, and in 1840 at Bellevue
in New York, almost half the women giving birth during the first six months of the year contracted
the fever. Eighty percent of them died. [Collins]
Another option of the period were the Indian Doctors, or as they were also known,
botanical practitioners; herbalists, to be exact. Regular physicians referred to them as
“irregulars." Though the name, Indian Doctor would imply that they picked up their
knowledge from the natives, much of what they knew had been brought with them from
the Old World. It is an interesting historical fact that herbalism in the old world and in the
new world among our natives grew and flourished at approximately the same time.
Two other options of this period were hydropathy and the Thomsonians. Hydropaths
believed in the curative powers of water, which, in retrospect, we realize brought a
needed bit of personal hygiene into the picture, while the Thomsonian movement put
medicine into the hands of the common man. The movement founded by Samuel
Thomson “after six doctors called in to help his seriously ill wife prescribed six different
treatments.” [Collins] Thomsonians believed that laypeople could treat themselves better
than any physician with a little help from nature’s botanicals. (4)
To read about the State of the Art of medicine in 1800, you might want to review our
final summary of medicine during the Revolutionary War.”

(4) The History of Medicine 1800 – 1850 by The Wellness Directory of Minnesota. Copyright 2003,
www.mnwelldir.org.

With the burning and destruction of many of the older courthouses during the
Civil War, a lot of the older records of Jane (Mason) and James Jeffery from southern
Virginia and North Carolina were probably destroyed. So we have had to relay heavily on
documents that have been handed down with their family to determine exactly which
Family Jane Mason descended from and where they lived.
Jane Mason descends from a very large, very wealthy and very politically
prominent family of the late 1600’s and through the 1700’s. She was born close to
Kingston, Virginia, Charlotte County in 1769 (as J. J. Sams informs us in his
writings about his Grandmother) and into the Southside Virginia Plantation Society prior
to and through our American Revolutionary War. Today Kingston (Alberta), Virginia is
in Campbell County very close to Mason Mills.
Jane’s actual father; both in his political or Civil contributions to our new nation
was quite a complex fellow. Jane’s Family was no less politically important to the birth
of our new nation than George Mason of Gunston Hall as you will discover from the facts
of her real father’s life. He enjoyed horse racing in whatever spare time he could afford.
He stabled the horse, “Sterling” which ran for his race entries. Sterling was quite a horse
at 15 1/2 hands tall and broad at the hip. He also liked to watch cock fights which were
contests of roosters of one County Courthouse Vestry pitted against the roosters of
another from around Sussex County, Petersburg and Richmond. So he was a bit of a
gambler I guess one could say.
This history of Jane Mason and her family is based basically in the documents
that have been handed down within the Jeffery Family; the single most important of
which is in the form of a letter. This Civil War era letter was written by Ambrose Jeffery
b. 1834, the Great Grandson of Jane Mason, to his parents Miles and Sarah Jeffery, in
1862. At the time he wrote it he was at the Cumberland Gap in Tennessee. In the very
body of this text he specifically states that his company had heard rumors that they were
getting ready to go to Louden, Tennessee into “Winter Quarters.” He said that he was
glad because they had “Kinfolk” in Louden and that the man he was referring to was a
“Nephew to Old Grandmother Jeffery.” Well, Old grandmother Jeffery to her Great-
Grandson, Ambrose, was Jane Mason. This is basically common knowledge within our
family and has been since she and James started creating descendants in 1790. Presented
below is a transcript of Ambrose’s letter. Many family members and descendants today
and in years past are familiar with this document.
Cumberland Gap, Tennessee
October 28, 1862
My dear Parents,
I have concluded to write you a line this morning, although I have very little hopes of it
reaching you; I have written so many and have heard of their destruction before they
reached you. I send this by Mr. Tucker, and hope you will get it.
We have seen a considerable portion of the Southern Confederacy since we left home,
and have endured a great amount of hardship and suffering. I can’t do more than mark
out the route (or a portion of it) that we have traveled since we left Tupelo, Miss.
We went from there by railway to Mobile, thence to Montgomery, thence to West Point,
Atlanta and Dalton, Ga., to Chattanooga, Tennessee, from there we went to Lowden,
within 30 miles of Knoxville. From Lowden we have taken it a foot all the time.
We shipped into the rear of the Gap, and captured Gen. Morgan’s supply trains, and
hemmed him up in the Gap. We then marched north to Richmond. There we caught the
Yankees with a larger force than ours, fought them all day, and killed and wounded and
captured all but a few. From there we went to Lexington, Georgetown, Cynthianna, and
Williamstown, and to within three miles of Covington, opposite Cincinatti. The Yankees
had about four or five times our force, and were well fortified, yet we had them scared so
badly that they were afraid to come out and fight us on fair ground. We stayed there two
or three days, when we fell back slowly to Georgetown. From that time on we were kept
on forced marches from one place to another, expecting a fight nearly every day, until
finally, the boasting Bragg ordered a general skedaddle back to Tennessee. This raid into
Kentucky has been a great benefit to us, although we had to retreat. We captured and
destroyed a great amount of Federal provisions. We supplied ourselves with Federal
wagons and mules, and we captured large amount of clothing and shoes and brought
away with us a large quantity of Ky. Jeans and linsey. We completely destroyed one
army, captured a surplus of arms and ammunition, and added thousands of Ky recruits to
our army. We are now at the celebrated Cumberland Gap, one of the strongest places in
the world. There never will be a battle fought here, for no General would be fool enough
to attack it. Gen. Morgan slipped out of here and reached the Ohio in spite of all our
Generals could do. The fact is, we had too many Yankee troops to contend with, or he
would have gone up sure.
A snow fell here yesterday 8 inches deep, yet the timber is nearly as green as ever. That
is a sight I never saw before.
There is a rumor in camp that we are going down to Lowden, on the Holston River to go
into winter quarter. I hope we will for I don’t want to stay here. Lowden is 30 miles
below Knoxville and on the railroad, and is located in a pretty country. And another
good thing, we have some kinfolks there, whom we found out while we were there last
August. The old man’s name is Mason. He is nephew to our old Grandmother Jeffery.
They treated us very kindly while we were there. There is one sad drawback to him
though. He is a Union man. He’s taken no part though and says very little. He had some
of our sick soldiers at his house while we were there, taking care of them. I inquired of
some of his neighbors about him, and they said he had always been a kind, clever man,
but went off in the Union thing.
We had never heard anything from you since we left home, until Asa saw Henry Harris
over in Bragg’s Army while we were up in Kentucky. I was overjoyed to hear that the
Federals had not interrupted you that you were all alive and well, and had a fine crop.
We learned by him that Jehoida and Robert were both in McBride’s Army but that Robert
had been discharged on account of sickness. He said also that McBride camped there by
our house on Livingston (creek). I am afraid they didn’t do your orchard and garden and
young shotes much good. I know what an army is, unless strict discipline is enforced.
I intend this winter, if they will give any furloughs at all, to get one and go to see you all.
If they give anybody a furlough, they will have to give me one, if they do justice, for
mine has been due me since last winter, together with the bounty and transportation. We
have never been paid off since we crossed the river, except $48.00 at Memphis, which
was soon spent for something to eat and wear. I am satisfied that it is the fault of our
Division Quartermaster, and I hate him bad enough to wish a hundred times that the
Yankees would get him and hang him. I have been homesick very often when I would
think of you all, but try to overcome it. I think I am resigned to the will of God, and if it
is His will that I never shall see your faces again, I can endure it like a man. Still, it
would be a matter of great joy to me to get back home in peace once more. You must
write to us if you ever have the least chance. I have written to you often, and so has Asa,
but we have never got a word from you, and none of our letters may have reached you. I
hope we will have peace next year. We hear good news from the northwest already.
Ohio and Indiana have elected a majority of democratic members to Congress so had
Pennsylvania. I had rather hear this than to hear of a great battle gained by us. I must
close. My love I send to all of you, one by one.
Your affectionate son,
Ambrose Jeffery

After completing a census search of Louden, Tennessee in the 1860 census, we
discovered that the “ONLY” Mason Family living in Loudon was that of Thomas
Jefferson Mason. Ambrose Jeffery knew this man as the “Nephew of old Grandmother
Jeffery.” So we researched to discover that Thomas Jefferson Mason was a son of Daniel
Mason and his French Hugonaut wife, Mary Brashear.

Thomas Jefferson Mason (5)

(5) This photograph (and their permission to post it here) is submitted to us by Bertie Dipietro and Helen
Luke of Richland, Washington. The original of this portrait as claimed by Bertie and Helen, is in the
possession of the T. J. Mason McQueen III Family of Louden, Tennessee whose ancestors owned and lived
at Mason Place (a bed and breakfast today) in Louden.
It has also said that one of the Ambrose Jeffery letters is also in Mr. McQueen’s possession. Here is the
transcript of a conversation I recently had with Bertie Dipietro, “This information from Lucille McQueen
which we have on tape, that Ambrose's daughter, Attie visited the McQueen’s and that she was definitely a
relative. I realize the value of the original handwritten letters of Ambrose, but I think if someone
somewhere is in possession of them, they would not give them up because of the monetary value of those
civil war kinds of documents. If you have a copy of the "love letter" from Ambrose to Mary, it has a very
interesting postscript which I just now pulled out and reread, saying that Attie's visit to Mason Place was in
l954. Then a foot note - this told us by Lucille McQueen- written by Ed McQueen, Lucille's son, saying "I
have the original letter, but not her answer” (Lucille McQueen passed away the following year after Bertie
and Helen’s visit to Louden.).
In the late 1980’s Mr. and Mrs. Dipietro, along with Helen Luke, made a trip to Louden and was invited
into the Lucille McQueen home and tape recorded their conversation with Lucille. Also as mentioned
above, Lucille mentioned Attie’s visit and remarks that she was definitely related to them. The Ambrose
Jeffery letters, as priceless as they are for their being written during the Civil War Era alone, are also
priceless in the fact that they are the “ONLY” documents left in existence of Jane Mason’s connection to
her birth family and for THIS reason alone they need to be housed in a library so they won’t be subject to
the natural decay process caused by our normal air which in time, creates a process of decay of old paper.
At least in a library they will be house in an environmentally controlled space so the natural process of
decay doesn’t have any more adverse effect on the paper Ambrose Jeffery’s words were written on. To
house these letters in a Library would be saving one of the only links that we family descendants have
today of the early history of Old Grandmother Jeffery; Jane Mason. It is our hope that Mr. McQueen finds
it in his heart to help us all save this crucial connection to the early history of Jane Mason for as long as it
can be saved. With this evidence we may be able to have a real Birth Certificate made for Jane Mason of
Sussex County, Virginia of 1769. This is Important and we just do not wish to loose Grandmother Jane any
more than we already have. If there is anyone who has the originals of these letters, PLEASE, take them
and house them in a Library where they will be protected against the Natural forces of age and decay and
let the family know where the are so we can have a birth certificate made for Jane.

Daniel Mason was in fact the brother of Jane Mason. Jane had been born to a very
large family of 13 brothers and sisters. Her Father was Colonel David Mason of Sussex
County, Virginia and her mother was Mary (Epps) Mason who we believe is descended
from Thomas Epps and his wife Elizabeth Poythress who descends from Pocahontas and
Capt. John Smith of the very early history of Jamestown and England’s new Virginia
Colony.
There are 3 Epps Family plantations south of Richmond, Virginia all of which
still exist today. The original Epps family dwelling was Appomattox Manor (used by
Gen. Grant during the Civil War) and is surrounded on 3 sides by the Appomattox River.
Then there is Weston Manor that is a few miles further to the southeast and also
along the Appomattox River.
The third Epps Family Plantation Estate built and completed in 1770 was
Eppington. Eppington was a favorite plantation haunt, because of its lush gardens and
close locale to Richmond, of President Thomas Jefferson. Mr. Jefferson had spent many a
day here during and after his term as president to our new nation. I would imagine that
his hands also got “into the soil” of the many flower gardens planted here.
An interesting side note to the Ambrose Jeffery letter is that also living in the
Cumberland Gap in 1862 was the daughter of Mary (Mason) Williamson (b.1764) and
her husband, Person Williamson, Mary Williamson. Mary (Mason) Williamson was the
daughter of Col. David Mason and Mary Epps and would have been Old Grandmother
Jeffery’s sister. In 1862, Mary Mason, if she were alive during the Civil War, would have
been a very old woman being born in 1764 but we are sure Mary Williamson was Mary’s
and Person Williamson’s daughter making her Jane Jeffery’s Niece just like Thomas
Jefferson Mason of Louden, Tennessee was her Nephew.

To continue this history, follow this link

COLONEL DAVID MASON