northernfamiliesI

Lawrence County Arkansas Genealogy Trails

Pioneers
To
Ol’ Lawrence County

Volume I:
The Northern Families

A Collaboration
By
Patricia (Milligan) Sproat
and
Tom Milligan

Introduction:

We have found it wonderfully amazing how the lives of Individuals find their way
in life. No matter when or where a person comes from, at some point in their lives they
become fixed in history with another individual or group of people or both, with similar
goals. Such is the case with the people we are going to research in this document. There
are 9 different families of individuals we are going to list and tell the story of their
Pioneering travel history from their individual origins through the end and after the
Revolutionary War in Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina all the way to Reeds Creek,
Missouri Territory of 1816. This is the Pioneering history of the following families:

Volume I: The Northern Families
The Daniel Culp Family of Annapolis, Maryland
The Ruddell Family of Frederick County, Virginia
The John Milligan Family of Berkeley County, Virginia and son, John Milligan II

Volume II: The Southern Families
The James Jeffrey and Jane Mason Family of Old Dominion Virginia
The Jehoiada Jeffrey Family (Son of Ol’ Jim and Jane Mason)
The Ware (Weir) Family of North Carolina
The Ragsdale Family
The Nathan Langston Family of North Carolina
The Sams Family of Illinois

All of these families represent two groups. Those who migrated west from the
Northern Shenandoah Valley over the Blue Ridge and those that also originally came
from the Western Shores of the Chesapeake Bay around Alexandria, Virginia but traveled
the entire length of the Shenandoah Valley to North Carolina and crossed Southern
Appalachia from there. Back then, in those “Old” years, before, during and after the
Revolutionary War, when they were all poised for their parts in America’s Expansionism,
did any of these families realize that by 1818 they would all be related to each other
through their marriages. Their individual stories are sometimes harrowing; sometimes
amazing but they would all make it across the Great Mississippi to the Missouri Territory
of 1816 and the new American Western Frontier.

As time goes on, there will be other families that became inter-related after these
easterners settled into Northeast Arkansas. Over the previously mentioned period of time
in our national history, all of the people mentioned above will come together as a group
in a single place. In the process, they give us their entire “Pioneering” story and their
places in Northeast Arkansas history will begin.

As you look at the list of families mentioned above, you may recognize that some
of the individuals we will be talking about were quite famous and well known before they
even came to the Missouri Territory. Some of these people made their names “On the
Way” to Northeast Arkansas and then some didn’t get to be well known until after they
arrived in Arkansas and lived what they considered to be “Normal” every day lives.

Living on the American Frontier was what it was all about and these people who
were tempered by War, made their names and reputations by challenging the Frontier to
carve their own existences from. That’s all “Western” America was during those early
days of our nation’s newly won freedom from the British; All Frontier. New immigrants
from England, Ireland and Europe to the Susquehanna Valley and Chesapeake Bay and
along the Potomac River as well as other points on the American Atlantic Seacoast, were
chomping at the bit to expand westward into The Great Shenandoah Valley of Virginia
and over the Blue Ridge and Allegany Mountains. These Appalachian Mountains were a
formidable barrier to Westward Expansion and to the Cumberland Plateau that awaited
these settlers on the other side. To some of these “Easterners”, west was just the other
side of the Allegany Mountains. To those that flatboated the Ohio River in those early
years of 1770’s, west was in the Spanish Territory that would soon be known as Missouri
and Arkansas. We did find a story of Spaniards as far north as early Wheeling, W.
Virginia that flatboated their way up the Ohio River.

So, even before their Freedoms were won from the British during the
Revolutionary War, this was the time Americans would seek out and build their lives,
create their own homesteads and farms on their own piece of the lush Virginia and early
North Carolina (Tennessee) countrysides.

Long distance travel in these early years was difficult considering the modes of
transportation they had access to; either by walking or by horseback and pack-horse or
wagon, in some places, for over land travel and by raft or canoe over the rivers. Even
still, many of the early adventurers into the Cumberland Plateau had to hack away at the
brush and trees to make their own trails into the wilderness until they got to a place were
they thought they could live and create a comfortable existence for themselves.

The other major obstacle these new “European” Americans had was the “Native
American” people that had lived on these lands for hundreds of generations before the
White settlers ever made their way to the continent. These many Tribes and Nations are
proud people and many wouldn’t know how to deal with the whites that were taking the
lands that held the burial grounds of their grandfathers.

Similarly, the whites didn’t know how to deal with Indian ways of life either and
more often than not, conflicts arose which cost the lives of many Whites and Indians
alike but the expansion into the American Frontier by the whites was indominable and
this spirit kept pushing the Native American Indian and their hunting grounds further and
further into the west as time and new settlements, marched on.

Some American adventurers, explorers, settlers and their families took their lives
west over the mountains of northern Virginia and south of the Ohio River into the land
the Native American’s called “The Ken-tuck-ee”. They ended up fighting the British and
their Allies, the Native American Indians, west of the Allegany Mountains during the
Revolutionary War years instead of fighting with Gen. Washington’s Continental’s east
of the Blue Ridge. They also discovered, just like Daniel Boone, who was exploring
Kentucky from the south that this vast fertile land was thick with Buffalo, deer and bear
that fed on rich brush and grasses that covered the hilly terrain. It was also a very well
watered land with natural streams that were full of fishes of many kinds and numbers.

Then there were those who fought in the Revolutionary War east of the Blue
Ridge and when their enlistments were over in General Washington’s Army, they too
would also settle on their share of the Blue Ridge and further on west to the Cumberland
Plateau, west of the Alleghany Mountains. These are the stories of only a few families
that made it through those perilous years. They along with many, many other families to
the Cumberland Plateau and the Ohio River Valley soaked the western side of the
Allegany Mountains with their determined blood, tenacity and hard work. They were
hardy, God Fearing Folk.

Follow the link at the bottom of
each page for more pioneer
history

The Daniel Culp Family