Walking in Their Footsteps

I am a sucker for rabbit holes. Sometimes I find the bottom; while at other times I only get tangled up in roots and climb back to the light.

That being said, I love visiting the places that were stops on my ancestors’ journeys to where I am now. Standing on a hillside overlooking the site of the Battle of Bean’s Station where my 3rd great-grandfather Thomas Lindsey Thomason, Sr. rode a horse into battle only to stumble in a ravine permanently injuring his leg. Soaking up the heat and humidity of a late April day in the Washington Family Burial Ground in Westmoreland County, Virginia where my earliest Washington ancestors in North America were laid to rest near the banks of Chesapeake Bay. Climbing down a briar choked bank to lay hands on the pierstones of my great-great grandfather Jack Moss’s long-gone blacksmith shop. Cooling my feet in Barren River trying to envision what one of the first settlements in Warren County, Martinsville, must have looked like before Cholera resulted in its abandonment.

A view of Big Barren River at Martinsville, Kentucky, where the Greathouse family first settled in Warren County.

I live on Greathouse Road in Warren County in South-Central Kentucky. Many who have heard my introduction know I am a proud, seventh-generation Warren Countian whose roots here go back to 1799 when my 4th Great-Grandfather, Samuel Brown Greathouse, Sr. received a land patent for 200 acres along Big Barren River during an effort by Kentucky’s infant government to settle the lands south of the Green River.

Marked by a sign and generations of memory.

Thanks to the great wealth of knowledge that is Clark County historian Harry Enoch, I have been able to learn much more about my Greathouse family’s journey through Kentucky on their way to the landscape I daily open my eyes to.

The earlier stop on my Greathouse family’s journey from Pennsylvania through Maryland, and into Western Virginia was a stop in Fayette County; first appearing on the tax rolls there in 1788. It fascinates me to think that my ancestor William Greathouse (5th Great-Grandfather) and his family were in the bluegrass four years before Kentucky statehood; living in Fayette County, Virginia.

Section of the 1861Topographical Map of the Counties of Bourbon, Fayette, Clark, Jessamine, and Woodford, Kentucky, by E.A. & G.W. Hewitt, published by Smith, Gallup & Co, New York.

By 1793, William was listed on Clark County, Kentucky tax rolls and purchased 50 acres of land on Little Stoner Creek, selling it shortly after. Outside of this brief period of land ownership in Clark County, the Greathouse’s must have been tenants, squatters, or renters on others’ land.

Poring over records I had never seen, I was fascinated to first read the names I share DNA with adjacent to those of much more famous men such as Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton.

Circa 1793 Clark County, Kentucky court order for Said’s Mill.

It is worth noting that the Greathouse’s presence in the area east of Winchester, Kentucky was well documented in tax rolls and most importantly for this story, when William Greathouse was empaneled in October 1793 on a jury of neighbors to a William Said who planned on and subsequently built a mill on Stoner Creek. This primary source was my inspiration to explore and find the area where William lived and my 4th Great-Grandparents, Samuel and Susannah Greathouse married in 1796.

The next part of this narrative weaves primary source with pure speculation creating a sense of wanderlust perfectly suited to the adventure that led me down this rabbit hole and on this short journey.

The author looking over the bottomland of Stoner Creek in Clark County, Kentucky.

Move ahead from the 1790’s to a beautiful, early spring March day roughly 230 years later. Thanks to a longstanding friendship with the primary author of this blog, a regular visit with her and her family brought me to Clark County, Kentucky. Having nothing better to do and with no arm-twisting needed, we set out in an attempt to find the site of Said’s Mill and the general landscape that the Greathouse’s called home in the early 1790’s.

Possible remnant of the mill dam on Stoner Creek.

Thanks once again to Harry Enoch’s guidance, we knew the general area and after speaking to the current landowner, we were able to quickly find remnants of what appeared to be the site of Said’s Mill along the meandering course of Stoner Creek. Situated above the suspected mill site were the collapsed remains of a double-pen log house with supporting documentation available from the Kentucky Heritage Council.

Circa 1976 photograph of a log house (no longer extant) in the vicinity of where the Greathouse family lived. Image from the Kentucky Heritage Council survey files.

Samuel Brown Greathouse, Sr. later became a prominent antebellum Baptist minister in Warren and Allen Counties, Kentucky helping establish congregations that are still active today, over 180 years later. Profiled in A History of Kentucky Baptists from 1769 to 1885 the following immediately leapt to mind: “he (Samuel) became alarmed about the safety of his soul, by the following circumstance: At a house-raising, he was carrying up one of the corners of the building, when a fork, with which the men on the ground pushed up the logs, split open and allowed the log to roll back, by which two men were instantly killed. ‘What would have become of my soul, if I had been one of those men?’ soliloquized Mr. Greathouse.”

The author amid the ruins of an early log house.

Could this log house, the remains of which I could stand atop, be the log house where Samuel realized his own mortality? Newly bloomed daffodils sprinkled the former dooryard of the house creating an even deeper connection to the past. Was I walking along the same two-track from modern-day US 60 (no doubt a buffalo trace and early thoroughfare) that William and Samuel would have walked to survey the future site of Said’s Mill and later, the grist mill where their flour and meal would have been ground to provide sustenance?

Goshen Baptist Church, Clark County, Kentucky.

Nearby Goshen Primitive Baptist Church, founded in 1797, would have been an early cornerstone for the religious fervor sweeping this frontier. Did this early church in Clark County have any connection to the naming of Goshen Baptist Church founded here in my neighborhood in 1848? Finally, what did this landscape look like when it was less cleared pasture and more small patches of corn interspersed amongst the rapidly disappearing cane breaks in this rolling part of the Outer Bluegrass.

Postcard of Goshen Baptist Church in the collection of the author. Goshen Baptist Church in Alvaton, Kentucky was founded in 1848 and the structure pictured was built in 1863 in conjunction with the Goshen Masonic Lodge that occupied the second floor.

There is no doubt their artifacts remain in detritus left in buried strata or even more solemnly in ones they left behind in now-unmarked graves. The lyrics to the 19th-century ballad ‘Sweet Sunny South’ come to mind and standing in the dooryard with the blooming daffodils brought them to my lips: “Take me back to the place where my little ones sleep . . . O’er the graves of my loved ones I long for to weep”.

A harbinger of spring and also a clue to an old homesite.

Back home in my own living room on Greathouse Road, I can’t help but think what their journey from the seaboard to the great valley of Virginia or down the Ohio River to Clark County, Kentucky and later to Warren County and the part of the world I know best must have been like. Hardship surely existed but it quickly gave way to success in this part of the world where their journey finally came to an end and mine began.