In my last post I wrote about Esther Kersey’s parents, Eleazar Kersey (1762-1816) and Elizabeth Harlan Kersey (1762-1845), and the experience of being Quaker during the Regulators War and the American Revolution, in North Carolina. The story can be found
HERE.
Esther Kersey was the oldest of the nine children Eleazar Kersey and Elizabeth Harlan Kersey, all born in Guilford County, North Carolina. The children of Eleazar Kersey and Elizabeth Harlan Kersey were: Esther Kersey (bn. abt. 1783, dd. aft. 1850, m. Abraham Wolfington 6 Feb 1808); Ayles (Alice) Kersey (bn. 6 April 1785, dd. 10 April 1850 in Parke County IN, m. Seth Beason, 3 November 1804); Stephen Kersey (bn. 6 May 1789, dd. 12 March 1845 in Parke County IN, m. Jemima Leonard in 1812); Jesse Kersey (bn. abt. 1790, dd. aft. 9 May 1816); William Kersey (bn. abt. 1791, dd. 3 February 1840 in Guilford NC); Enoch Kersey (bn. 10 May 1794, dd. 1 December 1837 in Parke County IN, m. Sarah Curl, 2 October 1834); Eleazar Kersey (bn. 15 July 1798, dd. 8 March 1854 in Hendricks County IN, m. Naomi Hodson 21 November 1835); Elizabeth Kersey (bn. 19 January 1805, dd. ?); Moses Kersey (bn. 6 September 1806, dd. November 1841 in Guilford NC, m. Asenith Ricks 24 October 1833).
Esther was born in or about 1783, the year of her parents’ marriage. At that time, her father, Eleazar Kersey, attended the Deep River Meeting in Guilford County NC, which was approximately six miles southwest of the New Garden Monthly Meeting (the preparative meeting at Deep River had been under the jurisdiction of New Garden Monthly Meeting until the Deep River Monthly Meeting was set up in 1778). In October 1794, Esther’s parents sought and received permission from the Deep River Monthly Meeting to join the Springfield Monthly Meeting, which had been set up in 1790 in southern Guilford County by the New Garden Quarterly Meeting about 18 miles to its southwest. On 3 October 1801, the Springfield Women’s Monthly Meeting minutes, reflected that “Elizabeth Kersey requests for her two daughters, Ayles & Esther, to be joined in membership & they having been under the care of the preparative meeting some time, this meeting grants for request.”
The next record I have for Esther is of notations in the Women’s Minutes of the Springfield Monthly Meeting records in February and March 1808 regarding a complaint made about Esther Wolfington marrying out of unity of the meeting, which means that like her parents before her, Esther and Abraham got married in another church denomination rather than going through the lengthy Friends marriage procedures and ceremony. She submitted a document condemning her actions in marrying outside of unity on 6 February 1808.
Abraham Wolfington was the 5th of eleven children of John Wolfington (bn abt 1749 in Antrim County, Ireland – dd 1812 at Greensboro, Guilford County NC) and Jane Bailey Wolfington (bn in 1753 in East Fallowfield Twp, Chester County PA – dd 1823 in Deep River, Guilford County, NC). All of their children were born in Guilford County NC: David (bn. 16 Nov 1770, dd. 25 Oct 1849 in Guilford County, NC, m. Anna McIntyre, abt 1804); Ann [Nancy] (bn. 23 April 1772, dd. 21 July 1847 in Orange County, IN, m. Thomas Leonard 7 Nov 1793); James (bn. abt 1773, dd. before 1840 in Orange County IN, m. Mary Sarah McCarrell. 18 April 1792); Sarah (bn. about 1773, dd. in 1845 in Orange County IN, m. James Leonard 7 Nov 1797); Abraham (bn. 4 Sept 1775, dd. 12 May 1850 in Orange County IN, m. Esther Kersey 6 Feb 1808); John (bn about 1777, dd. 25 Aug 1845 in French Lick, Orange County, IN, m. Jemima Leonard in 1795); Rebecca (bn. about 1777, dd about 1845 Orange County IN, m. Benjamin Jackson); Isaac (bn. 1 Mar 1784, dd. about 1850 in Orange County IN, m. Sally Elkins 16 Feb 1818); Samuel (bn. 18 Mar 1784, dd. 27 Feb 1869 in French Lick, Orange County, IN, m. Elizabeth Elkins); Elizabeth (bn. about 1785, dd. about 1845, m. Jacob Bodenhamer 7 Nov 1842); and Jane (bn about 1794, dd. in 1860 in Guilford County NC, m. Robert Parsons on 27 Nov 1813bin Guilford County, NC).
Esther Kersey was 25 when she married Abraham Wolfington; and he was 32. Esther likely knew of Abraham most of her life since his father, John Wolfington, owned property in Guilford County, described in the land grant records as a “tract or parcel of land containing one hundred fifty acres. Acres lying in the county aforesaid and joining the lands of the widow Kersey on the north and in the east joining the land that formerly belonged to John Sanders and the land whereon William Greer formerly lived and therefore compliments…(emphasis added)”. They were a neighbor of Esther’s grandmother, Hannah Hunt Kersey.
Esther and Abraham had two sons born in Guilford County North Carolina: Abram Wolfington (bn, 1809; m. Lucinda Rodman, 29 May 1836; m. Elizabeth Manley Bixler, 29 Mar 1851; dd. 4 Oct 1872) and Eleazor “Azor” Wolfington (bn 1811; m. Margaret Burns, 20 Sept 1829; m. Elizabeth Jane Holliday, 5 Apr 1873; dd. Abt 1882.). Other trees show they had more children, but I haven’t been able to find them myself, so I am leaving them out.
The facts that both Abraham and Esther were born and lived in Guilford County North Carolina, and attended Monthly Meetings that were subsidiaries of the New Garden Meeting are important to understanding the sort of people Esther, Abraham, and their families likely were. The New Garden Monthly meeting in Guilford County was an important location of the Friends in North Carolina in the early 19th Century as it significantly influenced the spread of anti-slavery views throughout the Society of Friends. The books I read suggested that the abolitionist sentiments were ingrained in the Friends Meetings in North Carolina because the leaders of the New Garden Meeting were often originally from Pennsylvania where abolitionism had been strong since a petition denouncing it was first brought to the Germantown PA Meeting in 1644. They were also influenced by itinerant ministers like John Woolman, who traveled throughout Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina 1746 through 1757, speaking to Quaker communities, Quaker slave owners and slaves on the evils of slavery and was sometimes able to convince Quaker slave owners to free their slaves. Woolman tried to lead by example throughout his life and would not willingly stay in a house where there were slaves and, if he had to stay in a home with slaves, he paid the slaves for their labor on his behalf before leaving; he refused to purchase goods produced by slave labor; and refused to wear clothes made from material that had been dyed as the dyes were produced by slave labor. John Woolman has been identified by scholars as perhaps the most important person in 18th Century Quaker faith and social reform; he was an abolitionist, reformer, writer, and minister, and his journal has never been out of print since it was posthumously published in 1775 (it is in Volume 1 of the Harvard Classics fifty volume set of the classics of world literature). His efforts significantly helped to change Quaker thought on slavery. John Woolman is my first cousin 8 times removed, and, was a first cousin of Esther’s grandmother, Hannah Woolman Hunt. Over time, New Garden meeting leaders significantly impacted the views of other Monthly Meetings on the issue of slavery, especially when Friends who had absorbed the anti-slavery principles at New Garden migrated to other meetings.
By 1758, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (“PYM”) made it an act of Misconduct, subject to disowning, for Quakers to engage in slave trading. In 1770, after a concern came to the North Carolina Yearly Meeting (“NCYM”) which was originally raised in the New Garden Monthly Meeting about buying and selling slaves, the NCYM adopted a statement condemning the importation of slaves, restricting purchase, and encouraging Friends to watch over the morals of any slaves already owned. Five years later, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, made up primarily of Quakers, was created. In 1776, the year Thomas Jefferson declared in the Declaration of Independence that “all men were created equal,” the NCYM made slaveholding or trading a disownable offense; thus, to remain or to become a Quaker, a person had to free any slaves they owned. At the same time, it instructed its subsidiary monthly meetings to protect freed slaves from recapture. If it was necessary to hire a lawyer or incur other legal expenses in connection with manumissions (formal release from slavery) or the protection of freed slaves, the NCYM declared its readiness to underwrite the costs.
Relying on this holding, in 1777, North Carolina Friend Thomas Newby and ten other Friends freed approximately 40 slaves, which attracted the attention of the North Carolina state General Assembly and courts. North Carolina law forbade the manumission of slaves except for meritorious service. The eleven Friends made no claim of meritorious service on the part of any of the slaves. Instead, they simply acted out of a religious conviction that human bondage itself was unjust and evil. The General Assembly of 1777, to address with the “Quaker problem”, decided to reaffirm and strengthen the colonial law which prohibited the manumission of slaves except for meritorious service as established by the county courts, by passing a new law titled "An Act to Prevent Domestic Insurrection." The new law further prescribed that "illegally" manumitted slaves were to be picked up immediately after liberation and sold at the next session of the county court.
After 1777, both Quakers and the formerly enslaved began buying slaves to free them. The North Carolina legislature subsequently required that to free a slave after 1791, a bond must be posted in the amount of two hundred pounds. In 1801, the bond stipulated was raised to $1000. The Quaker legal costs were paid by the NCYM. Paradoxically, in 1808, the North Carolina Yearly Meeting, as an entity, started owning slaves: holding nominal titles to emancipated Africans to circumvent the North Carolina law allowing freed slaves to be seized and re-sold into slavery. About that time formerly enslaved people began looking to move westward to escape the same draconian laws.
In 1787, the United States, through the Northwest Ordinance created the Northwest Territory, including all the land west of Pennsylvania, northwest of the Ohio River, east of the Mississippi River below the Great Lakes (or what became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and the northeast part of Minnesota). Article 6 in the Ordinance of 1787 simultaneously banned and enforced slavery, stating: “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted: Provided, always, that any person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service as aforesaid.” In 1803, the state of Ohio was formed and admitted to the Union, and the rest of the Territory was renamed the Indiana Territory. In 1805, Congress suspended Article Six of the Northwest Ordinance for ten years, and granted the territories covered by it the right to choose for themselves to legalize slavery. By the same act, Congress removed the legislative power from the General Court of the territory and created a Legislative Council that would be popularly elected. The same year a bill legalizing slavery was narrowly defeated in the Indiana Territory.
During the early 1800’s, approximately 50,000 North Carolinians left the state and moved to Ohio or Indiana both in protest of slavery and in search of new fertile lands to settle, including among them many Quakers. The Quakers brought freed Blacks who wished to leave North Carolina with them in their travel groups. The Land Act of 1800 allowed for relatively easy, legal land acquisition by private persons from the federal government. The first Federal Land Office in what is now Indiana was established in 1807 at the former French trading settlement at Vincennes. Land was sold for $1.25 per acre (about $33 in today’s dollars).
By 1809, there was an established community of 200 Quakers at the Whitewater Monthly Meeting in Wayne County. A new community was settled in Orange County, in 1811, by Jonathan Lindley and 11 Quaker families from North Carolina. This settlement was 3 miles east of what would become the county seat at Paoli, and less than thirty miles from the Kentucky border. The settlement became the seat of the Lick Creek Monthly Meeting. The Lick Creek Monthly Meeting was set off from Whitewater Monthly Meeting and first held in their newly built Meeting House on the 25th of ninth month 1813. Its limits then included the present bounds of Washington and Orange counties. Both Blacks and Whites had made the trip from North Carolina with Lindley. Supported communally by the Quakers on both ends of their journey, the free Black pioneers initially homesteaded near their Quaker neighbors. By the 1820 census there were 11 free Black families living in the county (about 10 years later, a free Black settlement town was created within three miles of the Quaker’s Lick Creek Meeting House. At the height of the community, in 1855, Black landowners held 1,557 acres and 260 people lived there. It was called Little Africa or the Lick Creek Settlement but was not part of the Lick Creek Monthly Meeting.)
I haven’t found many more records concerning Esther and Abraham in North Carolina because they were among those Quakers who immigrated to the Lick Creek Monthly Meeting in Indiana. Abraham’s father died in 1812 and, in 1816, Esther’s father died on the 1st of June. After her father’s will was probated in August 1816, she inherited Five Shillings Sterling (approximately $30 today, nearly enough to buy an acre of land in the Indiana Territory then). Abraham’s older brother James Wolfington lived in Orange County, in the Indiana Territory, near the Lick Creek Monthly Meeting, by, at least, November 1816, when he is on record as voting in the county election. This may have influenced Abraham and Esther’s decision as to where they would move in the state.
Indiana was admitted to the Union on 11 December 1816, as the 19th state, with generally the same borders as the current state. Its state Constitution contained language similar to Article 6 of the Northwest Ordinance, that no new enslaved people were allowed, but currently enslaved people remained so. Early Indiana was never a slave state, but neither was it fully free.
On 6 August 1817, Esther Wolfington submitted a request to the Springfield Monthly Meeting for certification to the Lick Creek Monthly Meeting in Indiana State. Isobel Hobson and Rachel Kersey were “appointed to make the needful inquiry and if they find nothing to hinder [the move] to prepare and produce it to the next meeting.” The Springfield Monthly Meeting granted the certification for Esther Wolfington to remove to the Lick Creek Monthly meeting on 10 September 1817. Any similar certification for Abraham and their sons would have been obtained from the Men’s monthly meeting, but I have not been able to find records for the Springfield Men’s Meeting online.
The wagon trip from the Carolinas to the Lick Creek Monthly Meeting took about a month, traveling by foot and covered wagon, in groups of 30 – 40 made up of family members and friends, through the Cumberland Gap on the Wilderness Road, originally blazed by Daniel Boone in 1775, the main trail westward to Kentucky from North Carolina, and then onto the Vincennes Trace. The Vincennes Trace, originally a well-worn buffalo migration route was used by American Indians, and after European traders and American settlers learned of it, it became an important early land route to travel west into Indiana and Illinois. It crossed what became Orange County Indiana between the County seat at Paoli (named after Pasquale Paoli Ash, the 12-year-old son of the North Carolina Governor in 1816) and French Lick, Indiana.
At the time the Wolfingtons moved to the Lick Creek Monthly Meeting, it was still a heavily forested pioneer community on the Western frontier of the country. Conditions of life were tough in the early period. Forested land still had to be cleared for newcomers to live and farm on.
As farms were carved out of the forest, trees were cut down and used to build log cabins for the settlers, and then the excess trees were shipped out to timber mills and the lumber sold. Everyone in the family had to work on the farm. Records show that the farm families were interdependent on their neighbors, with historical diaries describing trade and labor sharing throughout southern Indiana, such as house and barn “raisings” and “log-rollings” and group hunting with the meat shared out amongst the community. The early settlers grew corn, raised hogs, and had kitchen gardens in which they raised vegetables for the family meals. Additionally, the families grew flax and raised sheep as the cloth used for clothing and household linens and blankets for the family was made from home-grown wool and flax. While there was little time for relaxation or anything that could be considered shared cultural events; the Quakers considered building schools and Meeting Houses to be a priority.
The 1820 census showed that, in addition to Abraham & Esther’s family (the census showed a man and a woman aged 26 - 34, and two boys and a girl under 10 in their household), and his brother James Wolfington and his wife, Mary Sarah McCarrell, three of Abraham’s sisters and their families had also moved from Guilford County, NC to live in Orange County Indiana. The sisters were: Ann (aka Nancy) Wolfington Leonard, wife of Thomas Leonard; Sarah Wolfington Leonard, wife to James Leonard, and Rebecca Wolfington, Jackson, wife to Benjamin Jackson. Esther’s brother Stephen Kersey was in Orange County on the day of the Census. I don’t know whether he was living there at the time or was visiting on that day as he and his wife (Jemima Leonard) had been living in Parke County Indiana since at least 1814 as his daughter Malinda was born there, and other records show that he and his family were living in Parke County, Indiana at least from 1830 through his death there in 1845.
In 1823, Abraham’s mother died in North Carolina, and sometime in the decades after that, Abraham’s three younger brothers, John, Isaac, and Samuel left North Carolina and settled in Orange County, Indiana. The 1830 Census shows Abraham and his family in Orange County (it shows a man aged 50-59, a woman aged 30-39, a boy aged 10-14 and a girl under 10). Esther’s sister Alice (m. Seth Beeson) and at least two of her brothers Enoch and Eleazar Kersey moved to Parke County, Indiana in the late 1820’s to early 1830s as well.
The Underground Railroad began in the 1820s and 1830s in Indiana as free Black communities, Quakers, and Abolitionists worked together to help escaped enslaved people escape and move on to safer destinations, such as Canada. While I would love to be able to say that my family helped with the Underground Railroad helping enslaved people escape to freedom, the truth is I have no definitive evidence one way or the other. Very few people kept records of helping escaped enslaved people reach freedom to protect the secrecy of the network, the people helping enslaved people escape), and those seeking freedom who needed help. If caught, freedom-seekers would be forced to return to slavery and punished for trying to escape. People caught aiding those who escaped slavery faced arrest and jail. This applied to people living in states that supported slavery and those living in free states.
Historians now believe the path to freedom looked more like a spider’s web than distinct routes, through Indiana. Especially in the years before the Underground railroad was more formally organized, escaping slaves had few contacts in the North, and relied on help from friends, relatives and other Black people. Often Black people made the initial contact, providing shelter and assistance, while nearby sympathetic White people provided money, clothes, transportation, and legal services. It has been determined that in southern Indiana the trails leading from the Kentucky border line cut through the land held by free Black landowners and Quakers. The Lick Creek Meeting was less than thirty miles from the Kentucky border and was close to the free Black town, Little Africa, AKA the Lick Creek settlement. It was too close to the border to be safe staying there long, but, assuredly, freedom seekers would have sought help from the abolitionist Quaker community and the nearby free Black community. Levi Coffin, called the “President of the Underground Railroad”, a Quaker from Guilford County NC who immigrated to Newburyport, Indiana in 1926 indicated in his Memoirs that he knew of the Black settlements near Paoli in Orange County, where he spent time visiting relatives. (Levi Coffin claimed he and his wife housed about 2,000 freedom seekers over 20 years and that he knew of none that he had helped reach Canada who had been caught and returned to slavery.)
The 1840 Census showed Abraham living in Southwest Township, Orange County, Indiana in a household containing one man 60-69, one woman 50-59, and a girl aged 10-14. In May 1840, Abraham was elected to be one of five Trustees for the newly incorporated town of Paoli. Abraham did not hold that position long. After about a year the municipal government was abandoned by mutual consent after “a tall wagon-maker of the town attacked Braxtan, the President of the Board, for some fine imposed, and gave him a severe beating; this led to the total relinquishment of the town government.”
Abraham died on 12 May 1850, at 74, before the 1950 Census was done. He was buried in the cemetery at the Beech Grove Meeting House southwest of Paoli. Eight of his brothers and sisters died before he did, only Samuel and Jane survived him. Samuel, by this time, was living in French Lick, 11 miles southwest of Paoli. Jane had never left North Carolina. The 1950 Census shows Esther Kersey Wolfington also living in French Lick, Indiana, on her own . I have not been able to find any further reference to her. I don’t know when she died or where she is buried.
Sources:
Lick Creek Monthly Meeting Minutes, Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, Lick Creek After 1892, Collection: Indiana Yearly Meeting Minutes, U.S., Quaker Meeting Records, 1681-1935, , Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014, Provo, UT, USA; Springfield Monthly Meeting Women’s Minutes, Guilford College; Greensboro, North Carolina; Women's Minutes, 1790-1850 Collection: North Carolina Yearly Meeting Minutes, U.S., Quaker Meeting Records, 1681-1935, Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014, Provo, UT, USA; Deep River Monthly Meeting, Guilford NC, 4 1784 Tenth, U.S., Quaker Meeting Records, 1681-1935, Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014, Provo, UT, USA; History and Genealogy of the Harland Family in America, and particularly of the descendants of George and Michael Harlan, who settled in Chester County PA, 1687, compiled by Alpheus Harlan (The Lord Baltimore Press 1914); The Carolina Quaker Experience, 1665-1985, an Interpretation by Seth B Hinshaw (Briarpatch Press NC and Thompson-Shore, Dexter, MI, 1984); Quakers on the American Frontier by Errol T Elliott, The Friends United Press, Richmond Indiana 1969); Western North Carolina, a History by John Preston Arthur, The Edward Buncombe Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, of Asheville North Carolina, Edwards and Broughton Printing Company, 1914); Southern Quakers and Slavery, a Study in Institutional History, By Stephen B Weeks, PhD (the Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1896); Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad – the Geography of Resistance by Cheryl Janifer LaRoche (University of Illinois press, Urbana, Chicago and Springfield 2014); The Migration of Westfield Quakers from Surrey County, North Carolina 1786-1828, a Thesis by Ashley Allen Humphreys (submitted to the graduate school at Appalachian State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of arts, Department of history, May 2013); History of Lawrence, Orange, and Washington Counties, Indiana (Goodspeed Brothers & Co., Publishers, Chicago 1881); Moral Choices: to Indiana Quaker Communities and the Abolitionist Movement by Thomas D Hamm, David Dittmer, Chenda Fruchter, Ann Giordano, Janice Matthews and Ellen Swain, in the Indiana Magazine of History, vol. 87, No. 2, pp. 117-154 (Indiana University Press June 1991); Toward Freedom For All: North Carolina Quakers and Slavery by Hiram H. Hilty , (Friends United Press, Richmond Indiana 1984; digitized by Internet Archive 2013); Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy, edited by Willard Heiss, v.1 & v. 7 pt.5, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, 1974; Friends in the Carolinas by J. Floyd Moore, Professor Emeritus of Biblical Literature and Religion, Guilford College, Tercentenary Celebration Steering Committee, North Carolina Friends Historical Society, North Carolina Yearly Meeting of Friends, Greensboro, North Carolina, Copyright (c) 1997 Revised Edition; Lick Creek Settlement Holds Piece of Black History in Indiana - Limestone Post Magazine in Bloomington, Indiana; LICK CREEK SETTLEMENT(S) (Pt 1) | They Lived Along a Rocky River (rockyrivernc.com); Quakers in Indiana in the Nineteenth Century, by John William Buys (A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Council of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of Florida, 1973; Eric W. Nye, Pounds Sterling to Dollars: Historical Conversion of Currency, accessed Thursday, April 25, 2024, https://www.uwyo.edu/numimage/currency.htm
