Richardson Family Part Two

          On September 24, 1829,  Dorcus Barker daughter of Jeremiah and Mary Beeson Barker married Daniel Richardson,  son of Christian and Lovina Ingle Richardson, in Randolph County North Carolina.  The following is quoted from an article written in 1930 by a seventy year old grand-daughter of Dorcas and Daniel: Their honeymoon was a trip on horseback to  Indiana.  One horse carried them both with all their worldly possessions. It was a long and perilous journey through wilderness with only a blazed trail.  The dense forests were alive with wildcats, panthers and wolves.  One evening as they were riding late to find a shelter for the night, a piercing scream broke the stillness of the forest!  Looking up they saw a wildcat, ready to jump down on them. The horse seemed to sense the danger and lunged forward to safety, with only claw marks on his rump.  When they arrived in Indiana, they entered land near Center Valley in Hendricks County, where Dorcas sister Jane and her husband William Craven lived along with several of her brothers.   They put up a cabin, with help from the few neighbors.  One man came from White Lick, near Mooresville, another from Mill Creek, the others were nearer, seven in all.
     The following spring they sold this land at a profit and bought 80 acres a mile north of Hazelwood.  Here they lived in a rail pen and used a quilt for a door until they could get a house built.  The deed to this land is recorded in 1830.  Grandfather paid $1.25 an acre and earned much of the money by working on the National Road for 35 cents a day.  One evening as he was coming home through the forest a wildcat stalked him.  He built a fire and stayed by it all night.
     "When the cabin was first built it was one room, without floor or door.  Again the quilt was used until they could put up a door with leather hinges, then they felt rich indeed.  This cabin was in the woods, no clearing except as Daniel cut trees for use as wood, to split for rails, to make a puncheon floor for the cabin, to make crude farming implements, and make furniture,  Soon a second room was added with an attic. A brick chimney was built between the rooms with a stairs on one side and a pantry on the other side of the chimney."

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The James and Rachel (Jackson) Nichols Family

James Nichols was born in 1762 in Pennsylvania. This was a time of turmoil for the Scotch Irish colonists who had settled this area. The French Indian War was being fought all along the frontier. We don't know anything about James as a child but I imagine he was born in a cabin carved out of the wilderness. His father was also James and he had a brother Erasmus and a sister Jane but this is all that is known. Whoever his mother was she had to have been a strong woman to survive in this lonely wilderness and bear at least three children.

The first actual record known of James is in 1798 in Pennsylvania . By this time he had married Rachel Jackson who was also born in Pennsylvania, although there is nothing known about her ancestry. Their first child, a daughter Sarah, was born in Pennsylvania in 1798 followed by Erasmus in 1800. Sometime between 1800 and 1803 the Nichols family moved to Nelson County, Kentucky. We can only imagine what a wilderness it still was at this time. The family likely took either Zane's Trace from Wheeling WV (then Virginia) southwest to Maysville (Limestone) on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River or floated down the Ohio from Wheeling to Maysville. From Maysville they would have taken the road from Maysville to Lexington and then a spur of the Wilderness Road to Bardstown in Nelson County, where they settled.

Not much is known of James and Rachel's time in Nelson County Kentucky except that their family grew. Thomas (my ancestor) was born November 5, 1803, Jane April 21, 1808, Harriet July 14, 1811, Eleanor September 27, 1813, Andrew December 27, 1815, Elizabeth 1816, and James December1, 1818. Because of information on the 1810 census I suspect a child was born and died between Thomas and Jane although I have no actual proof of this. They most likely lived west of Bardstown. In Rachel Jackson Nichols obituary it talks of her going to Cedar Creek Baptist Church when they lived in Kentucky. This old church was located about 4 miles west of Bardstown on the Bellwood Road, one mile south of Highway 62, near the site of Rogers Station.

In about 1820 the whole Nichols family left Kentucky and headed to Indiana where they settled in Hendricks County. This is where they stayed...the moving was over.

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