It was a great reunion.
Saturday, as we explored several cemeteries, Cathy remarked that she always whispered an apology for walking over graves and hoped the people in them didn’t mind us. I offered up that I thought since we were doing it to preserve someone’s stories, they wouldn’t be overly upset.
I wondered if the ghosts of the departed watched us.
Sunday’s luncheon was like drinking from a firehose. I must have told Rebecca’s story close to half a dozen times because so many of the cousins had never heard it.
I introduced myself to one cousin saying, “I’m Bob, Rebecca’s grandson. Part of the long-lost line.”
He immediately replied, “Mueller, right?”
He remembered talking a lot with my dad in the months and years after the family reconnected.
We exchanged email addresses so we can stay in touch. I expect I’ll be doing a lot of that over the next few months.
Fort Seybert
Nestled in the valley near Franklin, West Virginia, in the late 1750s, militia captain Jacob Seybert built a fort in response to Indian raids and a request from Colonel George Washington. Known as Fort Seybert, it protected seven families, about 40 people.
On April 28, 1758, the day after destroying nearby Fort Upper Tract, Delaware war chief Bemino, AKA John Killbuck, laid siege against Fort Seybert. Captain Seybert held out for three days, but with most of the military-aged men gone across the Shenandoah Mountains, he eventually had to give up.
Bemino promised not to harm the settlers and to only take supplies.
Once inside, the warriors separated the occupants into two groups. One group was taken up on the nearby ridge and massacred. The survivors got taken to southern Ohio.
I had family members in both groups.
Michael Mallow, his wife Margaret, and their five children resided nearby and were part of the Fort Seybert community. Michael was off with the other men on the trip. Margaret, Mary (8 ½), Adam (6 ½), and three unnamed children had remained in the fort.
The three younger children were taken up onto the ridge. It’s possible that the youngest, an infant, stayed with Margaret for the first part of the journey. Conflicting accounts report that the war party killed a baby during travel, either by abandonment or by hanging in the crook of a sapling.
Adam returned to the area around 1766. When he was found, he’d forgotten all of the German he knew (the family spoke only German at home), and didn’t know his English name.
Mary made it home before her brother, though the exact date is unclear.
Margaret returned to the area in 1761—along with her son, Henry, born in captivity. She’d been about ten weeks pregnant when she was captured. Henry, born in November 1758, may have been the first white child born in Ohio, though his Revolutionary War Pension declaration says he was born somewhere on the banks of the Mississippi.
Some people believed over the years that Henry’s father was a member of the raiding party or part of the camp she was taken to, but there are no traces of Native American DNA in his lineage.
Cathy regaled us with this whole story as we stood around the mass grave and the old site of the fort, now heavily overgrown. She shared that in years not too far past, you could still make out the depressions from the palisades.
The mass grave sits between a couple of massive oak trees with a low stone wall around it. I don’t know who built the wall or how they knew how big to make the memorial. But to stand there and contemplate what they were thinking in their last moments as they looked out over the valley where they’d lived…
Words fail me.
Did they cry? Pray? Beg for mercy?
Did the children cling to their mothers?
Do their ghosts still wander the valley?
And what of the men? How did they react when they returned to find their home in ruins and their families murdered? I thought of a scene in The Patriot, where some of the militia discover the church a smoking ruin. One man commits suicide on the spot.
How would I have handled that return?
Could I have done something to prevent it? Or would I have died during the siege?
What effect would the presence of another handful of men have had on the siege?
There’s an annual reenactment of the massacre, complete with a mockup of the fort which is burned. As much as I enjoy historical events like that, I’m not sure I’d ever be comfortable attending this one.
I wonder what the ghosts think of it.
Descendants
How does Fort Seybert fit in to my family history?
Henry Mallow had a son, George, in 1781.
George had a son, Michael, born in 1814.
Michael had a son, Abraham, in 1841.
Abraham had a daughter, Mary Susan, born in 1872.
In 1889, Mary Susan Mallow married Albert Campbell Smith, and they had 13 children over the next 25 years, including Rebecca Florence, my grandmother.
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