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Descendants of Robert Dowling

Generation No. 3

3. REV. DEMPSEY³ DOWLING (JOHN², ROBERT¹) was born December 14, 1783 in Jeffries Creek, Darlington District, South Carolina, and died April 26, 1865 in Dale County, Alabama. He married MARTHA STOKES September 22, 1803, daughter of JOHN STOKES and NANCY ALFORD. She was born March 04, 1787 in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, and died January 15, 1859 in Dale County, Alabama.

Notes for REV. DEMPSEY DOWLING:
      Dempsy was the first son of Nancy and John Dowling. His name may have been the surname of a family friend. Nothing is known of his childhood. When he was about twenty, he married a sixteen year old girl from North Carolina named Martha Stokes. Her brother Henry would later marry Dempsey's sister, Rhoda. Doctor Anson West's "History of Methodism in Alabama" tells us that Dempsey "was of a strict type of Methodist. He was of that class who reproved sin in word as well as life. He was as severe as the Judgement. In rebuking persons for sin, Reverend Dowling had the perseverance of endless patience. In the lines of Christian doctrine, experience, and life to which he gave special attention, he was well advanced and thoroughly established. He was the patriarch and leader of the numerous tribe of Dowlings in the Methodist ranks" in Dale County, Alabama. In 1822, the year before daughter Elizabeth died, Dempsey was elected an elder in his church upon the recommendation of the Pee Dee District Conference that encompassed the Salkehatchee area. It was his reliance in God that prepared him for the grief presented by this twin's death (Elizabeth and her sister Milly had been born on May 5, 1808. She is the only one of his fourteen children who has no descendants today. Dempsey's other six daughters averaged living to the age of fifty-two; his seven sons, including one who died in the Civil War, lived to an average of seventy.)
      Toward the end of 1825, Dempsey was becoming much impressed by the news sent back by daughter Lacy from the one year old county of Alabama were she and her bridegroom had settled. On September 27th of that year, he sold the 330 acre farm (lying on both sides of Lake Swamp) where his twelve children had been born and made preparations to leave the Jefferies Creek area. A little more than a decade earlier, the War of 1812 had set in motion a chain of circumstances which would eventually result in thousands of Dempsey's descendants being Alabamians instead of Carolinians. Scores of men, such as his brother Zacheus, from the old colonies were sent to the edges of young America for defense against the British. The stories they sent home of fertile soils, abundant game, and long waving grasses, inspired more and more settlers to come explore this land toward the setting sun.
      Dempsey and his family moved to Alabama about the time John Dowling was born. The trip took six months. On March 1, 1826, Reverend Dowling and his large family crossed the Chattahoochee River near Fort Gaines, Georgia. That same week they began a new life near the first "town" that Dale County ever had; Richmond, Alabama. After living here for two years, the family packed up again and moved northward. They eventually settled on historic Hurricane Creek, two miles southwest of present-day Ozark (in the SW 1/4 of the SW 1/4 of section 1, Township 5, Range 24). It was here in a double-pen log house that Dempsey and Martha would spend the remaining half of their lives. Some years later these squatters paid the government $50.18 for the forty acre tract. The price indicates that it was the choicest!
      About the time he moved to his last home, Dempsey helped found Claybank Church. He, two brothers, three sons, and numerous other descendants preached there. The second building at Claybank, built in 1852, still stands. It is Dale County's oldest public building. The century old trees that were hewn square for it's construction came from son Edward's land. Rafe, one of Edward's slaves, did most of the log hewing. The supporting blocks came from John Sr's land. It is certain that no work was done on the Sabbath. An early edition of the "Alabama Historical Quarterly" states that Dempsey did not even allow meals to be cooked on Sunday and that he always had his family walk to Claybank services (3 miles distant) so that his beasts of burden might rest.
      An indication of the pay received by Dempsey for his pioneer preaching may be gained by our knowledge that a contemporary, just north of Dale in the Pea River Mission, received fifty dollars for his year of work. Therefore, Reverend Dowling's major occupation had to be farming. By 1850, he owned thirteen slaves. Their worth probably constituted the major part of his personal worth, $15,070, as recorded on the 1860 census.
      Dempsey had 111 grandchildren. "The Dale County Tombstone Book," by E. H. Hayes, shows that Dale County contains more Dowling graves than those of any other surname. The Claybank Church Cemetery was spotlighted in a syndicated column called "Strange As It Seems" for that reason. Though all the white Dowlings whose markers lie in Dale are kin, there are only four who did not descend from Dempsey. Many followed his calling. Great-grandson Will C. Hughes, a Texas Minister, stated that he knew of 42 preachers who descended from this patriarch.
      Reverend Dempsey Dowling died two weeks after the surrender of General Lee at Appomattox. His death came on the day that the South's final force surrendered to Sherman at Greensboro, South Carolina, April 26, 1865. He was buried beside Martha Stokes Dowling at the church in the pines, Claybank.
      - Taken from "A Dowling Family of The South" by R. A. Dowling

Children of DEMPSEY DOWLING and MARTHA STOKES are:

	i.		LUCY⁴ DOWLING, b. November 23, 1804.
	ii.		WESLEY DOWLING, b. 1806, Jeffries Creek, South Carolina; d. 1878, Claybank, Dale County, AL; m. AMANDA O'NEAL, 1837.

Notes for WESLEY DOWLING:
Dempsey Dowling's second child was given the good Methodist name of Wesley. After Reverend Dowling moved to his Hurricane Creek home in Alabama, this twenty-five year old son purchased his first land (shown on page 87 of the Dale County Plat Book). Two years later Wesley was elected a justice of the peace. He also served as a militiaman in the local 46th Regiment.

Sometime around 1834, Wesley took a trip to Irwington (now Eufaula), Alabama, to supervise the construction of that town's first plank building! This structure was also the town's first church building. Wesley's uncle Zacheus was the circuit-riding Methodist who talked the villagers into having it built. Wesley must have been good with his hands, because he was also reputed to be the best blacksmith in southeast Alabama. His shop stood south of Claybank on the Daleville road.

About 1837 Wesley married a seventeen year old girl by the name of Amanda E. O'Neal. She had been born in Georgia, though her father was a Virginian. "Mandy" lived some fifty-two years after this marriage, dying about eleven years after her husband. Both are buried at Claybank.

Wesley's two oldest sons were killed fighting in the Civil War. Private Colonel Jasper had been born in 1838. Martin R. was three years younger. Both had walked into Ozark on a beautiful March day in 1862 and told Captain R. F. Crittenden that they would like to be members of his company in the 33rd Alabama Infantry. Exactly one year later father Wesley was being given a Confederate death payment of 53.65 for each son; both are thought to have died in the same battle.

The year after his two sons were killed, Wesley was involved in a strange and tragic event that was repeated in "The Montgomery Advertiser." He was approaching the Choctawhatchee River bridge near Newton, Alabama, on December 3, 1864, when he noticed a half-dozen men of Captain Breare's Confederate Home-Guard ganged around a helpless looking Dale County man named Bill Sketo. They were preparing to hang the man on the charge that he had deserted the Rebels' front lines. (Sketo had come home because of his wife's serious illness and had followed the often used procedure of having a friend take his place.)
Mr. Dowling warned the self-appointed prosecutors that such a lynching was not right, whereupon they warned him that he "would get the same medicine" if he interfered! Then...as Sketo stood on the buggy, the rope tightening around his neck, he prayed, "Forgive them; forgive them, dear Lord!" Such a display of Christianity by this forlorn foreigner (he was of Spanish birth and prior to the war had preached around Newton) angered the "judge-and-jury" so much, they could stand it no more. They belted the red horse hitched to the buggy and Sketo's body came crashing downward!....But the victim was tall; his feet were dragging the ground under the post oak tree. Immediately, a crippled guardsman grabbed his crutch and used it to dig away the dirt from under the gasping man's feet. Years and years after this event,....and even into the twentieth century, that hole remained....despite constant attempts to fill it! One by one, the six hangmen died terrible deaths. One was riding his horse when a large limb from a post oak tree fell down and crushed his skull. One was killed by a run away mule. Still another was killed by lightening. One was found dead in a swamp.

	iii.		ELIZABETH DOWLING, b. May 05, 1807.
	iv.		MILLY DOWLING, b. May 05, 1808.
	v.		NOEL DOWLING, b. December 25, 1809, Darlington Dist., South Carolina; d. June 15, 1892, Ozark, Dale County, Alabama; m. SARAH DELANY MCDONALD, 1831.

Notes for NOEL DOWLING:
"DOWLING, NOEL, farmer, was born December 25, 1809, in Darlington County, S. C., and died June 15, 1892, at Ozark; son of Rev. Dempsey and Martha (Stokes) Dowling, of South Carolina, the former a Methodist minister who removed to Alabama in 1826; and grandson of John W. Dowling of Virginia, a Revolutionary soldier of Irish origin. Mr. Dowling received a common school education in South Carolina and was always the patron of schools and helped build up a religious influence in the pioneer country of his adoption. He was for sixty-one years a farmer in Dale County. Married: in 1831, to Sarah Delany, daugher of John MacDonald, a native of Scotland who emigrated to America, settled in Jasper County, Ga., and later located in Dale County."
- Source: "History of ALABAMA and Dictionary of Alabama Biography" by Thomas McAdory Owen, LL.D, VOL. III, Copyright 1921 p. 504

	vi.		FLETCHER DOWLING, b. February 12, 1812.
	vii.		ZILLIH DOWLING, b. May 11, 1813.
	viii.		MARTHA DOWLING, b. 1816.
	ix.		JOHN DOWLING, b. July 20, 1818.
	x.		EDWARD DOWLING, b. October 15, 1820.
	xi.		JAMES DOWLING, b. 1823.
	xii.		MARY ANNA DOWLING, b. 1824.
	xiii.		ZINNAMON DOWLING, b. February 02, 1826.
	xiv.		FRANCES DOWLING, b. October 18, 1827.

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