27 July 2006
To Various Marshall and Rohrer Cousins!
As
I was answering an email to our cousin Jane Cooper in California,
it dawned on me that today marks the 200th
anniversary of the death of our ancestor John Marshall in New Lancaster, Fairfield County, Ohio.
His wife Catharina Truby Rohrer Marshall
would survive him only by 13 days, dying on August 9th and leaving as orphans
her Rohrer children (Elizabeth Rohrer Robinson and Frederick
A. Rohrer) and her Marshall children (Andrew Marshall,
Samuel Marshall, John Marshall and Mary Ann Marshall Bailey).
This
family had arrived in the frontier village
of New Lancaster sometime
in late 1805 or early 1806. Their Marshall
children all had been baptized back in Greensburg,
Pennsylvania, in September 1805, perhaps
in anticipation of the journey. They had not yet purchased property in Ohio. The inventory of possessions from their
estate file indicates that they intended to operate a tavern in New Lancaster.
This had been their livelihood in Greensburg,
where Marshall was
listed in the tax records as an innkeeper; Catharina's father, Christopher
Truby, had died in their tavern-home in 1802.
On
the Ohio
frontier, they “died of a fever".
This simple and tragic set of words was passed down through several
lines of their family to our own time. See the firsthand record of
Thomas Ashe concerning this wide-spread fever at the family website. Ashe visited New Lancaster the same summer
the Marshalls
died and wrote about the sickness he found there.
Their
son John recorded in his family
Bible the dates of his parents' death (apparently carefully remembered by
others for these small children) and the place---"New" Lancaster, now merely Lancaster, Ohio.
Most likely, they were buried on the hill above the village. This site is
now a city park. Memorial stones were erected by the Truby and/or
Rohrer families in the Old German Burying Ground on South Main Street in Greensburg.
These stood into the 1930s, when the data on them was recorded (thank God!) by
Mary Truby Graff. The stones disappeared when Greensburg carelessly converted that historic
graveyard into a parking lot.
Most
likely, the Rev. John Wright (first pastor of the Presbyterian Church in New
Lancaster and a native of Westmoreland
County) sent word back to
the Trubys about the deaths and the survival of the six children. Their Aunt Hovey---Mary Ann Truby
Hovey---wife of Dr. Simeon Hovey, went
with others to Ohio and brought them all to
her new home in what is now Hovey Township, Armstrong County,
Pennsylvania----on the high west bluff of the Allegheny River just north of present-day Parker.
There, and with nearby Truby uncles and aunts, they were reared. The
Hoveys named their home "Happy Retreat". In
time the little cluster of farms and houses near Simeon Hovey's farm came to be
called Happy Retreat and continued
with that geographic name through the late 1800s. One hopes that
the children knew some considerable happiness there, given
the tragedy of their early childhood.
Four
of the six orphaned children (Elizabeth Rohrer Robinson, Samuel and John
Marshall and Mary Ann Marshall Bailey) in time would be buried behind the
Parker Presbyterian Church, close to their "parents", the
Hoveys. Andrew Marshall would die young, lost south of Wheeling, Virginia, in
the Ohio River at age 31.
Frederick A. Rohrer would make his home in Greensburg, live to be a very old man (until
1882), and be buried there. Four of
the six children, by the way, lived into their 80s. Samuel also had died at the young age of 33.
May John Marshall, his wife Catharina
Truby, and her first husband Frederick Rohrer all rest in peace with their
ancestors---and with their departed descendants, our large and extended Rohrer
and Marshall Family.
"A family tree
can wither if nobody tends its roots."
Your cousin,
Kelly Marshall
§§§§§§§
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