Connecting Adam Dickinson of Massachusetts with Adam Dickenson of Virginia
Explanation of who the two Adam Dick*nsons were
and why I think that they are the same person.
Adam Dickinson of Massachusetts Adam Dickinson (spelled with an i) was born to a prominent New England family on 5 Feb 1701/2.
His birth, like those of all of his siblings, is well documented in Springfield, Massachusetts town records.
The marriages of of Adams's siblings, and the births of many of his nieces and nephews are similarly recorded. But there does not appear to be any record of Adam Dickinson in New England after his birth.
Adam's paternal grandfather, Nathaniel Dickinson (1601-1676)
(see Wikipedia)
immigrated in the
Winthrop Fleet in 1630,
and was instrumental in founding and governing the towns of Wethersfield, Connecticut and Hadley, Massachusetts.
His mother's (Abigail's) paternal grandfather, Adam Blakeman (1598-1665)
(see Wikipedia),
was a Puritan minister who immigrated with members of his flock in 1638.
They established the town of Stratford Connecticut, which, like many towns of that era in of New England,
was a Puritan "Utopian" town in which the lead minister of the local Puritan church was also its political leader.
Adam Blakeman was, essentially by definition, quite conservative, but he is reported to have run the church and the town fairly (well, by the standards of the day).
Abigail's paternal grandfather,Moses Wheeler (1598-1698), Moses settled in New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1630's and then in Stratford, Connecticut, where, among other things,
he ran a ferry across the Housatonic River between Milford and Stratford.
His contributions to the development of Stratford are memorialized through the Moses Wheeler bridge,
which carries Interstate 95 across the Housatonic, very close to where he ran his ferry over 350 years ago.
Adam Dickenson of Virginia
Adam Dickenson (spelled with an e), my 7x great-grandfather, was one of the first permanent settlers in the Cowpasture Region of central Virginia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
He settled there in 1744, when the Cowpasture (named after a river) was very much on the Virginia frontier.
The Cowpasture region was entirely in Augusta County at the time, but is today divided among Augusta, Bath, Alleghany, and Botetourt Counties.
Adam Dickenson appears frequently in records of Augusta and Bath Counties. A few examples:
He first appears there in 1745 when land was surveyed for him.
He was as a justice in the first Augusta County court in 1745, and built the first mill in the area in 1747.
He was the executor of the estate of his son-in-law Samuel Brown in 1750
He accumulated a fair amount of land and property before his death in 1762.
However, Adam just kind of "showed up" in the Cowpasture in 1845, and no Virginia records that I have found identify his origins.
Adam Dickenson's Virginia Family
Adam Dickenson's wife was
Catherine Stephenson. Adam died intestate, and court records regarding of his estate establish his wife's name.
Adam and Catharine had three children - two daughters, Abigail and Mary, and a son, John.
Abigail Dickenson (1730-1749), married Joseph Carpenter, Jr. in 1746, in Augusta County.
It has been reported that she was born in 1730 in New Jersey. (That location will become important later.)
But that report is not well documented.
Captain John Dickenson
(1732-1799), the leader of Dickenson's Rangers of the Virginia Militia,
and for whom Fort Dickenson in central Virginia was named.
John Dickenson was injured in the Battle of Point Pleasant in what is now West Virginia in 1774.
Mary Dickenson
(1725-??), who is sometimes mistakenly said to be the daughter of John Dickinson,
the governor of Pennsylvania and Delaware. But that John Dickinson was born after Mary.
Mary and two of her children led distinctly interesting lives. See a footnote below.
Reconciling the two Adam Dick*nsons as one person
No historical records tied to his time in Virginia reveal his place of birth or parents,
and only one Virginia history book appears to remarks at all on events in his life before he appeared in Virginia.
Nonetheless I am comfortable asserting that Adam Dickinson of Massachusetts and Adam Dickenson of Virginia
are the same person.
Birth: The birth year reported for Adam Dickenson in Virginia records matches the
well-documented birth year of Adam Dickinson.
The births, marriages, and deaths of all of Adam Dickinson's sibling are recorded in contemporary town and church records.
If Adam Dickinson had died as a youth or young adult in New England, that event almost surely would have been recorded.
Previous Place of Residence:
Oren Morton's Annals of Bath County Virginia says that Adam Dickenson of Virgina was in Hanover, New Jersey in 1733.
Hanover is 20 miles Elizabethtown (now Elizabeth), where his brother Jonathon served as minister of the Congregational (then Presbyterian) church fromn 1709 until he died in 1747.
Jonathan was a prominent theologian,
and the first president of what became Princeton University.
New Jersey has been reported (though not with much authority)
as the birthplace of Adam Dickenson's first daughter, Abigail.
Spelling: All records from Massachusetts describe his birth and spell his name Dickclass="red">i.
In Virginia,
There is no specific record of how Adam Dickenson spelled his own name but all civil records is son John
referred to himself as "John Dickinson" in his will.
Most stories referring to Captain John Dickenson's militia company refer to "Dickenson's Rangers",
but the historical markers at the fort named for him identifies it as "Fort Dickinson".
Finally, I've not been able to find another good possibility for the origins of Adam Dickenson.
Geographical Notes on Bath and Augusta Counties, and "The Cowpasture"
Bath County - the subject of the book excerpted below - wasn't created until 1790, well after the events described in the book.
Most of these events happened in what was then part of Augusta County. As late as 1775, Augusta County extended indefinitely westward, through what is now West Virginia, and beyond. In 1776, the territory that is now in West Virginia was separated from Augusta County, and the northeast and southeast corners of Augusta County were separated into Rockingham and Rockbridge Counties, respectively. Bath County was created from the western end of Augusta County and the northernmost part of Botetourt County. Then, in 1822, Alleghany County was formed from portions of Botetourt and Bath Counties.
The Cowpasture Region is an ill-defined area of central Virginia that was part of Augusta County when it was settled in the middle of the 19th century. It encompasses portions of modern-day Augusta, Rockbridge, Botetourt, and Bath counties, and includes much of the length of the Calfpasture, Little Calfpasture, and Cowpasture Rivers, plus part of the Jackson River. A focus of the Cowpasture Region is Beverly Manor, which was effectively a housing development of the 1840's and 1850's, in what is now the outskirts of Staunton, Virginia (an independent city inside Augusta County). The region is, I suppose, roughly bisected by the Cowpasture River. An article about Settlers of the Cowpasture in Augusta County is informative, but inexplicably omits mention of Adam Dickenson. (To illustrate the notion of overlapping county records, that article references Oren Morton's book on the history of Alleghany County.)
Footnote: Adam's daughter Mary Dickenson
Her first husband,
Samuel Brown,
died in 1749, when she was only 24 and pregnant with their third son.
Her second husband,
Humphrey Madison, an ensign in Dickenson's Rangers, was killed on 12 Sep, 1756, in a raid by Native Americans.
Within a few days of Humphrey Madison's death, two of this three stepsons (the sons of Mary and Samuel Brown) were kidnapped in (probably) a separate raid.
One of Polly's kidnapped sons, (probably) Henry Brown, escaped and returned home, though perhaps not for several years. His return and later life are not well documented.
Her oldest son, Adam Brown, did not return at all. Instead - surely unknown to Polly - he grew up among the Wyandotte people of Michigan. He retained his birth name, but became a village chief and was reasonably prominent in the Wyandotte nation, ultimately playing a leadership role among Native Americans in the war of 1812. The town of Brownstown, Michigan (which no longer exists under that name) was named for him.
Her only daughter, Catherine (Kitty) Madison, lost her father (Humphrey Madison) when she was only two years old. Catherine also had a difficult young adulthood:
She married Capt. Robert McClenachan, Jr at age 18. He was killed in the Battle of Point Pleasant in 1774when she was just 20
and was pregnant with their second son.
She then married William Pogue, who reportedly died after they were married only 10 months,
again, leaving her pregnant. Their son died as an infant.
Fortunately, Kitty's third marriage, with William Arbuckle lasted until her death
Both Mary and Catherine had better luck with their third marriages:
Mary Dickinson married James Littlepage in about 1758 and lived together for 35 years until he died.
They had one son, John Dickinson Littlepage, who named several of his children after Mary's other children.
Mary may have had a fourth husband named Davis, though no documentation for him or their marriage has been found.
The evidence for that marriage is that her brother John Dickinson's will referred to her as "Mary Davis".
Kitty Madison married William Arbuckle at age 25 in 1779.
He had survived the Battle of Point Pleasant unscathed, but was not a professional soldier.
William and Catherine (my 5x Great-Grandparents) had eight children.
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1732 - 1799 (66 years)
