Boone: A Biography (4 page)

The Boones were Quakers from Devonshire in the extreme southwest of England. Devonshire is one of the most beautiful counties of Great Britain, a place of highlands and moors covered with heather and bracken, high rocky hills, long pleasant valleys running down to the sea. The river Exe rises out of a bog in the north and runs through Brampton, Tiverton, Stoke Canon, Exeter. The Boone family had been settled in this area for at least two hundred years, living primarily around Exeter, an ancient town with buildings dating from Roman,
Saxon, Norman, and Tudor times. Exeter’s splendid cathedral dated from the eleventh century and had been rebuilt between 1280 and 1370 as a Gothic masterpiece.

Exeter had long been a center for the weaving and dyeing trades, producing a woolen cloth of serge weave. But it was also a market center where many goods as well as produce were sold near the cathedral. Smiths made guns, horseshoes, hinges, and tools for the village. George Boone II completed an apprenticeship as a blacksmith and married Sarah Uppey around 1660 before settling down to his trade at Stoke Canon. George II was a member of the Church of England, prosperous, entitled to a pew at the parish church. He was the father of George III, born in 1666, who became a Quaker.

The man who founded the Society of Friends, George Fox, was born in Nottinghamshire in 1624 to a Puritan family and was apprenticed to a shoemaker. At the age of eighteen he experienced a conversion, a call, and began to wander from town to town, valley to valley, witnessing and exhorting, encouraging drunkards and sinners to repent and reform. He supported himself by making shoes. In Nottingham Fox was jailed for intruding on a church service, shouting, “Truth is not in this meeting.” He was arrested in Derbyshire for preaching in the street. His message of humility and simplicity began to attract followers, and enemies, and in places he and his listeners were stoned. His flocks were primarily artisans and farmers. His followers were especially well received in the West Country, in Devon and Cornwall. But in much of England Quakers were accused of vagrancy and jailed. Fox himself was imprisoned for refusing to take off his hat in court. In prison he drew a large following among the inmates and local people.

Quaker communities became tightly knit. Before a Quaker could move away he had to get a “certificate of cleanness” from his meeting, declaring his faith and good character. Quakers were expected to visit the sick and bereaved, talk with the troubled, and discuss problems and plans in the family and community. To marry, they had to obtain approval of the committee of Friends and were forbidden “to keep company”
or marry outside the community of Quakers. They had to avoid all gambling, music, frivolity. But because Quakers were known to be trustworthy in their dealings, they gained the respect of society and their businesses prospered.

George Boone II chose the weaver’s trade for his son George III, who was born in the sixth year of the Restoration, 1666. George III established his weaving business in the village of Bradninch, where he had probably served his apprenticeship. In 1687 young George married Mary Maugridge, from an old Bradninch family. Mary, the daughter of John Maugridge, was baptized in Bradninch in 1668. She gave birth to her third child, Squire Boone, in 1696. The other children were George IV, baptized in 1690; Sarah, 1692; Mary, 1694 (d. 1696); Mary, 1699; John, 1702; Joseph, 1704; Benjamin, 1706; James, 1709; and Samuel, 1711. It would seem the Boones always had large families. George III and Mary Maugridge Boone joined the Friends Meeting in nearby Cullompton sometime after 1702.

After the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession, the woolen trade declined. There was widespread unemployment in Devon. Norwich and Yorkshire had begun to produce a less expensive kind of wool cloth. This decline in their business almost certainly influenced the Boones to think of immigrating to the New World. George IV, Sarah, and Squire Boone traveled to Pennsylvania as early as 1713, and George IV and Squire soon joined the Friends Meeting there.

It would seem the younger Boones were sent to Pennsylvania to scout out opportunities for George III, and the rest of his family soon followed. But before he left Devonshire for America, George Boone III wrote out a confession to the local Society of Friends. The handwritten copy still exists in the Devon Hall of Records in Exeter. In the letter he admits a number of failings:

I am constrained to make mention
of this my transgression not without grief but with trouble and sorrow of heart for this my
wickedness—which was keeping of wild company and drinking by which I sometimes became guilty of drunkenness to the dishonour of truth.

And then he goes on to confess another shortcoming:

I fell into another gross evil which I also confess to my great shame and sorrow that I did so little regard the Lord and the dear mercies of the Lord, but went on in another gross sin by which the honour due unto marriage was lost, for the marriage bed was defiled.

Bradninch, 29th of the 12th month, 1716

Many Quakers had already gone to the New World in the 1600s. William Penn, the son of an admiral highly respected by King Charles II, had been inspired by the “inner light” as a youth and was expelled from Oxford University for refusing to attend Anglican services. He became associated with George Fox and preached on the Continent. He served as trustee for Quakers immigrating to the New World. By 1678 there were hundreds of Quakers from Yorkshire living in New Jersey. Some had already crossed the Delaware into what would become Pennsylvania, where Swedish immigrants had earlier built settlements. The headquarters of the Quakers in America was established at Burlington, New Jersey, in 1677. George Fox visited the community there to encourage the members.

On March 4, 1681, Charles II, to settle a debt claim to William Penn’s late father, granted Penn a charter to twenty-eight million acres, all lands west of the Delaware River between forty and forty-five degrees and extending five degrees west. The king named the region Pennsylvania in honor of the late admiral. William Penn himself came to the colony in 1682. Penn’s proprietary land agent granted tracts of land to immigrants on generous terms. After a parcel was surveyed, the purchaser paid an annual quitrent of a penny an acre. Land could be bought outright, fee simple, at the price of one hundred pounds for five thousand acres. Settlers started to pour into the colony. Between
1682 and 1684, fifty ships arrived in Philadelphia, bringing settlers from London, Bristol, Ireland, Holland, and Germany. A number of Welsh began to arrive.

The Welsh immigrants tended to settle near each other in what was called the Welsh Tract, forty thousand acres with towns named Merion, Radnor, Haverford. The only physicians in the colony at this time were members of the Welsh community.

Edward Morgan of Bala, a Welsh Quaker who had arrived in 1691, settled with his family in the Moyamensing District of Philadelphia County. Nine years later they moved to Towamencin Township near Gwynedd. Here Squire Boone, who would become the father of Daniel Boone, met Edward’s daughter Sarah. A Friend’s meetinghouse had been established at Gwynedd in 1701. George III and Mary Boone had moved there soon after they arrived in America.

The Morgans of Merionethshire in North Wales had become Quakers soon after George Fox visited there in 1657. Morgan is one of the most common names in Wales, along with Jones. Edward Morgan belonged to the tenth generation descended from Llewelyn Ap Morgan. That part of Wales is renowned for its mountain crags and mists. In the seventeenth century its main businesses were sheep grazing; knitting stockings, gloves, sweaters; and making wigs. Writing in the 1180s the historian and priest Giraldus Cambrensis described Merionethshire as “
the roughest and rudest of all
the Welsh districts. The mountains are very high, with narrow ridges and a great number of very sharp peaks, all jumbled together in confusion. If the shepherds who shout together and exchange comments from these lofty summits should ever decide to meet, it would take them almost the whole day to climb up and down again.”

Quakerism had taken root in that part of Wales following the preaching of Morgan Lloyd and John Ap John. Since the times of the Druids, the Welsh had been a people who loved music and praise. One of their own in the fifth century, named
Morgan, had called himself Pelagius
, translating Morgan (“of the sea”) into Latin, when he rose
to high office in Rome and preached a doctrine denying original sin. He gained many followers, until he was denounced as a heretic by Augustine of Hippo. The Welsh had always loved a religion of praise, and independence, preferring to seek peace, liberty, and happiness on their own terms and in their own rugged world.

When George Fox visited Wales, he found a small, though receptive, audience for his “quietism” and pursuit of the “inner light.” Fox’s best reception was in the mountains of Merionethshire, and there he invited his listeners to come to Pennsylvania to take part in the “holy experiment” with freedom and brotherhood on the banks of the Delaware and Schuylkill. Edward Morgan and his family had answered that call.

W
HEN
George III and Mary Boone arrived in Pennsylvania in 1717 with their six younger children, Mary, John, Joseph, Benjamin, James, and Samuel, they first lived with their son George IV and his wife, Deborah Howell Boone, in Abingdon. Before winter they moved to the Quaker community of North Wales. George IV had presented the
certificate “of his orderly and good conversation
” from Cullompton, Devonshire, to the Friends’ Abington meeting on “8 mo. 26, 1713.”

It was at Gwynedd, near Oley, that Squire Boone and Sarah Morgan were given permission to marry on the thirtieth day of the Sixth Month in 1720. Quakers referred to the months by numbers to avoid using the pagan names such as January and February. Earlier that same year George III had been required to confess to the Gwynedd Monthly Meeting his “
forwardship in giving his consent
” to the marriage of his daughter Mary to someone “Contrary to the Establish’d order amongst us.” This was not the last time a Boone would be asked to confess and apologize to the Friends for the behavior of his children.

Squire Boone has been described as a rather small man
, with fair
skin, red hair, and gray eyes. Sarah Morgan was taller than most women, with black eyes and black hair, strong and active. The marriage of Squire and Sarah is described in the Gwynedd Friends Meeting Book:

At a solemn assembly of the said people
[Quakers] . . . the said Squire Boone took the said Sarah Morgan by the hand (and) did in a solemn manner declare that he took her to be his wife, promising to be unto her a faithful and loving husband, until death should separate them, and then and there in the said assembly Sarah Morgan did likewise declare.

In April 1718 George III moved his family to Oley, in Berks County, where his older daughter, Sarah, and her husband, Jacob Stover, had been living for three years. The new meetinghouse in Oley was named Exeter, after the town back in Devonshire. The stone building still stands and is used as a meetinghouse. George III bought four hundred acres of fine meadowland and forest. By 1728 George III had built a mill at Exeter, and we have the impression of years of prosperity. But after a period of peaceful relations with Indians, the area was suddenly threatened by Shawnees. George Boone wrote to the governor requesting help: “
Our condition at present
looks with a bad vizard, for undoubtedly the Indians will fall down upon us very suddenly, and our inhabitants are generally fled, there remains about 20 men with me to guard my mill.”

Many settlers were so frightened they left their homesteads. Within days eleven Indians, painted for war and carrying weapons, arrived near Van Bibber’s Township, going door to door demanding provisions and drink. A posse of twenty local men gathered to pursue the warriors. The leader of the Indian band refused to negotiate and fired on the settlers, wounding two before fading into the forest. The settlers took refuge in a mill, possibly George Boone’s. The Shawnees were on their way to join a party of Delawares in a
campaign against the
“Flatfeet,” as the Catawbas were sometimes called. In all they wounded five settlers in what luckily turned out to be the only ever hostile encounter between whites and Native Americans in the Philadelphia area.

B
ECAUSE OF
their cooperation, craftsmanship, division of labor, and hard work, the Quakers were well adapted for frontier life. They were used to being frugal, self-reliant, resourceful. They raised their own sheep and flax, spun their own wool and linen, wove their own cloth. In the Philadelphia area the Quakers were in the majority and became the leaders of the colony.

The Boones were leaders of their community. Squire Boone became a trustee of the Oley Monthly Meeting, and his brother
George IV and his wife, Deborah, deeded land
for the Quaker burial ground. George III was a justice of the peace. Several Boones served as delegates to the quarterly and annual meetings of the Friends. The strong sense of community and brotherhood among the Quakers helped sustain them through the hardships of the frontier. They provided care and aid to the sick or struggling. At the same time they were strict about the conduct of their members, requiring violators to make a written confession of errors and acknowledgment of justice. The confessions were posted on the door of the meetinghouse.

Squire Boone was a weaver and blacksmith. He also farmed his land and ran a gristmill, and he had a substantial herd of cattle. A man of many parts, hardworking and talented, Squire was neighbor to Mennonites, Swedish Lutherans, Presbyterians, Huguenots, and Moravians as well as Quakers. Though he grew increasingly independent and liberal in his thinking, he was a man of patience and common sense. And like his father before him, he was touched with restlessness, curiosity, an urge to move on.

Among the Boones’ neighbors in the area were the extensive Lincoln family. “
Boones and Lincolns several times
intermarried. Sarah Lincoln
sister of John Lincoln who was the gr[eat] grandfather of President Lincoln, married William Boone son of George Boone and Deborah (Howell) Boone by Friends Ceremony 8th mo 27th 1761.” Anne Boone, daughter of Squire’s brother James, married Abraham Lincoln on July 10, 1760. Because Lincoln was not a Quaker she was condemned by the Friends Meeting. Their daughter Mary later married a James Boone. Both Boones and Lincolns are buried in the yard of the Exeter Meeting House. The Boones and Lincolns would be acquainted later also in Virginia and Kentucky.