Autauga-Statewide County AlArchives History - Books .....House, Wilder, Bledsoe 1888
************************************************
Copyright.  All rights reserved.
http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm
http://www.usgwarchives.net/al/alfiles.htm
************************************************

File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by:
linda houlroyd houlroyd@oakharbor.net November 13, 2011, 8:38 am

Book Title: A History Of Methodism In Alabama


It is impossible at this stage of matters to give with absolute certainty the
name of the Methodist who first settled in the bounds of what was for many years
the Alabama Circuit, but it is a fact that Mrs. Martha Lee Bledsoe, if not the
first Methodist reaching that fair and beautiful region, was, nevertheless, in
the advance of Methodist emigrants to that section. She took up her abode on the
sunset side of the Coosa River, a mile or so from Fort Jackson, in August, 1815.
That was just one year after a treaty had been made and concluded between Maj.
Gen. Andrew Jackson, on behalf of the United States of America, and the chiefs,
deputies, and warriors of the Creek Nation, extinguishing the Indian title
thereto and ceding the region of country about the Alabama River and further out
to the United States Government, and it was while the United States troops were
stationed on the line which bounded the ceded territory, superintending the
removal of the Indians across the said line. That boundary line has been given
on a preceding page in Chapter VI.

' A slight detail in biography and incident will narrate how Mrs. Martha Lee
Bledsoe was led to emigrate to the section of country which was once traversed
by the Alabama Circuit. Her maiden name was Wilder. She was born in the Colony
of Virginia in 1770. Her father, William Wilder, who served through the seven
years of the Revolutionary War between the United Colonies and Great Britain,
moved, after the close of that war, to that section of Georgia now included in
Wilkes County. When a young lady she married B. H. House, who in a few years
after marriage died, leaving her with four children, two sons and two daughters.
A few years after the death of her first husband she married J. Bledsoe, of
Kentucky, who died about one year after marriage, leaving her by this marriage
one daughter. "When the war between the United States and Great Britain, and the
war between the United States and the Creek Indians commenced, the two sons of
Mrs. Bledsoe, Jacob P. House and William H. House, enlisted in the military
service, and they were employed in the campaign against the Creek Indians and
the British. Being a widow and her two sons being in the army, Mrs. Bledsoe
moved from Georgia to Winchester, Tennessee, where then lived her married
daughter. When the time of service for which they had enlisted expired, her two
sons were honorably discharged from the army. They were mustered out of service
at Fort Jackson. Instead of returning to their former home, they took up their
abode on the soil they had helped to redeem from savage occupancy, and went into
business across the river from where they were discharged from the military
service. They built for themselves a storehouse on the opposite side of the
Coosa River from Fort Jackson and about one mile from the fort, and supplying
themselves with a stock of goods, which they had transported from Fort Claiborne
on the Alabama River on pole boats, they opened a traffic with the Indians and
also with the United States soldiers who were stationed at the fort a mile away.
When her sons were settled at that point Mrs. Bledsoe set her face to go into
that land to sojourn with them, and in the month of August, 1815, having passed
over the intervening country between "Winchester, Tennessee, and that spot, she
took up her abode at the place of her sons' business, on the very line which
divided the ceded territory from that still owned and still to be occupied by
the Indians. Afterward she moved from that place and settled a home in the pine
woods, about twelve miles from where the town of Washington was established, and
in the bounds once included in what was established as Autauga County she lived
until her death in 1832. She died suddenly near Big Island, on the Coosa River.
Mrs. Bledsoe was renewed in her heart in her childhood under the Wesleyan
ministry, and she was an earnest and faithful member of the Methodist Episcopal
Church until her death. For a half century or more she walked in the ways of the
Lord. She attended upon the class-meetings and love-feasts. She was at the first
Camp-meeting held at the noted Camp-ground at Graves's Ferry, on the Alabama
River, five miles below the town of Washington. When she lived at the place a
mile or so from Fort Jackson she resorted to the fort to hear the Chaplain to
the soldiers preach. Two of her daughters and one of her sons were Methodists,
while one of her sons was an Episcopalian, and her youngest daughter, Mrs. C. M.
Brown, who in this year (1889) is still living, has been for long years a
Presbyterian.

Evidently Mrs. Bledsoe and her children were among the very first settlers in
that fascinating region from Fort Jackson to the Holy Ground, after the
extinction of the Indian titles to the land thereabouts. It is a tradition that
Jacob P. House, the son of Mrs. Bledsoe by her first husband, raised the first
crop of corn ever raised by a white man in what was at one time Autauga County,
after the cession of that territory by the Indians to the United States Government.

File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/al/autauga/history/1888/ahistory/housewil47nms.txt

This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.net/alfiles/

File size: 5.7 Kb