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Descendants of
Pioneers Visit Here
Mr. and Mrs. Horace Coudy of St. Louis are
in Hillsboro for a vacation stay and they are making their home
while here at the residence of former County Superintendent of
Schools John H. Grigg and Mrs. Grigg, in Tillson Place.
Mr. Coudy, a retired business man of St. Louis has never lived in
Hillsboro but his ancestors were pioneer settlers at Hamilton, the
town which preceded Hillsboro, about 1821 and was located west of
here and which was abandoned when the present site of Hillsboro was
chosen as the county seat, in 1823. [Hamilton was apparently
the first town proposed for the area but it never materialized.
The Seward's settled a mile or two from where Hamilton was proposed
to be.]
The mother of Mr. Coudy was [Mary] Caroline
Seward, one of the daughters of Colonel Israel Seward, who
came here from Ohio and whose family before that was from New York
[actually New Jersey]. Colonel Israel Seward and his wife, "Aunt Peggy" Seward, and their
children, who settled on the present Butler hill, south of Butler,
were the grandparents of Horace Coudy. They came to this
county before it was a county and built their large log cabin in a
grove of trees north of the present Jenkins or Chisholm farm, south
of Butler, previous to 1821. The grove was called "Seward's
Grove" and their house still stands today, with additions and
clapboarding to turn it into a large two-storied modern-looking
house called "the Walker place" for a good many years, now "the
Roberson place".
[The author refers to Israel having the
title "Colonel". I've found no evidence that suggests
that Israel was ever a Colonel in any military service and I believe
the author has Israel confused with his father, Colonel John Seward,
who served as a Colonel in the War of 1812 and who also settled near
Hillsboro either with or possibly a year or two after his son.
Israel's home, said to be still standing in 1938, was no long around
when I visited Hillsboro in December of 2004.]
Colonel Israel Seward and his wife kept an
inn, where lawyers, legislator and other travelers between
Springfield and the then-capital, Vandalia, stopped overnight.
One of their sons, the first George Seward in the county, was the
second mail carrier in the county. Abraham Lincoln,
Springfield attorney and Illinois legislator, slept in the home
later on in history, going to Vandalia from Springfield, on
horseback.
Mrs. Margaret Seward outlived her husband
and eventually moved to Hillsboro to make her home, in the red
brick house north of the Courthouse which once was "the Starr hotel"
and now is a rooming house owned by Mr. and Mrs. Walter Harkey.
Mrs. Margaret Seward was one of the founders and first two members,
the other having been John Tillson of Hillsboro, of the Hillsboro
Presbyterian church, in March 1828. The church's 110th
anniversary is to be observed this month.
Colonel Israel Seward was an uncle of
William Henry Seward of New York, that American statesman who was
from 1861 to 1869, secretary of state, serving his first term as
such in the cabinet of Abraham Lincoln. William Henry Seward
was instrumental, as secretary of state, in the purchase of Alaska
from Russia in 1867. The purchase price was $7,200,000, a
price which was returned many times over, to the treasury, by the
discovery of rich gold fields there, twenty years after the
purchase. But for years, Seward's purchase was derided, as a
place of ice, snow, Indians and seals and was called "Seward's
Folly".
[Israel Seward was in fact William H.
Seward's first cousin, not uncle. They shared the same
grandfather, the first Col. John Seward (1730-1797) of Revolutionary Was fame.
William H. Seward's father was Samuel S. Seward (1768-1844), a son
of Col. John Seward and Israel Seward's father was Col. John Seward
(1765-1845), also a son of Col. John Seward, the elder.]
Horace Coudy, the descendant of Hillsboro
pioneers, now visiting the scenes of the early life of his family in
Illinois, has spent most of his life in St. Louis. An uncle of
his [Oliver Coudy] was the first husband of the late Mrs. Susan Rice, widow of the
late Judge E. Y. Rice and the mother of the late Mrs. Amos Miller of
Hillsboro. Horace Coudy has many cousins "several times
removed" living in the county, including Mrs. Mary Cory, Mrs. J.D.
Chisholm, Mrs. John O. Fisher and LeMar Seward of Hillsboro, Jesse
Seward of Butler and many others at Raymond and other places.
There are two books valuable to such
Montgomery county residents as are interested in pioneer life in
Hillsboro, in which the Tillsons, the Sewards, the Rountrees, the
Killpatricks and other "first families" in the county appear.
They are Mrs. John Tillson's book, "A Woman's Story of Pioneer
Illinois", a copy of which is available at the Hillsboro Public
Library, and the papers of Judge Hiram Rountree, published in the
Hillsboro Democrat in the early 70's, written by Judge Rountree and
published before his death and re-published by The Montgomery News,
in 1931 and 1932. Judge Rountree's articles are not available
at the library, except in bound form in The Montgomery News. A
copy in the form of clippings, pasted in a book, is owned by his
granddaughter, Mrs. E. M. Stubblefield of Hillsboro. The
Illinois State Historical Library at Springfield also filed the
Montgomery News' copies in which Judge Rountree's papers were
re-published during 1931 and 1932. |
