A Hoggard Memoriam…Again

An update to / clarifications of my June 23rd, 2021 Hoggard post on Facebook…upon further obsessive research, and untangling of Ancestry.com results!

The “decorated graves of Ma and Pa Hoggard”…but only the first Ma, and only until about 1833.

In Virginia, Temple Hoggard married Margaret Johnson in 1822 when both were about 19. Margaret gave him six children in 11 years, but died apparently just after the family moved to Ross County.

She had just had a child (whose death date is unrecorded, and might have been an infant death – since the name James is repeated for a later son) and I can imagine there could have been fatal consequences after the 400+-mile trek. (See Google’s modern equivalents of possible routes…and my math in a comment at the end.)

Lived in the Valley First, then Later the Hilltop

Although Temple bought part of his hilltop farm from an older brother of his deceased wife – it was a few years later that he migrated there.

Temple moved the family westward in 1832 or 1833, probably to join his brother-in-law Alexander Johnson, in Ross County – an example of “chain migration.” But he didn’t buy land from Alexander until Temple married a new wife.

Temple is first recorded in Union Township, probably near West Scioto Township – Temple’s neighbors in the 1840 census include William Rodgers, who was the son of an early large landowner at Slate Mills. (William’s father was also from Virginia, though from Loudon County in the north corner of Virginia, not the Hoggards’ Louisa in the center. Like his father, William was buried in the now much-desecrated Union Cemetery on Union Lane off Egypt Pike.)

Another Union Township neighbor of Temple was Levi Anderson, who in 1838 had moved to and expanded the historic home still proudly standing on Anderson Station Road near Maple Grove Road. (Levi was also related to Rodgers, and both were involved in Nathaniel Massie’s 1795 “Battle of Reeves Crossing” that delayed the founding of Chillicothe a year…but I’m getting distracted.)

(Curiously, Temple had a brother named “Anderson,” born 1807 – implying that the two families knew each other in Virginia. Also, one of Temple’s daughters married an Anderson.but I’m getting…never mind.)

I can’t tell exactly where widower Temple located his household of 10 in the 1840 census, which certainly included hired help beyond the seven Hoggards. He may have been renting while dealing with his family’s loss of their mother after relocating across the mountains. But these two prominent neighbors imply he may have been on the eastern end of Anderson Station Road.

Though he evidently wasn’t living there yet, Temple had probably acquired a square of about 110 acres on the West Scioto hilltop by 1838, which was apparently the core of the fa – and now includes the Hoggard ruins, graveyard, and most of the Hoggard Trail in the Buzzard’s Roost preserve. Perhaps he was at work clearing the land and building a home for his family before moving them there after at least seven years.

In 1844 he bought an adjacent triangle of 32 acres from brother-in-law Alexander Johnson on the hilltop near Polk Hollow Road, to create an anvil-shaped property. (Johnson is also involved in the history of Harley’s House, which stood on the site of the park’s “Kid’s Nature Zone” at the large parking area.)

A Blended Family

Temple remarried 11 years after he was widowed, to a widow who had three children.

Mary Cline was born in or near Frankfort in 1807. In 1825 she married Johnathan Devault (or Devoult…and probably remotely related to the DeWalt company). He may have been a member of the early German (and bordering French and Swiss) immigrants to Ross County, decades before the large German immigration in the 1840s and 1850s.

She gave Devault three children before he died in 1843. Temple Hoggard married the widow in October 1844, and Mary became the second Hoggard “Ma,” giving Temple three children.

But she did not join him in final rest. While wife #1 Margaret was presumably buried in the Hoggard graveyard in 1833, wife #2 Mary was buried in the McDill Cemetery in 1890 (on Polk Hollow Road behind North Fork Village.) McDill Cemetery appears to have become the community burial ground for West Scioto Township by then.

Yet, Temple appears to have insisted on being laid to rest in the family graveyard – at age 95, eight years after his second wife. (Other family members were later buried in McDill.)

The shared obelisk in the graveyard for Temple and Margaret could have been raised earlier, maybe in the 1870s, so he may have been committed to that site. (But I still can’t reason out why Margaret’s 1832 or 1833 death date is absent…unless she’s not buried there..but why else would there be a footstone?)

Who Was Nancy Mull?

I’m sorry to short-change her again (after my Facebook post), but the only non-family marked burial in the Hoggard Cemetery remains a mystery. Nancy Mull died in 1847 at age 26, and at least her marker has been reassembled now that the graveyard is in a park. (I didn’t even know the four large pieces were there when I explored the land in the 1980s.) The tablet-type gravestone, of probably Portsmouth-area Buena Vista sandstone, is a different character than all the other marked and unmarked gravestones. If it was reconstructed in the original orientation (I presume fitted to the below-grade remnant), it also faces north, unlike the south-facing marked Hoggard markers.

I first speculated that she was a freed slave the Hoggards may have brought west from Virginia, but that does not match the age of a woman slave aged between 36 and 54 owned by 27-year-old Temple as listed in the 1830 Virginia census. Nancy may have instead been hired help, or perhaps a neighbor who succumbed to the stresses of settlement or childbirth. That would imply there was a family graveyard already established, possibly by occupants before the Hoggards – who may be marked by some of the plain slabs, or in now-unmarked graves.

(Whoever started the graveyard and when, they located it on the highest point of land in the immediate vicinity, along the public road – following traditional wisdom and respect.)

Whose Child was Lovey J.?

When I first made my Facebook post, I should have looked more closely at the listing for the Hoggard Cemetery in “Tombstone Inscriptions of Scioto Township” published by the Ross County Genealogical Society. The 1969 list shows that the marker says right on it that the five-year-old was the child of “A.M. & M.”

That would be Temple’s son Alexander M., and his wife Margaret Anderson. (That’s another Margaret in the family, and another link to the Anderson family. Also note that “Alexander” is the same name as the brother-in-law who sold land to Temple.)

I’m not sure where this second-generation family lived at the time, but by the 1870s, Alexander’s family were in “East Scioto Township.” In yet another tragedy in the family, Alexander died in 1877 at age 48 in or near East Monroe in Highland County. I suspect it was not a natural death, away from home like that – possibly an accident or a swift illness, possibly while visiting or working with an uncle who lived in western Ross County. (I’m forgetting details somewhere in my convoluted notes.)

Yet Alexander was buried in the old family graveyard…right next to his daughter who had been laid to rest 12 years earlier.

Note to Self: Further Topics to Explore

• What is the context of the name “Temple” in the Hoggard family? There are one or two more before our Ohio Temple. (Not to mention the four or five “Johns” in a row, though that is a common name.)

• Were the now-blank rough stones used for most of the burials in the Hoggard graveyard painted in lieu of being inscribed? Is there any evidence of paint after more than a century? Nothing is mentioned in the Genealogical Society’s notes.

• How does a second, eastern, home/farmstead shown on an 1860 map factor into the Hoggard farm? What happened to it and when, and what might be discoverable and how? Why is there a separate entrenched, older road snaking down the hillside from it (or up to it), across a property line to the main valley? Was it the original Hoggard homestead or built by previous settlers, and the current ruins were a later expansion for the growing family?

This may have been a simple log cabin, with at most four large cornerstones as a foundation – easily carted off when it was abandoned, as well as the fireplace masonry. Perhaps those were reused in an addition to the main Hogggard home…now lying bare there.

The remains of the Hoggards have been part of the Ross County Park District for more than 20 years.

“The Earl H. Barnhart ‘Buzzard’s Roost’ Nature Preserve conserves nearly 1200 acres of the most rugged and scenic country in this area. Over 5 miles of forested trail meander past ponds, vernal pools, the crumbling remains of old homesteads, and deep, wooded ravines.”