The Night Meeting from Fisher's River North Carolina Scenes and Characters
When I was a kid, Sundays were special. Sunday mornings, our family went to the First (and only) Presbyterian Church, and after church, we usually gathered for a big lunch at my grandmother’s house. In the afternoon, more family, including a Presbyterian preacher from a nearby town, would arrive for the big weekly poker game. We kids hung out under the dining room table so we wouldn’t miss any of the raunchy jokes, family stories or the way Great Aunt Goldie could place her bets with perfectly controlled flatulence. “I see you and I raise you * * * * .” We wanted to be on hand to run to the store across the street in case somebody needed a fresh pack of cigarettes. Religion in my family, you can see, had a certain irreverent quality.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I found a passel of Baptist preachers in the family tree. Not any old Baptists, but Primitive Baptists. Conservative, foot-washing, psalm-singing Baptists. Well, some of them were also ‘stillers, so maybe not so conservative. One of them, Gideon Potter, wrote an account of his life that provided more names and more clues, and before I knew it, I was off on a genealogical trek to the New River area of the Appalachian mountains, an area that includes Grayson County, Virginia and Surry County, North Carolina.
My paternal grandfather, whom I never knew, was born in Illinois, but his people came from Indiana. This grandfather, Ura Earl Neal, was the son of James Neal and Tabitha Jane Potter, who married and began their family in Owen County, Indiana and then moved to Douglas County, Illinois around 1871. James Neal was raised in Indiana by John and Frances Thompson Mills. I don’t know what happened to his parents or what their connection was to the Thompson/Mills families. Tabitha Jane was the daughter of Gideon Potter, the Primitive Baptist elder, and Tabitha Jane Hodges. Gideon was the son of Stephen Potter and Martha Phipps; Tabitha was the daughter of Bartholomew Hodges and Elizabeth Cockerham.
In the 1790s, these Potter, Hodges, Phipps, and Cockerham families were living in Grayson County, Virginia. By 1810, they had moved to Surry County, North Carolina in the neighborhood of Mount Airy, the birthplace of Andy Griffith and the model for Mayberry. If you want to know why we say skillet instead of frying pan, yonder instead of over there, reckon instead of suppose, then consider that there may be a deeper reason than exposure to the television show.
Fisher’s River North Carolina: Scenes and Characters by the American humorist and Baptist preacher Hardin E. Taliaferro is an entertaining account of life in Surry County in the early 1800s. From it emerges a picture of how the people lived, their pastimes and work, their way of speaking, their food and customs, and their sense of humor. Here’s a short sample that describes Moses Cockerham, a relative of our Elizabeth.
I have said Long Jimmy Thompson was a big eater. He was the Milo of Mitchell’s River, and Mose Cackerham was the Maximius of Fisher’s River. Once, at a gathering, Long Jimmy let in on a large tray of hog’s feet that was set on a table. He made such havoc of them, and the bones fell so fast on the floor, that it provoked Lark Cannady to blurt out,
“Hellow, Uncle Jimmy, you hull out bones faster nur a cotting-gin can shell out cotting-seed, a nation sight. You kin beat a whole cotting-pickin’ uv huming beings all holler.”
But Long Jimmy paid no more attention to this witty gibe than a hungry cur would to a gnat. At a reaping at Uncle Billy Norman’s, Mose Cackerham ate up the back-bones of several hogs, and their joles. The bones kept falling on the floor with such force and noise that Dick Snow exclaimed
“Dang it, Uncle Mose, ef your bones don’t fall as hard on the floor as ears o’ corn on the floor of a empty corn-crib at a corn- shuckin’, and nearly as fast. By jingo! I wouldn’t feed you fur all yer wuck. You’d ‘duce a famine in a man’s smoke-house mighty quick.”
When Indiana and Illinois were admitted to the Union in 1816 and 1818, these extended and intermarried families began to move west. Migrations were usually by flatboats, at an average of 3000 per year, along the Ohio River to the Wabash and White Rivers in Indiana. By the early 1830s our families were settled and farming in Lawrence and Owen Counties in Indiana.
If there were plenty of Hardshell Baptists in this branch of the tree, there were also some outlaws. The Phipps family seems to have been particularly rowdy. I haven’t been able to identify Martha Phipps’ parents, but I assume that the Phipps men who moved west with her and Stephen Potter were her close relatives, brothers or nephews. Two Phipps men, twins Shack and Shade, went from being outlaws to being upstanding citizens and gained fame as the oldest living twins in the U.S. They were associated with the Long brothers who were part of notorious Banditti of the Prairie that assassinated Col. George Davenport, and they hung out with Jesse James in Missouri. One short summary and one long account of their exploits can be found here and here. Edward Bonney’s book about the gang, their crimes, and their eventual apprehension is available for online reading here. In another piece of unrelated weirdness, one of the gang members, Robert Birch, escaped from jail and resurfaced in New Mexico where he discovered gold at Pinos Altos near Silver City.
The Phipps/Phips/Fipps family gets more interesting. In his autobiography, Gideon Potter described his mother, Martha Phipps, as being of Welsh descent. In Appalachia, people who had dark hair and eyes were sometimes said to be Welsh. This is curious, because parts of the Phipps family are connected to the Melungeons, a tri-racial group from central Appalachia. So, when Gideon said that his mother was of Welsh descent, did he mean she was of Welsh descent, did he mean she was brunette, or did he mean she was mixed-race?
As for Tabitha Hodges Potter, she was part of the sprawling Hodges/Hodge/Hedge/Hoge family. One researcher says, “These Hodges started arriving in Surry County, NC in the 1770s. There are so many in the next century that they are mindboggling since they used the same names over and over.” Indeed, they were so mindboggling that contemporary Hodges resorted to DNA testing to trace family lines. Our Tabitha belongs to Lineage 1, but there are gaps, so I can trace her no further back than her father, Bartholomew. Tabitha’s mother, Elizabeth Cockerham/Cockram/Cochran is also impossible to trace, although because of various other family connections, I can put her near, if not in, the family of Moses Cockerham whose son Mose ate up that pile of back-bones and joles at the reaping at Uncle Billy Norman’s place.
There’s a saying that Presbyterians are no more than Primitive Baptists who moved to town. If this were a book, that move would be the next chapter. For now, I’ll leave the Potters, Hodges, Phipps, and Cockerhams in peace near Indian Creek, Indiana.
Dear Family and Friends,
The next day, Sunday, the sun came out, and we saw both the Aya Sofia and the Sumela Monastery. The joke here is that no one has ever actually seen Sumela because of the fog and clouds, so we were pretty lucky. It was a nice hike and not very crowded once we arrived.
