THE GREAT HERITAGE

By the way a Lexington kinswoman of mine, a descendant of Nathaniel Hart, was asked by a newcomer, with complimentary intention, if it were not true that she was of a very old Kentucky family, in fact a descendant of Daniel Boone.

"Daniel Boonewas my great grandfather's surveyor." replied the lady haughtily, and in my opinion, with unwarranted hauteur.

Should someone ask a descendant of Daniel Boone if he, or she, was a descendant of one of the Harts, or some other member of the Transylvania Company, the person interrogated might reply, haughtily: "I am a great grandson of Daniel Boone. Members of the Transylvania Company were land-speculators."

I attend college in Hanover County, at Ashland-near the birthplace of Henry Clay, who married Lucretia Hart, daughter of Colonel Thomas Hart, brother of Nathaniel of the Transylvania Company, who was also a member of the company, as was his brother, David.

Not far from Ashland, at Hanover Court House, lived Bickerton Winston, whose country place was called Signal Hill.

Mrs. Bickerton Winston, a kinswoman of mine, adopted her sister's daughter, Bessie Lee, who father, early in life a widower with several daughters, yielded Bessie, now the wife of Judge "Pat" Cardwell, of Richmond, to her aunt, to simplify his domestic problem. Bessie was about my age, both of us in the 'teens, and I was her house guest.

I sat next to Mrs. Winston, my cousin Bettie, at dinner one evening. Like many Virginians of her generation, she was an encyclopedia of genealogy, and a devotee of discussion of that subject. Genealogy is the art of tracing one's relationship to notable persons without tracing to persons not notable, and more numerous.

Cousin Bettie was discussing, most entertainingly, her favorite topic, when Mr. Winston, at the other end of a long table interrupted her to say, in tones audible, necessarily, to every guest:

"Bettie, you must be making your young kinsman most unhappy."

"Well," he said-having commanded the undivided attention of everyone at the table-you have been telling the young man that he is related to everyone in Virginia who is, or was, famous, rich, distinguished, talented, handsome, socially eminent, aristocratic or heroic in battle.
The young man is not, I understand, rich. He not distinguished looking. He may never be famous. You can only make him feel poor, obscure, untalented, and by comparison with paragons you have described, altogether dingy. Why don't you stop punishing him and let him eat his dinner?"

For forty years I have relished the incisive humor of my kinsman-in-law, Bickerton Winston, fox-hunting squire of Signal Hill.

In his mood there is a lesson for those, and there are many in Kentucky, as well as in Virginia, who attach to themselves importance because they are descendants of, or relations of, well-known persons, and who may be tempted to rest upon their honors, and their oars.

Who is more fatuous than the man who must always tell you to whom he is related be blood, or marriage?

And yet how tempting it is, to most of us, to do that which all of us condemn.

Many persons know who the first Nathaniel Hart was, a very much smaller group know who the second Nathaniel, my great-grandfather, was.

I wonder who could tell me who the first American member of the Hart family was?

Mrs. Sarah S. Young, who wrote, nearly sixty years ago, "The Genealogical Narrative of the Hart family," speaks of the man who settled at Hanover Court House in 1690 as "the great ancestor" of the Harts.

Let us inquire why she uses that sounding adjective. She says all that was known of him was that he was a merchant, and probably, late in life, a blind man.

His seat of business was Hanover Court House, which is hardly urban in the second quarter of the Twentieth Century, and which was more definitely rural in the last decade of the Seventeenth Century.

Therefore we could omit the adjective "great" and say the first American Hart was a country storekeeper.

I know nothing against, or for, county store keepers, as a class.

In Bill Nye's History of the United States a young white man told Sitting Bull that his ancestors came over in the Mayflower.
Sitting Bull said:

"That is very interesting, but before you try to marry a squaw of my tribe the big chief will want to know why your ancestors had to come over in the Mayflower."

I am not assuming, in this earnest, timid and speculative, inquiry into my ancestry, that the "great ancestor" had to come over, but I assure that he did come over to better himself, financially, and perhaps socially, and that he hoped to accomplish was accomplished in the next generation. For Thomas Hart of Hanover and North Carolina, father of Nathaniel of the Transylvania Company, was evidently, a man of substance.

Dr. Archibald Henderson, author of "The Transylvania Company and the Founding of Henderson," speaks of Nathaniel as

"a men of affluence and social position, residing at his famous country seat, The Red House, in Caswell County, North Carolina."

It seems probable, in the absence of information as to any Hart prior to the advent of the first Thomas at Hanover Court House, that had the so-called great ancestor been a well-to-do, socially well placed, Englishmen he would have remained contentedly, in England.

For any man to be an Englishmen, is "greatly to his credit", we learn from the writer of the libretto of the operatta, "Pinafore."

And life, for the socially and financially fortunate, is pleasant even today in England. It must have been enchanting in the Seventeenth Century, when taxation had not become wholly ferocious and relentless.

But we cannot be too sure that what I assume as to the first Thomas Hart actually was true, for we know that Nathaniel Hart did leave "his famous country seat, The Red House," and the easy circumstances of a gentleman of North Carolina, where life had it's undoubted compensations, and consolations, to try his fortunes in the chancy ventures of the Kentucky wilderness where he was killed by Indians-killed and scalped a historian says, but not scalped. Mrs. Young assures us.

Mrs. Young says the Indian who killed Captain Hart were quickly pursued and killed, in possession of the knee buckles and shoe buckles of their victim, their only trophies.

I am, while condemning the custom, talking genealogy, because I am doing here today what a member of a parliamentary body does when he rises to a point of personal privilege, filled with a desire to discuss a subject which may be of more interest to him than to his audience.

I want to tell you that I believe inheritance of the blood, and the legends, of two families whose members were lured by the fascination of the Kentucky wilderness made me once who is upon certain aspects of Kentucky and the duties and opportunities they create, and the regret they should occasion.

In 1784, two years after Indians killed Nathaniel Hart, and eight years before Kentucky became a State, James Wallace of Culpepper County, Virginia, procured a grant of 6,000 acres of land in a tract set apart few officers and soldiers of the Continental Line on the Ohio River near the mouth of Paroquette Creek-later known as Hurricane Creek-in now what is Crittenden Co.

So when Richard Henderson, James Hogg, the three Harts, and others, were founding Henderson, a father of my great-grandfather Wallace was procuring a grant of land in somewhat remoter wilderness which remained a wilderness long after Henderson became a scene of civilization, wealth and fashion.

Adjoining the grant to James Wallace, Robert Kirk procured a grant for services in the Revolution, and the small settlement at the mouth of the creek known as Kirksville was one of the three earliest towns on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, the other being Maysville and Louisville.

Over the Wilderness Trail came one Arthur Hooe Wallace, of Culpepper County, Virginia, to Kentucky to seek his fortune.

In Woodford County he met Letitia Preston Hart, daughter of Nathaniel Hart, of Spring Hill, which, until it was sold a few months ago, never passed from one owner to another through purchase. It was bought by Silas Mason, whose wife, Suzanne, is a daughter of Mrs. Henry Burnett, Mrs. Mason is therefore, a descendant of Mary Ann Hart, and her husband, Colonel Richard Dallam. So the land has never been out of the hands of descendants of Nathaniel Hart since Indians owned it.

Mary Ann Hart was a daughter of the first Nathaniel Hart and a sister of Chinoe Hart, sometimes erroneously spoken of as the first white child born in Kentucky.

Chinoe actually was born in Virginia while her father was on the way to Kentucky to prepare a home for his family, and, therefore, was given the Indian name for Kentucky.

Another sister was Suzanne, who became the wife of Isaac Shelby.

Nathaniel Hart, of Woodford County, married in Smithfield, Va., Susan Preston. My grandfather Wallace was born of that union.

James Wallace, for reason of which I am in ignorance, did not come to live upon his 6,000 acres at Paroquette Creek.

My grandfather's Woodford County sweetheart did not say "yes" until he had, off and on, proposed for fifteen years-in the meantime making a comfortable fortune in New Orleans, which may have helped his suit. When he married he retired from business and lived on the Paroquette Creek grant part of the time, living part of the time in Louisville, where his residence, still standing, was opposite the now abandoned postoffice, the site of which then was woodland.

With him, not to live in his house, but to set up separate establishments in the wilderness-where an idyllic life was contemplated-came four of his brothers, William, John, Albert and Henry, and two unmarried sisters, Amanda and Caroline.

Members of the clan were slave owners. Some of them were horse owners. They had a community, or family, race track. A flat field, or meadow, on the Kirkland bought of Robert Kirk by John Wallace, still is known locally, by old inhabitants, as the Race Field. The pioneer life was intended to be, in a way, somewhat deluxe.

All of the original residences were of log. Two were supplanted in due time by brick houses.

Of the three log houses which remain, one is a two story house with rooms twenty feet square opening upon a broad central hall.

The floors are of ash. The house is on a solidly built stone foundation and over a full basement. The arch rock in the wood fireplace in the kitchen, which is in the "L" must weigh half a ton. I have seen nowhere else just such a log house-although it has been disfigured by weather boarding and a modern porch, supplanter, no doubt, of a colonial porch.

The residence was built by my spinster great aunt, Caroline, to combine the charm of a wilderness adobe with the comfort of a commodious residence, as comfort was known in those days. The rooms were, of course, heated by wood fires only.

I was born on the Paroquette Creek tract, adjacent, by the way, to the Ford farm and the interesting Ford Cemetery which figure prominently in "The Outlaws of Cave-In-Rock, by Otto Rothert, secretary of the Filson Club.

The deer and bear then had been killed out. But smaller game was abundant. The woodland streams still ran crystal-clear. The wolf traps rusted unused, but wild turkey gobblers could be heard at dawn every morning in May, and could be seen, any day in the plowed fields when the corn was young, or had just been planted.

You may remember that when the first Transylvania Legislature sat, with an elm tree, at Boonesborough as the State House, nine laws were passed.

One of them was to preserve the breed of horses, another was to preserve game. A tenth law should have had as its object preservation of the forest, for game cannot be preserved without forest preservation. But Daniel Boone and Squire Boone, and other legislators, were not as far-sighted as William Penn.

There is a legend to the effect that the Cherokee Chief who signed the deed to Transylvania said to Colonel Henderson:

"You may have bought a fine territory, but you may have trouble occupying it."

It was a fine territory, a great heritage of those who were to follow those who settled it.

It seems to me that instead of indulging too much in ancestor worship; instead of spending too much of our time in contemplation of the gallant men, and the somewhat braver women, who were pioneers-all honor to them-we should concern ourselves more than some Kentuckians do about the present and the future of Kentucky.

The Hendersons, the Harts, the Luttrells and others did not look backward. They looked forward.

I imagine they contemplated survival of some of the aspects of Kentucky which thrilled Daniel Boone, who surveyed, or explored for them part of the 20,000,000 acres which constituted Transylvania.

Like the Transylvania legislators who set under the elm, I am an advocate of preservation of game-restoration now is necessary of course and I dislike, and oppose, and agitate against, avoidable and unnecessary uglification and devastation of the country which thrilled the pioneers no less by it's beauty than by its evident potential fruitfulness. I oppose pollution of streams, ruin of roadsides, and the soil of farms.

Those who came after Henderson and his contemporaries inherited a country composed of majestic forests, as well as rich pastures; a country in which the woodland streams ran so clear that the Indians shot fish with the bow and arrow. Kentuckians of our generation have been slow in arriving at realization that it is not necessary to destroy the beauty of a country to use it for agriculture, and other enterprises. Some foreign countries, and some States in our Union are in this respect more progressive.

Henderson is proud of being the scene of the first municipal park west of the Appalachians. I spent nearly half of my time for five years in advocacy of a State park in the foothills of the Appalachians, in Southeastern Kentucky which would preserve, and which now has preserved, a major scenic asset of the State. Now, perhaps, a Federal Forest of 100,000 acres is to surround that park. For twenty-five years I have advocated Federal forests in Ky.

I honor the pioneers whose achievements you celebrate, and I honor Audubon, for some time a resident of Henderson, but I should rather see in the forests the birds Audubon saw, and the turkeys, deer and bear Boone hunted, than to see on the wall prints which reflect Audubon's interest in the forest-an interest which made the miller bankrupt and the naturalist famous-or to see in a park a monument to Boone.

I don't like to see newer States in the West, or older ones in the East ahead of Kentucky in protection of natural beauty.

The Kentucky whose somewhat romantic reputation is widespread is not Louisville, or Lexington, or Frankfort, or Harrodsburg, or even Henderson.

To the outside world these cities, and the rest of the municipalities within the State's boundaries, are but market towns for an agricultural State whose natives are leniently indulged when they call it "God's Country."

It was that Kentucky that the pioneers left us.

I want to see some of the aspects of Kentucky that fascinated Boone and his contemporaries remain, that our descendants may understand what the pioneers saw in Kentucky; what members of the Transylvania Company saw in it when they hired Daniel Boone, as foreman of an ax and saw gang, to clear the Wilderness Trail sufficiently to make it a rude wagon road for the vanguard of settlement and civilization in what was to become the still youthful State which we call Old Kentucky.

Kipling, celebrating South Africa in its pioneer period, said:

Lived a woman wonderful,
May the Lord amend her,
Neither gentle, kind nor tame.
Yet her pagan beauty drew,
Christian gentleman a few,
Hotly to attend her.

Kentucky was, in climate and soil at least, gentle, kind and true. She was fitted to become the tender mother of generations of descendants of the pioneers.