In 1861, Stanton Archibald Campbell sat down to write a letter to his daughter Truth Alice Campbell. She was the last remaining member of his immediate family. His wife Eliza Lamson Campbell died five months earlier. His four sons and one other daughter, five children, were “lying by the side of their mother in the burying grounds.”
Campbell was 44 years old; his daughter was nine. He wrote, “Feeling my infirmities and that I might soon be taken away and to leave for her the benefit a brief record or history of her family and relations.”
It was a loving sentiment and a useful letter: It told a daughter about to be left alone in the world who and where her relations were. It conveyed whom among them might be trusted, and whom it might be better to avoid. It was a truthful letter. Perhaps inspired by his daughter’s name, it told her both the rough and the smooth about her family members.
For example, one Lamson aunt “married a man although she had one child before she was married. He of course is a low ignorant man, or he would not have married her.”
Now here was sauce for the historian: a letter written by a man about his own family. It would be rich in information with no unanswered questions, or would it? Sadly that is never the case. Human memory is imperfect, and human knowledge incomplete. Gaps must be filled, facts checked.
For example, Campbell wrote that his Uncle Archibald “was called out as a soldier I think in the War of 1812. Upon reflection I think it was the Revolutionary War.”
Uncle Archibald was born in Mount Washington in 1766. That meant he was nine years old at the onset of the Revolutionary War and 46 years old in 1812. At either age, it was strange if he were “called out as a soldier,” and what exactly did “called out” mean when there was no draft?
The Revolutionary War did not end until 1781, and during that war, it was common parlance to be “called out” by the militia. Would a search of Revolutionary War records discover Uncle Archibald? It did. Archibald Campbell was sworn in in Sheffield on October 14, 1781, at the age of 15. He served in Colonel Ashley’s militia as a fifer for 10 days, during which time he marched to Saratoga.
Other references to Uncle Archibald were more tantalizing to contemplate and more difficult to research. Uncle Archibald “had one child by a girl by the name of Kline who afterward married a man named John Jones … the child was called after his father and he always called my father ‘Uncle’ but his father never owned him.”
Uncle Archibald was his father’s older brother of Scotch descent, had red hair, and a red-hot temper. He could be cruel to animals, frightened children, and was often morose. Late in life, this singular fellow married a good-natured widow “with whom he lived very happily having his own way in everything. He died in his eighties.”
Campbell also wrote details about Uncle Archibald’s illegitimate child. Archibald Jr., born in Mount Washington in 1802, “resembled [his father] physically and in disposition. Cousin Archibald accumulated considerable property and moved with his family from Mt. Washington to New York.” How did he accumulate property? From Uncle Archibald?
As a young man, Archibald Jr. married into the wealthy and prominent family of Miles Curtis—not once but twice. He married Luana Curtis, and when she died, Archibald Jr. married her sister Fanny. With the Curtis sisters, Archibald Jr. had four children: Fanny, Harry, Polly, and Curtis. Probate Court records show that in 1826 Miles Curtis left his considerable estate to his son Willis and son-in-law Archibald Jr. as guardian of his four grandchildren.
Campbell wrote his daughter almost nothing about the mother of Archibald Jr.: “a girl by the name of Kline.” Why was she dismissed? What was her full name? Why did he call her a girl and not a woman; how old was she when the illegitimate child was born? Was there a fornication trial, and if not, why not?
In 1774, there were only 23 families who petitioned for proprietorship of the proposed new town of Mount Washington. In 1802, when Archibald Jr. was born, Mount Washington had a population of barely 400. According to General Court records delineating a new road, the Klines, the Campbells, the Curtises, and the Joneses were near neighbors. It was a small population removed by several miles from any larger town with four families clustered together. There was a rich mix for intrigue. In the same General Court records, however, there was no mention of a fornication trial. As an avenue for discovering who the mother was, it failed.
Was there a Kline girl born in a year that made her old enough to mother a child in 1802 who also married one John Jones? John and Deidamia Kline married in 1782. They had six children: three boys and three girls. Two of the daughters were too young to be a mother in 1802: Betsy was born in 1800; Deidamia was born in 1809. Neither married a man named Jones: Betsy married Willis Curtis; Deidamia married Cyrus Lamson. The third Kline girl was born in 1786 and is listed only as an unnamed female child. She would have been 16 in 1802, but did she marry a Jones?
Thank goodness for Herbert Keith, who in 1944 trod the Mount Washington Center Cemetery and copied the inscriptions on tomb stones. There it was inscribed on “this stone set by their youngest son B. A. Jones”: John Jones died 1846; wife Elizabeth Kline Jones died 1843. The mother of Archibald Campbell Jr. was Elizabeth Kline Jones, born 1786, the daughter of John and Deidamia Cline, and the sister-in-law of Willis Curtis and Cyrus Lamson, which made her sister-in-law and aunt to her own son. When Archibald Jr. was conceived, Elizabeth was 16 and Uncle Archibald was 34 years old.
Elizabeth married John Jones in 1802, the year Archibald Jr. was born. The marriage in the same year as the illegitimate birth explained why there was no fornication trial. The marriage regularized the birth.
What of Elizabeth and John Jones’ lives? John purchased his first piece of land in Mount Washington in 1800 when he was just 19. He married Elizabeth when she was 16 and he was 21. After the birth of Archibald Jr., with John, Elizabeth had seven more children. John purchased additional land in 1803 and 1813. Together John and Elizabeth prospered. All seven children are all named in John’s will filed in 1846. Elizabeth and John were rich in children who lived to adulthood, and an estate that mentioned, among other treasures, “a mansion house in Mt. Washington.”
Research into public records told us much about a sentence fragment in an old letter: “a girl by the name of Kline.” Yet there is much we will never know: the circumstances surrounding carnal knowledge of a 16-year-old girl by a 34-year-old man; the reason John Jones married Elizabeth; why, when by that marriage the birth was regularized, they named the child Archibald Campbell Jr.; why the Campbell family acknowledged the child; why the father did not; and why Stanton Campbell called one a “low ignorant man” for marrying a woman who had previously borne a child but wrote not one word of criticism about John Jones. We can only guess, but guessing is a disservice to the heroes and villains of the piece.
