1774 Captain John Skidmore the Battle of Point Pleasant 1774 October 10

CAPTAIN JOHN SKIDMORE  AND HIS COMPANY AT BATTLE OF POINT PLEASANT
ON 10 OCTOBER 1774

JOHN SKIDMORE AND HIS COMPANIES AT THE BATTLE OF POINT PLEASANT IN 1774, AND AT FORT HINCKEL IN JUNE 1775.

The Romans had a term for it: Nil desparandum. “Do not despair” should be a motto always kept in mind by the family historian. For years the Hinkle family had a largely hearsay account about a “Fort Hinckel” in the Germany Valley near Riverton in what became Pendleton County, [West] Virginia in 1787. The story was widely believed and the family put up a monument in 1936 about the fort near its presumptive site.1 However despite an intensive search of the written record by a highly qualified researcher no real proof of the tale could be found.2 Two earlier forts on the South Branch, Fort Upper Tract on 27 April 1758 and Fort Seybert on the next day, were destroyed and their occupants either killed or carried away by Shawnee Indians. Hinkle’s Fort was said to have been built in 1761-and 1762 at the expense of John Justus [Jost] Hinkle (1706-1778) to protect his family and retainers from the Shawnee. It offered the only defense for the settlers in what was then a very thinly populated and densely forested community. The recent discovery of a muster roll of the men who were actually at Fort Hinckel under Captain Skidmore from June to September of 1775 supplies, at long last, a definitive piece of evidence about the fort.3 The militia list turned up in private hands in a most unlikely place, written on a blank page of a French Bible belonging to Joseph Cheuvront who was one of Skidmore’s men formerly stationed there. This list is printed here as FIRST PART,

1Still standing. It reads (in uppercase type) Hinkel’s fort. Several hundred yards west of this marker about the year 1761-1762 John Justice Henkel, Sr. built a block house as a home for his family and a protection against the Indians. It became a nucleus for a colonial frontier fort after used by Continental forces during the Revolution and was called Hinkle’s fort.” Later the state put up a historical marker at a “scenic overview” of Germany Valley which also remembers the fort.

2Mary Harter (1911-1992), a fellow of the American Society of Genealogists, and the founder and editor (with a great many other accomplishments) of the Henckel Genealogical Bulletin. I know that she would be delighted to learn something definitive has turned up about the fort which would now entitle hundreds of living descendants of Jost Hinkle, styled the Revolutionary “commander” of the fort, eligible to join patriotic societies in his right.

3The date when it was built seems very likely but is still unproven. I have since found that the fort was still offering protection to the neighborhood as late as 1781 when John McGlaughlin stated in his application for a Federal pension that he was then stationed there. The garrison was now under the command of Captain William Smith, presumably the same William Smith who had been a private under Captain Skidmore in 1775.

1775 intended to precede what I had published in 1998 about Captain Skidmore’s company enrolled a year earlier to fight the Indians at the Battle of Point Pleasant. It was fought in 1774 in the name of George III, but by local initiative, for the advancement of the royal colony in Virginia. It opened up the west for settlement, but in 1775 Lord Dunmore, the colonial governor, had fled and the American Revolution had begun. (WS)

FIRST PART, 1775

At the time of John Skidmore’s marriage to Polly Hinkle they settled near Mud Lick on the North Fork of the South Branch of the Potomac about two miles from the Mouth of the Seneca.4 This was not far from Fort Hinkle near Riverton in Pendleton County, Virginia which had been built by his father-in-law “Jost” Hinkle and his family during the French and Indian War. Hinkle’s stockade was never attacked but with the coming of the Revolution the British first agitated the Indians, and then armed them, and alarms were numerous all over on the frontier.

The function of the militia in the western counties of Virginia was largely defensive. They were given the job of protecting the frontier from the Indians (now allied with the British) freeing the Continental Army for more important business elsewhere. In 1774 Captain Skidmore had been wounded twice at Point Pleasant which had subdued the Indians for the moment. Recovered, he was the logical choice to protect the fort that had been built by his wife’s father in Germany Valley.

Cheuvront was probably appointed by Skidmore as his company clerk on this tour of duty, probably in the expectation that they would eventually be paid by a new government for their service. Elsewhere I have pointed out how these company clerks in 1774 had a problem setting down the names of the men who served with them.5 The Germans clerks (lately arrived from up the Rhine in the German Palatine) had trouble setting down the Scotch-Irish names for what was the largest ethnic block of settlers in the Virginia Valley. The reverse was true and the clerk at Fort Hinkle added still another dimension, for Joseph Louis Cheuvront was a Francophone born 2 February 1757 in Strasbourg, France.6 He was 15 when he and his first cousin Peter Challe went to England to learn the craft of smithery. Cheuvront clearly had difficulties in understanding both the Germans who served in the company, as well as the accent of the Scotch-Irish which would have been noticeably different from English he had heard spoken as a boy in London.

Moses Ellsworth, another son-in-law of Jost Jinkle, is said to have paid the captain of the Virginia for the Cheuvront and Challe passages, undoubtedly as indentured servants, to America on his ship which left London late in December 1773 and had arrived in Virginia by February 1774. Their terms of service for an agreed number of years were said to have been purchased by John Bennett representing Ellsworth, and they were taken to the fort to work as blacksmiths. Jacob

4Later he built a substantial brick house on the South Branch of the Potomac, unfortunately torn down by a later owner and replaced by a large frame Victorian house which still survives. 

5Lord Dunmore’s Little War of 1774: His Captains And Their Men Who Opened Up Kentucky & The West To American Settlement (Heritage Books, 2002), xii.

6He is said to have known seven languages, clearly an exaggeration, but he certainly did have a better education than many of the other men in the company.

Challe, reportedly an elder brother of Peter Challe, was also there by 1775 when Cheuvront recorded the following muster-roll in his huge French Bible.7

General Muster of Joseph Louis Cheuvront Fort Henckel Militia presided over by Johann Justus Henckel, Commander of Fort and 6 June 1775 Militia Capt. John Skidmore Company

Johann Justus Henckel Jr. Moses Elsworth Jacob Henckel Adam Bievel [Biebel, Bible] Paul Teeter George Teeter Philip Teeter Andrew Johnston Abraham Henckel Isaac Henckel Paul Henckel Joseph Skidmore Martin Peterson James Cunningham William Cunningham Christian Strely [Straley] Joseph Cheuvont Valentine Felty Castle [Cassel] Peter Challe [Shull] Jacob Challe Joseph Bennett John Bennett William Bennett

Johan Bievel [Bible] Wm. Gregg

7This was a large lectern Bible: Le Nouveau Testament de Nostre Seigneur Jesus-Christ (the Mons edition, dated 1672), where Cheuvront recorded the muster roll. This edition of the French Bible was printed at Mons in modern Belgium, and five thousand copies are said to have been sold in the six months after its publication. In 1998 I did biographies of the men who were with Captain Skidmore at Point Pleasant in 1774 who could be traced. I can not to do this for the men listed in Cheuvront’s Bible in 1775, but see my notes on Isaac Henkle, William Bennett, and Arthur Johnson elsewhere who had also served earlier under Captain Skidmore in 1774.

Jacob Rule Robert Mennes [Minnis] Godfrey Bumgardner John Phearis [Phares] Joseph Rule Thomas Miller George Miller Dan House Jacob House Mathias House George Dunkel Jon Dunkel Zach Weese Jon Weese Jacob Weese John Lambert Arthur Johnston John Smith Daniel Little Alex Robbins”

After what was seemingly a peaceful tour of duty at the fort in 1775 Cheuvront married his first wife Elizabeth Elsworth in January 1777.8 He enrolled as a private in the Virginia line in April 1780, and was present at Yorktown on 17 October 1781 when the war ended with the surrender of Cornwallis. Cheuvront never applied for a Federal pension for his service but he did leave a memo that said: “In the year 1781 at the siege of Yorktown God delivered me from all tormenting fear, and gave me two seals to my ministry.”

In 1813 Isaac Robbins wrote to Francis Asbury, the famous Methodist bishop, that he dated his turning to God in the fall of the year that Cornwallis was taken “through the instrumentality of Brother Joseph Cheuvront who used to carry a Bible in his pocket and read to him and converse with him pertaining to the kingdom of God.”9 Cheuvront was ordained into the Methodist ministry at the Conference held Uniontown, Pennsylvania in 1790. He had joined the Baltimore Conference by 1800 and is recorded there as serving two parishes in northern Virginia and Ohio. He died testate on 5 March 1832 and was buried in the New Bethel Church Cemetery at Good Hope in Harrison County, West Virginia.

As for Captain Skidmore, several of the men who served still later under him during the Revolution applied for Federal pensions in their old age. Elsewhere in the Appendix I have noticed two further engagements in 1777 and 1779 when Captain Skidmore was called out. The statements made by the men on these expeditions to support their claims are our best source of information on the action that he saw during the rest of the war. While no muster roll survives, the paymaster at the new capital at Richmond lists a sum of over £350 as having been sent to Captain Skidmore in 1777

8He married a second wife Sarah Bollen on January 26, 1802 at Good Hope, Harrison County.  9This was clearly another smaller Bible (or New Testament) in English.

to pay his men.10

Let us end these notes with the cautionary Nil Desparendum, and then look, for example, at the shabby, dusty old foreign language Bibles long forgotten in local historical societies.

APPENDIX, PART 177411

Captain John Skidmore, the son of Joseph and Agnes (Caldwell) Skidmore, was born on 10 June 1736 in Murderkill Hundred, Kent County, Delaware, and died on 12 October 1809 in Pendleton County, (West) Virginia, at the age of 73.12 He married Mary Magdalena (Polly), the daughter of John Justus and Mary Magdalena (Eschmann) Henckel, on 2 March 1762 at the Peaked Mountain and Cook's Creek Presbyterian Church in Rockingham County. They are buried on a hill overlooking the site of their home about two miles down the South Branch of the Potomac from Ruddle on the east side of Route 220. His grave has been marked with a new stone by the West Virginia Hills Chapter of the Daughters of the American Colonists, who dedicated it to his memory on 2 August 1969.

After the defeat of Braddock's army in 1755 the militia of Augusta, Frederick, and Hampshire Counties were called out to protect the border. John Skidmore and his two older brothers all served in the French and Indian War, and the expenditures read into the minutes of the House of Delegates show that the Skidmores were paid 7sh each for their service in the company commanded by Captain Abraham Smith. On 19 August 1767 he was appointed as a Captain in the same Augusta County Militia with Peter Veneman as his Lieutenant.

His company was called out in 1774 and served with distinction at the Battle of Point Pleasant, the chief event in what is now called Dunmore's War. The call to arms went out in late July and about five weeks were spent in filling out the companies and in securing provisions. Henry Mauk, one of the first to be recruited by Captain Skidmore, reported that he was put to work making pack saddles to carry the supplies of the army across the mountains. Skidmore's company left what is now Pendleton County on 1 August 1774 and arrived at Camp Union (now Lewisburg, West Virginia) on the 10th where they rendezvoused with other units from Botetourt and Fincastle Counties. On 22 September 1774 the army under Colonel Andrew Lewis had advanced to what is now Charleston where they halted long enough to build canoes to float their supplies down the

10The inflated sum of £350 must be discounted for this was the period when paper money was “not worth a Continental.”

11This Appendix was written in 1998 and first published as “Captain John Skidmore and his company of South Branch Men at the Battle of Point Pleasant, 1774" in the Allegheny Regional Ancestors, vol. 7, no. 4 (Winter 1998) 92-106. [Jeff Carr, an authority of Pendleton County families, has recently kindly updated a part of what I wrote in 1998.]

12This biographical material on Captain John Skidmore is taken from my earlier book Thomas Skidmore (Scudamore), 1605-1684, of Westerleigh, Gloucestershire, and Fairfield, Connecticut; his ancestors and descendants to the ninth generation. A completely revised and greatly enlarged third edition will now be found (with several other books and 47 articles) on the Scudamore/Skidmore Genealogy CD-ROM (1998). It is available currently from Cary B. Skidmore, 355 Kimberly Lane, Los Alamos, N. M. 87544. More information (not reprinted here) on Captain Skidmore’s service during the Revolution, on the bench in Augusta, Rockingham, and Pendleton Counties, and his numerous posterity will also be found on the CD-ROM.

Kanawha River. A return taken of the Augusta companies at a camp on the Elk River on 27 September 1774 shows that Captain Skidmore's company consisting of himself, Lieutenant Robert Davis, Ensign Nicholas Harpole, three Sergeants, and 32 rank and file were all fit for duty.13 On the 30th they resumed the march up the Kanawha and arrived on October 6th at a point on the Ohio River, now Point Pleasant, where they camped for the night.

Early in the morning of October 10th two men came running into camp with the intelligence that a large party of Indians was scarcely two miles up the Ohio. The drums beat the sleepy army to arms and 300 of the men were divided into two columns and paraded out to meet the enemy. The two lines marched about 200 yards apart and had only advanced about half a mile when the Indians attacked. The men broke ranks and took shelter behind the trees. Colonel Charles Lewis (in a bright red waistcoat) fell mortally wounded almost at once. Reinforcements were sent from the camp and the engagement wore down to a series of skirmishes that lasted the rest of the day.

Eventually the company of Captain Skidmore was pocketed in between the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers and Crooked Creek with no apparent avenue of escape. Late in life Captain John Skidmore told his young grandson Archibald Taylor (1795-1889) of the considerable gallantry of Captain Mathew Arbuckle which was perhaps the turning point of the battle. Towards sunset Arbuckle with volunteers from the field jumped Crooked Creek and keeping under the high bank of the Kanawha marched single file to the rear of the Indians. Just before Arbuckle was in position Captain Skidmore was shot a second time and his company gave way. He called to them that he was not dead and to stand firm. As his men made a charge to secure him the flanking detail of Arbuckle opened fire and the Indians retreated. Soon afterwards the Indians made a final retreat across the Ohio taking their dead and wounded with them. The Virginians had lost 46 dead and 80 wounded according to the best received estimate.

News of the victory at Point Pleasant did not reach Williamsburg for almost a month. A dispatch from the camp was published in the Virginia Gazette on 10 November 1774 and it lists Captain Skidmore among the wounded. He was hit by two bullets that day. The first passed through the calf of his leg and did no great harm. The second, late in the day, hit him in the hip and passed through his body missing any vital organ. It lodged in his clothes on the other side; "caught in the waistband of his pants" as it was later put by Billie Thompson.

According to the pension application of Adam Harpole the company went on from Point Pleasant to a place on the west side of the Scioto River about 15 miles north of Chillicothe, Ohio, where peace was made with the Indians. They were then marched home, after a tour of what he recalled as “something more than three months.” He also notes that the company did not receive any written discharges. However a payroll does survive for the company which lists the time (which varies from 91 to 134 days) that each man had served.14 Captain John Skidmore and Lieutenant

13Reuben Gold Thwaites and Louise Phelps Kellogg, Documentary History of Dunmore’s War 1774 (Madison, Wisconsin, 1903), 415-6.

14State Library of Virginia, Miscellaneous Reel 78, (Soldiers and Public Service in Dunmore’s War). I am indebted to Donna Kaminsky of Overland Park, Kansas, for a transcript of Captain Skidmore’s company from the microfilm and several useful comments on the participants named there. In addition to the men who went to Point Pleasant there are on the same reel payments made to persons who contributed either supplies or services to the various companies. Among them is a payment of £1.17.2 for a claim for sundry supplies made by his mother Ann Skidmore. The margin Robert Davis served the longest -- 134 days each. John Skidmore (with most of the other Captains who saw combat) was paid at the rate of 7sh 6d by the day for a total of £50.5sh.0d.

Several of the men who served under Captain John Skidmore at Point Pleasant enlisted soon after in the Revolutionary army. A few of them survived to file for pensions as old men, particularly after the Pension Act of 1832 was passed. Their applications are the best source of information that we have on the action which his company saw during that war. John Mace (who was not at Point Pleasant) lived later in Lewis County and in the state of Ohio. He stated that he was enrolled in May 1777 under Captain Skidmore to go to the relief of the settlers in the Tygart Valley. Isaac Hinkle, who had been at Point Pleasant in the company commanded by his brother-in-law, was now in 1777 his Lieutenant while Samuel Skidmore (a younger brother of the Captain) was the company’s Ensign. According to Mace the company was marched to Westfall’s Fort in the Tygart Valley where they were based while spying and ranging throughout the West Augusta area. They spent their time there searching for Indians and buying beef for the regular army who were pursuing the British elsewhere. No muster roll survives for this company, although the paymaster at the new capital at Richmond lists a sum of over £350 as having been sent in 1777 to Captain Skidmore to pay his men in the Greenbrier Militia.15 John Hagle, who was living in Lewis County when he applied for a pension in 1832, says that he was enrolled as an Indian spy under Captain Skidmore on 1 March 1779 and was discharged at Christmas, this being “the periods between which experience had taught them to fear visits from the savage foe.”16

During the lull following Burgoyne’s surrender the new county of Rockingham was formed out of Augusta. Captain Skidmore lived within the boundaries of the new county, and was appointed by Governor Patrick Henry to serve as one of first Gentlemen Justices for Rockingham County. He was later nominated by the Court as High Sheriff and appointed as Major in the Rockingham Militia. However before his signed commission as Major was returned from Richmond, a formality, he had resigned on 25 May 1778 and William Nalle (who had also served as a Captain at Point Pleasant) was appointed in his place.

The following officers and men served under him at Point Pleasant, and to their names we have appended the number of days they served, their per diem rate, and the total payment they received for their service on the expedition:

notes that this sum was “pd JS,” who was presumably to then reimburse his mother. She probably contributed cornmeal for diets for his men from the family mill on Skidmore Mill Run above Ruddle.

15John Skidmore (almost as great a land speculator as his father) entered a small claim in the Tygart Valley for 200 acres adjoining the land of John Lambert, which he later assigned to Heinrich Carlock who in turn assigned it to Daniel Westfall. It was confirmed to Westfall by the Land Commissioners on 25 March 1780.

16John Frederick Dorman, Virginia Revolutionary Pension Applications, (Dartmouth, Virginia, 1992) volume 49, 34-6. Nothing else is presently known about an expedition by Captain Skidmore’s company in 1779 and Hagle may have been confused about the date. Hagle (who was born in 1750 at Schuylkill in Pennsylvania) had been earlier at Point Pleasant under Captain John Lewis and Lieutenant William White. He stated that he “started from the part of Virginia which is now Randolph County under Lt. William White as a drafted militia man, [and] was Marched to Point Pleasant.”