Isaac Hoover Julian by MRS
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Isaac Hoover Julian By MRS. GRACEJULIAN CLARKE Isaac Hoover Julian, youngest child of Issac and Rebecca (Hoover) Julian, was born June 19, 1823, about one mile and a half southwest of Centreville, Wayne County, Indiana, in a two-story log house surrounded by forest. He was fifth in the line of descent from Ren6 St. Julien. This French ancestor, both of whose parents died during his infancy or early child- hood, was a native of Paris. Little is known as to the early life of Red, but he became a soldier by profession and served for a time in the armies of James I1 of England. Later, having embraced the Protestant faith, he migrated to Holland where he enlisted under the banner of William of Orange. He was in the Battle of the.Boyne (July 1, 1690) which determined that William 111 should remain on the English throne. For his serv- ices, the soldier received from the King a grant of land “on the Mississippi River”. Returning to France and finding that country an unsafe abiding plwe by reason of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, St. Julien set out for America with the intention of finding his land-grant. He was upwards of forty at that time and tired of soldiering. En route, he stopped at the Bermuda IslFnds, why or for how long is not known, but while there he married Margaret Bullock (or Bulloch) , daugh- ter of a Scotch father and a Spanish mother. This was Red’s first and only matrimonial venture. Proceeding to the mainland, an estate was purchased in Cecil County, Maryland, on Chesapeake Bay, where two sons were born whose early deaths were attributed to the climate. The family then removed to Virginia, settling on a plantation near Winchester in the Shenandoah Valley which estate is said to be still in the possession of descendants. Ren6 and Margaret never saw the Mississippi land-grant, nor did any of their family, but it is said that the survivor of the Boyne used to tell his children that they were not to consider themselves perma- nently established until they should reach that “Promised Land”. Ren6 St. Julien is reputed to have been a man of giant frame, with red hair, strong will, and an irascible temper. He was a slave-holder. Six sons grew to manhood-Stephen, George, John, Peter, Isaac and Ren6, Jr. These American born sons shortened the name St. Julien to Julien or Julkn. 10 Indiana Magazine of History The fifth son, Isaac, the great-grandfather of the subject of this sketch, is mentioned in Irving’s Life of Washington as residing near Winchester in September, 1755.l Isaac Julian married Barbara White, daughter of Dr. Robert White, a surgeon in the British navy, and Margaret (Hoge) White. The fear of Indians became so great that Isaac and Barbara left their well-stocked farm\ and all their household goods, except the few articles that they could carry with them on horse-back, and with their seven children fled from the Valley of Virginia. They passed the Blue Ridge and made their way southward as far as Randolph County in the North Carolina Piedmont, where another farm, comprising a thousand acres, was purchased. The original deed to this land is still in the possession of descendants. Four of the brothers of Isaac, who left Virginia at about the same time and for the same cause, also settled in the same part of North Carolina.2 The children of Isaac and Barbara were Isaac, RenB, Mary, Catherine, Rebecca, Margaret, and Abigail, Mary the oldest being about fifteen at the time of the migration, while the youngest, Isaac, was a baby. It is said that the first Isaac had a very dark complexion, which led his father, Red, to call him his Spaniard, referring to Margaret Bulloch’s maternal line- age, and that, in each succeeding generation, there has been at least one “Spaniard”. The second Isaac married Sarah Long, daughter of Tobias Long of Pennsylvania and grand-daughter of Edward Long (or Lange) who came to America with William Penn’s fleet. Twelve children were born to this Isaac Julian and Sarah- Bohan, Tobias, Isaac, Zeruah, Jacob, Elizabeth, RenB, Shubael, Sarah, Elinor, and Martha and Barbara (twins). The third Isaac, father of the Isaac Hoover Julian of this sketch, came to Wayne County, Indiana, in 1808, and was soon followed by three of his brothers, Jacob, Red, and Shubael. In 1816, these hardy sons were followed by the parents and their six daugh- ters. The year after his arrival in Indiana Territory, the third Isaac Julian married Rebecca Hoover, daughter of Andrew 1 Washington Irving, Life of Washington, I, Chap. 18. This item of information relative to Isaac Julien, eon of Ren6 St. Julieh, is given in connection with an account of the Indian panic which followed the defeat of Braddock in July, 1766. ‘For more than a generation, pioneers of the Shenandoah Valley together with a vast number of colonists from the interior of Pennsylvania who migrated by way of the Valley, had been moving to the Carolina Piedmont by the same general route as that now followed by the Julian families. Clarke: Isaac Hoover Julian 11 Hoover, one of the earliest pioneers of Wayne County and a leading member of the Society of Friends. The Hoovers were likewise from Randolph County, North Car~lina.~It is in- teresting to note that members of both the Hoover and Julian families had united with the Society of Friends during the evangelizing tour of Job Scott, a well-known English Quaker who visited Randolph County, North Carolina, in the year 1788. There have been various conjectures as to just when the Hoovers became Friends and it is therefore gratifying to have the question settled by Isaac Hoover Julian’s explicit state- ment contained in a sketch of his life sent to the writer by his grand-daughter. Andreas Huber, grandfather of Rebecca Hoover Julian, must have removed from his home on Pipe Creek, Maryland to Randolph County, North Carolina, about the same time that the sons of Ren&St. Julien fled from the Valley of Virginia to the same section. It seems probable that the two families were acquainted in North Car~lina.~At the time of Isaac Hoover Julian’s birth in 1823, his father (the third Isaac Julian) had lately completed a term of service in the state Legislature. He had been a school teacher, a Justice of the Peace, and a holder of other local offices. But having signed some notes for a friend on the eve of a financial panic (1819) he now (1823) sold his farm, paid off the notes, and purchased from the Government a tract of land on the Wabash, near the site of the present city of Lafayette in a newer section than Wayne County. There he and his twelve-year-old son John erected a cabin, to which, in December, 1823, he con- ducted his family. At this time, the fourth Isaac in direct line was six months old. The recurrence of a fever from which it was thought the father had recovered laid him low and he died a few days after their arrival at the new frontier home. His widow immedi- ately returned to Wayne County with her six children and by means of tireless industry and dauntless determination man- aged to give them such educational advantages as the time and place afforded. It meant hard work and self-denial on the part of all. Never physically robust, the fourth Isaac Julian, the young- * See Grace Julian Clarke, “Andrew Hoover Comes to Indiana”, in Zndiana Magazine of History (1928), XXIV, 223-241. *See ibid., 223-226, for an account of the migrations of Andreas Huber. The writer haa found no actual evidence to prove that the Hoovers and Julians were acquainted in North Carolina. Rebecca Hoover Julian’s mother was Elizabeth Waymire, daughter of Rudolph Wehmeyer (a native of Hanover) who came to America in 1760. The writer hopes to deal more at length with the Waymire family in a later article. 12 Indiana Magazine of History est child of the widow, was spared much of the drudgery that fell to the lot of his older brothers. Having an insatible appetite for reading and the family library being exceedingly limited, he used to walk miles at all seasons to borrow books about which he had heard. His brother George W. Julian, six years older, was a sort of mentor to him and the tie between them was always close. Work on the farm in summer, daily reading, chiefly history and poetry, a few contributions to local newspapers, some of them in verse, teaching district schools, and a prospecting tour of Iowa occupied the time of the young man until his twenty-third year. In 1846 he and his mother removed to Linn County, Iowa, a few months before the ad- mission of that State to the Union. There he entered a quarter- section of prairie land, to which he added forty acres of wood- land by purchase, expecting to build a home and remain in that western area. He obtained a school and continued to write axtides for newspapers. He became also a contributor to The Ludies’ Repository, a monthly magazine of scholarly tone pub- lished at Cincinnati under the supervision of the Methodist Church. In addition he became interested in the politicql and social upheavals of the time, especially in relation to the anti- slavery movement, sending articles and letters to the National Era, an able antislavery journal published in Washington City by Dr.