St. Charles, Missouri
March 30, 1920
My dear Mrs. Parrish:
Mrs. C. C. Lemly, of Hot Springs, Arkansas, wrote to my mother Mrs.
C. H. Gauss, about your inquiry for Johns family history, and I am writing
to say that we would be very much interested in any family history that
you can give us, also that you are very welcome to any that we can give
you.
Mrs. Lemly and my mother are cousins, the former being a daughter of
Alfred Johns, and my mother of John Jay Johns, sons of Glover Johns
of Buckingham County, Virginia.
Alfred Johns left Virginia when a young man, married Miss Mary Wharton
in Mississippi, and had a plantation near Clinton, Miss., called "Chevy
Chase". No doubt Mrs. Lemly has told you something of her immediate
family. We call her Cousin "Bonnie". she was the youngest
child and was nicknamed Bonnie, but as she grew up she named herself
Roberta Lee.
My grandfather, John Jay Johns, came to St. Charles, Missouri, when
a young man and lived here until his death at eighty years of age, in
1899, April. My mother's maiden name was Charlotte Elizabeth Johns.
Out of a large family, three sons and my mother are living, also a half-sister,
the daughter of my grandfather's first wife.
The story in the family is that three brothers came from Wales in early
colonial days, one settled in Pennsylvania, one in Maryland, and one
in Virginia, ours of course being the Virginia branch. My grandfather,
about the time of his golden wedding, wrote a statement of family history,
but we cannot find this paper, so what I give you is from other sources.
I have found a paper which is a list of the family of John and Elizabeth
Johns, and will copy this below. It is evidently the same family
as the one you listed in your letter to Cousin Bonnie, with one or two
slight variations in dates, but Edmund Winston Johns is not in it, and
this I would like to clear up, as we have always understood that John
Johns married Elizabeth Glover, while you have Winston. Perhaps
it was Elizabeth Glover Winston. We know that Winston was a name
in the family, and one of my mother's brothers, now dead, was named
Shirley Winston Johns.
Following is the list:--
John Johns, born October
14, 1746, married February 28, 1765. In another place I found
the statement that he died at 75 years.
Elizabeth Johns, his wife,
born october 30, 1749, died June 16, 1784. In another place it
was stated that she died at about 39 years.
Their children were:--
| William Johns, born January 10, 1766 |
|
(Here Edmund Winston Johns is missing) |
| Judith Johns, born May 2, 1768 |
| Glover Johns, born December 25, 1769 |
| Anthony Johns, born March 11, 1771 |
| Martha Johns, born October 27, 1772 |
| (Mary Johns, born May 4, 1775. (You have January) |
| (
Died December 28, 1852 |
| Samuel Johns, born September 28, 1777 |
| Elizabeth Johns, born March 24, 1779 |
| Sarah Johns, born March 12, 1781 |
| (
married February 1, 1804 |
| Anne Johns, born March 6, 1783. (You have 1782) |
| John Johns, born June 3, 1784, died January 12, 1868. |
Glover Johns was born in Buckingham County, Virginia, Christmas Day,
1769, married in 1805 to Martha Jones, who was born in the same county
in 1780, daughter of Joel Jones, a Welshman. She died in 1828.
They had four children, Frederick, Alfred, Elizabeth and John Jay.
Frederick died, unmarried, in Tennessee, when something over thirty
years old. Alfred, as I have said, went to Mississippi.
Elizabeth married William Cowan and lived in Tennessee; one of her daughters
is an old lady, Mrs. Virginia Wooldrige, now living in Richmond, Virginia.
John Jay was about ten years old when his mother died. He was
born in Buckingham County June 27, 1818.
In 1831 Glover Johns sold his plantation in Virginia and went with John
Jay to Nashville, where I think his daughter, Mrs. Cowan was then living.
In the Fall of 1833 father and son went to Hinds County, Mississippi,
near Jackson. Here Glover Johns began raising cotton, but he died
the following year, 1834. (My mother had a brother Glover Johns, who
died when a young man, and I have a cousin Glover Johns who is living
in San Antonio, Texas.)
After his father's death, John Jay Johns lived with his sister, Mrs.
Cowan, in Memphis, Tennessee, until 1836, when he went to Miami University,
Oxford, Ohio, where he graduated in 1840 and married Catharine Woodruff.
He then went to Mississippi, and was a cotton planter, but in 1844 came
to St. Charles, Missouri, about twenty miles from St. Louis. He
brought with him some of the negroes he had inherited but left some
with his brother Alfred in Mississippi. His first wife died, leaving
two little girls, and in 1847 he married Jane Durfee (my grandmother).
Her mother had come from Scotland to St. Charles County in 1816, and
her father, Rev. Thomas Russell Durfee, had come from Massachusetts
as a pioneer Presbyterian minister. Her mother was a little girl
when she left Scotland.
John Jay Johns had bought some of the rich land near the Missouri River,
two or three miles from the town of St. Charles. For several years
he lived in the country, then moved ot town, leaving the negroes on
the farm, it being near enough to visit every day. In 1833 he
built the home in St. Charles that we are now living in, the place containing
between four and five acres, situated on a hill. Some of the forest
trees still remain. A few years after the Civil War, the negroes
being gone, he gave up farming and rented his land to tenants.
The care of his home place and the church work in which he was always
interested filled his time. He had thought of being a minister
but was not very strong when a young man and gave up the idea.
From the age of twenty-four he was a Presbyterian elder.
When a young man he began keeping a journal, which at first was a record
of farming, gardening and the weather, but gradually he included public
and family events. I hope some time to copy it in more compact
and convenient form. Have read some of it and there are references
to family history, also a description of a visit he made to Virginia,
when he went one year as commissioner to the General Assembly meeting
in Staunton, and revisited the places he had known. He always
loved the State, and when he became partially blind in old age one of
the books he liked to have read to him was Marion Harland's "Judith,
a Chronicle of Old Virginia", describing the same sort of people and
life that he remembered.
One of my sisters joined the D. A. R. a year ago, on the record of our
Massachusetts ancestors1, which we happened to
have in a book. They were among the earliest colonists and were
people to be proud of, but we have always considered ourselves Southerners
and would like to establish, if possible, a Revolutionary record for
our Virginia ancestors. My father2,
who died several years ago, was intensely Southern in his feelings.
His mother, Henrietta Fawcett, was born in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Her grandparents were French Huguenots who settled in Augusta County
about 1770. Fawcett of course is the Anglicized form.
Any additional family history that you can give us would be very interesting
to us. Who is Mr. Thomas Johns of Bristol? Do you know the
date when the Johns family first settled in Virginia? My grandfather
had an oil portrait of his brother Frederick, probably painted about
1830. He had dark hair, was smooth-shaven and wore a stock.
The picture has gone to my uncle Frederick.
I have written this long letter on the typewriter. Some of it
may not be interesting to you but I thought it could be more conveniently
read if typewritten. Hoping to hear from you.
Mrs. T. T. Parrish,
630 Day Avenue, S. W., Roanoke, Va.
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