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WILLIAM VANDEGRIFT

Born circa 1760 in Holland

Some of what we know about are ancestors are found in records which were recorded long ago.  The words may be faded and difficult to read but we are able to put some of the pieces of our ancestry puzzle together.  Some of what we know are family legends, based upon facts and nurtured in our imagination.  And, so it is with William.

It is legend that William Vandegrift came from Holland sometime during the 1760's and landed on the Ohio River where Portsmouth was later built.   William was a baby when they came to that place.  The names of his father and mother are unknown.  They were our original immigrant ancestors.

The original Van der grifts who came to America in the 1640's crossed the ocean from Charlois , Netherlands .  Charlois at one time was a village a short distance south west of Rotterdam and is now a part of the larger city.  There is no record of a William Vandegrift, or any person with a similar surname, leaving the Rotterdam area to come to America during the mid 1760's.  It may be they came from the Amsterdam area.  The fact is, we know of no relationship between the original family and William. 

What we know about William is a blur.  His great grand-daughter, Elmira , when she was ninety-two years of age, and seemingly of good mind, wrote an account about his coming to America and landing on the Ohio River where Portsmouth was later built.  In 1946, we have a second letter she wrote to her niece, Rose McInroy, and said that William came as a baby.  Who was William’s father and mother?  William’s son, Leonard, then was certainly the third generation in America .

During the 1760's, traveling the Ohio River would often have been perilous.  It was inhabited by a diverse Indian population whose ancestors had roamed the region for over ten thousand years.  There were the Shawnee , Delaware , Wyandot, Mingo and Miami .  In the past, the Indians had roamed freely without rivalry or warfare but with the intrusion of white traders and settlers all that began to change.

The mouth of the Scioto River was a strategic point at which the Indians assembled to attack unwary voyagers on the Ohio River .  There were very few settlements along the Scioto .  Portsmouth was settled in 1803; however, many of its earliest settlers predate that by several generations.  The decade beginning 1760 was an America full of adventures and dangers.

It was difficult to move from one place to another.  The under brush was thick.  Indian trails were dangerous.  There was the possibility of ambush.

After the end of the French and Indian war in 1763, the British came to control the area that’s now Ohio and the British sought to limit migration west of the Appalachian Mountains .  The French claimed the area until that time.  Whether William came to what is now Portsmouth , Ohio would be hard to determine in written records.

The Lower Scioto Valley was a migratory field for the buffalo. Elk and bear roamed in the wooded hills and the deer and wild turkey made it their home. The valleys were filled with small game and fish swam in the cool waters.  It was a paradise for the hunter.

In 1795 the valley of the Scioto , with its wealth of forest and stream, with its high and rolling upland, bold bluffs and nestling valleys, became the property of the white man.

We don't know how long William and his father remained around the confluence of the Scioto and Ohio rivers.  Portsmouth was put under water by floods a few times and he may have decided to find some other place to live.  There would have been no problem for William, as a young man, to go on foot or horseback to Fayette County , Pennsylvania rather than on the river.  Unless you paddled your own canoe, the upriver trip would have been by keel boat and that would have taken far longer than walking.

The Indian wars of the 1790's ended.  Life on the rivers were often very difficult.  The rivers were the highways in those days.  Produce, freight -- all sorts of goods -- and people -- used the rivers for transportation.  We search in our imagination for the boat William built but it is too distant for us to see.  If it was a keel boat, we could tell of the "rough and tumble" fighting to near death as they bit off ears and gouged eyes.  That doesn’t fit the perception of William as we would see him in our mind’s eye.

There were other vessels on the Ohio and we look to see them:  flatboats and steam boats.  We are even unable to see how large a boat William operated.  We only know what Elmira said. 

It may be he met his wife in Fayette County .  According to Elmira , she had died while she was yet young but had two sons, Leonard and George. George drowned when he was about seven years of age. 

William had worked the rivers, perhaps, as his father before him.  We believe that around 1810, he worked as a Cooper and that he and his son operated toe boats on the Ohio River .

We know nothing more.  We can only explore our imagination.