Who was James Sherrill? Who were his people? Where did he come from?
James Sherrill's heritage was one of Farmers, Pioneers, and Soldiers fighting for their freedom and independence. James' grandfather, Joshua Sherrill, fought the British at the famous Battle of Kings Mountain in 1780. Joshua Sherrill is DAR Patriot Ancestor, A103423. James' great-grandfather, William Sherrill, DAR Patriot Ancestor, A103445, was a Captain in the Battle of Kings Mountain. Joshua Sherrill, William Sherrill, and many others of the name Sherrill, lived in the Catawba area of North Carolina, which was settled by Adam Sherrill and his sons in 1747. At that time there were buffalo, wolves, bears, turtles, deer, elk, quail, rabbits, squirrel and many other creatures inhabiting North Carolina. It was still like a frontier when James was born there in 1830.
James Sherrill's father, Hugh Sherrill, moved his family to Cherokee County, Alabama between 1833 and 1835. By the time James Sherrill was five years old, his family was established on their plantation on the banks of the Coosa River. If the Catawba in North Carolina was still like frontier, the Coosa area in Cherokee County was truly wild country. James fished the Coosa River and hunted the woods for game as he grew older. While his older sisters were learning to spin and weave, James was following his father and older brothers around the plantation, or on hunting or fishing expeditions. It seemed a charmed life, but at the root it was sustained by slavery. Evidently, Hugh Sherrill suffered a revulsion of feeling about that peculiar institution which had been familiar to him all his life. When Hugh left the South, and his plantation, behind, he patently rejected slavery.
James Sherrill's father Hugh broke with generations of tradition and culture when he moved his family from Alabama to Iowa in 1846, going to live north of the Mason-Dixon line for the first time in his lifetime, and a first in his family. The Missouri Compromise, which passed the US Congress in 1820, established slavery as legal south of the Mason-Dixon line, and prohibited slavery north of the line. By moving to Iowa, Hugh Sherrill made a deliberate choice that went against generations of his ancestors. It was as good as a public declaration against slavery. Hugh gave up the plantation life that he had known in North Carolina, and had continued in Alabama.
Hugh Sherrill's move north of the Mason-Dixon Line was to have repercussions far beyond giving up the plantation. Hugh's older children had married southerners, and they stayed in the south when Hugh moved his family to Iowa. Hugh's younger sons married northern women. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, the Sherrill family was divided by geography, by whether their income was derived from plantations, and by family ties, according to who they married. The men went and fought in the war, and it was literally brother against brother for Hugh's sons. All except James, who left the United States of America in 1852, taking the Oregon Trail over 2,000 miles to the Willamette Valley in Oregon Territory.
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Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/68278734/hugh-sherrill: accessed
22 December 2022), memorial page for Hugh Sherrill (17 Sep 1792–28 Feb 1849), Find a Grave Memorial ID 68278734, citing Pine Hill Cemetery, Des Moines,
Polk County,
Iowa,
USA;
Maintained by Texasnmyheart (contributor 46847602). |
But that was years in the future. For now, we find Hugh Sherrill on page 20 of the Wapello County Iowa State Census in 1847. James Sherrill lived at home with his parents, age seventeen, and worked on his father's farm. James' older sister Margaret kept a journal of those years. When Hugh Sherrill died in 1849, at age 57, James went to live with Margaret and her husband, and worked on their farm. Margaret makes a point about her brother James in her journal. She describes him breaking up the sod with a sod plow - pulled by six teams of oxen -- which would be twelve oxen pulling the plow. James must have been a large, muscular young man.
Coming Tomorrow: The Wagon Train Crosses Iowa and arrives at the Missouri River
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