Jonas Friend, oldest son of Isreal Friend and Catherine House, was born circa 1725. He had lived at Friend's Fort, now Elkins, Randolph Co., West Virginia, where he died 15 Nov. 1807. He had married by 1754 to Sarah Skidmore in (some say) Rockingham Co., Va. They had five children.
The Friend family has been reported extensively. Honorable biographers including Warren Skidmore and Peter S. Craig are referenced through the attached PDF. Inserted links provided by Stuerke-1 invite you to visit some exciting profiles of relevant family members and neighbors.
The following biography abbreviates "Jonas Friend and Friend's Fort" by biographer, Warren Skidmore:
This profile's birthplace for Jonas Friend is posted with some license. Skidmore says that Isreal Friend, father of Jonas, started mining iron ore in 1734, on a tract of land on the Potomac River about two miles north of Harper's Ferry. In 1736, they were living west of the Potomac four miles south of the mouth of Antietam Creek. Jonas was a teen.
Concerning his marriage location, the WikiTree profile for Israel (father of Jonas) reminds us that Joseph Skidmore (father-in-law of Jonas) is found in Frederick County, Maryland in 1750. Frederick County Maryland also has a survey for John Friend about this time. (Stuerke)
In a 1754 deed, Jonas and his wife Sarah were called "late of Frederick County in the colony of Virginia but now of Augusta County". Jonas Friend was a Corporal in the French and Indian War serving under Captain Abraham Smith, He helped rebuild Fort Seybert after the massacre and was present 1761, when the property sold. Jonas bought 44 acres, part of a tract of 350 acres on the North Fork of the South Branch of the Potomac from the Green heirs on 29 May 1761. He was appointed a Constable in 1767.
By 1772, Jonas had moved to the Tygart River Valley in what became Randolph County. However the Friends didn't dispose of their land in Pendleton County until 22 May 1776 when they got a very good price (£105) from Charles Powers for what must have been his 44 greatly improved acres on the North Fork.
Sarah Friend's father, Joseph Skidmore and some of her brothers followed soon after to what is now Elkins. Edward Skidmore , Jonas' brother-in-law, and his young wife had come out to Virginia by 1772 bringing with him from Duck Creek Hundred in Newcastle County, Delaware, Benjamin and William Cleaver, Joseph Donoho, and probably Jesse Hamilton.
These men settled soon after in the Tygart River Valley and entered into a partnership with Jonas Friend to purchase a certificate for 1000 acres. Jonas Friend, his teen-age son Joseph, Edward Skidmore, and the other three partners promptly located at the mouth of Leading Creek. They built Friend's Fort.
On 16 September 1775 Jonas Friend was appointed a Gentleman Justice for Augusta County and he and Colonel Benjamin Wilson (appointed on the same day) became the first two representatives of the Virginia county system of law and government west of the Alleghenies.
On an evening in April 1781 Alexander West, a neighbor, was visiting at the fort. He and Jonas were sitting outside when West saw what he thought was an Indian in the shadows. He started for his gun but Jonas Friend stopped him saying the figure in the dark was probably one of his "yaller boys." Both West and Friend had fierce dogs, and not altogether certain of the identity of the figure, the dogs were set loose. However they flew at one another and the intruder vanished into the forest. West wanted to alarm the settlers that night, but Friend talked him out of it. The day following an Indian raiding party descended on the community and killed three of five men returning from the settlement which is now Clarksburg. From there they moved to Leading Creek where they destroyed most of a colony of six families taking three prisoners. This was the most disastrous Indian visitation on record in the Tygart River Valley. There was now little doubt that West had seen a scout from the raiding party and Jonas Friend condemned himself bitterly for not letting West act on his impulse to alarm the settlers.
He and Benjamin Wilson, William White, and William Cleaver appraised the estate of Joseph Skidmore, Senior, on 19 June 1778. His father-in-law had died at what is now South Elkins.
Edward Skidmore, the Cleavers, and several other families left the Tygart Valley for what is now Nelson County, Kentucky, in 1779, according to the pension application of William Cleaver filed in 1832 from Grayson County, Kentucky. On 24 June 1782
At a court held at Clarksburg on 22 September 1784 Jonas Friend was appointed a Surveyor of a public highway from his own house to Eberman Creek. He was to work the tithables on Leading Creek, both sides of the Tygart Valley River, up Eberman's Creek, and across the river to Hezekiah Rosecrances, and to keep it in lawful repair.
On 26 March 1792 the Randolph County Court ordered that Jonas Friend be exempted from laboring on the highway, and that Cornelius Westfall be appointed as surveyor of highway in his place.
Jonas and Sarah Friend divided the 1000 acre tract on 25 May 1795 and sold 300 acres to their son Andrew Friend for £1000. The remaining 700 acres of the tract was deeded by Jonas Friend on 22 August 1796 for $1.00 to the remaining four partners "my part being laid off and a deed of Bargain and sale made unto my son Andrew for three hundred acres."
Jonas Friend perhaps also had the unhappy distinction of suffering from Randolph County's first recorded case of senile dementia. His declining years are reported by Hu Maxwell:
"Jonas Friend lived to be very old, and in his last years his mind was very weak, and his memory existed nearly altogether in the past. He fancied that he was still a soldier fighting the British in defense of his country; and with his knapsack on his back and his gun on his shoulder he would go from house to house, halting occasionally, as if on picket duty, when he would raise his gun and go through the act of firing, exclaiming in exultation that there was one Red Coat less."
He is said to have died on 15 November 1807 at Friend's Fort, and his wife Sarah Friend followed him in death in the year following.
On 18 August 1784 the newly constituted Harrison County court ordered Jacob Westfall to make a list of all the white people living in his former militia district which included the Wilmoth's Settlement on Leading Creek. Jonas Friend was head of a household that included six white persons, one dwelling, and two other buildings. He was the only tithable in the household, so it may be taken as certain that his son Joseph Friend was in the west fighting Indians. In addition to the parents the other four white souls in the household must have been his son Andrew and his three daughters Sarah, Nancy, and Mary.
The life of Jonas Friend has been reported by master historians and the findings have been repeated at Jonas Friend on WikiTree.
At Friend-66 we can find reference to a disconnected Friend family in Garrett County Maryland. The birth location given in the present profile, Friend-1323 is Garrett County. This may indicate that the profile was constructed for a person different that the Jonas Friend of Friend-88. However, the other fields for this profile seem to be filed exactly the same as Friend-66. There are no unique data beside birth location in this profile. Spouse, ancestors and siblings and Jonas's death all seem to be "borrowed" from Friend-66. I recommend that the content of this profile be deleted (including present discussion), that the birth date and location be deleted, and that this profile be merged with Friend-88. Stuerke-1
Alternate birth
Jonas Friend born 1734 in Friendsville, Garrett, Maryland
Buried Williamsport, Washington County, Maryland, USA.
Joseph Skidmore and his wife, who had gone south to Pendleton County in 1749, were back in what is what is now Washington County, Maryland, on 1 October 1753 when they signed a deed selling Monican. (Frederick -County, Maryland, Deeds, E, 320-1.
I have already dealt with Joseph Friend in a paper published over 40 years ago. See "Captain Joseph Friend's Revolutionary Pension Application" in The Magazine of History and Biography by the Randolph County Historical Society (Number Eleven, December 1954), 19-22. He stated that he was only 19 years old at the time he first served in the militia company commanded by Captain Benjamin Wilson in 1776, and elsewhere that he was nearly 70 (probably a bit overstated) in 1822.
They settled about one mile north of Franklin on what is still known as Friend's Run. Jacob Friend and his wife were both living in Pendleton County as late as 10 December 1817 when his will was signed. For this couple and their nine children see my notes on "The Friend Family" in Pendleton County, West Virginia, Past and Present (1991), 108-9. Overlooked in this account was their daughter Elizabeth, born in 1771, who married William Lawrence in 1791. Lawrence applied for a pension as a Revolutionary soldier in 1819 in Pendleton County.
David Armstrong, "Thomas Skidmore: First Settler on Site of Elkins," Hacker's Creek Journal, X, 98-101.
Randolph County Deeds, IX, 482. Joseph Friend, of Nicholas County, sold to David Holder and Thomas Skidmore, 398 acres on the Cheat River at the head of Coburn's Run, for $600.00. See also Historical Cemeteries of Webster County, West Virginia (Exchange, WV, 1981), I, 1. There was no probate on his estate in Nicholas County. His grandson, Rev. Richard Anderson Arthur (1817-1899), taught and preached in Wheeling and Cincinnati in association with the Methodist Episcopal Church, and was involved with the abolitionists before the war. It is a great pity that no monument exists to memory of Captain Friend there, probably Webster County's most distinguished citizen.
C. J. Maxwell, Descendants of William Wilson, 1722-1801, and Elizabeth Blackburn (Dallas, Texas, 1943), 13. For Benjamin Casner, formerly of Randolph County, see the History of Noble County, Ohio (Chicago, 1887), 475.
Randolph County Orders. Andrew Friend, the justice in Randolph County, must be carefully distinguished from his cousin Andrew Pendleton Friend (1780-1865) in this period. Both died in what was to become Braxton County. Andrew P. Friend was one of the first justices named in Nicholas County, and was later an unsuccessful candidate for the House of Delegates. There were also several members of the Friend family of Washington County, Maryland, who patented land in Randolph County, but lived there briefly if at all.
Randolph County Surveys, I, 321. This land was presumably at or near the Kanawha Run Camping Area in Sutton Lake National Park. It is further described as on the dividing ridge of Salt Lick on the waters of the Holly River and Kanawha Run.
1880 census of Milton Township, page 200A. Jonas Friend was apparently overlooked in the 1860 census of both West Virginia and Ohio, and is not found indexed in the 1870 census of West Virginia
This person was created through the import of Grant R. Phillips, Jr..ged on 08 April 2011.
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