Agnes Ann (Caldwell) Skidmore (1705 - 1792)

Born 1705 in Wicomico River, Somerset County, Maryland

Ancestors

Wife of Joseph Edward Skidmore — married 7 Apr 1730 in Murderkill Hundred, Kent County, Delaware

Descendants

Died 2 Jan 1792 at about age 87 in Ruddle, Pendleton County, Virginia, United States

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Biography

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Occasional Papers, no. 36

“GRANNY” [AGNES] SKIDMORE, A NURSE-PRACTITIONER BY 1769 IN VIRGINIA.

by Warren Skidmore

Next to nothing is usually known about the subservient wives of the early settlers on the Virginia frontier. I did know a bit about Agnes (Caldwell) Skidmore before I made my first long visit to Virginia in pursuit of family history in 1951.1 I spent a day in the courthouse at Rockingham County, and then that evening I was able to use a daybook kept at Felix Gilbert’s store in that county with hundreds of charges from 1774-1777.2 It was owned by Mrs. John T. Harris of Harrisonburg who very kindly set up a card table in her living room and let me spend several hours making pencil notes from it.3 I set down a long list of things that could not be made at home which were purchased by the Skidmores at Gilbert’s establishment. It included hemp, blankets, salt, beeswax, kegs, girths, shears, pots, kettles, wire, hammers, thimbles, hats, shoes and (surprise) quantities of rum imported from the West Indies. However my major new discovery was to find in the daybook that Mrs. Ann or “Granney Skidmore,” whose charges were entered in both names, appeared to be the only nurse-midwife (who was then known familiarly with the epithet “granny”) who dealt at Gilbert’s store.4 (WS)

It started with a tedious drive through northern West Virginia over roads that had hundreds of sharp 90 degree turns laid out years earlier by county surveyors to avoid crossing through any poor farmer’s corn patch. I finally arrived at Philippi in Barbour County where I had an indifferent meal at an eatery with a “White Only” sign on the door. I eventually got home several days later after stopping at several other courthouses, lastly at Fincastle in Botetourt County. The county clerk there told me that while he was a Virginian he still highly approved of my Republican senator, Robert A. Taft, son of the former president. He was pleased to hear that Senator Taft’s office had sent me several years earlier a pass to the Senate Gallery which I occasionally used when I was at college in Annapolis, Maryland. There were then no McDonald’s or fast fooderies, no motels, and only very occasionally a set of drafty “tourist cabins” to accommodate the traveler. (Different times, different mores, now happily largely forgotten.)

2 I had learned of this ledger from John W. Wayland who had printed some useful extracts from it in his History of Rockingham County (Dayton, Virginia, 1912) 64. Alas this daybook (which I would love to find and fully transcribe today) can not now be found. The Skidmore extracts printed here in the Appendix mention still other volumes (called Ledgers F and G) of what was once clearly a long series of the financial records of the store between 1769-1774. Alas, all of these daybooks now seem to be totally lost.

3 This was back in the dark ages before photocopiers.

4 A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles, by Mitford M. Mathews (University of Chicago Press, 1951) 731.

Local usage also sometimes transformed the noun granny into a verb as

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Agnes Caldwell Skidmore, a daughter of Andrew (1675-1751) and Margaret (Train) Caldwell of Kent County, Delaware was born about 1706, but on the Wicomico River in Somerset County, Maryland. She went to Delaware about 1715 where Andrew Caldwell later farmed a plantation called The Exchange.

5 Her father became one of the most influential men in Kent County, and her brother Major Andrew Caldwell (ca. 1704-1774) represented the county in the General Assembly of Delaware for 12 years from 1745 to 1757. Agnes (known also as Annes or Ann) married Joseph Skidmore (1706-1778) of Murderkill Hundred in Kent County, Delaware. He had been left an orphan in childhood, but survived and managed to marry well to Agnes before 7 August 1730.

6

On 18 June 1736 Joseph Skidmore, now styled a yeoman, sold Fisher’s Delight (a small plantation that he had inherited from his father) for £70. Driven by ambition he left shortly after his wife’s confinement for what is now Washington County, Maryland.

7 Agnes joined her husband soon after in Maryland where the majority of her 11 children were born. They stayed there for a time, but then went by way of the gap at Harper’s Ferry up the Shenandoah to what was then the old Augusta County in Virginia.

Joseph Skidmore set out immediately on a search the area that became Pendleton County where he entered surveys of an enormous lot of the choicest bottom tracts which promised easy development. One of the best of these, containing 54 acres on Lick Run near the present crossroads at Ruddle in Pendleton County, he kept for himself where he built a profitable gristmill. His home there, originally a log cabin, was hard by the mill and enlarged several times. About 1840 the original house was sided over for the last time, and the burr stone from the mill used as the foundation for a chimney added to the house. It can still be seen embedded in the sod, and an old photograph taken of the house as it looked after 1840 still survives.

8

The only mischief that the Skidmores are known to have suffered at the hands of the Indians was here at this log cabin and was remembered by Delilah (Skidmore) Cogar (1827-1919), a great-granddaughter of Agnes Skidmore. According to her the Skidmores lived on a small run and one day when Agnes was home alone a party of Indians appeared and stole a hog which had just been dressed and was hanging up outside the cabin. Agnes (who Mrs Cogar described as “a large spare-made” woman) sat down on the floor and cried while the Indians looked in through the cracks of the house and laughed at her. The Skidmores did all of their trading at Felix Gilbert’s store at Peale’s Cross Road about five miles southeast of Harrisonburg.

9 He was in business by 1765, but his trade was in a small way

“she grannied yore mother when you was born,” an example quoted by Mathews.

5 The town of Woodside below Dover now stands on this tract together with the old Caldwell burying ground. See the long article “Notes on the Caldwell Family of Kent County, Delaware” by Mary Couper Williams, (Genealogical Society of Pennsylvbania, vol. VI, no. 2 (March, 1916).

6 For an extended biography of Joseph Skidmore see Thomas Skidmore (Scudamore), 1605-1684, of Westerleigh, Gloucestershire, and Fairfield, Connecticut, (3rd ed., CD-ROM, 1998), 51-58. Andrew Caldwell deeded a acre of land to his presumptive son-in-law on 7 April 1730.

7 According to Susannah (Skidmore) Harper her father, [Captain] John Skidmore, had been born eight days earlier in Delaware.

8 Moments in Time; a Pictorial History of Pendleton County (1988) 128.

9 This was then where the roads from Swift Run Gap and Brown’s Gap come down around the

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until he went off to London and came back to Virginia with a fine stock of goods to please the local planters. In addition to his emporium, he also ran an inn and tavern here that drew a heavy patronage from a wide area about the Shenandoah Valley.

10

Gilbert and Joseph Skidmore, Senior had one trait in common. Both were members of the Church of England, this in an area where the majority of the population was either Scotch-Irish and Presbyterians, or German and Lutherans. Gilbert was one of the most active members of the local Established Church. In 1761 he and John Buchanan were chosen as wardens of the Augusta Parish Vestry and they ordered a parish register book, a Bible, and two prayer books (now lost) to be used by the incumbent and what must have been a small congregation. In addition to the account book I saw in 1951 there was an earlier one for the 1768 and 1769 for Gilbert’s emporium that found its way to the local historical society.

11 From it I found that in 1769 Granny Skidmore purchased a quantity of ginger for which she earned in turn a credit for her sale to Gilbert of a surplus supply of the root of the ginseng plant. Presumably this was dug up in the forest about Ruddle. Ginseng was highly prized in China (where it did not grow) and it is possible that some of her hoard of the root was eventually exported there.

12 It is clear that she was a medical practitioner in a small way, and that her talent extended beyond midwifery and childhood complaints. Ginger was then the best known remedy for stomach complaints, and ginseng had a reputation as a general tonic but also (probably undeserved) as a great restorative of masculine vigor.

Americans living on the frontier in the 18th century did not have access to a doctor, and most probably could not have afforded his fees even if they had. There were not many trained physicians in early America and the majority of them practiced their skills in the cities along the Atlantic seaboard. However in many of these rural communities there was frequently a resident, usually an aging matriarch who had several children of her own, who assisted their neighbors in childbirth and with some other simple treatments of common complaints.

mountain and cross the Keezletown Road. These roads are now U. S. Route 33, and State Route 276.

10 There are predictable entries for people from what is now Rockingham County, but also from present day Pendleton, Randolph, Albemarle, Culpeper, and Greene Counties, as well as travelers and from several other unidentified places. Wayland also noticed elsewhere that George Washington stopped at “one Gilbert’s” at Peale’s Cross Roads on 30 September 1784. Jonas Friend, a son-in-law of Granny Skidmore, purchased eight kegs of rum from the Indies which he carted back to his fort near Elkins in the Tygart Valley for the entertainment of his guests.

11 This earlier daybook was previously unknown to me, and I remain indebted to Glenn Huffman of Harrisonburg, Virginia, for an old undated newspaper article of extracts from it headed “Roster of Many Early Rockingham Settlers from Old Account Book, by P. C. Kaylor, president of the Rockingham Historical Society” found in a local newspaper. I digitized and annotated the Kaylor clipping and then published it as “Felix Gilbert’s account book, 1768-9” in the Allegheny Region Ancestors, vol. 8, no. 2 (Summer 1999). The original book (with a missing back and a loss of the index from A-O) was formerly in the possession of the historical society, but it has not been seen since the society moved several years ago and is also presumed to have been lost.

12Ginseng grows in deciduous forests, and the plants (identified by the bright red berries) were dug up in the autumn. The roots are frequently over-harvested, and ginseng is now protected as an endangered species in several states.

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There are not many written records that survive about early American grannies.

13 Mostly they sat by patiently waiting for nature to complete the birth. They confined their activities largely to comforting mother, and then finally tying the umbilical cord. Also, on occasion, they went so far as to christen an infant to save its soul when its death was imminent.

Agnes and her husband seem to have separated perhaps as early as 1768. Joseph Skidmore and a part of his children moved before the Revolution to South Elkins in what is now Randolph County where they were among the earliest settlers in the Tygarts River Valley. Joseph and his youngest son Andrew Skidmore attempted, unsuccessfully, to dam up the river at South Elkins to power a new mill. If we believe Andrew Skidmore he went there at the age of 18, and this would put their removal in 1768. What is certain is the quality of the land they claimed, and that Joseph Skidmore was again among the first to stake out several potentially useful sites for profitable resale when the community grew.

Agnes, up to now a dutiful wife, had followed her husband from Delaware to Maryland, and then to a hard life in frontier Virginia. Clearly she now rejected still another removal to an even more dangerous and difficult life. Joseph Skidmore then deeded his old mill and home-place to his son Samuel Skidmore on 26 August 1772, and presumably Samuel agreed to support his mother there in her old age. This seems to have been an amiable agreement until Samuel Skidmore died untimely in 1780 leaving a widow and a minor son as his heirs. Agnes Skidmore made a determined effort after his death in a suit “Skidmore vs. Skidmore” to have her dower set off in the Mill Run property by her son’s executors.

14

She kept a relationship with her family back in Delaware. In 1774 her nephew Jonathan Caldwell was the captain of a company called the “Blue Hen’s Chickens” in the Revolution in the Delaware regiment commanded by Colonel John Haslet (ca. 1757-1777).

15 He promptly became something of a local celebrity. Word of Caldwell’s exploits reached Agnes in Virginia and she saw a grandson, Jonathan Caldwell Friend, named for her nephew.

16

Agnes Skidmore survived her husband for many years. She put in a claim at a court held for

13 Zachary B. Friedenberg, The Doctor in Colonial America.(Rutledge Books, Inc., Danbury, Connecticut, 1998), 80. He notices a dated list (like a parish register) kept by one New England midwife of all the births where she officiated.

14 Apparently unsuccessfully. It descended soon after to her infant grandson Samuel Skidmore (1779-1852), later a doctor in Georgia, who sold it after he attained his majority to his cousins Levi and Isaac Skidmore of Pendleton County. It 1823 the property was owned by their brother James Skidmore, by then the largest landowner on the county, and it appears in the tax list of 1823 called the Old Mill Place.

15 I have dealt with Colonel Haslet (who was also a medical doctor) earlier in an Occasional Paper, no. 24, “The Inventory Taken in 1762 of the Shop and Medicines of Dr. John Skidmore at Dover, Delaware.” Haslet had started the study of medicine as an apprentice to Dr. Skidmore long before the Revolution.

16Captain Caldwell was a son of her brother Joseph and Mary (Jenkins) Caldwell. For Jonathan Caldwell Friend (1774?-1856), a son of Jacob and Elizabeth (Skidmore) Friend, see Heritage of Braxton County West Virginia 1995 (Heritage Book Committee, 1995), 149. There are some errors in this account, and his family in Braxton County seem to have not known about Friend’s namesake in Delaware.

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Augusta County on 18 January 1775 for supplies furnished to the militia a few months earlier on their way to the battle at Point Pleasant. Mrs. Ann Skidmore was paid “By Sundry p[er] Aud[it] £1.17.2 Ex.”:

17 This entry is not itemized but it may have been for diets (meals) served to her son’s company of militia before they left for the battle at Point Pleasant.

She was not mentioned in her husband’s will (who had “a negro wench” that took care of his household), while she stayed apparently by agreement at her more comfortable home at Ruddle. She was probably delighted to have been there in 1777 which was a particularly bloody year on the frontier. Her son, Captain John Skidmore, was sent out at the head of a company of men recruited in Pendleton County to protect his kinsmen and the other early settlers in the Tygart Valley.

18

Agnes Skidmore was living as late as 2 January 1792 clearly over 80, but presumably still “spare-made” and of good mind, when the Pendleton County Court ordered that a deposition about a lawsuit be taken from her. She was buried there on the home-place at Ruddle. There are two old graves here. One that could still be traced in 1951 (when I was there) was several yards south of the house with a small field headstone. It was remembered by the owners as the grave of “a Skidmore woman.” A foot-stone had recently disappeared then, but the grave facing to the east could be easily traced. The other grave, some distance from this, had been plowed over in 1951. It was said to be the grave of Mary Elizabeth Hartman, the young first wife of Reverend John George Dahmer.

19 Mrs. Dahmer may have been taken on as a companion to Agnes Skidmore who probably was not living alone at this date.

Felix Gilbert was a determined Loyalist during the Revolution, and Andrew Skidmore (Granny’s son) accused him with “speaking Treasonable words that tend to encourage sedition on the Western Waters.” He was accused of influencing a Tory uprising that had to be put down by the Augusta militia, and was convicted by the new Rockingham Court at their second sitting in May 1778. It was the verdict of the court that Gilbert should post a bond of £1000 to insure his good behavior.20 He abandoned his business ventures in Virginia soon after, and went to Washington in Wilkes County, Georgia where he died, still called a merchant, in 1801.

APPENDIX.

SKIDMORE EXTRACTS FROM THE 1768-9 AND THE 1774-1777 DAYBOOKS.

[No month or day found] 1769. Ann Skidmore, to 1/2 lb Ginger, to 2 tins, to 2 Blankets, credited by 8 lbs. Ginsang at 2 Shillings. 17See my Lord Dunmore’s Little War (Bowie, Maryland, Heritage Books, Inc., 2002), 99, 109.

18 Including his father, his sister Sarah (wife of Jonas Friend), and his brothers Thomas and Andrew Skidmore.

19 Reverend Dahmer married Nancy, the daughter of Captain John Skidmore, as his second wife. They are buried elsewhere.

20 Freeman H. Hart, The Valley of Virginia in the American Revolution 1763-1789 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1942) 104. :Hart also cites the Felix Gilbert account books in his bibliography. It is to be regretted that no one has ever attempted even a brief account of the numerous Loyalists in the Virginia Valley, good men, now forgotten.

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Saturday, 14 January 1775. [Captain John Skidmore and his younger brother Thomas Skidmore were at Gilbert’s store.] Captain Skidmore was credited with £2.18sh.8½d. for hemp. He bought two blankets for £1.2sh.0d. He seems to have paid an account of Henry Buzzard of £4.15sh.0d, and bought 1½ pecks of salt for 7sh.6d. He paid a total sum of £6.7sh.6d.

Thomas Skidmore was credited with “20½ Grey Skin”21 at £1.17sh.7d. He bought three blankets at £1.17sh.6d., one Handkerchief at 1sh. 4d., and one quart of Rum at 1sh.6d. He paid the sum of £2.0sh.4d.

Mrs. Ann Skidmore was credited with 3¼ Beeswax, at 3sh.9½d. :[This seems to have been tendered for his mother by Thomas Skidmore.]

Saturday, 4 February 1775.

Jonas Friend was credited for 82 “Grey Skin” at 1sh.9d each, for £7.3sh.6d. He purchased 49 and 1/8 gallons of Rum at 1sh.9d (£10.9sh.9½) and also eight kegs at 2sh.6d (£1.0sh.0d)

Monday, 6 February 1775.

Andrew Skidmore bought one girth at 1sh.0d, ½ pint of rum at 7½d., two quarts of rum at 7sh.6d., ½ pint of rum at 7½d., ½pint of rum at 7½d. His sum 5sh.4½d.

Wednesday, 8 February 1775.

[Captain John Skidmore and his brother-in law Gabriel Coile were at the store.] Captain John bought a pair of shears, some pots, a blanket, a linen wheel, another blanket, salt, and rum. Coile purchased two yards of wire at 4d., and a hammer at 1sh.9d.

Thursday, 16 February 1775.

Joseph Skidmore, Junior. Credited with hemp, £1.5sh.0d. He purchased one thimble at 4d., a pair of shears at 1sh.6d., and one hammer at 1sh.9d. Also two quarts of rum at 3sh.

Saturday, 2 March 1775.

Andrew Skidmore. Credited with a payment of £12.0sh.6d.

Monday, 3 April 1775.

Andrew Skidmore charged with “one bad £5 Bill received of you,” £5.0sh.0d.

Monday, 19 June 1775.

Joseph Skidmore, Senior. One hat, at 4sh.3d.

Captain John Skidmore. One kettle.

Wednesday, 30 August 1775.

Granny Skidmore. To shoes.

21 These were furs from trapped gray squirrels who were, with their tails, about 16 inches long. Gilbert also dealt occasionally in fox, mink, and wolf furs.

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Thursday, 7 September 7 1775.

Granny Skidmore. To shoes.

Samuel Skidmore, one pair of shoes, 8sh.

Tuesday, 31 October 1775.

Captain John Skidmore. Paid an account for G. Hammer, and bought salt for 3sh.4¼d.

Monday 13 May 1776.

Ann Skidmore, one bottle of rum, £2,7sh.0d.

Monday 3 June 1776.

Captain John Skidmore. By cash, £20.1sh.0d.

Jonas Friend, By cash, £3.0sh.0d.

Wednesday, 13 September 1776.

Granny Skidmore, two pair of shoes, 18sh.; one bridle, 3sh.; one peck of salt, 6sh.3d.

Sunday, 3 November 1776.

Received of Andrew Skidmore “one eight dollar Virginia Bill, No. 11087, passed on 7=1776.

Gilbert made Andrew Skidmore sign the daybook “as suspicious of counterfeit.”

22

22 This is one of two genuine signatures of Andrew Skidmore I found in 1951 in Rockingham

Sources

• http://www.skidmoregenealogy.com/images/20081116_OccPap_no._36_Granny_Skidmore.pdf

• Findagrave http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=skidmore&GSiman=1&GSbyrel=all&GSdyrel=all&GSst=52&GScnty=3099&GScntry=4&GSob=n&GRid=155183277&df=all&

• WikiTree profile Caldwell-1320 created through the import of JOSEPH~1.GED on Jul 14, 2012 by Joseph Stalnaker. See the Changes page for the details of edits by Joseph and others.