The Adonijah Foot of this profile was born on May 8,1823 in Springfield, Massachusetts. He was the youngest of eight children born to Adonijah Foot and Clarissa Woodworth. His father was the first Master Armorer at the Springfield Armory in Springfield, Massachusetts. His family had lived on the Armory grounds at least since 1809. He was just two years old at the time of his father's untimely death in 1825. Sometime after his father died, Adonijah moved with his mother and his six living siblings (ages 8 to 16) moved down from the hill on which the Armory stood to the growing town of Springfield on the Connecticut River.
[Add Adonijah's life-changing years at Springfield's "Old High School" ; Also his civil engineering work in Lebanon, NJ before his first wife and daughter died about 1852.]
From 1853 until his premature death one month shy of his 37th birthday, Adonijah was the Resident Engineer of the 4th Division of the Mobile & Ohio Railroad. He was in charge of finishing construction of the last section of this railroad, between Rienzi and Baldwyn. [See map showing the section between Rienzi and Baldwin in the column to right.] https://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Special:EditPerson&u=24561035# About two weeks before Adonijah's death, he was severely injured by an accident falling from his horse while on the job. According to family records, the cause of death on April 12, 1860 was work-related -- two weeks earlier, he was knocked off his horse in a forested area near Carrollville, a pre-railroad town to the west of Baldwyn on the map. He was severely injured and died two weeks later. Click on the obituary from his hometown paper, the Springfield Republican (April 16, 1860) in the column to the right. It was written by the editor Samuel Bowles, Adonijah's high school friend and brother-in-law. [1]
Exactly one year after Adonijah's death, the Civil War began. Festivities to celebrate the completion of the Mobile & Ohio railroad were held in January, 1861, but normal freight and passenger service between Mobile, Alabama and the Ohio River to the north were short-lived. After the Union victory at the battle of Shiloh in April 1862, the Confederate forces pulled up the tracks as they retreated to southern Alabama.
Adonijah's gravestone was still propped up against a tree in the abandoned Old Carrollville Cemetery, Frankstown, Prentiss County, Mississippi in 2017. [2]
Research notes:
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Adonijah is 21 degrees from Herbert Adair, 20 degrees from Richard Adams, 18 degrees from Mel Blanc, 23 degrees from Dick Bruna, 19 degrees from Bunny DeBarge, 30 degrees from Peter Dinklage, 16 degrees from Sam Edwards, 17 degrees from Ginnifer Goodwin, 19 degrees from Marty Krofft, 13 degrees from Junius Matthews, 15 degrees from Rachel Mellon and 19 degrees from Harold Warstler on our single family tree. Login to find your connection.
Categories: Descendants of John Skinner, Skinner Name Study