A HISTORY OF THE FLEMINGFAMILY OF FLEMING, OHIO
By Richard A. Davis
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1. The Scottish Background
3. The Family Comes to America
4. How Margretta Stopped the Train and Put Fleming on the Map
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1. THE SCOTTISH BACKGROUND
We might begin our history of the Fleming family on Sept. 17, 1821, when the family stepped off the Telegraph in Philadelphia and became an American family. Certainly it was a new beginning. But where did they come from? Why did they emigrate? What preparations did they make to come? Who preceded them, came with them, came after them? Why did they live where they had lived before they came here? The truth is that history flows infinitely backward, and we can never come to the end--that is the beginning–of it, though at some point we hope we come to a convenient stopping (starting) point. It is partly a matter of what we can identify with. Our parents and grandparents tell us stories about themselves, and those stores are part of our history. Some parents don't tell their children much, and they leave them without a history. My father tells about how he lived with his grandfather during his senior year in high school and never knew he might want to know how his grandfather was a pioneer in western Kansas, and who his great-grandfather was. He found out some of it later when he went to investigate his family history, but much of it died with his grandfather. The Civil War comes alive in the history of the Fleming family because several Fleming cousins wrote letters which were serendipitously preserved, and in Robert Flemming's memoir of the Battle of Shiloh. Nobody wrote about that momentous voyage that ended Sept. 17, 1821, but we have the ship's passenger list, so we know who they came with and something about how they came. And there were stories handed down, some of which turn out to be wrong, as we shall see.
Earlier than that, we can make surmises from the wider history. For instance, Wilbur Turner, in his earlier family history wrote that the Duke of Argyll invited several families, among them the Flemings, to settle vacant lands he owned near Campbelltown. That much is true, but Dr. Turner was not a historian, and he did not discover the great historical significance of that small event.
One point I hope to convey in this family history is that our families are part of history. World War II is something that happened to our parents and grandparents. The Civil War is something that people took part in who are our uncles and first cousins, however many times removed. And not just the American Civil War. The English Civil War had a tremendous impact on our family. (It is grossly misnamed, because what impacted the Fleming family took place in Scotland, not England.)
Since our American story begins in 1821, we miss the colonial period of American History, the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the first phase of our national development. But just because it is not Fleming history, that doesn't mean that it is not part of our personal histories. Lucy Cole Flemming, after all, was a Daughter of the Mayflower, and all her descendants are eligible. All the descending lines from John and Jane Fleming married into older lines of American history sooner or later. Frances Irvin takes us to the tenth generation of Fleming history from John and Jane. Just for sport, let's see what that means.
Samantha Kay Thompson has two parents, Daniel Edward Thompson and Cary Sue Ricino. Samantha has four grandparents, two for each parent (Rodney Eugene Thompson, b. 1947, is the Fleming line) . She has eight grandparents (Audrey Jean Jacoby, b. 1928), 16 great-grandparents (Elsa Lurea Ferguson, b.1905), 32 great-great-grandparents (Carl Breckenridge Ferguson, b. 1881) , 64 3-great-grandparents (Lydia Jane Breckenridge, b. 1855), 128 4-great-grandparents (Andrew Fleming Breckenridge, b. 1823), 256 5-great-grandparents (Agnes Fleming, b. 1802), and 512 6-great-grandparents (John and Jane Fleming, our founding parents). That means that Samantha has 512 family stories at the generation of John and Jane Fleming. If she has a genealogy for each, she has quite a library. Samantha, by the way, is 2016 on the numbering of our genealogy, and even now is going higher as we discover ever more descendants.
But Samantha doesn't even know the names of all 512 of her6-great-grandparents. Some she may know as names, but nothing else. John Fleming and Jane Colville Fleming are--or can be--more important to her because of this volume of family history. They have become people she, and we all, can imagine as real people, not just names on a genealogy chart.
So where shall we start with the history of the Fleming family? The first thing we know is the name. A Fleming is a member of the Flemish people, who lived in Flanders. Today, you have to look hard to find Flanders on the map, but in the Middle Ages it was the land of the powerful Count of Flanders. Now it is the two northwestern provinces of Belgium (which didn't even exist before 1815), plus the adjacent area of France, which a French king grabbed away, and at times Zeeland in neighboring Netherlands. The two main cities were Bruges and Ghent. In the Middle Ages Flanders was prosperous from trading and from the cloth industry, and that probably explains why people named Fleming ended up in Scotland. For Scotland is sheep country.
Fleming is a generic term, so it is probable that people coming from Flanders were called that many times when they emigrated to England or Scotland. We can't say that someone named Fleming belongs to our family. Be that as it may, there are records of people named Fleming in Britain as early as the Norman Conquest, when Flemings came over with the Normans.In Scotland's Story: a New Perspective, Tom Steel writes:
In 1153 David I was succeeded by his grandson, Malcolm IV. He, in turn, was succeeded by his brother, William. During the sixty years that these two brothers ruled, Scotland was a land of peace and promise. A colony of Flemish settlers were asked to come to upper Clydesdale, where the land was rich for farming, and their rearing of sheep contributed greatly to the development of trade with the burghs.
Whenever they came, by the mid-Seventeenth Century, when our Fleming family entered recorded history, the Flemings were thoroughly Scottisized and tending a farm in East Kilbride, Lanarkshire. East Kilbride is southeast of Glasgow in what is now the Glasgow metropolitan area. Just northeast of East Kilbride is a point on the map named Flemingtown. Dr. Turner reported that a member of the family was Sir Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin. Apparently he got that information during his trip to Campbelltown, but I have been unable to trace the ancestry of Dr. Fleming, who was born on a farm about 10 miles southeast of Kilbride in Ayrshire. So from our point of view, the relationship is not a very close one.
In the 1650's, our branch of the family emigrated from Kilbride to the Kintyre peninsula near Campbelltown at the invitation of the Marquis of Argyll. In order to understand the historical significance, we must back up quite a bit.
If you look at a map of Scotland, you will see that the Kintyre Peninsula is a long narrow strip of land jutting far south between the Firth of Clyde and the Jura Sound. Its south end is only about fifteen miles from the nearest point of Ireland.
About the same time the Anglo-Saxons were invading England from the southeast, the Irish were moving into Scotland from the southwest. It is assumed that the Picts who then inhabited Scotland were Celts who spoke a Celtic dialect similar to Welsh, but no trace of their language has survived. The highland Celtic which survives in Scotland is closely related to Irish, so apparently those Picts who did not give up their language for Anglo-Saxon adopted the dialect of the Irish.
In 1222, Donald, son of Somerled, King of the Isles, acquired The Island of Islay and the Kintyre Peninsula and founded the MacDonald clan. In the course of time the clan grew in power until it dominated the western Highlands and the Isles. That 15 miles of water between Kintyre and Ireland is less than the distance from the Scottish mainland to the Outer Hebrides, and the MacDonald clan bridged the gap. In later spelling convention, Scotts are Mac and the Irish are Mc, but there is no hard and fast division. Scottish McDonalds were part of the Ulster Settlement of James VI's time. (James I of England). At that time Presbyterian Scotts were imported to displace Catholic farmers in Ireland, and particularly in Ulster, nearest Scotland.
The chief rival of the MacDonald Clan for power in Scotland was the Campbell clan, which originated farther east and South and were originally a lowland clan. This rivalry is described in Oliver Thomson's The Great Feud: the Campbells & the MacDonalds, (Sutton, 2000) at first the two clans were separated by lesser clans in between, but gradually they extended their influence and came into direct contact and rivalry. The MacDonalds were Highland, spoke Gaelic, and remained Catholic. The Campbells were Lowland, spoke the Scottish version of the Anglo-Saxon tongue, and converted early to the Scottish version of Calvinism.
It might be assumed that the MacDonalds, being the arch-typical Highlanders, would have been champions of Scottish nationalism. On the contrary. What they were champions of was MacDonald power. That meant supporting the King of Norway's claim to the Western Isles when that suited their interest. It meant supporting an English King in distant London over a more interfering Scottish king in nearby Stirling or Edinburgh. Whichever it was, it tended to be the losing side. In the end, it was the Stuart Pretender over the Restoration Stuarts and Hanovers and the Act of Union.
In the Middle Ages, Scotland was only fitfully prosperous, the Highlanders living notoriously primitive lives and the Borders in the south being constantly overrun and pillaged by the constant warfare between the English and the Scots. The Scots were not notably observant in the Catholic faith, although popular tourist attractions are the magnificent ruins of the magnificent abbeys of Jedburgh, Kelso, Melrose, and Elgin.
The Protestant Reformation began in earnest in Scotland about 1540 and came to fruition about in 1660. Although the Scottish Reformation is identified with John Knox, he was its spokesman and publicist rather than its instigator. It was conceived and nurtured by young Scots clergy who had fallen under the spell of John Calvin in Geneva. The struggle between the Catholic Mary and the Protestant reformers is famous in story and legend. The Presbyterians thought that her son, James VI (First of England) would advance their cause when he became successor to Elizabeth (the first, of England, nothing of Scotland), but he hated Presbyterianism, and Scotland, for that matter, and seldom returned to Scotland once he had tasted the pleasures of the South. He did not return to Scotland for fourteen years. When he finally came, he brought with him a series of proposals intending to bring the Church of Scotland more in line with the Church of England. The changes were at first rejected outright, but eventually adopted under severe pressure, but never accepted by many of the clergy. This was the beginning of the alienation of the Scots from their king. James believed in the Divine Right of Kings. As far as he was concerned he was appointed by God to rule the country and the Church. But as he went into gradual decline, the Scottish people turned more and more toward the Church as the major influence in their public as well as private lives. It should be remembered that though James was king of both Scotland and England, the union he wished for did not take place, and with his residence on far-off London, the Scots were pretty much left to their own devices.
When King James died in 1625, his heir Charles was 24 years old. Though born in Scotland, he had left at three and had no personal knowledge of Scotland, since he had not accompanied his father on the latter's one visit back to Scotland. He was not raised to be king, since his older brother Henry was expected to succeed. But Henry died in 1612. Charles tried to learn the art and duties of kingship, but he had neither his brother's charisma nor his father's talent for compromise. All he had was an instinctive devotion to the concept of the Divine Right of kings. He did not travel to Scotland to be crowned there for eight years. By that time he had thoroughly alienated the Scots, not so much by his neglect as by his remote-control intention to bend Scotland to his will.
But back to Kintyre. By the beginning of James VI's reign over both kingdoms Kintyre had fallen into the hands of the Earl of Argyll, who was a Campbell. The plantation project to colonize Ireland with lowland Scotts included Kintyre, but except for the founding of Campbeltown, it did not get very far. At that time Campbelltown was called Loughead because it was at the head of a Loch, or harbor. It did not come to be called Campbeltown regularly until the end of the century.
During the Civil War, the MacDonalds attempted to take back Kintyre from the Campbells, and invaded down the peninsula with an army composed partly of Highlanders and partly of Irishmen. But their campaign was unsuccessful, and they ended up holed up in Dunaverty Castle on the southern tip of the peninsula. The Irishmen were evacuated by boat, but the Highlanders could not be evacuated, possibly because there were not enough boats. The siege was a short one, because the castle had no source of water. The Commander asked for clemency for his men, and thought he had it when he marched his men out. But the Campbells, egged on by their Covenanter chaplain, began a slaughter of 250 men. News of the slaughter appalled the rest of Scotland. This was in 1647.
Thompson wrote that when news of the massacre got out, the MacDonalds still resident in Kintyre fled fled for their lives up the peninsula. Other sources don't mention the flight, though some may have fled. More importantly, the armies brought with them the plague, which was already raging in London, and the plague took a heavy toll on the locals.
Be that as it may, the new Earl of Argyll found that his farms in Kintyre were lying waste, and he was cash poor, without the revenue from their rents. So he recruited emigrants from his lowland allies, and the second phase of the great Plantation of Lowlanders began. This probably explains a curious point. The Flemings were a sept of the Murray clan. (A sept is a division of the clan or an allied family.) The Earl of Argyll was married to the daughter of the head of the Murray clan. So the Flemings were a useful family to settle in the formerly hostile territory.
It should be pointed out that the land was not swept clear of Highlanders by any means. Early censuses or rent rolls indicated that the population was more or less equally divided between Lowlanders and Highlanders. The Lowlanders spoke the Scottish dialect of English, while the Highlanders spoke Gaelic, and it was a problem getting ministers who spoke Gaelic for the Highland churches. It was hard enough getting English-speaking ministers. The two populations lived side-by-side with very little intermarriage until near the end of the 18th Century, after which time the two populations rapidly intermingled and merged into one. Besides Fleming, other lowland family names are Breckenridge, Clark, Greenlees, and Andrew. Names of Highland origin include most of the Macs: Mckay, MacGeechee, and Loynachan. The Lambs, the Haddows, and the Ormistons did not emigrate from Kintyre, but came from Lanarkshire, the region the Kintyre lowlanders originally came from.
What was farming like in 17th Century Kintyre? In the first place, the wheel was not introduced until the next century. The roads were little more than bridle paths, and the horses drew either sledges, or two poles dragged along the ground with a platform fitted between them, the way we see pictures of the Plains Indians. They grew oats and barley and kept a horse for plowing, and a few cows and sheep. They also kept poultry and bees. A farm usually consisted of pasture land and two fields. One field received what manure was collected, and the other was carved out of the pasture, worked until it wore out, and allowed to recuperate by nature while another field was carved out.
Potatoes were not introduced until the 18th Century, and though they produced considerably more calories per acre, they were resisted for a long time as not real food. But once they were accepted, a revolution in Scottish Highland economics took place about the second quarter of the 18th Century. Potatoes released land for the production of grains which were distilled into Scotch whisky, and for the first time the Highlanders had a cash crop. For a long time, Campbeltown was a major center of the production of Scotch Whisky. At about the same time as the Potato was introduced, the Scots began to harvest kelp along the seashore. The kelp was dried and burned for potash which was used in making soap and glass. For the first and perhaps only time, the Highlands experienced a net gain in population from immigration.
The Earl of Argyle (The Title raised to Duke in 1704) owned the land which was rented to the farmers. But not every farmer rented directly from the Duke. The land was rented to tackmen, who in turn rented their holdings out to individual farmers. A tackman might have the subleasing of many farms and live in town, or he might be a farmer among his leasees. A farm was basically what a farmer could cultivate with one horse, but some farms were worked by more than one family, and a farmer might own "one foot" of a horse.