Four generations of Wickhams after the Revolutionary War

CONTENTS

#1 Noyes =1st Ruth Goldsmith
             2nd Catherine Conklin,
             Abigail Terry's mother
             m. 1799
 
#2 Barnabus = Abigail Terry
                        m. Nov. 20, 1801
     Newspaper article about home

#3 George=Hilinda Hawkins

#4  DeWitt Clinton=Harriet Miller
For whom was DeWitt Clinton named?

[#5 Ross Miller=Mary Alice Steventon]

Revolutionary War Connections

Within two years, Barnabus (1781-1857) married Abigail (1783-1866).   Noyes built a house for them.  [See article.]  He was 82 when he died.

DeWitt Clinton (1827-1903) , (see photo) and his wife Harriet Miller (1822-1903), were Presbyterian.  They had five children, though the 5th died as a baby.  DeWitt taught school for 40 years.  He was principal of the school in Otisville in 1875-79 directory.  She was interested in genealogy, so it is disappointing to be having difficulties learning about her family.   Both died in 1903. 

REVOLUTIONARY WAR CONNECTIONS

There is no knowledge of Noyes' participation in the Revolutionary War, nor of Conklin or Terry ancestors who also lived in the same area of Long Island.  Though more research is needed.

Hilinda Hawkins' Long Island grandfather, Timothy Hawkins, was a "signer of the Association" in 1775. 

Harriet Miller had both a grandfather, Eluid Tryon, and a great-grandfather, Jacob Aldrich who participated.

Who was DeWitt Clinton for whom "our" DeWitt was named?

    This was Barney Wickham's. There's no doubt about it. Any of the elders who spent their youth in the Ridgebury neighborhood will tell you that, though not one of them can say who Barney Wickham was, or when he lived.

   The record, though, patiently pieced together through years of research by Mrs. Evelyn Wickham Hale of Brooklyn, with the aid of Fred G. Wickham of Matamoras and others, shows that Barnabas Wickham, ninth of the fifteen children of Noyes Wickham senior, was born in 1781, had eleven children and died in 1857.  So, assuming that he was married at the usual age in his twenties, the Austin farmhouse beside a byroad linking Ridgebury and the Lower Road was his home during the first half of the Nineteenth Century.  For, though Barney’s brood seems to have scattered to the four winds and many states, Mrs. Hale's notes include a little story passed on by Arthur N. Wickham of Lincoln Neb., to the effect that the Barney Wickham dwelling was built by the senior Noyes "down at the lower end of the farm" when Barney married Abigail Terry, "who was too proud to live with the old folks, and had to have her fine frame house."

   Tradition said further that it was an oak house with mahogany stair rail, which is true but quite inadequate to describe the Austin house. The banister is a fine hand-turned piece of woodwork complemented by carved decorations on the exposed stair ends.  But much more unique is a large paneled mahogany closet set into and following the curve of the rounded wall surface where the stairway makes a graceful turn a few steps up from the main hall just inside the back hall door shown in the picture.  The position and curve of the stairs were innovations but the curving closet was more so.  Besides being curved to the line of the wall, it has the same shelf-like cornice which adds length and interest to the exterior of windows and the back door.   The front entrance, obscured by foliage when the picture was made, is a portal befitting a fine frame house, with sidelights and transom and suitable paneling. Instead of the huge rough stone fireplace back generally built in country houses of the period, Barney Wickham's has two tall, slender brick panels backing the fireplaces of the double parlors.

Probably Barney’s was the most sumptuous of the cluster of Wickham dwellings on the far side of Guinea Hill, which is an extension of the Huckleberry Hills on which Ridgebury perches.  Presumably all the Wickham farms, most of them now out of the family, had been cut from the thousand-acre tract which Noyes Wickham, Senior, acquired about the end of the Revolution. Though some say he came to Orange County before the war, Mrs. Wickham thinks 1784 a more likely date.  That year, she said, his first child, Sarah, married Elijah Wells, and the Wells record is that Elijah went to the Drowned Lands near Goshen about then. All had been Long Islanders, and before that the Wickhams were New Englanders.  Noyes whose name was sometimes distorted into Norris and Norrice, was a distant cousin of other Wickhams who gathered about Middletown and Goshen.

   Noyes Wickham's home, which Barney's Abigail preferred not to share, was down a long lane slightly southwest of Barney's home.  On either side of Barney were his twin nephews, Albert and Alfred, sons of Barney's younger brother Daniel.   It appears that Barney's farm also was transferred to Daniel's family after Barney's death. Mrs. Harriet Pettit of Middletown recalls that Joseph H. Wickham owned the Austin farm in her girlhood and that before him it was owned or occupied by a Daniel Wickham, undoubtedly Joseph's grandfather.  After Joseph's death his brother, William Wallace Wickham, who is apt to be confused with his uncle of the same name, bought the farm but did not live there, according to recollections of his children, Mrs. Benjamin Roe and Henry D. Wickham of Massachusetts.  After the death of William Wallace in the Nineties it was sold out of the family.

     The buyer was John K. Austin, whose son Byron is the present resident.  The Austins also had been long in America.  The Texas city of Austin owes its name to one branch of the family.  Another branch remained in the East and helped settle the westward side of Orange County.  John K., as a prosperous Twentieth Century dairyman on the Barney Wickham farm, recalled that as a youth he had been a country meat peddler selling chickens at twenty-two cents each dressed, and legs of lamb at eighteen cents. He would never have believed there would be a time when chickens and lamb could not be bought at any price in Orange County.—Photo by Barbara Smith: text by M. P. Seese.