New Natchez (Delahorne line)

John Dillahunt and Elizabeth Martin are Floyd Amatus Delahorne’s great-great-grandparents: the line runs from them to their son Samuel, born in Louisiana in 1815; to Samuel’s son Augustin Delahunt; to Augustin’s son Jeffrey Delahorne; and to Floyd. They are the furthest people back on the Delahorne side whose names we have, and neither of them has a parent recorded. Where they came from is the open question of that branch.

What we do have is a place. For four years, between the summer of 1806 and the tax year of 1810, John Dillahunt was at Natchez, on the Mississippi, in what was then the Mississippi Territory. It is the one address in his life before Louisiana that is written down, and it is where the couple’s eldest child is said to have been born. This piece is about that place.

The people the town is named for

The town takes its name from the Natchez people, who lived on the bluffs and creeks around it for centuries before any European arrived. Their principal settlement, the Grand Village, stood on St. Catherine Creek, a few miles south-east of the later town, on ground that has been excavated and can still be visited.

They were the last of the mound-building peoples of the lower Mississippi to be seen at first hand, and the French who lived among them in the early eighteenth century wrote down what they saw. Their ruler was called the Great Sun, and was held to be descended from the sun itself; a temple with a fire that was never allowed to go out stood on one of the mounds, and the chiefly family, the Suns, were buried from it. Rank passed through the mother. A Great Sun was succeeded not by his own son but by his sister’s son, and the Suns were required to marry outside their own class, so that a man of the highest rank took a wife from among the commoners and their children’s rank came from her. The French found this so unlike their own arrangements that they wrote it down at length, which is why we know it.

The French built Fort Rosalie on the bluff in 1716 and planted tobacco on Natchez land. In November 1729 the Natchez rose and killed most of the settlement, more than two hundred people, in a single morning. The French reply over the next two years broke the nation: the Great Sun was captured, hundreds of Natchez were shipped to the Caribbean as slaves, and the survivors scattered to live among the Chickasaw, the Creek and the Cherokee, where their descendants still are. By the time any of our family reached the bluff the Natchez had been gone from it for seventy years, and only the name remained.

The district, 1716 to 1817

The compiler of the district’s early inhabitants, whose lists we use below, set out its history in a few pages, and the outline is this. The French finished Fort Rosalie on the bluff in 1716, a year after a trading post was opened there, and from 1718 settled colonists on St. Catherine’s Creek and on the Yazoo: about seven hundred people by 1720, and nearly three hundred Germans in the two years after. The rising of 1729 ended all of it, and the French made no further attempt to settle the district. Britain took it under the Treaty of Paris in 1763 as part of West Florida, put a garrison in the old fort in 1764 under the name Fort Panmure, and began granting land; a colony of Highland Scots settled about thirty miles east of Natchez in 1768, and Americans from the older colonies came in steadily after 1763. The Revolution brought more of them, loyalists and people who simply wanted to be out of the war; in 1776 the district held seventy-eight families and about as many enslaved people. Spain declared war on Britain in 1779 and took the whole district within months.

The Spanish governed it from 1780 to 1798, from the town, and the court records of those years survive and are published. The population grew fast under them, and the newcomers were Americans, not Spaniards or Frenchmen: 1,610 people in 1783, including sixty soldiers at the fort, and 2,679 five years later. The United States received the district by treaty and took physical possession in 1798, made Natchez the seat of the new Mississippi Territory, and organised the old district into counties, Adams round the town among them. Settlers then came by five routes, two of which matter here: down the Natchez Trace from Tennessee through the Chickasaw and Choctaw lands, and down the rivers from the Ohio. Our people, coming from the Cumberland country round Nashville, would have used one of those two. Mississippi became a state in 1817, the year after the last of the lists we use was made.

What puts John Dillahunt there

The evidence is small, but it is dated and it is his.

• Nashville, 1 October 1803. A newspaper list of letters waiting at the Nashville post office names “John Dillahunt, 3” beside “Silas Dillahunt, 2”. There were two adult John Dillahuntys in the Cumberland country that year, and this could be either.
• Natchez, 30 June 1806. The Mississippi Messenger prints the letters waiting at the Natchez post office, and among the D’s is “Dillahunty John 3”. Three letters waiting for a man is a man recently arrived, with people behind him who are writing.
• Natchez, 1 April and 1 October 1809. Two more lists in the Weekly Chronicle, both with “John Dillahunty” among the unclaimed letters. On the same page in April, among the M’s, are a James Martin and a John Martin, and a notice about a debt that had passed through the hands of a Samuel Martin.
• Adams County, 1810. A printed compilation of the district’s early inhabitants gives the 1810 tax list of Adams County, the county round Natchez, from a microfilm of the original roll, and “Dillahunt, John” is on it. A reading of the manuscript roll itself, made for this project, did not find him, and the two have not been reconciled: either the reading missed one line in five or six hundred, or the compiler worked from a different roll, or she erred. We hold the printed line as a transcript, not yet as a fact.
• Gone by 1816. No Dillahunt appears in any Mississippi list of 1816, under any spelling. By 1813 John was party to a lawsuit in Pointe Coupée Parish, Louisiana, and by 1815 Samuel was born there.

So the sequence is Nashville, or thereabouts, to 1805; Natchez from 1806 to 1810; Louisiana from about 1813. The only John Dillahunty of the right age known to have left the Cumberland country in those years is one who inherited land near Nashville in 1802 and then disappears from every Davidson County record while his brothers stay in all of them. Whether that man is ours is not proved, and it is the question the research on this branch exists to answer.

What the district’s records do not hold

The four years at Natchez are the years in which John and Elizabeth must have married, if Amelia was born in 1806, and that is where the search went next.

• The Adams County marriage book was read leaf by leaf for the years 1802 to 1819, on the bride’s side and on the groom’s. No Dillahunt, under any spelling, and no Elizabeth Martin marrying anyone. They did not marry in Adams County in those years.
• The Catholic registers of Natchez, which under the Spanish had been the only registers there were, are published and on our shelf. No Dillahunt.
• The court records of the Spanish period, also published, hold no Dillahunt either, but they hold a Martin household that matters, below.

That leaves two possibilities, which are not exclusive: that they married before Natchez, on the Cumberland or on the road, or that they married at Natchez in some way the surviving books do not record.

The other Dillahuntys

Natchez was not the only place in the territory with the name. Forty miles south, in Wilkinson County, a William Dillahunty died in 1804 leaving a widow, Sarah, who signed with her mark, a set of shoemaker’s tools, and at least three enslaved people; the man who administered the estate with her, Joseph Johnson, is said to have married a Dillahunty daughter in Davidson County, Tennessee, three years earlier, a marriage we have not yet seen on a record. William’s son John, born about 1799, was a minor in 1816, went to West Point in 1820, and died at Woodville in 1844, so he is not ours, though for a time we thought he might be. An Isaac Dillahunty was clerk of the Wilkinson court in 1819 and died in 1822. These people came down the same road from the same Tennessee neighbourhood, and how our John relates to them is one of the things the Tennessee records have not yet said.

The Martins of Second Creek

The Spanish court records of Natchez hold one Martin household that reaches back to the Cumberland, and it has been carried forward as a candidate for Elizabeth’s parents. In July 1790 a Samuel Martin bought a plantation of 262 arpents on Second Creek, south of the town, from Robert Abrams. Within a year he had left it and gone to live among the Chickasaw. Abrams petitioned to have the land back, and a witness deposed in August 1791 that he had carried a letter from Martin’s wife to him in the Chickasaw nation, and that Martin, having read it, said there was nothing to stop his wife marrying again, for he would not come back to live with her. The release of the land is signed “Elizabeth (X) Martin”. Four years later, in April 1795, an Elizabeth Martin “of this district” gave evidence in a Natchez lawsuit that she had lived a long time in the neighbourhood of James Bosley of Cumberland, and signed with a mark.

That is an abandoned, illiterate Elizabeth Martin holding her own at Natchez from 1790 to 1795, who had come from the very neighbourhood near Nashville in which the Tennessee Dillahuntys lived: a Bosley stands beside a Dillahunty in the Davidson County papers, and a county history has a Samuel Martin of that neighbourhood buying land from James Bosley in the 1780s, a compiled claim not yet checked against the deed. A woman married and holding land in 1790 cannot be our Elizabeth, who was bearing children into the 1820s. She could be our Elizabeth’s mother. The naming of John and Elizabeth’s own children fits a mother’s family headed by a Samuel and an Elizabeth. It is a hypothesis, and it is written down as one.

There is a second Martin family in the same county, a Thomas Martin who died about 1801 and his widow Ann, whose deeds of gift name a son Samuel and several daughters, none of them an Elizabeth. And there is a third, across the river in Avoyelles: a Samuel and Isabelle Martin whose daughter Emily married Auguste Moreau in 1815 and whose household was enumerated next to our widow in 1830. Isabelle is what a French clerk writes for Elizabeth. Whether the Second Creek couple, the Avoyelles couple and Elizabeth’s parents are one family, two or three is the question that the Moreau marriage record, still unread, would go a long way to answer.

What we still do not know

• Where John and Elizabeth married. Not in Adams County between 1802 and 1819; not in the Natchez Catholic registers. The Cumberland and the Trace remain.
• Whether the 1810 tax list has him. A printed transcript says yes and a reading of the manuscript says no. Reading the manuscript again, against the other names on the same printed page, would settle it either way.
• Who the Natchez Martins were to Elizabeth. The Second Creek household is the strongest lead there is, and it is a lead only.
• Where the family was from 1811 to 1813, between the last Mississippi record and the first Louisiana one.

The history of the Natchez people is drawn from published histories, chiefly the accounts of French writers who lived among them in the 1720s; the history of the district from 1716 to 1817 follows the introduction to Serena Abbess Haymon's compilation named below. Both are background, not something our records establish. Every claim about our own people rests on a record we have read: the newspaper letter lists of 1803, 1806 and 1809; Serena Abbess Haymon, Early Inhabitants of the Natchez District of Mississippi, for the 1810 and 1816 lists; May Wilson McBee, The Natchez Court Records, 1767–1805, for the Second Creek Martins and the 1795 deposition; the Adams County marriage book on microfilm; and the Wilkinson County probate records for the 1804 estate.