♂Beauchamp Augustus Harvey

Beauchamp Augustus Harvey (4 October 1850 – 27 November 1927) was a native of Wabash County, Illinois, who spent most of his life at Mount Carmel, and in 1918 published a sketch of the county’s history in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, in which the first white settler he describes is his own great-grandfather^W. He was the elder brother of Julia Esther Harvey (1857–1951), the great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006).

Early life

He was born on 4 October 1850 at Rochester, on the Wabash River in Wabash County, the eldest of the seven children of the physician James Harvey (1821–1896) and Eleanor Tougas Lovellette (1830–1898). His father’s father was Beauchamp Harvey (1788–1859), one of the first settlers of Mount Carmel and a commissioner of the county, and his mother’s grandfather was Augustus A. Tougas dit Laviolette (1776–1849), a French trader from Vincennes who had settled near Rochester about 1800. He wrote later that he was born “not twenty rods from the trading-post of his mother’s grandfather, Augustus Tougas”. By 1860 the family had moved to Mount Carmel, where his father practised medicine, and he was living there in 1870.

The 1918 sketch

His “Historical Sketch of Wabash County, State of Illinois” appeared in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society in April 1918, under the name B. A. Harvey. It is partly a memoir, and its family material rests on what he had heard at home. A note to the article introduces him as the great-grandson of Augustus Tougas, “the first settler of the county”, and the grandson of Beauchamp Harvey, “one of the first settlers of the town of Mt. Carmel”. In it he names the Tougas brothers as the county’s first white settlers and dates their trading point on the site of Old Rochester to 1800. He records that his great-grandfather was said to stand seven and a half feet tall and that his word “was law” among the Piankashaw^W, and he had heard his great-aunt, one of Augustus’s daughters, say that as many as three hundred Indians would gather about her father’s trading place. Of the Harvey side he writes that his grandfather came to Mount Carmel in 1819 and built one of the three houses then standing on the site of the town, and that he had heard his father say he was born in one of them.

The sketch also describes his own boyhood. He wandered up and down the Wabash with a gun on his shoulder, finding mounds and collecting stone axes, flint arrowheads, pottery and pipes. He wrote that he had given many pieces to the Smithsonian Institution through Robert Ridgway^W, whom he calls a schoolmate and who became a well-known ornithologist there, and had supplied the Indiana state geologist with specimens. He called the physician and botanist Dr. Jacob Schneck (1843–1906) “my esteemed friend and neighbor”, and wrote that he had often gone digging into the mounds with him and was “at times … the Doctor’s pilot” to the sites he had found as a boy. Dr. Schneck’s son later married his niece, Mabel Wilkinson.

Family and later life

In August 1906, when his sister Ella’s husband, John S. White, died at Seattle, a Springfield newspaper recorded that “B. A. Harvey and Mrs. Stein of Mt. Carmel”, he and his sister Mary Alice, came to Springfield to join the family for the funeral; one of Ella’s sons was named Beauchamp A. White. Two years later, in June 1908, the obituary of his youngest brother, Orian Ross Harvey, who had died of tuberculosis at Deming, New Mexico, named him among the surviving brothers and sisters as “B. A. Harvey of this city”, that is, of Mount Carmel. The family record names no wife or children for him.

A cemetery memorial records that he died at Mount Carmel on 27 November 1927, aged 77, and was buried there in Rose Hill Cemetery, where his parents lie; no other record of his death has been checked.