♂William Robert Wilkinson

William Robert Wilkinson (19 January 1816 – 28 June 1886) was an English-born merchant, miller and county judge of Friendsville, Wabash County, Illinois, who kept the town’s post office from 1841 and was described in 1883 as “without doubt the oldest post-master in the State”. He was the great-great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Robert Thomas Wilkinson (1850–1917), Robert’s daughter Mabel Wilkinson (1875–1954) and her daughter Mary Esther Schneck (1900–1968).

Early life

He was born on 19 January 1816 at Hole House, in the chapelry of Howgill, in the parish of Sedbergh in the Yorkshire Dales, and was christened at Sedbergh on 10 February 1816. He was the son of Thomas W. Wilkinson (1767–1840) and his second wife, Ann Rae (1784–1858), whose surname the county history prints as Rah. A county history published in 1883, whose sketch of him appears to rest on information from the family, calls him the ninth of his mother’s fourteen children; his father, twice married, had nineteen in all. The same history says the family had long farmed at Hole House.

In 1830, when he was fourteen, the family emigrated to the United States, a crossing the history says took eight weeks. They spent seven years at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and in 1837 moved on to southern Illinois. His father died in White County in 1840, and his widowed mother afterwards moved to Friendsville, where she died.

Friendsville

By 1841 he was established at Friendsville as a merchant, in partnership with William Wood under the name Wood & Wilkinson, and the county history credits him with the first drug store in the town, on the south-east corner of Main and Cyrus streets. He was commissioned postmaster of Friendsville in 1841 and still held the office in 1883. The 1850 census lists him as a merchant owning real estate worth $1,000; by 1860 he gave his real and personal estate as $20,000 each. In 1859 he built a flouring mill at Friendsville, and the 1870 census gives his occupation as milling.

Public life

He was commissioned a justice of the peace by Governor French on 6 September 1849, a notary public on 18 August 1856, and county judge of Wabash County on 30 November 1857; his wife’s obituary in 1885 calls him “Judge William R. Wilkinson”. In 1876 he was elected to represent his senatorial district in the Illinois General Assembly, and he was later appointed to a state commission examining the overflowed lands along rivers where the state had built dams and locks.

Originally a Whig, he was, according to the county history, one of six men who founded the Free Soil party in Wabash County in 1848, and their six ballots were the only votes the county cast that year for Martin Van Buren. The Free Soil party opposed the spread of slavery into the western territories and ran the former president Van Buren as its candidate in 1848; in Wabash County it was a party of six. He joined the Republican party at its first national contest in 1856, voting for Frémont, and remained a Republican.

Marriage and family

On 9 December 1841, at Friendsville, he married Sarah Williams (1816–1885), who had been born in Ireland and brought to New Brunswick, New Jersey, as a small child; her father, George Williams, moved the family to Wabash County in 1830. The 1860 census shows George Williams, aged 74 and born in Ireland, living in the Wilkinson household. The county history records that the couple had eight children, five of whom were living in 1883. Six are known by name, born in Wabash County between 1843 and 1859: Alice, who married W. H. Besley; Mary, who married John H. Allison; Robert Thomas; Sarah, who married Thomas H. Penn in 1881; Jane, who died in 1882; and George.

Sarah died at the family home in Friendsville on 26 August 1885. William Robert Wilkinson died there ten months later, on 28 June 1886, and was buried at Friendsville.

Notes

The 1860 census enters his eldest daughter as “Harris A.”; the 1850 census, the county history and later family records all call her Alice A., and the two are the same girl. His son Robert’s obituary refers to his parents as “Col. and Mrs. William Wilkinson” and calls both of them natives of England; the records do not explain the title, and Sarah was born in Ireland.