Billy Crockett's Revolutionary War bones, No. 1

First of all, I'm not trying to set off a border skirmish with our neighbors to the east in Monroe County, where William Crockett and his Revolutionary War service have been part of the lore for more than a century. That's the boulder and bronze plaque, above and left, in Albia's Oak View Cemetery that commemorate him. I've borrowed the images from a site maintained by Iowa's chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution.

But I did remark tongue-in-cheek the other day to a distinguished Lucas County Daughter of the American Revolution that it was just too bad we gave "Uncle Billy" up without a fight. Considerable glory radiates from the grave of any Revolutionary War patriot buried in Iowa and illumines any county lucky enough to have one. Without the remains of Uncle Billy and an elusive McKinley, once said to have been buried at Greenville, Lucas County is bereft.

So if the traditional link between Monroe County and Uncle Billy were not so strong, I'd have been tempted to make a circumstantial case that he might well have died in Lucas County's Cedar Township, where the only known official sighting of him in Iowa was recorded on the 14th day of December, 1850, and that he might have been buried in what now is Bethel Cemetery (Uncle Billy was 97 when the 1850 census-taker spotted him, so it's unlikely he lived too much longer).

At the time, the original part of Bethel was known as the McDermott graveyard, after William McDermott, Cedar Township's first settler, who thought he owned the property. It then was known as the Sargent Graveyard for a time after it became clear that my great-great-great-grandmother, Eliza (Rhea) Rhea-Etheredge-Sargent, and her second husband actually owned the site. She deeded it to the public. It became Bethel after it was expanded to the south and Bethel Church built there.

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I first came across the Crocketts --- Uncle Billy, his son, William Jr., and daughters, Susanna and Nancy --- many years ago when investigating my ancestor's, Eliza's, land acquisitions in Lucas County.

The Crocketts reportedly had arrived in Monroe County from Indiana during the fall of 1849 and settled in for the winter in rented quarters south of Albia among members of their extended Robinson family. William Crockett's first wife, Mary, had been a Robinson.

The following spring, the Crocketts came farther west to Cedar Township, Lucas County, where William Jr. bought from the government for $1.25 per acre the two 40-acre tracts outlined in red on the following map. The patents for these tracts, issued in Washington, D.C., are dated Dec. 2, 1850.

At about the same time, Grandmother Eliza and her second husband, Thomas Etheredge, and their blended family arrived from southeast Iowa and settled on a farm on the Lucas-Marion County line, due south of the current location of the village of Columbia, due east of what once was Belinda Christian Church.

Both the Crocketts and the Etheredges decided to relocate once the harvest of 1854 was complete. The first Etheredge farm had proved to have thin soil and too many hills, according to family lore. I don't know what motivated the Crocketts. But William Jr., Susanna and Nancy (William Sr. surely must have been dead by now) headed southwest into Decatur County that fall, staked in part by the $400 Eliza and Thomas Etheredge paid them for those two outlined tracts on Oct. 10, 1854.

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The inscription on the bronze plaque mounted on that big boulder in Oak View Cemetery reads in part as follows:

WILLIAM CROCKETT: Served in Revolutionary War as a private 4th class. 4th Battalion, Capt. Philip Mathias Company, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Militia. Came to Monroe County, Iowa, 1847, died here 1849, buried in Collins Cemetery one mile south of Albia, Iowa. Remains removed  and interred here under this boulder in 1926 under supervision Betty Zane Chapter, D.A.R., Albia, Iowa. Deceased was a cousin to Davy Crockett.

Now right off, one difficulty is evident. William Crockett was alive and well and living in Lucas County during 1850, so he didn't die in 1849. No one's questioning the accuracy of his Revolutionary War service record, however. The claim that he was a cousin of Davy Crockett is dubious and seems not to have been made by the grandnephew, George R. Robinson, who provided the earliest published information about his Uncle Billy. And to state that his "remains" were removed from an earlier grave and buried here is stretching it just a little.

Actually, volunteers dug into was was previously thought to be William's "lost" grave, located in the middle of a field south of Albia, during 1926, found at best a couple of buttons and a few fragments of wood, placed those along with, perhaps, a couple of handfuls of soil in a metal box --- and that is what actually lies buried here.

But I'll come back to all of this another time. And, yes, I know I misspelled "Wm. Crocket" on the following map. It was in a hurry. I'll try to redo the map and replace it later.