My Hillis Family History (lengthy)
A HILLIS FAMILY HISTORY
The earliest reference to a Hillis I could find was from Scotland.According to the extracts from the council register of the burgh of Aberdeen,Scotland, for the year 1442:“The nets of Adam Hillis in Aberdeen were tampered with.”A Wattie Hillis was a tenant of part of Cupar Grange in 1514.Research into other unrelated Hillis family trees also trace the name back to Scotland.
The earliest ancestor we can confirm as “ours” is Abraham Hillis, born in 1736.Although Abraham’s specific origins are unknown, many of the Hillises who came to America were from Scotch-Irish stock.On April 24, 1763, at age 27 he married Ann Ewing, age 19 and born in Chester Co., Pennsylvania. They had seven children, James (born March 3, 1765), Samuel (1769), Alexander (1771), John (1773), William (November 12, 1775), Abraham, Jr. (1777) and Margaret (1784).Although in his forties, Abraham served in the Revolutionary War as a private in the second battalion of the Chester Co. Militia.Family records note Abraham was a great orator and a politician.From Pennsylvania, they moved about thirty-five miles to Cecil County, Maryland, at the top of Chesapeake Bay.At the least, William and all the children after him were born there.
Around 1792, Ann and Abraham exchanged their property in Maryland for a large tract of land on Bear Grass, east of Louisville, Kentucky.They started for their new home across the Appalachians, a journey of over 500 miles, but “owing to the dangers of the forest, it being inhabited by Indians,” they were unable to get farther than Mason County and afterwards settled in Fleming County, Kentucky,and sold the Bear Grass land “for a trifle.”
Near the mouth of the Allison (a small creek that flowed into the Fleming River), Abraham and Ann built a brick house, a water mill, and horse-drawn mill for grinding corn.Abraham died in 1826 at age 90 in neighboring Lewis Co., Kentucky and was buried at the “Thomas Hughes burying ground,” just across the creek, about a quarter mile from the mill.After his death, Ann and much of the Hillis clan moved about 160 miles across the Ohio River to Putnam County in the middle of Indiana, where Ann lived with her son William until she died on May 27, 1838 at age 93.William Hillis and his family founded the Poplar Springs Presbyterian Church near Bainbridge, Indiana.Between 1829 and 1878, thirty-seven Hillises appeared on the church rolls there.Its origins are unknown, but there is also a Hillisburg, forty-five miles away in Clinton County.
Ann Ewing was obviously of sturdy stock.She had a strong Scotch-Irish brogue and did sentry duty one night when Abraham was away, and got through one Indian attack staying in a stockade.Like the Hillises, the Ewings also trace back to Ireland.According to a published Ewing history cited by Betty Rasmussen, our line is from a John Ewing of Carnshanagh, parish of Fahan, County Donegal, Ireland.He was apparently born in Scotland about 1650 and migrated to northern Ireland, where it “seems very probable” that he was at the siege of Londonderry in the 1680s, on the side of the English.He had eight children.He emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1729 when in his eighties;some of his sons had come to America earlier.His youngest, Samuel Ewing, born in 1719 in Ireland, married Margaret McMichael and had twelve children.At some point they ended up in Chester Co., Pennsylvania.They later moved to Frederick County, Virginia and ultimately to Kentucky, but not before their oldest child Ann married Abraham Hillis. The Ewings and Hillises served in the Revolutionary War together;Samuel Ewing was shot in his right thumb and arm in 1776.Samuel Ewing died August 24, 1796 at age 77.There is a town called Ewing in Fleming County.
Abraham and Ann’sson Abraham (also known as Abram) Hillis was born May 31, 1777.On May 12, 1803 he married Margaret Cowan in Mason Co., Kentucky.She bore him four children and died in 1811, the same year her last child was born, presumably of complications following childbirth.Less than a year later, Abraham married 21-year-old Mary (Polly) Miller at Flemingsburg, Kentucky. A photo of the Hillis house is included. They had nine children, including Samuel Ewing Hillis, born May 1, 1817.Abraham and Polly also probably joined the Hillis exodus to Putnam Co., Indiana in the 1820s.After Abraham’s death in 1848, Polly joined other Hillises in a move to Marion Co., Iowa.Many Hillises would come to live in Iowa.
Also plentiful in Fleming Co. was the Hester family. The family tradition is they originally came from Hamburg, Germany.Jacob (or John) Lawrence Hester was born in the Kingdom of Hanover, Germany about 1738.One family story is that he was a gardener to a highly-placed German family, whose younger daughter eloped with him.They came to Pennsylvania where they became friends with the Hillis family.There is no documentary confirmation of all this.
Jacob’s son John Hester was born June 11, 1765 in Pennsylvania.He was a sergeant in the Northampton County [Penn.] Militia in the Revolutionary War.He married Margaret Gilbert on February 3, 1789.They followed Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Trail to Flemingsburg, where their daughter Margaret Hester was born July 4, 1817.It was she who married Samuel Ewing Hillis on October 8, 1840 in Crawfordsville, Montgomery County, Indiana.Besides Margaret and Samuel’s marriage, Samuel’s sister Paulina married Levi Hester, and his sister Margaret married Solomon Hester.John Hester built a Presbyterian Church in Flemingsburg (see photo);Margaret helped in the construction.The Hesters, like the Hillises, moved to Indiana, according to one relative, “on account of slavery.”
Margaret and Samuel’s first child, Hester (Ann) was born in Montgomery Co., Indiana in 1841 and daughter Pauline was born in 1843, the same year Samuel and Margaret journeyed 250 miles by immigrant wagon to the rolling hills of eastern Iowa, where they lived in a log house near Anamosa.Daughter Frances was born in 1846 and daughter Mary in 1850.Two of Samuel’s brothers lived nearby.Samuel served two terms as the Jones County treasurer.He and Margaret also helped build a church there. The “Wapsie” illness (named after the nearby Wapsipinicon River) came and the family moved to higher ground at Coanes Prairie.In the “bitter cold” winter of 1856, the family moved to western Iowa.Frances, who was ten at the time, later recalled:
"Reached Council Bluffs the 1st of February, the first warm day of winter.Drove until ten o’clock that night until father could find a place to get his six horses cared for.They were having a dance and all the furniture moved out of the house but they took us in.We had a big chest that mother had filled with roasted chicken, pies, cakes, bread, which was frozen.She took it in and warmed enough for our supper and breakfast.After supper, we climbed up a ladder to a loft and carried up our bedding and put it onto the floor, and I had a good sleep but I don’t think my poor mother slept any.Next morning, we settled with landlady, her husband was dead drunk, and started on our last lap of our journey.Our destination was Magnolia, beautiful name and beautiful for situation."
They stayed in a log house one mile north of Magnolia in Harrison County, ten miles east of the Missouri River.By then, Margaret was pregnant with Whitman Andrew Hillis, who was born August 10, 1856.In 1857 a frame house was built, where Newell Dwight was born in 1858.One other child, Ada, followed.
The six-foot-two-inch Samuel and a hired man felled the trees and furnished the lumber to build a new Congregational church in Magnolia.A man was hired to build the window frames, seats, doors and pews, but the rest of the construction was by Samuel and his fellow congregates.
Once a school was built, daughter Hester, who attended Iowa College (later Grinnell) taught there.As Frances described it:
"My sister taught school in a little log school house.It had two half windows, two benches, no desks.The teacher furnished her own chair.Had a solid fire place.No public money, select school.She received a dollar and a half a week, boarded at home.After that we had public money.Had school two months in late spring, and two months in the summer and early fall.We made a great deal of mental Arithmetic.All the examinations were conducted in this way just as if we were one class.
"Our teachers were young ladies from the east.Education very limited.My sister attended the first teacher’s institute.The other teachers were eastern people.She went with fear, but came home quite elated for she was the only one that could spell Shakespeare among the teachers."
Newell has stated his father was a dreamer and not a great farmer.His mother Margaret was educated and devoted to church work.Newell recalled the family living in poverty, but they must have had some fun:Newell and Whitman liked to go hunting “prairie chickens”—a form of wild turkey.One day, one of the brothers filled the gun with sawdust as a joke on the other.Then later he must have forgotten about it, picked up the gun himself and blew the bird to pieces.Those wild Hillis boys!
Hester later became a missionary who worked in India from 1870 to 1880 amidst appalling poverty.After a three year stay at home, she returned to India and died there in 1887, probably from a heart condition or starvation.
Pauline (also called Plithy) was a teacher who took care of her disabled sister Ada, the family’s youngest child, her whole life.It was told she passed up a marriage proposal out of her devotion to Ada.
Emma apparently lived her 95 years in Harrison County.She was quite serious about her religion--there was never any card playing, dancing or such frivolities in her house.She had coal-black hair even in her old age.
Mary died in 1869 at age 19 from unknown causes.
Like Hester, Whitman also made religion his career.He married Ida Cope of Wisconsin.They had two girls and six sons, including Percy David Hillis, born January 23, 1882.He became a missionary for the American Sunday School Union and later a district superintendent.Afterwards he worked as a field man for the Moody Bible Institute and then for the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (Biola).He died in Los Angeles in 1930. His grandson Jack remembers his big bristly mustache, “like an amiable walrus . . . very outgoing.”His granddaughter Beth recalls a mock-chase around the kitchen with Whitman clutching a knife . . . “and chocolates—he always had chocolate!”
Newell Dwight became the most well-known Hillis.He married at age 19 and also attended Grinnell College.Farming was not a favorite occupation for him either—stories were told he would take the plow over hill out of sight and stop at the end of the row to read from a book before turning around.He began starting and teaching Sunday schools and found he liked reading and preaching.A wealthy Chicagoan spotted his talent and subsidized him.He attended Lake Forest University and in 1887 the McCormick Theological Seminary.After a brief pastorate in Peoria, Illinois, he served at a Presbyterian church in Evanston and then the Central Church in Chicago.From there he was called to a large Congregational church in Brooklyn where he stayed for twenty-five years.He wrote many inspirational books, and spoke all across America and even Europe.During World War I at the behest of Teddy Roosevelt he lectured around the country to sell war bonds and even visited the European front. He also sent money faithfully to Pauline for her and Ada’s support.A stroke in 1925 greatly weakened him before his death in 1929.
Newell strongly influenced our branch.He put Whitman’s children Percy David Hillis and Harry Moore Hillis through Oberlin College in Ohio.There they met and subsequently married sisters, Anna Lizette Harger (called Lizette) and Frances Hyantha Harger (called Fannie), respectively.Newell early in his career had bought land in the wheat area of the Great Plains, which was later sold at a great profit.Hooked on the idea of land speculation, he bought much cedar timberland in the Pacific Northwest and encouraged many of his parishioners into buying.Percy and Harry were hired to “cruise” the land (estimate board footage) for him.Timber prices didn’t go up but taxes did, putting the investments in debt.Feeling bad about misleading his flock, Newell offered to buy them out, creating a huge debt for himself.At some point, unfortunately, Percy and Newell ended up suing each other.The details of the suit are unknown, but it is believed it was related to the failure of these ventures.
Newell’s daughter Marjorie Hillis was an editor of Vogue magazine and wrote a bestseller in the late 1930s, Live Alone and Like It.The book may seem tame today, but at that time for a single woman to tell other single women how to enjoy life, etc., was quite a sensation. Newell’s granddaughter Betty Rasmussen has been the archiver of much of our family history.
The families of Anna Lizette Harger and her sister Frances Hyantha Harger came from Dover, Ohio.Madison Harger, born about 1811, came to Dover in 1834, a carpenter by trade.He operated one of the first flatboats on the new Dover canal and ended up in the hardware retailing business (an occupation that would later occupy his great-grandson Percy David Hillis and Percy’s son Gene).By 1839, Israel Ricksecker had settled in Dover as a watchmaker.In 1843 he was a founding member of the local Moravian church.Israel served on the local school board from 1851 to 1858;Madison Harger was elected to the board in 1871.In 1876 Madison’s sons Charles G. and Harry took over the hardware store.Israel Ricksecker also brought his son Julius into the now-expanded silversmith and jewelry business in 1870.Both Julius and Charles served on the Dover city council in 1875.All this commingling is not inauspicious, because on December 28, 1875, Charles G. Harger married Adelaide E. Ricksecker; in 1873, Julius Ricksecker had married Charles’ sister Mary.In Dover today, Harger Street and Ricksecker Street lie parallel, one block apart.
Charles and Adelaide had four children.Anna Lizette was named after Israel’s first wife Maria Elisabeth “Lizette” Bleck, who died in 1855.
After Percy and Lizette married on Christmas Day, 1907, they had a grand cross-country honeymoon, visiting family in Ohio and Uncle Newell in New York City, where they took in opera and heard Caruso sing.They returned to Victoria, Canada and continued with the lumber business.Son Robert was born in December 1908, followed by Beth in 1910, Jack in 1913 and Eugene in 1914.The family had a beautiful stone and wood beam house in Oak Bay, but the decline in the lumber industry hit them hard and by the middle of the decade they were operating a dairy business, first in Rocky Point and later Strawberry Vale, both outside of Victoria.Living conditions on the farms were a little more primitive, with heating oil in common use.On October 6, 1921, while the children were off at school, an explosion occurred in the kitchen and Lizette was killed.The family immediately responded, both Hillis and Harger, but it was Adelaide (known as Grandma Littleness) and her daughter Edna (known affectionately as Aunty) Harger who contributed most of the time caring for the young children while Percy tried to rebuild their lives.The family moved back to America and established a dairy in Monroe, Washington.Percy ultimately ended up in the hardware business and his four children attended Queen Anne High School in Seattle.Percy remarried after his children were grown and had another son, Maurice.Percy died in Hillsboro, Oregon on November 26, 1953.
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Much else of our family history is left to surmise.Little is known, for instance, about occupations.It would be natural to assume that all the Hillises from John Hillis to Samuel Ewing Hillis were farmers.Abraham Hillis, Sr. was a miller, but perhaps a farmer too.Beginning with Whitman and Newell’s generation, there is reaching beyond the soil:Hester became a missionary, Pauline a teacher, Newell a minister and orator in New York City, and Whitman a church organizer who traveled over much of the Midwest.
Education was apparently of great importance.Abraham Hillis, Sr., could have been an orator of note without being well-read, but it seems unlikely.Samuel Ewing Hillis served as a county treasurer, a position that would require accounting skills as well as reading and writing.Teachers and preachers dominated the Hillis occupations for at least the next three generations.
While Abraham served during the Revolutionary War, it would appear none of our direct Hillis ancestors fought in the defining event of 19th century America, the Civil War—Samuel was nearly 44 and living in western Iowa when it broke out;his youngest brother would have been 30.A survey of known death dates of Hillises of service age shows none died between 1861-65.Rufus Ricksecker, the brother of Adelaide, joined the Ohio volunteers at age 19.He fought in many battles and was promoted to lieutenant.He was brought down by three musket balls in 1864.Addie’s husband, Charles G. Harger, also served in the War, and was wounded.Roger Hillis, a brother of Percy, was killed in France in World War I.
Prepared by David Hillis,March 2001
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