K e n t uc k y C l ay Eleven Generations of a Southern Dynasty Katherine Bat eman
Contents Introduction vii Map xiv Family Tree xvii 1. The Ancient Planter 1 2. The Chyrurgien and the Rebel 11 3. Family Reunion 23 4. Mysteries 33 5. Family Secrets 49 6. The Voice 63 7. House Stories 73
8. Daddy s Girl 87 9. Strong Women 107 10. Little Dolly Dumpling 119 11. The Little Indian 135 12. Catharine and Robert 149 13. Granddaughters 165 14. House Lust 177 15. Kentucky My Way 187 Acknowledgments 201 Notes and Sources 203 Index 215
1 The Ancient Planter A lthough I cannot prove it, I am convinced that John Thomas Claye the first of my ancestors to come over from England had brown eyes. This may sound odd, even inconsequential to families who over time have looked into the eyes of relatives that reflect rainbow hues: blue, green, violet, or that luscious yellow that turns to key lime in certain lights. It is not odd, however, to me. My conviction that John Thomas Claye had brown eyes has substance behind it. All of us, all of the Clays and Cecils the mothers, the fathers, the sisters, the brothers, the grandparents, the babies are brown-eyed. Photographs show our dark chocolate eyes for the seven generations that cameras have existed to capture them. Histories of the early settlers of Virginia and Kentucky go even further back. One author speaks of my eighteenth-century relatives not just in terms of their Revolutionary War service or their careers in law and politics but also discusses in surprisingly lush language the family s dark brunette looks. A husband writes love
Kentucky Clay letters to my black-eyed baby. Oral tradition describes black eyes flashing. Consequently, I think that when John Thomas Claye sailed into the Chesapeake Bay in February 1613 he gazed at his new Virginia homeland through irises of brown. I think his dark eyes darkened further when he stepped off the ship Treasurer onto the wharf built just months before on the James River side of the fledgling Jamestown colony. They darkened in stunned disbelief as he walked through the palisade and took in the handful of crude shelters, the deep mud, and the lethargic shamble of the Jamestown colonists who, like him, had invested as land speculators in The Tresorer and Companie of Adventurers and Planters of the Citty of London for the Firste Colonie in Virginia. Imagining John Thomas s brown eyes as he stares in confused shock at the skeletal colonists the ones who felt lucky to have survived the starving years of 1609 to 1611 helps me feel that I am in that rain-drenched Jamestown winter with him. I stand beside him as he surveys the bleak and dreary settlement he has come to: the two rows of timber and mud houses, the disheveled storehouses within the fort s triangular form shaped by precariously leaning palisades. I stand there as he contrasts the noisy vibrancy of London the home he had left just weeks before with the sluggish stillness of this exhausted place. I want to comfort this twenty-six-year-old relative of mine as he wonders if the Treasurer has docked too soon, as he tells himself this must not be the Jamestown he was promised, the place he has invested in, the place where he plans to buy land, make a home, start a family. Yes, I want to comfort him. I want to touch his arm. I want to say to John Thomas, Look at me. Look at my brown eyes. I am one of yours. Eleven generations of your family know your story. Your story and all those like yours taught us what we can do, who
The Ancient Planter we can be. We know that so many of you faced this awful place alone and that you did not give up, you did not go back to the safety, the familiarity of England. Through your stories we know we are capable of taking risks, capable of starting over; we know we are capable of change. We owe the first step in family fearlessness to you. So many of us are here to affirm that the decision each of you made was a positive one, not just for you but for all of us in your bloodlines. According to the family story, John Thomas Claye came to Virginia in 1613 for one reason only: to amass land. He made that trip across the Atlantic on the ship Treasurer in the dangerous gray winter seas to replace the land he would have inherited if he had not been born the second son of Sir John Thomas Claye and Mary Carleton Claye, if England s laws of primogeniture had not determined that his older brother, William, would get everything. To match the family landholdings was a tall order. The Clayes were well established in England. John Thomas s father was a Welsh coal baron knighted by Elizabeth I, and his mother was the daughter of Sir William Carlton, the Chief Cockmatcher and Servant to the Hawks for Henry VIII. At first, John Thomas had not considered buying stock in The Tresorer and Companie of Adventurers and Planters of the Citty of London for the Firste Colonie in Virginia or sailing to Jamestown. For one thing, he had not reached his majority in 1606 when the Virginia Company put out its first call for adventurers to participate in purse or in person in the land investment venture. And then ships filled with additional adventurers and supplies for the fledgling colony began to return to London with more than logs and furs. The ships also returned with stories. Hard-to-believe stories. Stories the board members of the Virginia Company tried to hide, with little success, from
Kentucky Clay the public. Potential stockholders clustered in London s business district and conferred over what they had heard from the captains and crew of the ships returning from Virginia. In spring 1608, only thirty-six of the first one hundred fifty adventurers survived the first year in the new colony. Could this be true? In 1610, of the five hundred settlers in the colony in 1608 most healthy new adventurers only sixty were still alive. And, nearly unspeakably, those sixty may have survived only because they were willing to eat their own dead. Unthinkable. At first, John Thomas Claye was not tempted to join the sons of English nobility in the Virginia Company venture: at first, the second sons who trickled into the fledgling colony and, later, the distressed cavaliers who flooded into Virginia in the 1640s following their land losses in the English Civil War. John Thomas was not interested in Jamestown until 1612. That spring, news of an amazing new strain of tobacco reached London, tobacco planted in Virginia from Spanish seeds acquired in the West Indies by John Rolfe, an early Virginia Company adventurer and future husband of Pocahontas. This tobacco was so wondrous that descriptions of its luscious leaves their resistance to disease, their richness of flavor reached London before the first hogshead filled with the precious commodity left Virginia a year or more later. The news of this fine new cash crop was all it took to rekindle interest in the Virginia colony and to pique John Thomas s interest. The Virginia Company seized the moment. On March 12, 1612, the stock company rewrote its charter to extend the boundaries of the Virginia settlements one hundred miles west to allow for large tobacco plantations. Flyers to entice new investors passed from hand to hand. Pay your own way: get a grant of one hundred acres of river-rich plantation land. Private men s clubs were
The Ancient Planter full of the talk of this amazing new tobacco, of the land that could be had, the money that could be made in the new world. So in 1612, while the hubbub raged about Virginia s new cash crop, John Thomas Claye, now twenty-six and still single, thought about the land in England lost to birth order. As I imagine it, he considered the thousands of acres of available land in Virginia. He pictured the family s land in mountainous Monmouth, Wales. He tried to imagine the flat but fertile marshland described by those who had returned from Virginia. He mulled his future over and over, looking this way and that at the idea of emigrating to Virginia. And finally he came to the conclusion that the only way to have the life he wanted was to join the swell of second sons sailing to Virginia. He joined forces with the Virginia Company, purchased a fare on the ship Treasurer, and sailed to Virginia in purse and in person to amass land as a planter. The first decision John Thomas Claye made after arriving in wet, dreary Jamestown set a precedent for generations of our family. John Thomas decided to move away from the more established settlements in the colony. For his initial grant of one hundred acres he chose a site near present-day Hopewell on the south side of the James River, about twenty miles west of Jamestown in newly laid out Charles City County. The land taken from the Appomattocs in the winter of 1611 12 was fertile. It was so fertile, in fact, that it was named the new Bermuda after the lush soil of the Bermuda Islands. Further, it was near choice transportation routes. To the north of John Thomas s patent was the James River. To his west the wide mouth of the Appomattox River flowed into the James, commingled with the many fingers of Swift Creek. Further, there were large tracts of land in Charles City County, space for bigger plantations. John Thomas planted