The Caseman Family: Mary Jane's Story

Mary Jane was born July 31, 1854 in Pendleton County, Kentucky. Her birth was recorded as Mary Jane Ceeseman, daughter of George W. Ceeseman and Mariah Radigal. Since the county listed mothers under their maiden names, Mariah’s appearance as “Radigal” is puzzling—her maiden name was Johnson, and no earlier marriage is known. No Radigals appear in the 1850 Pendleton census, and “Ceeseman” is almost certainly a misreading of the clerk’s handwriting.

The family lived on a farm in Flower Creek, Kentucky, rural Pendleton County with hilly, rolling terrain and fertile river flats.  Flower Creek had a post office on the east bank of the Main Licking River.  Flower Creek had a small post office on the east bank of the Main Licking River, and the region remained backwoods country with wagon roads and stage routes leading toward steamboat landings on the Ohio River.  The Kentucky Central Railroad came through in the year of Mary Jane’s birth, but the county would not have a newspaper until 1870. Falmouth’s old pioneer cemetery, destroyed in 1930 when its stone markers were crushed for road gravel, held some of the earliest settler graves. Mary Jane and her siblings likely attended the one-room schoolhouse built in nearby Butler in 1856.  

Her grandfather, William Johnson, operated a saw and grist mill on the South Fork of the Licking River beginning in 1832, and her uncle, Jacob Caseman, ran a sawmill on Flower Creek until his early death at age 37 in 1874.

Mary Jane was the second of fourteen children born to her father over thirty-four years and two marriages. Mariah had the first ten in Pendleton County, and George's second wife later added four more in Lewis County. Mary Jane's early years were marked by loss: two siblings - Jacob (15 months) and Lydia Ann(age 5) - died within a day of each other when she was four years old, both from "infant flux." No record is found of her borhter William H. (1858) after 1860, and likely died young as well. A sister, Emma, was born in 1861 several months before George enlisted in the Union Army. If George's five children born before the Civil War, only two survived childhood.

George was a farmer, likely a tobacco farmer as Pendleton County was one of the first counties in Kentucky to produce tobacco.  George was away at war from the time Mary Jane was seven until 10 years old, leaving Mariah with three young children, Mary Jane,  William, 3, and Emily, 7 months.  Seven-year-old Mary Jane would have taken on many household responsibilities.  George’s two brothers, Jacob and young Foster, enlisted at the same time, leaving leaving the Caseman farms without adult men. Jacob married in 1857 and that family also lived in Flower Creek with two young children when Jacob went off to war with his brothers.

Our only photo of George (1828-1913)

The three brothers, George, Jacob, and Foster, all farmers, enlisted in the Kentucky 23rd Infantry in the fall of 1861 after tobacco harvest  and left their infantry unit in August the following summer about the time crops would again have to be harvested.  They were absent from the Union Army for several months and returned before the 1863 spring campaign started.  As a result of absence over these few months, George was demoted from sergeant to private.

In June 1864 the family would receive news that George had been captured at Kennesaw Mountain just north of Atlanta during Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign.  He was released in November 1864 and returned home to the farm in January 1865.  After George’s return, he and Mariah had another five children in rapid succession. Mariah disappears from the records after the birth of her last child in 1874 and presumably died before 1880.

Five years after her father's return,  15-year-old Mary Jane married 23- year-old Francis Marion Shumate in the family home.  Frank was from nearby Carter County but there were other Shumates living in Pendleton; likely, Frank came to Pendleton County through these connections.

Mary Jane's and Frank's marriage license, Pendleton County

By the 1870 census, Frank and Mary Jane were living in Falmouth, where Frank worked as a laborer. His 14-year-old brother died the following year.   The couple had three children over the next several years, George W.  born in 1874, Frances Elizabeth (“Aunt Sis”) in 1876, both born in Illinois, and Jesse in Lewis County in 1879.  The family’s whereabouts in Illinois or when they moved out of Pendleton County is not known.

Mary Jane and Frank moved from Illinois to the Clarksburg area of Lewis County by early 1879.  Just days after the birth of her third child, Jesse, in April 1879, Frank was killed by being kicked in the head by a horse.  Only age 24, a widow, and mother of three young children, Mary Jane had suffered multiple losses, including three young siblings, her mother, two young uncles (Foster killed in the Civil War; Jacob in 1874), a mother-in-law in 1871, a 14 year old brother-in-law, and years of her father's wartime absence and captivity.

The 1880 Census shows Mary Jane living in Valley, Lewis County, Kentucky, and working as a seamstress.  On the neighboring farm lived her widowed father, George, and his six children ranging in age from six to 19 years.  Mary Jane had been living in Lewis County at the time of Frank's death 1879 and her father and the rest of the children were in Lewis County at the time of the 1880 Census.

In 1883, Mary Jane, unwed, gave birth to another child, Grace Lee Shumate (aka Grace Martin), fathered by William Frederick Horsley, a 35-year-old farm laborer living on a neighboring farm with his sister, Amanda. A 1902 letter to Grace from William confirms the connection.

Eight months after Grace's birth, 29-year-old Mary Jane married 49 Abia J. Dillon, a farmer from Fleming County.  Notably, William Frederick Horsley was a witness at the wedding.

Mary Jane and Abia Dillon marriage certificate listing W.F. Horsley as a witness.

Mary Jane had another loss in 1885 when her son, George W., named after her father, died at eleven years old.  Her daughter, Francis, married at age fourteen in 1889 to William Johnson, age thirty. Mary Jane and second husband, Abia, may have separated that year before his death in 1889 in Fleming County.

Mary Jane's children:  Jesse Shumate, Grace Martin, Francis Shumate

In 1890, Mary Jane married a third time. William “Bill” Martin was ten years younger, and this marriage lasted forty five years until Mary Jane’s death.  Grace, who had been using the Shumate surname, adopted the Martin name after the marriage and was thereafter known as Grace Lee Martin.

Half sister, Lydia Caseman, Lydia's husband Charles Wallace, and Mary Jane, photo taken in 1890's

In the 1900 census, Mary Jane, husband Bill, and Grace are still in Valley.  Hiram Horsley, a nephew of William Frederick owns the next farm over and William Frederick is living with another nephew in Hamilton County, Ohio, working as a day laborer.  Her father, George, now 72, had remarried at age 52 to Eliza Ellen Moore, a woman the same age as daughter Mary Jane, and they are living on a nearby farm with their four teenage children. George fathered his last child at age 71.

Mary Jane and Bill had no children of their own, but my mother, Ramona, remembers Bill as a caring stepfather and grandfather.

Mary Jane’s youngest, Jesse Shumate, married and left the home in 1898, made a living as a farmer, but had his own tragedies with the deaths of two wives at young ages.  Jesse’s life was filled with loss and one of his descendants related Jesse felt he was a curse.  For a time around 1920, Mary Jane and Bill are caring for Jesse’s two children in their home.

Grace, 19, eloped in 1902 with Jacob Dillow, her teacher at Valley School. Why they eloped is unclear as Jacob was a fine, upstanding, educated young man.  They remained in Portsmouth for the next 3-4 years until buying a farm in Vanceburg just over the hill from Mary Jane and Bill’s farm in Valley. 

By the 1920 census, Mary Jane and Bill left their farm in Valley and moved to a home just across Dry Run Creek in Vanceburg, Lewis County where they were close at hand for Grace and Jacob’s seven children.  The family suffered another loss in 1925 when Grace and Jacob's son George, 17, died in 1925 from diabetes. Son Jesse's first two wives died at young ages, one in the 1918 influenza epidemic; another grandson died with typhoid fever in 1934.

By 1930, Mary Jane and Bill were still living in the Dry Creek home and operating a general store in the area.  Her daughter, Francis, married without children during Mary Jane's lifetime continued to live in Clarksburg, a once thriving community just north of Valley.  Grace and Jacob gave Mary Jane seven grandchildren and Jesse three grandchildren.

 William Martin and Mary Jane

William Martin in front of his and Mary Jane's General Store and Sunoco Station, Vanceburg, KY

Our mother spoke of Mary Jane with affection, often adding “the men really liked her.”  She had searched for the identity of Grace's biological father and only the advent of digital records finally confirmed him as William Frederick Horsley. He never married and lived with various relatives until his death in New Grand Chain, Illinois, in 1922.

Mary Jane died June 18, 1935, at age 80, with influenza; her husband survived her by sixteen years.  Both are buried in Woodland Cemetery in Vanceburg.