Thomas Pittman: Licking Creek to Gnaw Bone

 Thomas Pittman, son of William Elias, was born in 1809 at Licking Creek, Pennsylvania, and died 84 years later near Gnaw Bone, Indiana. His father took the family to Monroe County, Ohio, somewhere around 1820. Monroe County had only just been organized in 1815, and in the 1820 census it has just 4,645 people.

Monroe County is about 210 miles due west of Licking Creek. Licking Creek was in Bedford County at that time, and in the same 1820 census Bedford County had over 20,000 people. Perhaps the Pittmans were something like the Boones, and wanted only to go where they were no longer in sight of another man's chimney smoke. 

The road they would have taken might well have been the famed National Road. Construction had begun in 1811, following part of the old Braddock trail to Pittsburgh. By 1818 it had been completed to Wheeling (about 50 miles north of Monroe County).

In Green township the Pittman Family, William Elias and the children, settled down to farm the land and put down roots. At about 1830 Thomas married Anna Rebecca Clark and over the next twenty years they had 8 children. Here's a timeline of the important events during those twenty years (or so) in Monroe County.

• Abt. 1831 - Marries Anna Rebecca
• 1832 - Birth of son Isaac
• 1833 - Birth of son Andrew
• 1835 - Birth of son Absalom
• 1837 - Birth of daughter Rebecka
• 1839 - Birth of son Harvey
• 1844 - Birth of son Elias
• 1847 - Birth of twin daughters, Barbara Ellen and Hanna
• 1849 - Birth of Thomas
• 1850 - Death of Anna Rebecca and young Thomas, both from typhoid fever

Sometime in the second half of 1830s Thomas' father, William Elias, along with several of his siblings and children, would move on to Nodaway County, Missouri. Nodaway, in the upper northwest corner of the state, had only recently been opened to white settlement (Platte Purchase). 

We know little about Anna Rebecca. She has the same surname as Thomas' mother, Elizabeth Clark, and the marrying of cousins is a frequent occurrence in the Pittman timeline. All we seem to know is that she died in January of 1850, along with 4-month old Thomas, from the ever present typhoid fever (according to the 1850  mortality record for Monroe County). At the time of the 1850 census, six months later, Thomas and family are still in Green Township. Thomas' property is valued at $100. The census gives his birthplace as Ohio, which is not correct, and indicates also that he could neither read nor write.

Soon Thomas would marry his 2nd wife, Elizabeth Moore, and his family would continue to grow. Within a few years they will have moved westward themselves, on to Brown County, Indiana, but more about all that in the next installment.