Soldiers before the townships: the Revolution's and 1812's men who came later

1775 – 1869 · the pre-city service roll

The county frame, as Howard states it: there were no white inhabitants in this territory during the Revolution or the War of 1812. Two soldiers of the Revolution afterward lived in the county — Peter Roof, senior, and Isaac Ross — and lie in South Bend's old City Cemetery; they are the county's, printed here because the townships' own pre-service roll begins in the same pages and the reader should see the whole of it. Of the War of 1812, Howard writes that "several soldiers of the war of 1812, likewise resided in the county, many of them amongst our prominent early settlers," and names seventeen: Thomas J. Allen, John B. Chandonai, Daniel A. Cottrell, Ransom Curtis, Theophilus Case, Archibald Defrees, Christopher W. Emerick, Daniel Heck, Christopher Lenz, Artemus Johnson, Peter Johnson, John Mack, senior, Jesse K. Platz, Jehu Meredith, Peter Roof, junior, Claybourne Smith and John Sample. Chandonai, the scout trusted by Generals Cass and Harrison, is the famous name of the list; none of the seventeen is placed by Howard in Clay or Harris township.

The Clay Township man the county list omits: Isaac Eaton, born in Loudoun County, Virginia, on 24 January 1775 — "having been born after his father's death," his grandson's biography in Howard says — was bound out to the blacksmith's trade, ran away to Maryland, and worked at it there until he came to St. Joseph County and entered eighty acres on sections 16 and 17 of Clay Township. "He offered his services to his country during the war of 1812, serving under General Mason, and witnessed the burning of Washington, D.C." He died on the Clay homestead on 25 December 1869, his wife Margaret (Metzger), whom he married in Frederick County, Maryland, in 1798, having died there on 23 April 1863. Eaton's 1812 service stands on his family's biography alone; it does not appear in Howard's own county roll of 1812 men printed in the same work, and the file prints the claim and the omission together, at exactly that strength. The biography adds that Isaac's unnamed father "served in the war of the Revolution" — a claim the printed dates strain (the father died before the son's birth in January 1775) and which is carried here as Howard's claim, dated as Howard gives it, and no further.

One more name at pointer strength: Solomon Barkdoll, a gunsmith who "served in the war of 1812, participating in the battle of Fort Meigs," came to this county and left it again within about five years for Chillicothe, Missouri; his daughter Matilda married Samuel R. Jennings, whose son's Civil War course stands below in Clay Township. Barkdoll's own county residence is placed in no township by the record read, and he is entered here as kin-record only — the grandfather of a Clay Township soldier, not a settled resident of this ground.

Sources:

1. Howard (1907), vol. 1, "Other Early Wars" — the county's Revolution and 1812 rolls, the seventeen names, and the Chandonai notice.
2. Howard (1907), vol. 2, biographical sketches — the Eaton sketch (Edwin Douglass Eaton's), for Isaac Eaton's service, land and death; the Jennings sketch, for Solomon Barkdoll.