Mushen family history:
400 years of American beginnings.

For six straight generations, New England holds between 85% and 95%. These people landed in Massachusetts and simply stayed — marrying other colonists in the same handful of towns, for a century and a half.

Then look at the step between the eighth generation and the seventh. New England collapses from 85% to 39% in a single generation. Nothing about that is gradual. It is the Revolution: Congress finished the war with no money and a great deal of western land, and paid its soldiers in acres. The eighth generation fought. The seventh generation moved.

After that it never comes back. The Mid-Atlantic peaks at 59%, the Midwest at 41%, and by the third generation the family's centre of gravity is Oregon — three thousand miles from Plymouth, having taken nine generations to get there.

Andrew Warner (c. 1595–1684) arrived in Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s, then joined the migration that pushed inland to found Hartford on the Connecticut River. He was an original proprietor — one of the men who held the town's land in the beginning and parcelled it out.

Then, in 1659, he did it again. A doctrinal quarrel split the Hartford and Wethersfield churches — a fight over baptism and church membership bitter enough that the losing side chose to leave rather than submit. They moved twenty-five miles north into the Massachusetts wilderness and founded Hadley.

The town's first town meeting was held at Andrew Warner's house on 8 October 1660. He served as juror, selectman and highway commissioner, and worked as a maltster. Hadley became one of the major towns of the upper Connecticut Valley and the parent settlement of several others.

The Wampanoag had kept peace with Plymouth for half a century — it was the father of their sachem who made the first treaty with the people off the Mayflower. In 1675 that ended. The war that followed killed a greater share of New England's population than any conflict in American history since, the Revolution and the Civil War included. Twelve towns were destroyed outright. The colonists came close to losing.

John Carter of Woburn was twenty-one, and in Captain Nathaniel Davenport's company. That December they marched through frozen swamp in a snowstorm against a fortified Narragansett town built on an island in the mire — the Great Swamp Fight, one of the bloodiest single days in colonial American history. The attackers went in across a single fallen log. Davenport was shot dead at the head of his own company.

Carter came home. He lived another fifty-two years, made lieutenant, and lies in Woburn's First Burial Ground under a stone that still names the war.

Rebecca Nurse was seventy-one, devout, and widely respected — which is exactly what made her case notorious. The jury returned not guilty. The accusers erupted; the judge invited the jury to reconsider a single ambiguous remark she had made; they came back with a conviction. Thirty-nine neighbours signed a petition on her behalf, which in that atmosphere was a dangerous act. She was hanged on 19 July 1692.

Her sister Mary Esty was hanged on 22 September, among the last eight. Knowing she would die, she petitioned the court — not for herself. She asked that no more innocent blood be shed, and proposed that the accusers be questioned separately and the confessors re-examined, because she was certain they were lying and would be found out. It is one of the most extraordinary documents of the whole episode. It changed nothing in time to save her, but the executions stopped that autumn.

A third sister, Sarah Cloyce, was accused, imprisoned, and survived.

When the war ended, Congress had land but no money, and paid its veterans in western acres. The Ohio Company of Associates — largely New England officers and soldiers cashing in military warrants — founded Marietta in 1788, the first organised American settlement in the Northwest Territory. It was not a drift. It was a government finding a way to settle its debts, and it moved a whole generation of New England families over the mountains in twenty years.

Twenty-two ancestors died in Ohio between 1797 and 1861, and four of the same generation died in one Ohio county. Ebenezer Nye — the Connecticut soldier who had been paid continuously through Yorktown — went out to Marietta in 1790 and on to Rainbow in 1795, where he preached, held civil office, and donated the ground that became the village burial place. He was then buried in it. His sandstone marker still stands, and the Marietta DAR marked the grave.

Ebenezer Porter (1732–1827) of Ipswich was among the last of the Ohio Company party to reach Marietta in July 1788, and died at Little Hocking at ninety-four; his own Revolutionary service is claimed but not yet proved. Lydia Cummings and Solomon Fuller are buried in the same county.

The Revolution did not just end for this family. It relocated them — and everything west of here follows from it.

Twenty-four ancestors died in Vermont, in records running from the 1740s to 1853: Halifax, Bennington, Guilford, Weathersfield, Hardwick. It was the cheap frontier for crowded Connecticut and Massachusetts families, and both New York and New Hampshire claimed it, having sold overlapping titles to the same acres.

In 1777 the settlers stopped waiting for a ruling and declared an independent republic. Vermont was its own country for fourteen years — with its own currency and its own postal service — until it joined the union in 1791. Several of these death records still carry the jurisdiction as it stood: Bennington, Republic of Vermont. Some ancestors here died as citizens of a country that no longer exists.

And Vermont is where the Gores were waiting. Amos Gore went up from Norwich, Connecticut to Halifax in the 1750s. His son Ebenezer was born there in 1793, and his grandson Emerson in 1824. Three generations in one Vermont town — and then the whole line picks up and leaves for Iowa, and after Iowa, Oregon.

Emerson and his twin brother Emery were cabinetmakers, and better with machinery than that suggests. Three years before they went west, the two of them were granted U.S. Patent No. 6,571 for a wind wheel — a vertical-shaft machine, two tiers of angled sails turning about an upright timber shaft, carried on a tapered eight-sided trestle and driving a toothed ring gear at the base. Most American windmills of the period turned on a horizontal axis like a Dutch mill. This one does not.

Twenty years later, in Oregon, Emerson patented a gang plough praised for being manageable “by a boy of twelve.” It was said the only real difference between the twins was that one was a Baptist and the other a Presbyterian.

Mary Elizabeth Gilmore was born in Pennsylvania, granddaughter of the Covenanter migration and daughter of Robert Gilmore the Marine — which is how two of these five crossings finally meet in a single marriage. She lost her father young and her mother not long after. She had read the whole Bible before she was seven. She married, was widowed almost immediately — her first husband, a Mr. Rose, died within a year — and supported herself as a schoolteacher.

She married Emerson Gore on 20 September 1849. Her son by her first marriage, Lewis Albert Rose, went west with them.

They left Charleston, Iowa on 27 April 1852 in an ox-drawn train of about forty wagons and reached the Rogue River Valley on 27 September. Six months. Mary was pregnant the entire way.

Emerson's father Ebenezer had died at Charleston two years earlier. The family had been inching west for two generations — Vermont, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa — and he did not live to finish it.

When the cattle stampeded and the wagon ran toward a bluff:

They arrived into a war. The Rogue River Wars were running, and in the summer of 1853 the Gores built a fort on their donation claim, at what is now the junction of Highway 99 and South Stage Road, south of Medford. It sheltered “settlers for miles around at times of Indian excitement,” with their families, stock and possessions. One recorded panic turned out to be men chasing a bear.

The drawing is not a picture of a building. It is a measurement, made by someone who wanted the thing recorded before the last of them died. It gives the stockade as 160 by 80 feet, built of logs 20 and 26 feet long, buried four feet deep in the ground — and then, beneath it, does something no photograph could: it lists everybody who lived there.

List of Pioneers who lived here in 1853-4-6. First line: “Emerson E. Gore, wife and 3 children — L. A. Rose, Annetta J. Gore, Walter S. Gore '52.” Second line: “Emory E. Gore — bachelor, 1852.”

Those are people already on this page. L. A. Rose is Lewis Albert Rose, Mary's son by the first husband who died within a year of marrying her. Walter S. Gore is the boy born on 3 December 1852, three months after the wagons stopped — the one who grew up to write down the buffalo and “Whoa, Buck,” and to become Medford's first school principal. He was an infant inside this fence. Emory is the twin, and the co-inventor on the 1849 patent at the top of this page, listed here as a bachelor.

The rest of the column is the whole neighbourhood — the Hoffmans and their six daughters, Dr. McKinnell and his wife, the Geiger brothers, a string of bachelors, and a line that stops you: “Mr. Frick, wife and baby (buried within stockade) '53.”

The Gores farmed beside an Indigenous village and, unusually, got on with their neighbours. Mary nursed the sick and fed them. Emerson played the violin.

Then one day during the troubles an armed party came to the house. They did not attack. They came inside, sat down in a circle around Emerson, and the chief motioned for him to play.

So he played. He played until his arms gave out, and he did not stop — because he did not think he was permitted to stop — until the chief finally signalled that he could. Then they left.

Family memory holds that the music was part of what kept them safe. When the war came in 1854 the account records that the Indians “took up their luggage, went past Father's home, took the trail over Jacksonville hill” — passing the Gore place untouched, with every opportunity to do otherwise. Of Mary, the chief had said simply: she has a good heart.

Early years were thin — six weeks living on beef without salt, salt at a dollar an ounce, seven dollars for a squash. Emerson farmed, did carpentry on the buildings of Jacksonville, and ran a sawmill on Bear Creek with Emery until the flood of 1861–62 carried it off. The family went on to orchards, livestock, shops, schools and banks. Walter — the boy born three months after the wagons stopped — became Medford's first school principal.

Robert Gilmore and his brother came out of the north of Ireland “of Scotch-Irish descent and Scottish Covenanters in religious belief, fleeing from persecution to gain religious liberty in the new world,” and settled in Mercer County, Pennsylvania. He was a blacksmith. He married Nancy Smith, who was some twenty-nine years his junior, and took her on a wedding journey of forty miles on horseback to a house she could not find — it was hidden behind a stump until they rode around it, and she was, the family says, dismayed.

Mary Elizabeth was born on 6 February 1827, when her father was sixty-eight and her nearest sibling was five years older. On 14 June 1828 he died of cancer of the face. She was sixteen months old. Whatever she knew of the stowaway crossing, Tun Tavern and Captain Mullan's Marines, she knew at second hand, from a house he was no longer in.

What she read

Because she was so much younger than the rest, she became her mother's constant companion, and her sweetest memories were of walking in the woods with her. She had two books. Her earliest textbooks were a single spelling book and the Bible, which she had read through before she was eight years old. A second account in the same family record puts it earlier still — that she had read the Bible in its entirety before she was seven.

In the yard stood a chestnut tree too large for her to reach anything on. So she sat underneath it and watched the squirrels drop the nuts, and ran and picked them up. It was, she wrote, her only way of getting those particular chestnuts.

Her sister Jane was four during the War of 1812 and could already read, which most of the pioneers could not. Jane sat on a bench in their father's blacksmith shop and read the newspaper aloud to the men who came in with work.

These stories are hers and her granddaughter's, from the family record. Mary taught school in Mercer County to earn the money for her own wedding. She had a number of very lovely calico dresses, and spun and wove her household linen. When Lewis Rose died in Iowa two years later, leaving her with a four-month-old son, she went back to teaching to support them both — walking the boy to her mother every morning and collecting him after school.

Ten names. Hers is the last of them, and it stands alone — the Hoffmans, the Van Dykes and the Wrights are all listed as couples or families. Emerson is not on the tablet. Mary is.

The congregation was organised in William Hoffman's house on 22 November 1857 by Rev. Moses Allen Williams, the missionary whose diary that same year records calling on Emerson Gore at his sawmill. Williams went on to plant Presbyterian churches at Phoenix, Eagle Point, Medford and Klamath Falls. Thirty-six years later he buried her.

Now compare it with the stockade

Read the ten names on that tablet against the list of families written on the 1934 drawing of the Gore stockade, four sections above, and the same households keep coming back:

And two of the ten are sisters

Keziah Van Dyke, third name in the second column of the tablet, was born Keziah Gilmore on 6 February 1809 — Robert and Nancy's third daughter, and Mary's own sister. She married S. D. Van Dyke in 1834.

They did all of it together. Mary's memoir opens the crossing with “we, the Van Dykes and us, started to cross the plains”; the stockade roster lists “S. D. Van Dyke, wife and son John G., 1852” a few lines below the Gores; and in 1857 both sisters put their names to the same church. When Mary was widowed in Iowa and teaching school to feed her infant son, it was with Keziah that their mother was living, and Keziah's house where she left the boy each morning.

The two of them were born on the same day of the year, eighteen years apart.

She did it twice. Eighteen years after Jacksonville, Mary was among the founders of the First Presbyterian Church of Phoenix, organised in 1875 with Moses Williams again as its first pastor. She taught its Sunday school.

That church stood on the parcel where the Phoenix Historical Society Museum is today — land afterwards sold to the Phoenix Cemetery Association. Which confirms, to the yard, the sentence in the family record: she was laid to rest “in the little cemetery back of the little church (Presbyterian) she had helped to found” on 18 October 1893.

The church was behind her. It still is.

The Gaelic Irish lines in this family do something none of the others do. They stop — abruptly, at births clustered between 1720 and 1821, half the depth of every other origin. English lines run twelve generations back. Irish lines die at six.

The reason is a fire. On 30 June 1922, at the opening of the Irish Civil War, the Public Record Office of Ireland burned in the Four Courts, taking the censuses of 1821 to 1851, half the Church of Ireland parish registers, and nearly every will and probate record — seven centuries of documents. The 1861 and 1871 censuses had already been pulped by the government; 1881 and 1891 went for paper salvage in the First World War. No Irish census survives intact before 1901.

Under the Penal Laws most Catholic parish registers do not begin until 1820 or later, so beneath the fire there is a second wall where there was never anything to burn.