MARSHAL PINKNEY CAPPS was said to have been born in Kentucky on Sunday, February 14, 1847. His father was likely born in Tennessee and his mother in Pennsylvania. As of this writing, the names of his parents continue to elude family researchers.
THE GREAT CAPPS MIGRATION
One Account…
Sometime after Marshal’s birth and possibly before 1851, it’s said that our Capps family traveled with the Fielding Samuel, Sr., family and others from Kentucky into Clay County, Missouri. Marshal would’ve been no more than 3 or 4 years old during what was sure to have been an arduous journey.
The Samuels. The Samuel family lived in Owen County, Kentucky, appearing in the 1830 and 1840 censuses; however, the family isn’t in Kentucky’s 1850 census. This is as close as I’ve come to determining from which Kentucky county our Cappses may have originated. It’s likely that Marshal wasn’t enumerated in any Kentucky census, having been born in 1847 and likely having left the State by 1850. And without the names of his parents, it’s virtually impossible to determine which — if any — Kentucky Capps family was ours.
…and a Second
Another story passed down in at least one Marshal Capps line is that he had two older brothers and two sisters who were nearer to his age. The Cappses migrated from Kentucky not into Missouri but rather to Cottonwood Falls, Chase County, Kansas. The children were said to have been orphaned at a time when the two older boys were of an age to care for themselves, but not for their younger siblings. The older boys reportedly remained in Cottonwood Falls, while the younger children were taken in by a Missouri family (or families). Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to verify this claim as I’ve yet to locate Marshal’s family in the 1850 census. Marshal first appears in census records in Missouri in 18601.
INDIAN FOLKLORE
A tale recounted by Marshal’s daughters Fannie and Lucy - who were adamant that their father told this to them as a true story - is that Marshal’s parents were killed during an Indian raid on their wagon. If true, this would’ve likely occurred on the trail between Kentucky and Kansas or Missouri, depending on which migration is correct. According to the women’s accounts, before his death Marshal’s father hid him and his sister in a large trunk. The children survived the attack and were raised by a family member. However, the only sibling mentioned in this story is the sister.
To date, I haven’t been able to find any information on Marshal’s parents or siblings other than the possible states of his parents’ births. Unfortunately, census information is often inaccurate as it relies entirely on the knowledge and memory of the reporter as well as the accuracy of the enumerator.
So...Are We Cappses? This story has lead some to speculate that Caps/Capps may not have been the surname of Marshal’s parents, and that Marshal may have assumed the name of the Capps family who took him in. However, the 1860 census refutes this conjecture as Marshal Caps is shown to be living in the home of the William Brown family. If Marshal had assumed the name of the family who took him in, we’d all be Browns instead of Cappses. Further, in 2007 Marshal’s one of great-grandson's participated in the Capps Family Y-DNA project and it was proven conclusively that we are, indeed, Cappses. The new mystery, then, becomes the identity of the Browns. Who were they to Marshal...relatives, family friends, employers or kind strangers who took pity on a young orphan?
[Family Tree DNA Y-DNA67 Test. In October 2007, it was proved that we are Cappses when Marshal’s great-grandson participated in a Capps Family DNA project. Our matches suggest that our family belongs to halpogroup R1b1b2. Halpogroups represent fractures in a family tree and are tied to deep ancestry (10,000 or tens of thousands of years). Haplogroup R1b is the most common haplogroup in European populations. It is believed to have expanded throughout Europe as humans re-colonized after the last glacial maximum 10 to 12 thousand years ago. This lineage is also the haplogroup containing the Atlantic modal haplotype.]
THE MYSTERIOUS BROWNS
In 1860, 13‑year-old Marshal P. Caps was living in the household of William Brown1, a 55‑year-old merchant from Kentucky who migrated to Lamar Township, Barton County, Missouri. This census record is the earliest evidence of Marshal’s existence that I have yet to locate, and supports his daughters’ claims that he was orphaned at a young age.
Along with Marshal, William Brown lived with his adult children: Sarah J. (23), Margrit M. (22) and Joseph H. (29), and two grandchildren: Russell W. (10) and William J. (5). William and Joseph’s wives likely were deceased by 1860 as neither woman lived in the Brown household at the time of enumeration on July 24, 1860. William’s daughters immediately follow the head of household on the enumeration sheet and are listed in age order. The males are listed next, also in age order, beginning with William’s adult son Joseph, followed by Marshal and then Joseph’s two young sons. Curiously, Marshal wasn’t set apart from the family group as was the practice with a non-family member (a boarder or employee); rather, he’s listed in age order along with Joseph’s sons.
Marshal worked as a farm laborer; however, given that William was a merchant and Joseph a blacksmith and the family didn’t live on a farm, Marshal wouldn’t have been staying with them as a paid farm hand. He could’ve been a boarder, but that’s unlikely given his young age...and it’s even less likely because he wasn’t identified as a boarder on the census, which was the practice. Rather, it’s more likely he had been taken in by the Browns as a foster child, which supports the account of his parents’ untimely deaths. Given his proximity to Joseph on the enumeration sheet, Marshal was likely in Joseph’s care living in William’s household.
An Anderson Brown and a William Brown are shown to be living near Fielding Samuel, Sr., in the 1840 census12 in Owen County, Kentucky (Anderson, next door; William, seven households away). It’s possible that the William Brown family also migrated with the Samuel and Capps families from Kentucky into Missouri. One could further speculate that Marshal was taken in by the Brown’s when his parents perished. However, according to the 1860 census1 William’s son Joseph was born in Missouri in about 1831 — more than 20 years before the Cappses left Kentucky — which doesn’t support this migration hypothesis.
Coincidentally, a Jessie Brown is found to be living in the household of Marshal’s eldest son William Capps in the 1910 census in Yeager, Hughes County, Oklahoma (see William Capps’ family page). Jessie, a farm laborer, was born about 1885 in Arkansas, and the locations of his parents’ births are “unknown.” There’s unlikely to be a connection between Jessie and our “mysterious Browns,” but it’s interesting to note just the same.
OUR DAVENPORT HERITAGE
MARY SUSANNAH DAVENPORT was born Friday, November 8, 1850, in Johnson County, Missouri. She was the second daughter of WILSON DAVENPORT and ELIZABETH NOLEN.
As was Wilson Davenport, most of the early settlers to Johnson County were corn and hog farmers. Many Johnson County residents migrated to Missouri from Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and the Carolinas.
Our Davenport family is well researched and documented. The “Pamunkey Davenports” of Colonial Virginia arrived in America in the 17th century and have been traced to Martin Davenport who was born before 1625 in England. Martin was the first of this line to immigrate to the U.S., settling on the Pamunkey (“Pah-monkey”) River in Virginia.
Mary’s mother Elizabeth [Nolen] Davenport was also from a well-researched family. The known progenitor of our Nolen line was Mary’s fourth great-grandfather, Pierce Nowland I, born ~1625 in County Dublin, Ireland. His son, Pierce Nowland II, born ~1654 in County Mayo, Ireland, was the first of the Nowland/Nolen clan to arrive in the U.S. He, like our Davenport ancestors, also settled in Virginia.
New Beginnings. Elizabeth died at the young age of 24 years, when Mary was but 16 months old. Wilson Davenport married 25-year-old Amanda Melvina Johnson in 1856. Mary, now 6, and her older sister Sarah Ann, nearly 9, were raised by their stepmother, and the family grew to include five more siblings: four half-brothers and a half-sister - James Buchanan, Jeremiah Farmer, Martha Lee, John Terry and Jefferson Hayes.
MARSHAL TAKES A WIFE
By 1870, Marshal Caps was living in the household of Wilson and Amanda Davenport as a farm laborer. On Tuesday, March 14, 1871, Marshal Caps, 24, married Wilson’s daughter Mary Davenport, 20, in Cass County, Missouri. The couple’s first child, William, was born in 1872 in Missouri.
Mary’s Afflictions. It’s likely that at the time of their marriage Mary had already contracted tuberculosis — a condition that ultimately caused her untimely death. In the 19th century, TB was the number one cause of death in the World and the number one cause of infectious death in the United States. It was referred to as “consumption” as it consumed people from within with its symptoms of bloody cough, fever, pallor (paleness) and long, relentless wasting. There was no cure. It ate away your lungs from the inside out as your body tried unsuccessfully to kill the bacterium causing the disease. Our bodies can’t kill TB; instead, we form fibrous walls around the bacteria walling off large groups of infectious particles into small spheres or “tubercules”. If you were able to successfully fight off the infection, the bacterium would remain dormant in your lungs. When you became old, infirmed, weak or ill, your body would lose its battle to keep the bacterium at bay. The TB would reactivate resulting in cough, fever, chills, bloody sputum, weight loss, night sweats and eventually death...sometimes from uncontrolled bleeding into your lungs from the holes left by the lifelong battle. This was not an easy way to go.
Mary was also afflicted with “falons”22 – a bone-spur condition that affected her thumbs, eventually making it impossible for her to hand stitch garments. This created quite a problem as in this time the woman of the house sewed all of her family’s clothes by hand. Sewing machines weren’t mass-produced until the 1850s. The first commercially-successful sewing machine was designed by Isaac Singer, who built the first machine where the needle moved up and down rather than side-to-side. A foot treadle powered the needle; previous machines were all hand-cranked. In 1858, Singer produced the World’s first consumer sewing machine, which sold for $125 in a day when the average annual household income was $500. Marshal used the proceeds from the sale of a calf to buy a sewing machine for Mary – the first to be purchased by a household in their area.
TO ARKANSAS (BY WAY OF KANSAS)
Due to Mary’s ongoing battle with tuberculosis, in 1872-73 Mary, Marshal and William migrated with Mary’s sister’s family (Thomas and Sarah [Davenport] Bryant and perhaps their young daughters Anna and Hannah - though both girls were deceased by 1873) from Cass County, Missouri, to the Flint Hills of Chase County, Kansas - a distance of roughly 125 miles.
How Did They Travel? Most pioneers traveled in a Conestoga wagon or a spring wagon made of hickory, oak or maple. Many chose oxen to pull their wagons because of their strength, and would use up to four oxen per wagon. The father would drive the oxen by walking beside the wagon and the women and children would walk behind it much of the time. Most days, they would’ve been able to travel 10 to 15 miles; on rainy or muddy days they might’ve made it just 1 mile! It would’ve taken 5 to 7 days to travel the same distance we can now drive in a single hour! So this 125-mile journey that we could easily drive in 2 hours probably took them at least 8 days...and likely longer.
Homesteading. Once they’d arrived, they would’ve had to buy land, and then clear the rocks and tree stumps before they could build a house and plant crops. The family’s first home was likely a lean-to, which looked like an open shed that would’ve faced a fire pit. And if there was no stream nearby, the men would’ve also had to dig a well.
Chase County, Kansas. Marshal, Mary and William settled in the hardscrabble community of Matfield Green, home to those who worked the prairie ranches. Anna Frances (18733) and Wilson (18763) were born here.
Pioneer homesteaders suffered hardship as they adjusted to life on the timberless prairie and lived in sod houses. Sod houses, or soddies, were small houses with walls built of stacked layers of uniformly cut turf. The individual “bricks” of sod were held together by the thick network of roots that made preparing fields for planting very difficult. Sod was cut with special plows or by hand with an ax or shovel. Roofs were made from timber, rough or planed, and were covered with more sod. If timber wasn’t available, roofs were built up with twigs, branches, bushes and straw. Soddies were practical and tough, but vulnerable.
Many early Kansas farmers grew corn and wheat, but drought and insects often ruined their crops. In 1874, a religious group called the Mennonites arrived in Kansas from Russia. They brought a variety of winter wheat called Turkey Red. This wheat was planted in fall instead of spring. It was harvested early in summer, and thereby escaped summer heat and many insects. Production of the wheat gradually spread throughout Kansas.
Around 1877, the still-growing family may have briefly returned to Missouri, where Julious (1878) was reportedly born. The family returned to Kansas sometime between 1878 and 1882, settling in Chatauqua Springs, Chatauqua County, where Lucy Ann (18825) was born.
Arkansas. In about 1886, the family left Kansas for the last time, bound for what would be their final destination – the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. It would’ve taken this band of two adults and five children at least 15 days to traverse the roughly 225 miles to their new home.
It’s rumored that during these years twin sons were born to Marshal and Mary. If true, it’s not known if the boys were stillborn or if they survived for only a short time as there’s no mention of them in any census and no record has yet been found to substantiate their existence.
By 1900, the family had settled in California Township, Madison County, Arkansas, where Jeremiah (1887), John Nicholas (1888) and Thomas Jefferson (1893) were likely born. In 1902, Marshal was settled in Hogscald Hollow’s Winona Township in Carroll County, Arkansas, located just a few miles south of Eureka Springs. Early settlers used the hollow (pronounced “holler,” meaning “small valley”) for butchering hogs, which is how the area got its name. During the Civil War, Confederate troops made whiskey in and around this area. The Hogscald Hollow area became popular when Beaver Lake was filled in the early 1960s.
The early settlements in the remote valleys and hollows of the Ozarks were generally isolated from the outside world and, to a certain extent, from each other. This self-dependence was responsible for the many water mills of the area. The mills provided the people with bread. Farmers of each settlement brought grain to the mill for grinding and took home a year’s supply of flour and cornmeal. The flowing waters of a creek turning a waterwheel, which in turn operated the grinding stones, supplied power for the mills. The very life of a thriving community depended on a good gristmill.
Eureka Springs. Legends of several tribes spoke of a Great Healing Spring in the mountains of what later became known as Arkansas. Early visitors believed this spring to be Basin Spring itself, and the magical waters drew the afflicted in such numbers that Eureka Springs transformed from an isolated wilderness to a flourishing city in a few short months.
The City of Eureka Springs was founded and named on July 4, 1879. As word of Eureka’s miraculous healing waters began to spread, thousands of visitors flocked to the original encampment of tents and hastily built shanties. By late 1879, the estimated population of Eureka Springs reached 10,000 people and in 1881 the town was declared a "City of the First Class," the fourth largest city in Arkansas. In the spring of 2001, Eureka Springs was named one of 12 distinctive destinations by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
THE CAPPS CHILDREN
Children of MARSHAL PINKNEY CAPPS and MARY SUSANNAH DAVENPORT are:
i. WILLIAM HENRY (WILL) CAPPS, SR., b. 1872 in
ii. ANNA FRANCES (FANNIE) CAPPS, b. December 4, 1873, in Matfield Green, Chase County, Kansas; d. December 6, 1961, in Eureka Springs, Carroll County, Arkansas.
iii. WILSON (WILS) CAPPS, b. January 14, 1876, in Matfield Green, Chase County, Kansas; d. October 18, 1947 in Carroll County, Arkansas.
iv. JULIOUS M. CAPPS, b. September 29, 1878 in Missouri; d. March 7, 1901 in Carroll County, Arkansas.
v. LUCY ANN CAPPS, b. June 7, 1882, in Chatauqua Springs, Chatauqua County, Kansas; d. March 15, 1968, in Eureka Springs, Carroll County, Arkansas.
vi. JEREMIAH M. (JERRY) CAPPS, b. January 1886 in
vii. JOHN NICHOLAS CAPPS, b. December 23, 1888, in
viii. THOMAS JEFFERSON (JEFF) CAPPS, b. August 5, 1893, in
Although it's very like to be true, with no hard evidence, I have been unable to substantiate or disprove the births of twin sons between 1883 and 1886.
CLAIMING A HOMESTEAD
As part of the 1862 Homestead Act, Marshal acquired 160 acres of land in Carroll County, Arkansas, at Township 19 North/Range 27 West, Section 14, on February 12, 1902...2 days before his 55th birthday.
The 1862 Homestead Act essentially said that any citizen or those seeking citizenship of the United States could claim a designated area of land – 160 acres - for farming. It would be given to the person claiming it as long as the following conditions were met:
· The individual must be over 21 years of age
· Some kind of home must be built on the land
· The land must be cultivated
· The individual and/or his family must live on the claim at least 6 months every year
· All conditions must be met for a total of 5 years and the claim must be finalized within 2 years of the end of this 5-year period.
Those who’d fought in the Civil War could count their time in service toward the 5 years, though they were still required to live on the land for a year. Those who wanted to could buy the land for a minimum price, but they were still required to build a home and cultivate the land. It seemed at first to be an easy way to get a farm, but in practice it was very difficult. The prairie land had to be cultivated and often no significant crops could be raised for 2 years. In the meantime, the claimant had to support his family in other kinds of work. If the farm was a long way from town, it might be difficult to work in town while living on the farm. This caused difficulties in fulfilling the requirement of living on the farm for 6 months of every year. Only half of the homestead entries filed before 1900 were ever completed.
Marshal met the stringent conditions and kept his farm for 17 years until his death in 1919.
OUR RELIGIOUS ROOTS
Marshal was a part-time Baptist minister preaching sermons, officiating at weddings and delivering funeral eulogies. The Cappses were faithful members of the Pleasant Valley Freewill Baptist Church in Pleasant Valley, Carroll County, Arkansas, the site of which is now under Beaver Lake (which covers parts of Benton, Carroll and Madison counties).
CONSUMPTION TAKES OUR MARY
Having suffered from consumption (tuberculosis) most - if not all - of her adult life, Mary Susannah [Davenport] Capps finally succumbed to the ravages of this disease and passed away Thursday, January 13, 1898, at the age of 47 years, 2 months and 5 days in Carroll County, Arkansas. She is interred at Rambo Cemetery, Benton County, Arkansas.
SECOND MARRIAGES
Three years after Mary’s passing, Marshal Capps married the widow MARY CATHERINE TURNEY STURGILL [b. June 22, 1851, in Carroll County, Arkansas], daughter of JOHN CLANTON TURNEY and PHOEBE JANE SCOTT, on Sunday, January 6, 1901, at the Pleasant Valley Freewill Baptist Church. Marshal was 53; Mary, 51. Mary became mother to Marshal’s younger children: Jerry, 13; John, 12; and Jeff, 7. Mary’s first husband, Andrew Jackson Sturgell, died before 1880. Mary had no biological children; she moved in with her youngest stepchild, Jeff, and his family following Marshal’s death.
MARSHAL’S PASSING
Marshal passed away Saturday, March 1, 1919, at the age of 72 years, 24 days. He is interred at Rambo Cemetery, Benton County, Arkansas, alongside Mary Susannah, his wife of nearly 27 years.
I’ve yet to locate a cemetery record for Mary Catherine. Though Marshal’s grandson Lester Capps recalled helping to dig his grandparents’ graves when he was a child, his grandmother would have to have been Mary Catherine as Mary Susannah died 13 years before his 1911 birth. Mary Catherine is shown to be living in the household of her stepson, Jeff, at the time of the 1920 census. She wasn’t enumerated in the 1930 census and, therefore, may have passed away after 1920 and before 1930.
MARSHAL AND MARY’S KNOWN DESCENDANTS (as of February 2009): 253
8 Children.
43 Grandchildren.
68 Great-grandchildren.
78 Great-great-grandchildren.
52 Great-great-great-grandchildren.
8 Great-great-great-great-grandchildren.
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