Adam Clark Wolfe – Intro
Adam Clark Wolfe (1830-1900) was one of the grandfathers of my grandmother, Mildred Wolfe Smith. Grandma never knew him, as she was born a couple of years after he died, so of course my mom never knew him either. But Mom spent a lot of time over several years doing genealogical research on Adam, trying to discover who his parents were. For her, he was what genealogists call a ‘brick wall’. Although she knew when and where he was born, she could find no trace of the previous generations of Wolfes.
When I began doing online genealogical research about 15 years ago, I found a lot of information about a Wolf family in Pennsylvania in the late 1700s that seemed to have a possible connection. Some members of that family migrated to central Ohio around 1810, to the same area where Adam Clark Wolfe was born in 1830. But for years I could find no evidence of a link between them and Adam.
Eventually though, that evidence turned up. I was reading through county court records about the estate left by George Wolf, a farmer who died in Knox County, Ohio in 1837. The records contained the names and ages of his four children, among which was Adam. Mom had found information about a brother and sister of Adam, and their names and ages also corresponded to the information in the court records, strengthening the case that this was Adam’s father. Then, thanks to the publications of a professional genealogist in western Pennsylvania in the 1960s and 1970s, I was able to trace the Wolf ancestors back to the first arrival from Germany in 1742.
I’ll save most of the story of Adam’s ancestors for another paper. In this paper I’d like to share what Mom and I separately found about Adam’s life. Often, we only collected a few bare facts from legal documents and censuses. Readers must use their own imaginations and their knowledge of rural life in America in the 1800s to try to reconstruct his life.
Adam Wolfe’s Parents & His Early Life
Adam was born in the little town of East Union, Coshocton County, Ohio in 1830, to George and Sarah Ann Wolf. East Union was a recently laid-out town with about 80 people and numerous vacant lots. Adam was the second child of George and Sarah Ann Wolf, who had married before a Notary Public in 1827. Their first child was named Simon, apparently born two years before that marriage.
I have not found any information about Sarah Ann’s personal history before marriage, or her family. However, it seems likely this 30-year-old woman with a 2-year-old son was a widow when she married George Wolf, who was seven years younger than her. This part of central Ohio was still frontier in the 1820s. Death at a young age was common. When a deceased parent left behind small children, life was particularly hard for the survivors. It would have been very normal, under those circumstances, for the local community to support Sarah Ann’s remarriage as soon as possible.
Adam’s father George Wolf had been born in West Finley Township, Washington County, PA. George’s birthplace was on the western Pennsylvania border, about 15 miles east of Wheeling, which is in the West Virginia panhandle between Pennsylvania and Ohio. George was brought as a child to Ohio by his father, John Wolf (1772-1828), and his mother, Catherine Devore Wolf (1776-1839). John and Catherine didn’t come to Ohio alone. John’s father (Peter Wolf, 1747-1829) led a group that included John’s married brothers and sisters, to acquire wilderness woodland from the Federal Government and turn it into farmland. It appears that several unrelated neighbors from Pennsylvania also migrated with them to the same location. I believe this large migration took place over several years, beginning about 1810.
The families settled on wilderness land along both sides of the border between Coshocton and Knox counties, with most of the new arrivals moving into Butler and Jackson townships, Knox County. This area, about 50 miles northeast of present-day Columbus, was marked on maps of that time as “Military Lands”. The region had originally been designated for veterans of the Revolutionary War who had never received their pay while in service.
Peter Wolf and his brothers were Revolutionary War veterans, as they had served in the county militia in Pennsylvania. His sons, however, were too young to have participated in the war. They may have purchased their land, or they may have purchased from other veterans their rights to acquire this land.
Adam’s father George Wolf was the fifth of eleven children. When he married and set up house in East Union in the late 1820s his younger brother Adam lived in the same town, possibly occupying a room in George and Sarah Ann’s house. The baby Adam Clark Wolf was apparently named after this uncle, as I have not found any other ‘Adam’ in the family up to that point. The younger Adam would sometimes sign his name as Adam Jr.
Adam Sr. had to leave East Union suddenly in 1830, a step ahead of the county sheriff. According to later biographies, Adam had been in business with a partner who left him with debts he couldn’t pay. At that time and place, non-payment of debts led to arrest and jail. Fortunately for him however, evading arrest was a mere matter of fleeing to a neighboring Ohio county. Adam Sr. went on to become a rich businessman and banker, and a pillar of the community in Muncie, Indiana. His story is one I hope to write in future.
In the early 1830s George Wolf moved across the county line, from Coshocton County into Knox County, and began farming. He was not a farmer for long though, as he died in 1837, just 34 years old. I don’t know the cause of death. He left his wife Sarah Ann with four children: Simon (b. 1825) Adam (b. 1830), Margaret (b. 1833), and William (b. 1836). An estate sale was held and most of the farm equipment and livestock was sold. Sarah Ann was given selected pieces of furniture and other personal items in the house, but she did not inherit all her husband’s property, as might be normal today. In accordance with the customary legal practice in Ohio at that time, most of her husband’s assets would be held for his children, unless the deceased father had specified in his will that his widow should have them.
Sarah Ann continued to farm on a smaller scale, either on that property or somewhere in the same neighborhood, and her four children lived with her. In January 1844 Sarah Ann died, at about 48, leaving her four children as orphans. Simon was about 19 then, Adam not quite 14, Margaret 10, and William 7. An estate sale was held, and items sold included a range of household furniture and furnishings, about 8 bushels of wheat in bags, some sheep, poultry, hogs, a cow, and a colt. No mention is made of buildings and land, suggesting she did not own the real estate. After her death, the three younger children were apparently put into the homes of some of the many Wolf relatives in the area. I don’t know where Simon went. He was then old enough to be on his own.
Adam Wolfe as a Young Adult
I did not find the whereabouts of Adam or his siblings between 1844 and 1850. Federal censuses were conducted every decade on years ending in zero (they still are), so I searched the 1850 census for all four of them. It showed Adam in the nearby town of Mount Vernon, the county seat of Knox County. He was living with a tailor’s family and may have been the tailor’s apprentice. He was then 20 years old.
Adam’s sister Margaret, who turned 17 in 1850, was living in the residence of Martin and Mary Mowery, and was found again in the same house in the 1860 census. Mary Wolf Mowery was a younger sister of Margaret’s father, George Wolf. The Mowery’s also had five children of their own in the house.
Adam’s 14-year-old brother William L. Wolf was found in the 1850 census in the home of Samuel and Hester Kemmerer. Hester was another younger sister of George Wolf, and the twin of Adam Sr. The Kemmerers had eight of their own children in 1850.
Simon, the older brother of Adam, was not found in the 1850 census, and I have not yet found evidence of where he lived after his mother died.
I found no evidence of Adam Wolf’s whereabouts between 1850 and 1857, when he appeared in Steuben County, Indiana. Steuben County (county seat – Angola) is in the northeast corner of Indiana, bordering on Hillsdale County, Michigan to the north, and Ohio to the East. I do not know exactly when or why Adam moved to that location, over 150 miles northwest of his previous home in Mount Vernon, OH. He arrived in northeastern Indiana too late to be a pioneer, as the first wave of settlers had arrived in Steuben County in the 1830s and bought all the available land from the federal government. By 1850 the area was developed enough that Adam could probably have traveled there by stagecoach if he had the fare. Railroads were even beginning operations in western Ohio in the 1850s.
On 25 June 1857 Adam married Harriet T. Brown in Steuben County, IN. In 1858 the couple paid $400 for 40 acres in the township of Steubenville, at the southern edge of the county. This small farm was located close to the farm of Harriet’s parents, Levi and Phebe Brown.
In 1858 the couple’s first child, William Albert, was born, and their second, a girl, was born in November 1959. Sadly, Harriet died less than two months after the birth of Mary Elizabeth (called “Lizzie” throughout her life). Harriet was just 22 or 23. Her death left 30-year-old Adam alone on his new Indiana farm in mid-winter with two babies to care for. The Wolf clan who had stepped in to help when Adam’s parents died were now far away. His grief must have been compounded by his desperate situation. I imagine that Harriet’s parents, who were also his neighbors, helped with the children. I wonder if the kids continued to live with their dad, or if instead they may have moved in with the Brown grandparents.
The 1870 census shows that Lizzie was by then living in Coshocton County, Ohio, in the home of the same Mowery couple who had taken in Adam’s sister Margaret in 1844. Possibly Lizzie had been there since she was a baby. In the 1880 census she was back in the home of their father and stepmother in Steuben County, Indiana. Lizzie would marry a blacksmith, Amos Cullison, in 1882 in Coshocton County, OH, and remain for the rest of her life in the little Ohio town where her father was born. Lizzie Wolfe Cullison died in 1899 at the age of 39, leaving her husband and three surviving children.
In 1870 William Albert (called Albert), son of Adam and Harriet Brown Wolf, was a 12-year-old living in Steubenville Township in the home of his father and stepmother. The 1880 census showed Albert still there, apparently working on the family farm. At some time after 1880 Albert moved to Delta County, Colorado where he established his own farm at California Mesa. He never married or had children and died in 1943 in Colorado.
In 1865 and After
The American Civil War began in April 1861, about three months after Adam’s wife Harriet died. Hoosiers would later boast that Indiana had more volunteers in the Civil War, as a percentage of the state’s population, than any other state in the Union. Indiana achieved that distinction though a combination of patriotism, peer pressure, and signing bonuses for short-term enlistments. But as a widower with children and a farmer in his 30s, Adam probably didn’t at first feel compelled to volunteer for service.
The Indiana incentives eventually motivated Adam to sign on for a 6-month enlistment in February 1865. He enrolled as a Private in Company C of the newly created 152nd Indiana Infantry Regiment. After training in Indiana, the regiment was sent to West Virginia and Maryland, where its companies were assigned to non-combat duties. Despite not “seeing action”, 49 soldiers in the regiment died from exposure and disease before the regiment was mustered out at the end of August the same year, four months after the war ended. Adam survived, but would be partly disabled from a lung ailment for the rest of his life.
A year after returning from the War, Adam married for the second time, in October 1866. His new wife, Sarah Kegerreis Faustnacht (1833-1905) was born in Lancaster County, PA to a German American couple. Relatives on both sides of her family had been in America for at least two generations. Her Kegerreis great-grandfather appears to have arrived from southwestern Germany (Baden-Wurtemberg) in the 1760s, and was living in Cocalico, Lancaster County, PA in 1771.
Incidentally, Cocalico is only about 10-15 miles from Lebanon, PA, where Adam Wolf’s great-great-grandfather Johann Peter Wolf settled in the early 1740s after his arrival from Germany. There is even a possibility that the Kegerreis and Wolf families knew each other, as they were both living in those neighboring German communities at the same time, around 1770. This was about 100 years before Adam and Sarah got together. The Lancaster County area is still well-known for a unique flavor of German American culture, as well as excellent farming.
Sarah Kegerreis had migrated with her parents from Pennsylvania to Stark County, Ohio. In Canton, Stark County, she married Moses Fostnaucht in 1851. Sometime in the 1850s the couple moved to Steuben County, IN, where they had a farm near Pleasant Lake in Steuben Township. In August 1865 Moses died after serving two years in the U.S. Army Cavalry, leaving Sarah a widow with four children. Sarah waited only a year before marrying Adam Wolf.
Sarah Fostnaucht and Adam Wolf soon had two sons of their own. Samuel Sherman Wolfe was born in December 1867, and George Adam Wolfe was born in March 1870. George Adam, who would be called “Adam” all his life, would later marry and raise six children, including my grandmother Mildred Wolfe Smith who was born in 1902. It appears from the censuses that only Sarah’s youngest child from her previous marriage, Catherine, lived with Adam and Sarah. It must have been a lively household though, as the census shows five children still in the house in 1880, when Adam was 50 and Sarah 47.
Adam and Sarah remained on the farm, or at least in the same area, until their deaths. Adam died at home in 1900, aged 70. His obituary says he had eight grandchildren at the time. Sarah died at home also, in 1905, aged 72. She was survived by five children (two with Adam) and 18 grandchildren.
Adam’s Brothers and Sister
As stated earlier, I haven’t been able to find solid evidence of the whereabouts of Adam’s older brother Simon after the death of their mother in 1844. I have some information about the other brother and sister though.
Margaret Wolf, b. June 1833. Sometime after the death of her mother in 1844, Margaret went to live with her father’s sister, Mary, and Mary’s husband Martin Mowery. They lived on a farm in Bedford Township, Coshocton County, which is adjacent to Perry Township, where her brother Adam was born. She was in the Mowery household in the 1850 census and again in 1860. She was not listed as a member of the household in 1870, but she again appeared in the records in 1872, in her marriage to Joseph A. Cullison, who was a farmer and former wagon-maker in Perry Township. He was also a widower and father of seven children. He and Margaret appear in the 1900 census, but he appeared in the 1910 census with a different (third) wife. I think Margaret died sometime between 1900 and 1906. She did not have children.
William L. Wolf. Adam’s younger brother William was born in March 1836, only a year before their father George died on their farm. William and the other children probably stayed together with their mother Sarah Ann until her death in 1844. In the 1850 census he was living in the home of Samuel and Hester Kemmerer in Butler township, Knox County, OH. Hester was a sister of William’s father George. In the 1860 census William was living with the family of farmer George Crofford in Perry Township, Coshocton County, where he was a farm laborer.
William served in the military during the Civil War, but I’m not sure when or in which units. My mom worked hard to track down his military records, even spending a couple of days doing research in the National Archives Building in Washington D.C. while visiting Cathy and me there. I have her notes in front of me as I write this, but it appears that she didn’t reach any final conclusions. They had records of several William Wolfs from Ohio serving in the Union Army. Making the task even more difficult, it was common for men to enlist for as little as three months, leave the army, and then join up with a different unit later, earning a second signing bonus. It often isn’t possible to tell if a William Wolf that served in one unit in, say, 1861, was the same William Wolf that served in another unit in 1864.
William may have first enlisted in April 1861, at the age of 25. This would have been immediately after the Union Army began recruiting. At least one of the William Wolfs served through the end of the war in 1865. Possibly that was him. I haven’t found any clear evidence.
In 1870 William was living in Perry Township, within a mile of East Union, where he owned a 32-acre plot. In the census he is shown as a 32-year-old single farmer. Sometime before 1880 he married Abigail (or Susan Abigail) Baughman. She was born in 1846 or 1847. William died in 1888, leaving his small farm to Abigail. They had no children.
Adam Wolf’s Children
The first son of Adam Clark Wolfe and Sarah Fostnaucht, Samuel Sherman Wolfe (b. 1867) married Emily Gaskill in 1889 and they had four children in the 1890s. Samuel and Emily apparently divorced in the late 1890s, and she remarried.
Adam and Sarah’s second and last child, George Adam Wolfe (b. 1870) married Elizabeth Jane Swager in 1891, and they had six children. My grandmother, Mildred Wolfe (b. 1902) was their fifth. The family was living in Jackson Township of Steuben County, IN in 1900, when he was listed in the census as a farmer. In 1911 they moved to Reading, in Hillsdale County, MI, where George Adam apparently started getting into the lumber business. They only stayed in Reading about one year, and then moved to Litchfield, also in Hillsdale County. George Adam operated a lumber yard in Litchfield and most of his kids graduated from the high school there. The exception was my grandmother Mildred, who was very seriously ill for a long time as a child. She did not return to school after the sixth grade.
By about 1930 George Adam was no longer operating his Litchfield business. In the census of that year he, his wife, and youngest son were living in Caledonia township, Michigan, just south of Grand Rapids. His occupation was listed as “lumber buyer”. He died in 1936.
George Adam’s wife, Elizabeth Swager Wolfe, was born in 1873 in Fort Wayne, IN. Her father, Peter Swager, had served in the Union Army in the Civil War, in Company E of the 142nd Indiana Infantry Regiment from November 1864 to July 1865. The regiment was stationed in Nashville for most of that time. Sometime in the 1880s he moved his family from the Fort Wayne area to the area in Steuben County near Steubenville or Pleasant Lake where the Wolfe family lived.
Elizabeth Swager Wolfe’s mother was Mary Isabelle Cook (1846-1936), called Belle. She was born in Schuylkill, PA. Both her parents were also born in Pennsylvania. She married Peter Swager in 1864, a few months before he went off to the war.
Belle Cook Swager died at 90 when my mom was seven years old, and Mom remembered her a little. One memory that stood out was of her great-grandmother’s custom of smoking a corncob pipe.
Consider for a moment: My mom’s great-grandmother, who Mom knew as a girl in the 1930s, had been the young wife of a Union soldier during the Civil War.
Obituaries & Photos
ADAM L. WOLFE, 04 Mar 1830 – 06 Nov 1900. Adam L. Wolfe was born in East Union, Coshocton County, Ohio,March 4, 1830, and died at his home, near Steubenville, Ind., Nov. 6, 1900, aged 70 years, 8 months, and 6 days. In 1857 he was married to Harriet S. Brown, and to this union were born two children, William Albert and Mary Elizabeth. January 4, 1861, his wife died. On Feb. 15, 1865, he enlisted in the service of his country as a member of company C, 152nd regiment, Indiana volunteer infantry, and served to the close of the war, being mustered out on the 30th of August 1865, at Charlestown, West Virginia. Oct. 4, 1866, he was
again married, this time to Sarah Fostnaucht, and to them were born two sons, Samuel S. and George A. The widow, three sons, eight grandchildren, one sister and a large circle of friends are left to mourn their loss, which is his eternal gain. Deceased had been for twenty-three years a consistent member of the German Baptist church and was an obliging neighbor and a good, loyal citizen. The funeral was conducted by Rev. Isaac Snowberger, assisted by Elder Shotts. The remains were laid to rest in the Pleasant Lake cemetery.
(Picture included with obituary)
Obituary from the newspaper “Steuben Republican”, Nov 28, 1900. page 1. Photo from the obituary. Middle initial is incorrect.
Obituary of Sarah Kegerreis Wolf, 2nd wife of Adam and mother of George Adam Wolfe. March 1905. “Sarah Wolf, daughter of Sarah and Samuel Keyerreis*, was born in Lancaster County, PA, Sept 15, 1833, and died at her home near Steubenville, Ind., March 10, 1905, aged 72 years, 5 months and 23 days. She was married in 1851 to Moses Fostnaught to whom were born five children, three of whom survive her. When eight years old she moved to Stark County, Ohio, and after her marriage to Steuben County, Ind. Her husband having died she was married to Adam Wolf, to whom were born two sons, Samuel S. and George A. Wolf. Again left a widow in 1900, she has made her home with her son on the old homestead where she died. In early womanhood she gave her heart to God and has lived a Christian life. She at first united with the Lutheran church, later with the Baptist and has since 1878 been a member of the German Baptist church. She was a kind neighbor and a good mother. Five children, eighteen grandchildren and one sister survive her. The funeral was held Sunday, March 12, at 11:30 at the Baptist church Pleasant Lake, Rev. Roberts officiating.”
*I have found the name spelled several ways and am not sure which is correct.
