Peters people
by GENEVIEVE TALLMAN ARBOGAST
Category: Fiction

BRIEF SYNOPSIS GOD BLEW, AND THEY WERE SCATTERED, BOOK III The continuing saga of the Taelmann (Tallman) family finds young William Tallman in the Oley Valley of Pennsylvania, some fifty miles from Philadelphia, where he shall remain from 1740 until 1780. There, circa 1742, he marries Anne Lincoln. Anne is the daughter of Mordecai Lincoln II, a land baron and ironmaster, and first wife Hannah Salter, the daughter and granddaughter of a powerful New Jersey political family; destined to become the great-great grandparents of the nation’s 16th president. Although William and Anne would have eleven children, after years of struggle the only child who would survive to adulthood would be their second child, Benjamin. Their trials are further complicated by the 1736 death of Mordecai, which had left his second wife, the former Mary Robeson, widowed with three young boys to rear alone. When she decides to remarry, William is drawn into a contract, devised to protect the inheritance of Mordecai’s sons, wherein he agrees to relinquish fifteen years of his life tethered to the yoke of the Lincoln legacy. He would not be freed from that promise until 1757, when the youngest of Anne’s half-brothers reached the age of twenty-one. In 1765 the immigration of his dearest friend and brother-in-law, “Virginia John” Lincoln, to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, brings a restlessness for William, which is quelled only by realizing an earlier ambition. 1768-80 finds William Tallman as the proprietor of an “Inn” in Reading, Pennsylvania, located approximately ten miles from his newly constructed stone residence, built on the site of the old Lincoln log house, on the banks of Amity’s Schuylkill River. Then, as Colonists can no longer deny that they are at war with England, in 1779, with an attack on Georgia’s Savannah, Thomas Jefferson, the governor of Virginia, calls for the enlistment of all able-bodied men. Answering the `Patriot Cause’ of the American Revolution, William and Anne’s son, Benjamin, now the husband of Dinah Boone, and the father of seven surviving children, joins De Best’s Troops of the First Partisan Legion, leaving his father to cope with matters in Amity Township, and the Inn in Reading. After the war, Benjamin returns to his family, immigrants to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where he and his father, William Tallman, establish plantations, comparable to that of “Virginia John,” i.e., Anne’s brother, Benjamin’s uncle, and William’s brother-in-law. The Linville Creek Baptist Church is the heart of the community, where Deacons John Lincoln, Jr. and Benjamin Tallman, supported by his wife, the former Dinah Boone, cousin of Daniel, become pillars of that admirable institution. There, also, Ben and Dinah’s progeny become acquainted with the Harrison family, founders of Harrisonburg, Virginia – relationships which, ultimately, result in the marriages of five of their children: three daughters and two sons. Then, with the turn of the century, now president, Thomas Jefferson begins a westward movement. Land offered at $2 per acre begins the “Western Fever.” A tide of settlers flow out onto Zane’s Trace, the trail that will deliver them to Ohio, a state in the unbroken wilderness of the Northwest Territory. There, as settlers, they will begin anew the task of settling another frontier, as the nation pushes ever westward toward the Pacific.