Abel Morgan

http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~morgansociety/genealogy/david.htm

In the summer of 1792, two forts or stockades were built on Slate Creek, named Morgan's and Gilmore's Stations respectively, and were occupied and corn raised in what is now Montgomery County, Kentucky, but owing to prowling bands of Indians and the remoteness to other forts, three men being killed, they were abandoned in September of the same year, the settlers returning to Boone's and Bryan's Stations. In February, 1793, six families, in all twenty-seven persons, again occupied Morgan's Station; Ralph Morgan's family being one. During the last days of March, Ralph Morgan and wife took four packhorses and went to Boonesborough to get their household goods, leaving their two oldest children, David Douglas and Abel Morgan, at the fort. On April 1st, Easter Monday, say the Historians, at 10 a.m., 1793, the men all being out looking after the planting of their crops, no man about the fort except one, and he old and infirm, the gates wide open, thirty-five Indians rushed in and captured the fort, killing the old man above named, and one woman who was unable to travel, and carried off the remainder, nineteen persons, as prisoners, after setting fire to the fort. David Douglas and his half-brother Abel Morgan, the former twelve years of age and the latter less than eight, at the time the rush was made on the fort, were playing in Slate Creek, and on hearing the yells of the Indians and the screams of women and children, at once fled for their lived pursued by four Indians. They boys knew of a large standing sycamore tree, hollow at the bottom, which they ran to and quickly entered, and there hid, standing on rotten portions of the tree until their pursuers had passed and repassed to their party, when they came out and made their way to Boonesborough and rejoined their parents. On the alarm being given, pursuit was made, which the Indians discovered, and massacred such of their prisoners as were unable to keep up in their rapid retreat. The pursuit was abandoned, but the captives were restored after Wayne's Treaty two years later.

The two brothers lie buried side by side in a country graveyard, not more than eight feet apart, about five miles west of Greensburg, Decatur County, Indiana. The writer visited their graves in February 1909, and copied the following inscriptions from their headstones:

David Douglas, Born Nov. 9. 1781. Died Jan. 23, 1861. Abel Morgan, Born March 14, 1786. Died July 16, 1863.

Abel Morgan and his cats Abel Morgan, by his wife, Sarah Howard Morgan, had five children, to-wit: Lydia Morgan, Ralph Morgan, Julia Morgan, Olevia Morgan and Martha Morgan. Lydia married Patrick Ewing; Ralph never married; Julian, born April 18th, 1815, married Samuel Gates Daily; Olevia married, first Killis McGinnis, second, Jesse Green, and third, Abel Anderson; and Martha married James King.

Abel Morgan's wife, Sarah Howard, died about the year 1821. Later he married a second wife, but they disagreed and he became dissipated and squandered his entire means left him by his father, Ralph Morgan. He hadn't the slightest idea of values, but bartered his lands for mere trifles. He came home late at night after one of his foolish land sales, and the next morning, his wife arising to get breakfast, discovered cats on the gate-posts, smoke-house and on the eaves of the house -- in fact, cats everywhere. Becoming alarmed, she aroused him and told him the whole place was covered with cats where dogs had treed them. He calmly explained to her that he had sold a piece of land the previous evening and had taken the first payment in cats.

The writer has listened to Abel Morgan by the hour narrating his early life and that of his father. His hatred of the Indian race was intense. He invariably called them savages and many times he emphasised the statement that 'the only good savages were the dead ones.' No wonder, for anyone who searches the early annals of Kentucky, as the writer has for the past eight months, must be fully convinced that it was rightly termed the 'dark and bloody ground.'