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| Market Street, Steubenville, Ohio, ca. 1905. Credit below. |
Sometime between 1887 and 1891, Sarah Flowers and her husband Harvey walked, or rode, into Steubenville, Ohio. So, too, did Sarah’s three children, John, Elizabeth (known often as Lizzie), and Flora, products of her earlier marriage to a man named Henry John (or possibly John Henry) Woods. Lizzie was the oldest, around 22 years old. John was close behind, perhaps 21 or a bit younger. Flora was the baby, maybe 15. They may have arrived together, or perhaps one forged a path and the others followed, trailing one another from Bellaire, in the neighboring county of Belmont, Ohio. This was a shorter journey than the one before, which had brought Sarah, Lizzie, and John all the way from Hampshire County, West Virginia (or just Virginia, when Sarah was born there in the 1840s) to Bellaire sometime between 1870 and 1880. These are my earliest Steubenville ancestors; Sarah was my 3x-great-grandmother, her daughter Flora my grandfather’s grandmother.
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| Woods-Flowers Family Migration, traveling from east to west to north. |
Soon after Flora’s arrival, she met a man from the upcountry of South Carolina who’d arrived in Steubenville a few years after she did, by way of Cleveland. He was ten years her senior, and perhaps charming, perhaps clever, perhaps simply employed. They were married on Christmas Day in 1899. The years passed – difficult, turbulent ones – and Flora gave birth to six known children. The fifth was a daughter, Mary Magdelene Littlejohn, born in February 1910. She was my great-grandmother.
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| Rufus Littlejohn's migration from SC to Cleveland to Steubenville |
As Mary grew to adulthood in Steubenville, a young man in Baker County, Georgia made a fateful decision: he would move north, perhaps to find better work or at least better pay, perhaps to be close to his older sister, Mattie, who had moved to Steubenville with her husband William Coker as early as 1917, or perhaps all of the above. Morris Lee Whaley arrived in Steubenville sometime between 1920 and 1929, arriving in his late teens or early twenties and taking a job in one of the local steel mills. He met Mary and perhaps they laughed at how close their birthdays fell to one another’s on the calendar – hers on February 22nd, his on February 28th; they were married in December 1931. Just under four years later, my grandfather Joseph Louis Whaley entered the world.
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| Morris Lee Whaley's path to Steubenville |
Just under four years after that, another baby entered the world, about 40 miles south along the Ohio River, in Powhatan Point. Cleola Johnson was an Ohioan, but just barely; most of her older siblings had been born in Alabama, before yet another northward migration brought a southern Black family to the Ohio River Valley. They moved north again, to Yorkville, and though Cleola’s path was more circuitous, she was rooted in Yorkville by her teenage years. That is, until she met that Steubenville baby boy who’d been born in 1935; they married in 1958, just after her high school graduation. My father, another Steubenville baby, was one of several children to come in the years that followed.
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| The Johnson Family from Jefferson County, AL to Jefferson County, OH |
Five generations of my direct ancestral line have lived in or passed through Steubenville, Ohio since the late 19th century. Others in my extended family can count that number higher – distant relatives in my generation and below have been born in that place in the years since my father and his family moved away, and live there still today. It’s a long history, with so, so many stories and while I’ve learned a lot, there’s still so much more to know (and share)…and so many people to meet.
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Do you know anything about these migration stories to Steubenville, Ohio? Or just have a thought to share? Drop a line in the comments section below!
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Photo Credit
Market Street, Steubenville, O. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2025673441/>.
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