Husband Dr. Allen Nesbit 1
Born: 1796 1
Christened:
Died: Aft 1877
Buried:
Father: Francis Nesbit ( -1802) 1 2
Mother: Unknown (Abt 1746-1823)
Wife
Born:
Christened:
Died:
Buried:
Children
General Notes: Husband - Dr. Allen Nesbit
He was chased a quarter of a mile by a panther when thirteen years old, and the fright and race gave him the heart disease.
He became a physician of the botanic or Thompsonian school, and got his medical education principally from his sister's library. She married a Presbyterian preacher, who afterward died.
The following is an article furnished by Dr. Allen Nesbit to the New Castle Gazette and Democrat, and published in that paper, February 21, 1868:
"Allen Nesbit was six years of age when he was brought here by his parents in 1802, from Cumberland county, so that his acquaintance with the history of the county runs back to his earliest recollection. He was a twin, the last of ten children; was born when his mother was fifty years of age, and weighed at his birth just fourteen ounces! In his 72d year (1868), he wrote without the use of glasses, and weighed 135 pounds; could shoulder a sack of wheat or carry a barrel of flour, and never had taken a dose of calomel, diluted iron or vitriolic acid.
"The Nesbit family left a good farm, a brick house, a distillery and malt mill, to live here in a round-log cabin with clapboard roof, loft, floor and door; their bedsteads of the primitive kind, made of small poles laid on forks driven in the ground. A split-log with feet put in answered for a table, small pieces of split wood with feet for chairs, and a couple of leaves of paper greased for glass in the window.
"At the time when the Nesbits came here, there were but two houses (log ones) in Darlington, one of them a tavern partly chinked and daubed. There was then but one house between Darlington and Mount Jackson, and not a dozen families in the bounds of what is now North Beaver, and part of them were "squatters," who soon moved away. But during the next two or three years twenty or thirty families came in, principally from Cumberland county.
"The load of 'moving' which the Nesbits brought with them consisted principally of the iron and other fixings for a grist and saw-mill, a barrel of salt, and one of flour, two sets of china cups and saucers, two sets of pewter plates, two pewter dishes and a pewter mush-basin, a cedar churn and a tub. In affectionate memory of the olden time, they brought with them a singularly-built arm chair, that had been brought from Scotland about seventy years before. They soon began to build mills, having to give eighteen dollars per barrel for flour, at Beaver Falls, twenty cents for meat, and a dollar and a quarter per gallon for the whisky, that seems to have been considered as one of the things indispensable at that day, and that was furnished to the hands with the regularity of the bread and meat.
"A bill of fare for breakfast then embraced bread, butter and coffee, a small allowance of pork and of preserved wild-plums or crab-apples, pone or Johny-cake, milk, butter; and perhaps a wild turkey, or leg of venison, or chunk of bear's meat, or a roasted raccoon, for dinner; and corn meal mush, out of that pewter basin, with butter and milk, for supper.
"Johny-cake was a mixture of corn meal, milk, water, and salt (with a little shortening when it could be obtained), made about as thick as the mortar they used to daub their log houses with, and put on a piece of clapboard with a woman's hand, and set up before the fire to bake. A trowel would not answer for spreading it on the board. No substitute would do for a woman's hand, as the hand ornamented the cake with the print of the woman's fingers (and, as the Doctor observes, made it look picturesque! )
"No salmratus or soda was used in those times. Our progenitors knew nothing about such stuff sixty years ago. Far better for the present generation would it have been had we, too, been kept in blissful ignorance of them. The mucous membrane of their stomachs would be worth from 25 to 50 per cent. more than it is at present.
"Then there were no meeting-houses, no preaching, and no graveyard. Francis Nesbit died six or seven months after he came to the county, and was buried in the then woods, where the Westfield graveyard now is. Perhaps this was the first funeral in the township. Near that spot a small log meeting-house was soon built, and in it there was occasional preaching.
"The appearance of the country was truly beautiful. The rich, loamy appearance of the soil, the density of the forests and thickets, the wonderful multiplicity, variety and gorgeousness of the blossoms and flowers, the exhilerating perfume they sent forth, the continual singing of the birds, the chattering of the many squirrels, the beautiful plumage of the vast flocks of turkeys, and the nimble skipping of the deer and fox, produced a sublimity and grandeur far beyond anything we have now in the cleared fields and meadows into which these forests have been transformed.
"Ere long came the vast profusion of wild fruits. Leading the van came the service-berry, growing luxuriantly on bottoms, flats and hills, and on the shelving banks small bushes bending to the ground with their loads of fruit. Men, birds and animals were fully supplied, and a great many left. Then the strawberry, plum, huckleberry, blackberry, haw, cherry and grape, each added its share to the richness that nature afforded, together with the vast amounts of delicious nuts. The woods abounded in the native (crab) apple, said by the Economitest to be the best fruit for wine on this continent.
"There was a wonderful variety of medicinal herbs, many of whose virtues in curing disease was not well known; neither are they yet appreciated as they ought to be. Then, in thick and broad patches, with its beautiful flower of every conceivable color, and moccasin shape, stood the admirable Cypripedium Pubescens of Linimus, known to people then by the name of "ladies' slipper," and by the Indians "moccasin flower," being the most powerful nervine in use. There, too, was the Verticillati (golden seal), the best tonic known, with Virginia snake-root, ginseng, and many others of great value. Although extinct here now, there is enough of them in the newer States and territories to cure all diseases that can be cured, without importing those ship-loads of deleterious minerals and other poisons from other quarters of the globe, to crowd down people's throats, sending them prematurely and uncalled-for to the judgment-seat of the Almighty! What stupendous folly! What preposterous insanity for a rational man that the Creator, with all his exhuberant goodness and mercy to the human family in providing, as the Scripture says, enough to satisfy the need of everything that lives, would leave thirty millions in this country without such medicines as would be necessary for them! Never would He do it.
"But we should remark that there was a contrast to the former part of this chapter. In those times the people often met with a straggling panther or bear, wolf or wild-cat, neither of them being very pleasant company, if their young were near. However, we do not know that they ever hurt any of our early settlers, though they very frequently got up a 'big scare.' Then there were a great many venomous snakes, of different kinds, more to be dreaded than wild beasts. They were not at all conservative in the use they made of their teeth, either as offensive or defensive weapons. They struck with amazing swiftness and precision, greatly periling the lives of their victims if some of those powerful balsams of nature were not just at hand.
"For a few years the settlers in the northern part of Beaver county were principally from Eastern Pennsylvania, and some from Allegheny and Washington counties, mostly of Scotch and Irish extraction, and were said by writers to excel in probity and uprightness any community. Dr. Duston, of Darlington, who was the greatest phrenologist in Western Pennsylvania, stated that those Scotch-Irish far excelled the Yankees or Yorkers, though himself a Yankee. He knew them whenever he saw them, by their peculiar cranial and facial developments.
"Soon, however, people came in from Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and from different countries of Europe, most of whom were highly-respectable, while some were ignorant and degraded, and not calculated to improve society."