Three Generations of Maryland Carrolls
by Louise Lucas Carroll Wade
CHAPTER I
The story begins, so far as the records are concerned, in colonial Maryland with the marriages of three couples -- Charles Carroll and Susanna Lord, Nathaniel Medford and Rebecca Bonner, and Joseph Douglass and Rebecca Lee. They lived within a few miles of each other on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, though possibly were not acquainted until the Medford and Carroll families were brought together by a marriage in 1814. It was the oldest child of that union, Charles Wesley Carroll, who selected Ann Crawford Douglass as his bride in 1848, thereby introducing the Douglasses to the Medford and Carroll families. But almost one hundred years before that, in the mid-eighteenth century, Douglasses and Carrolls and perhaps Medfords too, were arriving in the American colonies and putting down roots in Maryland.
The records show that four Carroll brothers appeared in Dorchester County at just about the time of the Revolutionary War. Presumably, they came from Ireland, and almost certainly from northern Ireland, for they attached themselves to the Protestant Episcopal Church in Dorchester County. Three of the brothers can be identified by name -- Patrick, Keel (sometimes spelled Kehal), and Charles. Keel Carroll became a trustee of the Union Chapel, and Episcopalian church East New Market, Maryland, and he is mentioned in connection with land transactions in the legal records of Dorchester County. It is quite possible that Keel and his brothers had financial interests in Caroline County too, but unfortunately a fire in 1851 destroyed those county records.
Patrick Carroll was a merchant in Caroline County. We do know that on the day before Christmas, 1790, he sold all his "goods, wares, and merchandise" to two gentleman from Baltimore. In August of 1791, he purchased land west of Fort Cumberland from a Dorchester County planter named Amos Griffith. Griffith had served in the American army during the Revolutionary War and had been paid by his state of Maryland in western land. This was a fairly common procedure; states that were short of money, would simply pay their soldiers in western land rather than cash. Amos Griffith was so compensated, but apparently he had no desire to leave his Dorchester County farm for the unsettled Cumberland frontier. So he sold the land to Patrick Carroll in the summer of 1791. Presumably, Patrick Carroll settled on the Maryland frontier, but in so doing, he moved out of range of county records and deeds, and hence out of range of the historian. He was probably, however, the first of the line of Carrolls to "go West."
Patrick's brother Charles remained in Dorchester County. We know that he married Susanna Lord on October 14, 1789 -- just a few months after the new Constitution had gone into effect and George Washington had taken the oath of office as the first president. According to the returns of the first census in 1790, Charles Carroll of Dorchester County was a Protestant land-owner, but he possessed no slaves.
That same census lists another Charles Carroll, member of the prominent Catholic Carroll family of the Western Shore of Maryland. He was the third Charles Carroll in America, his grandfather being land agent for Lord Baltimore and his father, Charles Carroll of Annapolis. The third Charles Carroll was born in Annapolis in 1737, educated in France and England as a lawyer but was barred from practice in Maryland because he was a Catholic. He managed the family lands, directed the estates of Carrollton Manor and Doughoregan Manor, and was active in colonial politics. He was a Maryland delegate to the Second Continental Congress and in this capacity signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Another member of the same family, Daniel Carroll, was a Maryland delegate to the Constitutional Convention and his signature was attached to the Constitution in September of 1787. It is possible that these Catholic Carrolls of the Western Shore were distantly related to the four Protestant Carroll brothers who settled on the Eastern Shore. But the only thing that the historian can say for certain is that the Maryland census for 1790 listed two Charles Carrolls, one of Dorchester County and the other of Carroll County.
Our Charles Carroll of Dorchester County and his wife, Susanna Lord, welcomed their first son in August of 1790. They named him James and raised him as an Episcopalian, no doubt intending him to remain an Episcopalian until his death. But James had a mind of his own. He fell in love with a Methodist lass by the name of Margaret Medford, and he was determined to have her for his wife, despite the fact that she was not an Episcopalian.
Methodism was a much more emotional religion in the early nineteenth century than Episcopalianism. It had been introduced to the colonies in the 1760's but its greatest advocate, and indeed the organizer of American Methodism, was Francis Asbury. Methodist preachers toured the country, meeting warm responses on the frontier as well as in rural areas of the older states. The Eastern Shore of Maryland was a fertile field for Methodist itinerant preachers, and in time it produced a Methodist leader of its own in Joshua Thomas. It was generally the middle and lower classes who responded to the Methodist appeal, but the Medfords seem to have been upper class Methodists. Both Medfords and Bonners were large landowners in Dorchester County. Nathaniel Medford and his wife, Rebecca Bonner, eventually raised ten children -- the fifth being a daughter, Margaret, born in January, 1787. Needless to say, all the Medford children were brought up as Methodists, and no doubt their parents expected them to remain Methodists until death. This is why their daughter Margaret caused such a stir when she was introduced by James Carroll to his Episcopalian parents.
The story goes that Susanna Lord Carroll was strongly opposed to the proposed marriage on religious grounds. But when she was unable to prevent the ceremony from taking place in March of 1814, she decided to convert Margaret to Episcopalianism. That effort, however, was abandoned in June of 1816 when Margaret Medford Carroll gave birth to her first child and defiantly named him Charles Wesley Carroll. This defamation of her husband's name was too much for the irate mother-in-law. She is supposed to have prayed in her Episcopalian manner that the Methodist Carrolls might never prosper.
Her prayer went unanswered, for James Carroll seems to have been the most prosperous of all her off-spring. He lived on a farm in Dorchester County, about two miles north of the present town of Hurlock (a small town dating from the construction of a railroad depot there in 1867). James and his wife were members of the First Washington Church, a Methodist chapel built around 1800. In the 1840's this small church was turned over for the use of Dorchester County slaves, and a larger Second Washigton Church was built for the white Methodists of the area. All of James Carroll's sons were members of this church. They and his sons-in-law were farmers, one of them owning the local grist mill in addition to a farm. Charles Wesley Carroll was prominent in Metholdist affairs in the Dorchester area, and his brother Josiah married the sister of a Methodist minister.
In is to be hoped that Susanna Lord Carroll found some happiness in the success of her son James and his large family, tainted as they were with Medford Methodism. All three generations of Carrolls, the immigrant Charles Carroll, James Carroll, and Charles Wesley Carroll, remained in Dorchester County, and we know that James and his wife and all of his children were buried there.
In Caroline County, Maryland, adjacent to Dorchester County, there lived a family named Douglass. They presumably were descended from a William Douglass, who was born in Scotland in 1610, came to the Amercan Colonies by way of Spain, and was living in Boston in 1640. Just exactly when this Douglass, or his sons, came to Maryland is not known. But a Joseph Douglass, who was commissioned as a captain in the Revolutionary army from Caroline County in 1776, used a coat of arms that was the same as the coat of arms of William Douglass displayed in Boston in 1640.
Joseph Douglass married Rebecca Lee. She is said to be the niece of Captain Harry Lee, the "Lighthorse" Lee of Revolutionary War fame and the father of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general. According to one source, the Lee connection is supposed to explain the frequent use of the name, Henry, in the Douglass family. Joseph Douglass' first son, Joseph Jr., married a Celia Wright and then in 1816 took Charlotte Wilson as his second wife. Seven children were born to them, the fifth being Ann Crawford Douglass. She was the young lady who in 1848, at the age of seventeen, became Mrs. Charles Wesley Carroll.
Her marriage took place in January of 1848, at just the time the Mexican- American War was coming to an end and the United States was preparing to add another 500,000 square miles to its national domain. The territory which Charles Wesley Carroll's son would eventually reach, Iowa and the Dakotas, had been added to the Union in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase. It was not until well after the War of 1812, however, that settlers ventured onto the rich farm land directly west of the Mississippi River. The Iowa Territory was opened up to settlement in 1838, five years after the Black Hawk Purchase had been wrested from the Indians. So rapid was the rate of settlement that Iowa had the necessary population to secure admission as a state in 1845. But the Dakotas were still lumped together as part of the "Great American Desert" in the 1840's. People felt certain that the prairies were too dry to cultivate, and settlers pushed across them as quickly as possible to reach the Oregon country. Nobody thought seriously of trying to live on the Great Plains prior to the Civil War.
The westward drive had not touched any of the Maryland Carrolls in the 1840's or 50's. Charles Wesley Carroll spent his entire lifetime in Maryland, apparently inheriting his father's farm in Dorchester County. He owned a few slaves, was active in the Methodist Episcopal Church, held such local offices as Justice of the Peace and Register of Votes, and in the post-Civil War period was active in the Republican Party.
His wife, Ann Crawford Douglass Carroll, gave birth to eight children, the eldest being George Henry Carroll, who eventually helped settle the "Great American Desert" of the Dakotas. Three of the eight children died in childhood. But Emma became the wife of Silas Sparklin and raised a family in Federalsburg, Maryland. There are several references in Alice Carroll's Diary to letters that were either sent to, or received from, "Sister Emma Sparklin." James Carroll remained on the family farm. Two of his brothers, Benjamin Franklin Carroll and Frederick Wilson Carroll, settled in the nearby town of Hurlock. Benjamin operated a canning factory in St. Michaels, Maryland. For a time, Fred Carroll also had a canning business in Hurlock, but when his factory was destroyed by fire, he moved his family to Washington, D.C., and took job with an insurance company.
Written by Louise Lucas Carroll Wade
Rochester, NY 1960
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