52 Ancestors 2025: Wheels

 

This is less a story about wheels than about the lack of them.

The Cossart side of my family arrived in New Amsterdam by ship, mostly from the Netherlands. Seeking new farmland, successive generations moved westward during pre-colonial times—first to New Jersey, then to Pennsylvania, settling in the Conewago area east of Gettysburg. This mixed Huguenot/Dutch community was linked by family and religious ties. They stayed together during colonial times and remained close when the American Revolution began. Many were patriots; young men joined local militias, and my ancestor, Francis Cossart, was active in the Committees of Correspondence and served in the Pennsylvania legislature, helping to craft the state constitution.

With the Revolution came the opening of lands west of the Appalachian Mountains, though not with the full consent of the Indigenous peoples who had lived there for generations. Daniel Boone had explored beyond the Cumberland Gap and established the Wilderness Road into Kentucky’s Bluegrass region. He and his brother Squire encouraged settlers from the colonies to emigrate west. The “Low Dutch” colonists took two routes: one down the Ohio River to the area now centered around Louisville, and one through the Cumberland Gap via the Wilderness Road to the region near Fort Boonesborough. My ancestors chose the latter.

A group of families left the Conewago colony and spent time around Shepherdstown in Berkeley County (now West Virginia) before making their way to Fort Boonesborough, Kentucky around March 1780. Their journey wasn’t by wagon (the Wilderness Road was more trail than road) so they packed their goods onto horses and traveled through dense forest. The group settled in the White Oak Spring Station area in 1781, building cabins and establishing farms.

Among these settlers was Pieter Cossart and his family. He had married Maria Durie, whose extended family included several Durie (or Duree) households as well as the Demarests (Demaree, originally Des Marets) and Bantas. But these were dangerous times. The British supplied weapons to Native American tribes resisting the loss of their lands. One attack on White Oak Spring Station in March 1781 killed four of Maria’s siblings: Petrus, Angenitje, Hendrick, and Daniel. Petrus’s wife managed to escape with their three children. Pieter Cossart himself was killed the following summer while out picking blackberries.

This was an era when travel to the frontier wasn’t along roads—it was over rough trails or waterways, and only in well-settled areas did actual roads exist. These were precarious times, and as the frontier moved west, so did the violent struggles between European settlers and Native Americans. This part of American history cannot be forgotten. At the time, colonial society largely believed in the settlers’ superiority, though some European and American philosophers viewed Indigenous people as living in a kind of natural state, free from monarchy, which influenced Enlightenment thought.

Coming from a family of early European colonists, stories like these are woven throughout my genealogical record. They are complex and difficult but important to understand, as we reflect on the times and acknowledge the errors of the past.

Wilderness Road picture: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1797882