Chapter 3 - Virginia

In 1858 William married Mildred Humes in Missouri. Her grandfather, John Hume (the “s” was added by Mildred’s father William) was an ironmonger who, according to family tradition, prepared the iron frame for one of Lewis and Clark’s boats at Harper’s Ferry. The Humes family intermarried with other Virginia Scotch Irish families: the Gilmores and Rowlands. They settled in Missouri in the mid-nineteenth century, where they became slave-owning farmers and millers.

• A few letters from the Gilmore side, and a good deal of genealogical research by John Wright Wheatley III and others.
• Mildred Humes’s school papers give a glimpse of school life in the 1850s.
• In 1937, Harriet Wheatley Williams (Mildred’s daughter) made a trip to Sidney Vale plantation in Virginia, the Gilmore home. She described it in a series of letters to her sister Mary.