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About Agnes Skidmore
Agnes “Anne” Caldwell Skidmore BIRTH 1705 Somerset County, Maryland, USA DEATH 2 Jan 1792 (aged 86–87) Ruddle, Pendleton County, West Virginia, USA BURIAL John Skidmore Cemetery #22 Ruddle, Pendleton County, West Virginia
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/155183277/agnes-skidmore
Parents
Andrew Caldwell 1675–1750
Margaret Train Caldwell 1680–1735
- Granny Skidmore PDF document
Agnes Caldwell had been born on the Wicomico River in Somerset County, Maryland, and moved with her parents to Delaware in childhood. Andrew Caldwell lived on a plantation called The Exchange, and the town of Woodside below Dover now stands on this tract together with the old Caldwell Burying Ground. Her father was one of the most influential men in Kent County, and her brother Andrew Caldwell, Junior, represented the county in the General Assembly of Delaware for 12 years from 1745 to 1757. Her nephew, Captain Jonathan Caldwell, was the commander of the “Blue Hen’s Chickens” in the Revolution. His company gave Delaware its state bird, and he gave his name to a young kinsman, Jonathan Caldwell Friend (1774-1856), who died in Braxton County, West Virginia.
Agnes Skidmore survived her husband by many years. She put in a claim at a court held for Augusta County on 18 January 1775 for supplies furnished to the militia a few months earlier on their way to the Battle of Point Pleasant. Mrs. Ann Skidmore and the accounts for Dunmore’s War show that she was paid By Sundry p[er] Aud[it] £1.17.2 Ex.” The list is not itemized, but it may have been for grain ground at her husband's mill after Joseph Skidmore had settled at what is now South Elkins or for diets served to the militia before they left for Point Pleasant. S he was not mentioned in her husband’s will and she seems to have stayed at the mill at Ruddle for its relatively greater comforts and safety. She was probably happy to be there in 1777, a particularly bloody year on the Virginia frontier, when her son Captain John Skidmore was sent out at the head of a company of men to protect the early settlers in the Tygart Valley. Presumably the deed, now lost, for the mill that Joseph Skidmore gave to his son Samuel Skidmore stated (or implied) that he was to support his mother in her old age at her home on SkidmoreMill Run.
Samuel Skidmore died untimely in 1780. Agnes Skidmore made a determined effort after his death to have her dower set off in the Mill Run property by his executors. Presumably this action was successful as she died and was buried there. There are two old graves here; one can still be traced several yards south of the house with a small field headstone (a footstone has disappeared in recent times). The other grave, some distance from this, has been plowed over. One is remembered as the grave of a Skidmore woman (Agnes beyond doubt) and the other was the grave of Mary Elizabeth Hartman, the first wife of John George Dahmer. [Reverend Dahmer married Nancy, the daughter of Captain John Skidmore, as his second wife, and they are buried elsewhere.] Agnes Skidmore was living as late as 2 January 1792 at the age of approximately 80 when the Pendleton County Court ordered that a deposition be taken from her.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/155183277/agnes-skidmore
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/155183277/agnes-skidmore “GRANNY” [AGNES] SKIDMORE, A NURSE-PRACTITIONER BY 1769 IN VIRGINIA.
by Warren Skidmore
Next to nothing is usually known about the subservient wives of the early settlers on the Virginia frontier. I did know a bit about Agnes (Caldwell) Skidmore before I made my first long visit to Virginia in pursuit of family history in 1951.1 I spent a day in the courthouse at Rockingham County, and then that evening I was able to use a daybook kept at Felix Gilbert’s store in that county with hundreds of charges from 1774-1777.2 It was owned by Mrs. John T. Harris of Harrisonburg who very kindly set up a card table in her living room and let me spend several hours making pencil notes from it.3 I set down a long list of things that could not be made at home which were purchased by the Skidmores at Gilbert’s establishment. It included hemp, blankets, salt, beeswax, kegs, girths, shears, pots, kettles, wire, hammers, thimbles, hats, shoes and (surprise) quantities of rum imported from the West Indies. However my major new discovery was to find in the daybook that Mrs. Ann or “Granney Skidmore,” whose charges were entered in both names, appeared to be the only nurse-midwife (who was then known familiarly with the epithet “granny”) who dealt at Gilbert’s store.4 (WS)
It started with a tedious drive through northern West Virginia over roads that had hundreds of sharp 90 degree turns laid out years earlier by county surveyors to avoid crossing through any poor farmer’s corn patch. I finally arrived at Philippi in Barbour County where I had an indifferent meal at an eatery with a “White Only” sign on the door. I eventually got home several days later after stopping at several other courthouses, lastly at Fincastle in Botetourt County. The county clerk there told me that while he was a Virginian he still highly approved of my Republican senator, Robert A. Taft, son of the former president. He was pleased to hear that Senator Taft’s office had sent me several years earlier a pass to the Senate Gallery which I occasionally used when I was at college in Annapolis, Maryland. There were then no McDonald’s or fast fooderies, no motels, and only very occasionally a set of drafty “tourist cabins” to accommodate the traveler. (Different times, different mores, now happily largely forgotten.)
2 I had learned of this ledger from John W. Wayland who had printed some useful extracts from it in his History of Rockingham County (Dayton, Virginia, 1912) 64. Alas this daybook (which I would love to find and fully transcribe today) can not now be found. The Skidmore extracts printed here in the Appendix mention still other volumes (called Ledgers F and G) of what was once clearly a long series of the financial records of the store between 1769-1774. Alas, all of these daybooks now seem to be totally lost.
3 This was back in the dark ages before photocopiers.
4 A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles, by Mitford M. Mathews (University of Chicago Press, 1951) 731.
Local usage also sometimes transformed the noun granny into a verb as
−2−
Agnes Caldwell Skidmore, a daughter of Andrew (1675-1751) and Margaret (Train) Caldwell of Kent County, Delaware was born about 1706, but on the Wicomico River in Somerset County, Maryland. She went to Delaware about 1715 where Andrew Caldwell later farmed a plantation called The Exchange.
5 Her father became one of the most influential men in Kent County, and her brother Major Andrew Caldwell (ca. 1704-1774) represented the county in the General Assembly of Delaware for 12 years from 1745 to 1757. Agnes (known also as Annes or Ann) married Joseph Skidmore (1706-1778) of Murderkill Hundred in Kent County, Delaware. He had been left an orphan in childhood, but survived and managed to marry well to Agnes before 7 August 1730.
6
On 18 June 1736 Joseph Skidmore, now styled a yeoman, sold Fisher’s Delight (a small plantation that he had inherited from his father) for £70. Driven by ambition he left shortly after his wife’s confinement for what is now Washington County, Maryland.
7 Agnes joined her husband soon after in Maryland where the majority of her 11 children were born. They stayed there for a time, but then went by way of the gap at Harper’s Ferry up the Shenandoah to what was then the old Augusta County in Virginia.
Joseph Skidmore set out immediately on a search the area that became Pendleton County where he entered surveys of an enormous lot of the choicest bottom tracts which promised easy development. One of the best of these, containing 54 acres on Lick Run near the present crossroads at Ruddle in Pendleton County, he kept for himself where he built a profitable gristmill. His home there, originally a log cabin, was hard by the mill and enlarged several times. About 1840 the original house was sided over for the last time, and the burr stone from the mill used as the foundation for a chimney added to the house. It can still be seen embedded in the sod, and an old photograph taken of the house as it looked after 1840 still survives.
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Agnes Skidmore's Timeline
| 1705 |
April 7, 1705
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Wicomico River, Somerset County, Province of Maryland
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| 1732 |
1732
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Murderkill Hundred, Kent, Delaware
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1732
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Murderkill Hundred, Kent, Maryland, United States
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| 1734 |
1734
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Murderkill, Kent, Delaware
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| 1736 |
June 10, 1736
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Orange County, Virginia
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June 10, 1736
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Murderkill Hundred, Kent, Delaware, USA
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June 10, 1736
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Murderkill Hundred, Kent, Delaware
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June 10, 1736
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Little York, Kent, Delaware
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