Lazarus Dameron was born in about 1765. In that year the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which for the first time required that American Colonists pay a tax to the British Crown. This extremely unpopular law was largely responsible for the American Revolution some ten years later. The Colonial Assembly of Virginia opposes the Stamp Act and joins the rest of the American Colonies in a general boycott of British-made goods in protest. In Pennsylvania, the first school of medicine was established at the College of Philadelphia. In Massachusetts, chocolate is manufactured for the first time. In Maryland, horse racing becomes a popular and fashionable spectator sport, and race tracks are sprouting up.
At various times during his life, Lazarus lived in Stokes Co., N.C., Washington and Russell Counties, in Virginia, Floyd and Pike Counties in Kentucky, and Cabell County, West Virginia. Lazarus left Virginia with brothers, Richard and Moses, and settled in an area of Floyd County, Kentucky, which later became Pike County. During the Revolutionary War, Lazarus had served as a scout in the Revolutionary Spy Service, spying on the Indians and British activities west of the Alleghany Mountains. He was still a teenager. He kept track of the Indians' migrations so that settlements could be warned when Indians approached. He, and other similar "Indian spies", followed the Indians into Kentucky and probably north to the Ohio River, and it was probably through this scouting activity that he became familiar with the Big Sandy River area of Kentucky. In 1779 Lazarus and James Fraley took part in an expedition sent to pursue marauding Wyandotte Indians who were attacking frontier settlers west of the Alleghenies. Again, in 1789, he was one of ten men selected to pursue a group of Indians who had attacked a frontier family, capturing and abducting a woman and her infant daughter. After the victory of General Anthony Wayne's militia at Fallen Timbers, in 1794, the Kentucky area was finally safe for settlement, and in 1795 about 75 families, including Lazarus Damron's, settled in the area which is present day Pike County.
Perhaps it was the pressure of their growing families that led Lazarus, Moses and Richard to leave Grayson County, Virginia, for Kentucky--in search of low cost farm land. Even as early as 1800, much of the good land suitable for farming in Virginia had already been claimed, and ownership often was transferred to the eldest son upon the death of the father, instead of dividing the land up into smaller and smaller parcels, which would not support the large families which were common at the time. Kentucky still had large tracts of open, unclaimed land, which was available at a low price. Many other families from Grayson and Russell Counties also moved west into eastern Kentucky. Shortly before 1820, Lazarus moved again, crossing the Big Sandy River to settle in what is now Wayne County, West Virginia. Lazarus had a number of children by another woman, Jane Jarrell, to whom he was never married. There were probably about 5 or 6 children by this woman--all born while he was still married to his wife, Nancy Short.
The Big Sandy River valley, during the time when Lazarus lived there, was very rugged and remote. Pioneers there lived a very primitive lifestyle compared to those who lived east of the Appalachian and Alleghany Mountains. There were few roads in the area, and people traveled mostly by boats along the various rivers and creeks, along which communities had sprung up. This lack of transportation demanded an almost total self-sufficiency of the settlers. Not only was their clothing handmade, but so was much of the cloth from which it was sewn. Merchants, from whom manufactured goods could be purchased, were few and far away, and the cash to purchase such goods was hard to come by. Much of the economy of the area was based upon the bartering of furs, ginseng (which grew wild and was plentiful in this area) and whiskey. The closest trading posts were over 100 miles down to the mouth of the Big Sandy, on the Ohio River. That trip would have been made on a flat raft, which would have had to have been pushed along with poles.
Lazarus died in 1829. During his life he had witnessed the birth of the United States, fought in its Revolution and seen the nation grow to 20 states which extended to the Mississippi River. He witnessed America finally expel the British presence in this country during the war of 1812, and remove the Spanish from Florida and the rest of the southeastern territory. Under President Jefferson the nation doubled in size with the Louisiana Purchase, and the Lewis and Clark expedition mapped the territory west of the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean. He also witnessed the first fissures begin to form in the new nation, as tension between the industrializing northern states and the agricultural South began to mount, and the Missouri Compromise was passed, hinting at that conflict to come over the issue of slavery.
http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=hagerj&id=I103827
