Person:Ephraim Hill (5)

See 1850 U.S. Census, KY, Crit., 238. Youngest son of David Hill and Hannah Elder. Married Nancy Porter, daughter of Ezekiel Porter and ______ Phillips, a sister of John and Robert Phillips, the Phillips family having come from NC. The Porters had been married before they came to KY. "Ephriam Washington Hill was one of the oldest grandsons of the first Ephriam. He was born in 1805 and lived to be 92 years old and I suppose was as strong a man as the county ever produced. A man thought he was a champion fighter heard of him and came and wanted to fight. Ephriam said he didn't want to fight, but the man said he was going to fight anyway. Well, he got showed. They did fight and without any proper fighting rules. Ephriam Washington Hill was the big man of the community and went by the name, Colonel. Rode in a two horse carriage when such vehicles were scarce. Ephriam W., after he was 60, married a ______ woman in the county (Susan Williams). Well, I don't think that Ephriam was so popular after he married this woman and I don't think he ever accumulated anything after that. After living an immoral life for a while she went off with another man." (William Hill, Siloam Springs, Ark.) Col. E. W. Hill Of the men who first looked upon what is now Crittenden Co., before but little of its virgin forest had faded before the woodsman’s ax, but few are living today. Among the thinned ranks of these pioneers is Col. E. W. Hill, born Aug. 7 1805, at the old Hill farm about one mile south of Marion, and for 88 years he has been a citizen of this section. He was in Marion yesterday and spent the day with his granddaughter, Mrs. J. T. Elder. His father, Col. David Hill came from North Carolina 100 years ago this fall; he was a young man and accompanied James Richey, a well-to-do man, who settled here and opened a farm, building a cabin on what is known as the Wm. Clement farm. The next year, or about 1784, Mr. Hill returned to North Carolina for a visit and returned to Kentucky accompanied by a number of settlers. Col. Hill remembers when his father left home and joined the ranks of the soldiers who fought in the war 1812-15. In the early days when people gathered regularly to muster, E. W. Hill, being versed in military tactics, was chosen to command and rose to the rank of Colonel. Col. Hill was happily married to Mary B. Porter, daughter of E. P. Porter. Three children were born to them, two of them yet living, E. P. Hill and Mary Dowell, wife of Judge Dowell of Kansas. 13 April 1893. (Crittenden Co., KY, Newspaper Abstracts, 1878-1895) From an interview with Ephriam W. Hill in the Crittenden Press, August 5, 1897: A Venerable Patriarch Your correspondent, in his perambulations, recently visited Col. Ephraim Washington Hill at his home on the back of Crooked Creek, about one mile as the crow flies southwest from Marion (KY). It was late in the afternoon of a very warm sunny day, and I found him quietly resting in his easy chair on the porch. He had been riding that day and was somewhat wearied, but he talked freely. Like most old people, he appears to live much in the past, and always finds pleasure in talking of old times. You wonder at the facility with which he carries you back to the time when this county was a wilderness, covered with pea vines; when deer were as common and plentiful as rabbits are now, and wildcats and catamount and panthers and bears and wolves contended for the mastery, and made night hideous with their discordant voices; when there was not a church, not a school house, nor mill, nor blacksmith shop in all the length and breadth of the county. He pointed to a very large stump in the yard and told me that was the stump of a tree that decayed and died wand was cut down about twelve years ago. The tree at that time was some four feet in diameter, and was but a sprout that sprang up from the stump of a Chiaquapin Oak that his father cut down when clearing the spot up on which he built his house about a century ago. Col. Hill saw the tender twig grow to a sapling, then become a sturdy oak, the monarch of the surrounding forest. He saw it wither and die, and may yet live to see the stump rot away and disappear. His father David Hill, was a native of North Carolina. When a very young man, nineteen or twenty years old, he came westward into the region of the Holston river, in East Tennessee. There he fell in with one James Richie and came with him to this country. Richie selected for his future home the place where the late N. B. Clement lived and died, and there young David assisted him to build a log cabin, the first home, so far as known, ever built for human habitation with the present limits of Crittenden County. That was about the year of 1795. David was then unmarried; he looked around and selected for himself the place where the subject of this sketch now lives, and for his father, Ephraim Hill, he selected the place where Col. Adams now lives, well known as the George Long place. He then went back to North Carolina and assisted his father to move out, and they settled on their respective places as selected by David; but before his death the father moved on the the same place with David, occupying a separated home, where he remained during the remainder of his life. About the year 1798, a number of immigrants came from North Carolina and East Tennessee and settled in the vicinity of Marion. George Elder settled the place now occupied by his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Joe Elder, on the Salem Road. He was a single man at that time but soon after, married a Miss Henry; he lived his entire married life on that place. Alexander Elder settled the place where Mrs. W. B. Crider now lives on the Princeton road, and his brother John Elder, settled just across the creek west; there two were related to George Elder, but were not his brothers. . . . to return to my subject, David Hill married Hannah Elder in the closing years of the last century. Ephraim W. was the third or fourth child of this marriage in a family of six, three boys, Anthony, William, and Ephraim and three girls, Margaret, Mary, and Lurana. Ephraim W. married Polly B. Porter in 1827 or 28, and from that marriage were born three children, two sons, Ezekial Porter, of this town, and David Edgar, who died in 1861, and one daughter, Mary E. now the wife of Judge R. A. Dowell, of Wellsford, Kansas. His wife died in the early 60's and in 1865 he married a Miss Williams. A daughter of this second marriage, Mrs. John W. Belt, now lives in his home with him. About the year 1840, David Hill sold out to his son Ephraim W., and went to Illinois. . . . Colonel Hill held the rank of Colonel of Militia of Livingston County, when his county was detached from Livingston. He was then made Colonel for Crittenden; so he has been Colonel for both counties. He has also been a Justice of the Peace. . . . After an hour pleasantly spent with this noble specimen of a generation that is rapidly passing away, we shook hands with him and took our leave, sincerely hoping that his sun, which is so clearly setting; may not be dimmed by a single cloud, that the _________ and successfully overcome. They were Nature's noblemen. Then felled the forest, fought the savages, and drove out the wild beasts. They were brought into conflict with the forces of nature, and found malaria to be the most stubborn of all their enemies. They belonged to that patient, heroic, uncomplaining class of men that with bleeding feet tread down the throngs o life's rugged pathway that succeeding generations in satin slippers may walk daintily over beds of roses. That Heaven's richest blessings may rest upon the few remaining survivors of that generation is our sincere hope. (Crittenden Press, August 5, 1897)