Or, Subtitled: Alabama Fever and Skyrocketing Cotton Prices as Alabama Opened to White Settlers
By 9 September 1818, Dennis Lindsey had moved his family from Wayne County, Kentucky, to Lawrence County, Alabama, since he patented a piece of land on that date in township 7, range 6 west, section 8 at the Huntsville land office.[1] Alabama would become a state the following year, so this land was in Mississippi Territory when Dennis Lindsey patented it. As my previous posting showed, this land was adjacent (on the west) to what would become the town of Oakville in Lawrence County, a town that Dennis would play a role in founding. The fact that Dennis Lindsey disappears from Wayne County, Kentucky, tax returns after 1816 and then shows up acquiring land in Lawrence County, Alabama, in 1818 indicates, I think, that he moved his family to Alabama in 1817. The Huntsville Republican newspaper contains a notice on 14 October 1817 (p. 3, col. 4) that an unclaimed letter was waiting in the Huntsville post office for Dennis Lindsey, further evidence that he moved to Alabama in that year.
When James Edmond Saunders writes of Mark and Dennis Lindsey coming to Alabama in 1827,[2] it seems he had mistaken 1827 for 1817, though it was Dennis who came to Alabama in 1817. Mark and his wife Mary Jane actually moved to Alabama with Dennis’s younger siblings in 1819. Dennis’s move in 1817 would have been a step to prepare for the resettling of his parents and siblings two years later. Continue reading “The Children of Mark Lindsey (1774-1848) and Mary Jane Dinsmore: Dennis Lindsey (1794 – 1836) (2)”
