The Fairchild’s of my family descended from five Fairchild brother’s who came to Mississippi in the early 1800s from the Carolinas.
We’re all a blending of two families. In my case, that’s Murphy and Fairchild. My mother was born to Patrick Henry and Emma Fairchild
One of those brothers was Robert Fairchild, and the first record of him being in MS comes from land records dated 1820. After moving around in the state for a bit, they mostly settled in the Jones County area. One of Robert Fairchild’s children was William H. Fairchild, (1810-1864). The date of his death is significant.
William had a son, James Amous Fairchild (12/14/1850 to 8/23/1913). He was an interesting fellow. He was successful, and was at one time the mayor of Moselle, MS in Jones County. His ‘quirk’ in life was that he took (shall we say) family to the extreme!
His young wife had a sister, and the sister-in-law’s husband was tragically killed. James had built a ‘dog-trot’ for he and his wife and their growing family. A dog-trot was like one huge long rectangular floor, with two rectangular ‘living areas’ with an open breezeway/walk-through in the middle, and all covered by one large roof. The idea was that one side could be the messy family area, and the other the cleaner and cooler entertaining area. The sister-in law moved in with them after William had converted one side for her. The 3 lived there until the day they all died… and William raised 7 children with his wife… and 3 with his wife’s sister, all happily under one roof! No, they weren’t Mormon, but Southern Baptist. One of the seven was Patrick Henry Fairchild, my mother’s railroading father! As a small child, I was taken to see this original homestead while it was still standing.
If that were not interesting enough, let’s go back to the son of one of the 5 ‘original’ Fairchild’s… William H., the one who I said his date of death was significant. It was during the years of the Civil War.
All of this happened in Jones County, MS., and Jones County is noted as being a fairly singular ‘hotbed’ of RESISTANCE to the Southern Confederacy. A large portion of the county, mainly due to economic reasons, rebelled against the new Confederate authority. Most of this rebellion came from the poor working class, who were heavily, and unfairly taxed by the Confederate authorities. The state had passed what was known as the ‘Twenty Rule,’ meaning that for every 20 slaves a land owner had, one member of his family was exempt from military service. The poor had a saying for this, “It’s a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s battle.”
A fellow by the name of Newton Knight rose up in open rebellion against the Confederacy.
He organized a rag-tag bunch of poor farmers and Confederate deserters, and waged all out war on the southern troops. In 1916 a movie was released about this unique piece of Mississippi history, entitled THE FREE STATE OF JONES, starring Matthew McConaughey. See photo above. It bombed at the box-office, only making back 1/2 of the production costs.
Now, back to my ancestor’s. William H. was appointed by the Confederates as a dreaded tax-collector. Recorded show that on the same date in 1864, not only was he murdered, but also the Sheriff of Jones County. We don’t know if they were together at the time, but it makes sense to think that they must have been. It’s also assumed that Newton Knight was behind it.
So there. That’s my newly discovered little piece of family history that you probably never saw in the movie or read in the book!
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Pen In Hand 