HILL’S PRARIE AND/TRUE WOMEN
Our Hill family has probably been in Virginia, Maryland, Carolina, and other southern states since the early 1600’s, with strong suggestions of links to various families around Jamestown, Bennett Plantation, and such Colonial centers, but verifiable “proof” is scarce until the birth of Abraham Hill in 1698. This Abraham Hill, (1698-1760) born in Virginia or North Carolina, married Sarah Judith Hinton, daughter of Col. John and Mary Hardy Hinton. Their son Henry Hill, Sr.(1730-1804) served as a private in the North Carolina Militia and married Sarah Cotton before moving from Chowan County, NC, to Washington, in Wilkes County, Georgia, with many of their close relatives and neighbors. Moving around 1774, some of the family served during the Revolution in Georgia, and some in Carolina.
At that time Wilkes County was quite large, including what later became Elbert, Oglethorpe, Coweta, and others of the later north Georgia counties. Among our Abraham Hill’s close relatives who came to Georgia with him were his cousin Tom and Tom’s sons – Thomas Abraham Wylie Hill (-1848), Middleton Milledge Meade Hill (1802-1850), and Thomas Baytop Jefferson Hill (1814-1873). They all started moving west from Washington, GA, within a few years. Thomas Hill, father of the three cousins who went to Texas, married Sarah “Sallie” McGehee, then moved to Marion County, AL, before later moving with his sons to Bastrop County, Texas. After Tom died in Texas, Sallie McGehee married Dionysius Oliver, who also came from Wilkes County, Georgia. Middleton Hill married Julia Foster and lived briefly in Tuscaloosa and Marion County, Alabama. Abram Wiley Hill married Evaline E. Hubbard. Our Abraham Hill went to Grenada, MS, and stayed there until a Yellow Fever plague killed him and most of his family. In the mid-1870’s, his (newly remarried) son and his grandson moved to Mooresville, Limestone County, Alabama, where the two men set up a joint medical practice.
Sarah Woods Windle’s True Women families are not the Hills themselves, but the movie uses Wiley Hill’s house as the home place for confrontations with the Indians, and much of the movie setting is actually Hill’s Prarie, the land our family bought from a widow named Jenkins. If you GOOGLE Hill’s Prarie, you’ll find quite a bit about this part of the process. http://hillsprairie.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2007/7/29/3126766.html
Somebody has bought the property and is now rebuilding it with periodic reports on line. The movie doesn’t make it clear, but according to Janice Windle’s book, the horse that took the first line across the swollen Brazos River was Sallie McGehee Hill’s blooded stallion. We’re related to a lot of Janice Woods Windle’s relatives in the book, but not very closely. It’s a good picture of what our “cousins” were going through at the same time.