Tousey Family

The first owner of Henrietta Wood was probably Moses Tousey (1778-1834) of Boone County, Kentucky.

They relocated from Greene County, New York, around 1803 or 1804, and an 1800 census record shows they did not own any slaves before the move. That census also may help corroborate Wood’s memory that the family was Jewish; the neighbors include Levi Hitchcock, Esra Jones, Ely, Phinehas Tiler, Jacob Van Soon, Abraham Snider, Benjamin Hubbard, Jacob Horn, Elijah Andres, Ezekiel Andres, though these could just be biblical names used by Connecticut Protestants. The Tousey gravestones in Kentucky do not seem to bear any Christian insignia.

By 1830, the federal census showed him with eleven slaves (2 males under 10, 2 males 24 to 35, 4 females under 10, 2 females 10 to 23, and 1 female 36 to 54). An 1834 inventory from a will book for Moses mentions “Negro man Bill” and “negro woman Daphne” (which Wood gave as the names of her parents in the Ripley Bee), as well as “negro boy Joshua.”¹

By the 1840 census, Moses’s son Omer Tousey is living in Dearborn, Indiana, with two free people of color (including one woman 55 through 99) in his household. There is also a Daphne Tousey in the 1850 census in Scott County, Kentucky, which lists her as a 70-year-old black woman born in Virginia.²

While being hired out in Louisville, Wood also remembered being briefly reunited with her brother Joshua, who had assumed she was dead. Henrietta identified him by a scar on his chin suffered from a fall while he was a baby. She also later remembered her mother coming to visit her in the slave pen of William Pullum, “but never heard of any of the rest of the family.”

For more on Tousey, see family history on Internet Archive, a book chapter on Touseytown, from Bridget B. Striker, ed., Lost River Towns of Boone County, a reference in the Encyclopedia of Northern Kentucky to a ferry established by Moses Tousey in 1820 (later supposedly haunted); and documents on Moses’s estate found in the Albert Gallatin Porter Papers at the Indiana Historical Society.

Because Moses’s grandson, Albert Gallatin Porter, went on to become a major Indiana politician, the family is often mentioned in biographical sketches of Porter. See three examples. Porter’s parents were Moses’s daughter and Captain Thomas Porter, a veteran of the War of 1812.

The house of one of the family cousins, Erastus, became the Tousey House Tavern in Burlington, Kentucky. See also the family gravestones and a map showing possible location of Touseytown.

The Tousey clan was related by marriage to the Gaines family that owned Margaret Garner. Elvira Percival Tousey (1809-1884) married James M. Gaines (1793-1851), brother of Abner Gaines and John Pollard Gaines, Garner’s first owner. See weisenburger1998, 31-32.

In addition to striker2010, see Melinda Sartwell’s essay, “Pioneers from the East: The Percival Family in Boone County,” available at Boone County Public Library and online at http://bcplfusion.bcpl.org/Repository/percival.pdf (PDF).