3. Carntall and Greeneville

In June 2016 I was pleased to accompany four American visitors on the Antrim leg of their trip. They had already whirled through Dublin, Llangollen, Edinburgh, Inverness, St Andrews and Troon; now we sampled Carnmoney, Ballyclare and Broughshane.

Susan Richardson Williams [1] has links with the Gladneys / Gledneys of First Broughshane Presbyterian cemetery and of Winsboro, South Carolina. Her husband William Dickson “Dick” Williams is a direct descendant of William Dickson of Greeneville, Tennessee (c. 1775-1842). Emigrating in 1791 aged around 16, William built a career as apprentice shopkeeper, merchant and postmaster. He left a large house in Greeneville for his daughter Catharine Douglas Dickson and her husband Alexander Williams; this Dickson-Williams mansion and its story of the family’s Civil War excitements are preserved in Greeneville through the efforts of local researchers such as the East Tennessee Historical Society. Susan is an ETHS past president and current board member. Beverly Williams (Dick’s brother), and his wife Wilhelmina, are ETHS stalwarts and guides at the mansion, where I was warmly welcomed in 2015.

For their Civil War episodes and acquaintanceship with politicians such as President Andrew Johnson, the Dickson-Williams family are well known across the Atlantic. William Dickson’s uncle William Steel Dickson (WSD) is perhaps better known on this side. He did not emigrate when under much pressure around and just after the 1798 Rebellion. He was imprisoned in Belfast and Scotland for over three years, made further trouble for his Church and Government with sermons and his 1812 Narrative, and died in reduced but honourable circumstances in Belfast in 1824 [2]. I thought it was worth joining the two sides of the family story and introducing Susan et al. to the Carnmoney and Carntall area where these Dicksons lived.

The Worshipful the Mayor of Antrim and Newtownabbey, Councillor Thomas Hogg, welcomes Susan Richardson Williams and family (l. to r. = Dick, Hallie, Jordan) to the council offices at Mossley Mill, 3 June 2016.

My Hill ancestors included several farming families in the same area. They died out, or moved off the Carnmoney farms and into town as the economic terms changed and the first World War approached; my parents met during government service in the second World War, and moved abroad in the 1960s. I lived out of Antrim for fifty years and paid attention only in 2012. Fairly soon, and appreciating the luck that placed my relatives in the neighbourhood of Sentry Hill and its archivist, antiquarian and photographer William Fee McKinney [3], I had a picture of tenant farmers, modest traders and tailors. Neither rich nor starving, they had the usual quirks, gleaned from newspaper snippets and libraries: domestic abuse, liver failure, testimony in court, insanity, death by whisky puncheon. One cousin, James Ferguson, has forty mentions in McKinney’s diary because he lived next to Sentry Hill and was a handyman; his widow, Anne (Hill) Ferguson, stayed friends with McKinney and lived till 1924. McKinney photographed my grandmother Jenny, and (shortly after their father Andrew died) her cousins the “Hill brothers” [4]. These Hills farmed along the Ballycraigy / Ballyhenry boundary; Andrew ran the pub at what is now Corrs Corner, and his brother ran the adjoining farm and quarry. McKinney had a firm view on drink, and may have disapproved of liver failure and puncheons. We were close neighbours but probably not that close socially. We were a small part of the community round Carnmoney and Sentry Hill, which was a small part of the stories of emigration, plantation, Rebellion and Carnmoney Presbyterianism.

It is not possible to imagine what life was like – to think yourself into the days of labourers, itinerant tailors, Temperance Society founder members and 1859 Revival converts. There can be glimmers of fellow-feeling. I doubt if the McKinneys would approve of us if we met; but William Fee McKinney would probably offer tea and intelligent discourse:

The tombstone for William Steel (or Steell, Steele,…) of Bellycraigy (Ballycraigy, Ballycraige,…) is still legible. According to William Latimer, a respectable Presbyterian historian strongly interested in the United Irish personalities, one of these Hills was convinced of descent from WSD. Latimer, sceptical, discussed this with McKinney; probably with other Presbyterian Historical Society (PHS) heavyweights such as F J Bigger and J W Kernohan; possibly in person with my cousin and my great-great-grandfather Samuel Hill. A surviving letter to Latimer claims only that Samuel attended WSD’s funeral with WSD’s grand-nephew Robert Car(r)uth; and McKinney records the Carnmoney marriage of WSD’s sister Mary and a John Car(r)uth. Moreover, in a transcription of a 1796 letter to William Dickson from his parents in Carntall, an uncle’s name is “Cal_th”; one hopes that the originals of this and other family letters turn up [5].

My Hills were implicated, but descended? Cousin James and family shared a house, a Church pew, and this grave with one of the several Robert Car(r)uths. The son Alexander had a bee in his bonnet about WSD (and Alexander Gordon, in his 1880s DNB article on WSD, acknowledges “Mr. A. Hill, Ballyearl”). But despite, or because of, substantial ferreting around the life and the brave / foolhardy campaigns in public and in Synod, the WSD archives are muddled or scanty. I did not find a convenient authoritative Dickson family tree; Dr Desmond Bailie’s fine short biography, published by the PHS and later revised and reprinted, collects much of what is known about WSD’s Carnmoney origins and immediate family – and that is not much [2]. Some effort was needed to trace family members of interest more to me and to people in Tennessee than to historians of Presbyterianism. WSD, for almost all his long public life, was associated far more with Portaferry, Belfast, Dublin and Keady than with Carnmoney, and he had good reason to keep the spotlight off his close family. McKinney had his local sources (Hills, Giffens, Orrs, McCrums), and Latimer collected what he could from the elderly Portaferry and Keady relatives. A great effort of reappraisal and commemoration was made by Bigger and colleagues around and after the Rebellion centenary. Yet (for example) Latimer hardly mentions WSD’s son who emigrated to Tennessee, apparently after a failed business venture with Bernard Coile, the touchy and Catholic merchant of Lurgan and Armagh who helped to publish the Narrative: Coile certainly, and William Gal(a)way Dickson possibly, found that officials made life awkward. It seems that WSD’s daughter Mary Charlotte married, and also emigrated, unremarked in the biographies. A minor oddity is that WSD’s Clifton Street grave is – according to what my cousin wrote – some distance from where Bigger placed the commemorative headstone. But Bigger was fond of flourishes, and open to petty accusations of poor scholarship.

29 August 2021 saw a bicentenary fundraiser for maintaining the Dickson-Williams mansion: Catharine’s 1823 marriage to Alexander Williams was re-enacted in period dress, with Dick and Susan as William and Eliza, and their daughter Hallie and her fiancé (now husband) John Haley as Catharine and Alexander.

Many Irish emigrants were relatives, friends or employees of William Dickson: his brother-in-law James McCurley, and James’s son John Dickson McCurley; a cousin Samuel Martin; some skilled masons and builders; and particularly a cousin William Galway (Galaway etc.) Dickson (c. 1785-1851), who had a bumpy career. Though probably not seriously assaulted or formally accused during or after the 1798 Rebellion, he was tarred with the same brush as his father and received no favours from the authorities. President Andrew Johnson later wrote:

The two young Dicksons, William and James, and their father, were provided for [in a family will]; their father just having emigrated to the country, was poor, with some daughters to take care of, and, as I am informed, became poor in consequence of British tyranny exercised toward his father, the Rev. Steele [sic] Dickson, in Ireland; also John McCurley, who is a near relation, was provided for no doubt.

One evidence of “tyranny” was the treatment of Bernard Coile (1771?-1829), a Catholic linen merchant and friend of United Irishmen, instrumental in the publication of Rev. Dickson’s Narrative (1812). He was twice imprisoned without decent trial and, in the 1820s, petitioned Parliament for redress. His formal business partnership with William G (Belfast Commercial Chronicle, 6 August 1808: COILE & DICKSON…regularly and largely supplied with LINEN & COTTON GOODS, Of every Description) was stymied; Francis Plowden reprinted this in his 1811 History of Ireland (vol. I, p. 127):

William G appears to have remained loyal to his father, helping him with the Narrative and its publication, including a fraught correspondence [6] with Coile about profits (if any), delays, errata and unsold copies. It was “most abominably printed” by Dublin’s John Stockdale, said Rev. Dickson in his 1813 Retractations:

At the end of 1824 Rev. Dickson died and was buried in Belfast, and I do not see his immediate family mentioned by the incomplete, inconsistent press accounts (see section 6 below). Later, too, William G’s family and burial were misreported. When Rev. William Latimer writes in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology in 1911

he or the typesetter may be forgetting Margaret and thus misquoting an 1897 letter to Latimer by Isabella Dunlop of Daisy Hill, Eliza Dunlop’s niece:

William left six children. Henry, James, Isabella, Margaret, William and Jane, who also went to Greenville Tennessee, and we believe all are dead, some of them left children, but we do not know anything of them now.

The Dickson home at Roan (near Keady, just down the lane from the Dunlops’ Daisy Hill) is better known today for its McBride family and a song about soldier Willie McBride [7].

In the Narrative’s appendix Occurrences in and from Armagh on the 9^th of September, 1811 Rev. Dickson reviews an incident very near Roan on his return from a day of meetings, meals and saddle repairs in Armagh. He denies being drunk; his “necessity to dismount” near a road junction is not explained, but he was 66 and in poor health with a history of biliousness and water cures, so we can guess; he briefly retraced his steps to find a mislaid handkerchief and a written note; soon after, when three men approached, he was pulled from the horse and badly beaten. They were strangers to him – “How can I know, to what party they belong, when I do not know the person of any one of them?” – so he resisted pressure to blame Orangemen. When writing the account for the Narrative he apparently sent his son as messenger:

The witness is probably Isabella’s father or brother (both called James); her own spelling is clearly Dunlop.

Simon Langley, who claimed that advertisements for the Narrative were libels, had in Dickson’s view such loose ways with insinuations and evidence that good witnesses were needed to avoid later misrepresentation.

William Dickson died at the turn of 1842/43; perhaps William G and family saw him alive in Tennessee.

The Armagh Guardian of 29 November 1851 has “At Grenville, Tennesse, USA, in the 64^th year of his age, William Galway Dickson, Esq., son of the late Rev. Dr. Dickson of Keady”. The published headstone transcriptions from Greeneville’s Old Harmony cemetery are inconsistent, but I think this William G, son of Rev. William Steel Dickson, is buried in grave V-13, and not in V-12 or elsewhere:

These sketches are kindly supplied by Beverly Williams, who with Susan and other members of the Williams family welcomed me to Greeneville and tramped round the cemetery. We agree that the middle initial at this 1851 grave of “William C. Dickson” may be a weathered “G”.

I thank Susan and family for their friendship and enormous energy, Queen's University (the McClay Library), Valerie Adams of the Presbyterian Historical Society's library, and Evelyn Barrett, Rosemary Sibbett and their NIFHS colleagues. I have described some of the Carnmoney and Dickson links (and thanked a good many other correspondents) in notes for the ETHS, the Presbyterian Historical Society, and the NIFHS. Members who are interested, but unable to visit the Research Centre, are welcome to contact me at chrishill197@googlemail.com. I would be delighted also to hear from descendants of the above-mentioned Hills, Car(r)uths and Craigs.

[1] http://www.srw-associates.com; http://www.easttnhistory.org

[2] W D Bailie, William Steel Dickson, Bulletin of the Presbyterian Historical Society, 1976; revised for Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter, edited by Liam Swords, The Columba Press, 1997. The Dickson family trees recorded at Sentry Hill (McKinney notebooks) and the Linen Hall Library (Blackwood pedigrees) are not extensive. A son was in business in Belfast, and the family of the Irish-Canadian author Derek Lundy are confident of descent from him, via another William Dickson also buried in Carnmoney (Men That God Made Mad, Jonathan Cape, 2006); but documentary proof, and a tombstone, are elusive.

[3] http://www.sentryhill.net

[4] B M Walker, Sentry Hill: an Ulster farm and family, Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 1981; fifth edition, 2004. Glass negatives and prints of 600-plus photographs of the Dundee-McKinney collection are at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, Cultra. Others are in Sentry Hill albums. Preserving, dating and cataloguing them is a long and expensive task. I am grateful to Wesley Bonar, Prof. Walker and the UFTM staff for their advice and help.

[5] Eight latters were transcribed in 1903 for the Gulf States Historical Magazine. I contacted Susan after reading about them in her SRW Associates blog; she has also written for the ETHS magazine Tennessee Ancestors.

[6] Kenneth Robinson, “Publishing the Rev. Dr. Steel Dickson's Narrative”, Journal of the Upper Ards Historical Society, No. 32, 2008.

[7] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03g18bp