... They
came in 1630 with the Puritans under Governor John
Winthrop, and established
the Massachusetts Bay Colony
where Boston is
today. Our earliest Dix ancestor who came
with this group
was Edward, whose name was spelled Deekes
on the ship's manifest.
He and many others had come to these
shores seeking freedom
of religion. But they soon learned that
the Puritan government
of Winthrop was as intolerant of
dissenters as the
English government had been of the Puritans;
so they pulled up
their stakes and moved west, where they
founded the town
of Wethersfield on the bank of the
Connecticut River.
A few years ago, I visited a friend in Hartford. My
hostess drove me
to near-by Wethersfield, where the town
historian showed
us the land where John Dix had lived.
Adjoining it, the
historian said, was the property of John
Wadham. Not surprisingly,
John Dix Jr., fell in love with one
of his neighbor's
daughters, Sarah Wadham, and married her.
Their son, Moses,
was born in 1724, almost one hundred
years after their
first ancestor had come to the New World.
So through the generations of Dixes succeeding John Jr.,
through Moses and
Ozias and Daniel, Alexander Franklin Dix
was born in 1831,
marking the two hundredth year that the
Dixes had lived
in America. By this time, the Dix family had
moved even farther
west into the state of New York. The
family of Daniel
and Dyanthia Dix consisted of three
daughters and one
son, Alexander Franklin, born in Wilson,
N, Y. The boy grew
to be a scholar, a student and teacher of
Latin and Greek,
a student at the college in Albany and the
University at Rochester
and an ordained Baptist minister. He
fell in love with
a girl of Pennsylvania Dutch descent, Helen
Beach, lovingly
called Nellie, and married her on January 2,
1861.
Though this was only nine days before the state of
Alabama seceded
from the Union, January 11, and the
situation in that
Southern state was rather uncertain, he had
already promised
to accept a position as teacher of Greek and
Latin in a Female
Seminary (i.e., girls college) in Midway, a
small town not far
from Montgomery; so he and his bride
embarked upon their
trip South, and began their home in that
Southern town.
More states seceded from the Union, and established the
Confederate States
of America with its capital at Montgomery.
War broke out between
the Confederate states and those that
remained with the
Union in the North, the so-called Civil War.
Most Northern people
considered it a war begun by the South
to retain slavery
as legal. But Alexander Franklin Dix believed
that the war was
not about slavery, but about a principle that
he had held in New
York and brought with him to the South,
States Rights. He
abhorred slavery, never had a slave, and
considered it immoral.
But he believed that a state had the
right to leave the
Union if it wished, and not to be compelled
by force of arms
to remain. I remember as a girl how angry he
was when anybody
suggested that he had fought to retain
slavery.
So Alexander Franklin Dix in Alabama, like Robert E.
Lee in Virginia,
had to choose between two loyalties: loyalty
to the Federal Government
or loyalty to his state. Both men
chose their state.
This was especially sad for Alexander Franklin. His
mother had died
when he was only two years old, but his
father was still
in the North, as well as the husbands of his
sisters and the
brothers of his wife. If he joined the
Confederate army,
he would be fighting against his brothers-.
in-law, all of whom
he loved.
However, he joined the Confederate army, and in the
second year of his
marriage was fighting in the battle of Shiloh
in Mississippi,
under the command of General Albert Sidney
Johnston. His first
child was born the next year; and as
evidence of his
admiration for his general, he named the baby
Albert Sidney Dix.
It seems that five of his ten children were born while the
family lived in
Midway. There he taught school and served as
pastor of the small
Baptist church. After about nine years, he
was offered a better
position at Mary Sharpe College in
Winchester, Tennessee.
There the remaining five children
were born, including
my father, Daniel, and his brothers Philo,
Paul and Murrie.
His sisters, Dimple and Dollie --aged
respectively, six
and two --called their baby brother Lell, and
this became the
name by which he was known by family and
friends. In later
life, he adopted Lell as his first name and was
officially known
as Lell Daniel Dix.
After finishing his service at Mary Sharpe College,
Alexander returned
with his family to the Midway area in
Alabama. The largest
town in the area was Union Springs,
where he became
pastor of the Baptist Church. A fellow
clergyman was the
Reverend Francis McMurray, pastor of the
Presbyterian Church.
His daughter, Mary McMurray Stakely,
had daughters nearer
Lell's age: and the two families became
friends. One daughter
was Annie Goulding Stakely, three
years Lell's junior.
As the years passed, Lell finished his schooling at Troy
Normal School, a
junior college in Alabama, and became the
secretary of the
YMCA in Montgomery. Annie Goulding
attended Cox College
in La Grange, Georgia, first as a student
and then as teacher
of art and astronomy. Their friendship
ripened, and they
were married in 1901. They thus achieved a
most amazing coincidence,
unknown to them at the time.
The reader will
'remember that in Wethersfield in the
early sixteen forties,
John Dix and John Wadham were next-
door neighbors,
and their families were united by the marriage
of John Dix, Jr.,
and Sarah Wadham.
Two generations later, John, Jr.'s, grandson, Ozias,
moved up the Connecticut
River and settled twenty miles west
in Wilmington, Vermont.
There he built a house that is still
standing. By the
next generation, the son of Ozias, Daniel, had
moved his family
to New York State. But the Wadhams
remained in Connecticut
during the generations of John, Jr.,
Noah, Jonathan,
and Susannah, who married Nathan
Holbrook.
Soon after the turn of the century, 1800, a young
Presbyterian clergyman
from Georgia, Thomas Goulding,
came to study at
Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut
By some chance,
a daughter of Susannah Wadham, Anne
Holbrook, and Thomas
Goulding met and became friends. In
1806 when Anne was
twenty years old, they were married
and left Connecticut
to make their home in Georgia.
By all accounts, the Reverend Thomas Goulding, D.D.
and his wife, Anne,
were an unusually attractive and desirable
young couple. Two
of their parishioners and friends,
Governor and Lady
Houston, presented them with a beautiful
lion-footed mahogany
table from England, which has become
a prize possession
in my family. At the death of Anne
Goulding, the table
passed to her grand-daughter, Mary
Stakely, who in
turn passed it to her daughter, my mother,
Annie Goulding Stakely
Dix. Now I, another Annie Goulding,
though four generations
removed from the original Anne
Goulding, am its
proud possessor.
There was only one generation of Wadhams in Georgia
that of Anne and
Thomas Goulding. Their daughter,
Charlotte, married
the Reverend Francis McMurray and made
her home with him
in Union Springs, Alabama. Charlotte’s
daughter, Mary Stakely,
was the mother of Annie Goulding
Stakely, who married
Lell Dix. Thus the two lines that had
been united by marriage
in 1709 and then separated by a
thousand miles and
almost two centuries were again brought
together in 1901
by the marriage of the Wadham daughter,
Annie Goulding Stakely,
and the Dix son, Lell Daniel Dix.
