We know precious little about James Roddye’s life. It’s true. Sometimes it seems we know quite a bit, but most of it is just names and dates, and more than a few of those are suspect.
The most of what we know comes after his move to Russellville, and even some of that – well, we know now that James’s land grants were around Bent Creek and not in what became Russellville. Those grants appear to have gone to Roddye’s father-in-law, George Russell.
While we haven’t found the documentation that tells us how James got what we now call Hayslope, it seems clear that it came from Russell, sometime around his move across the Holston River to Grainger County. The two men remained close, however: James was the executor of Russell’s will.
But what we know about Roddye before he came to Russellville, or even Bent Creek – that’s scant and difficult to find with any certainty. I have mostly tried to trace James backwards from Russellville, but recently I’ve started a new tack. I’ve gone back to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania – where I believe the Roddyes come from – and am trying to work forward to Russellville.
This is made all the more difficult by the various spellings of the Roddye name – Roddye, Roddy, Rhody, Roddey, and on and on.
James and his father James and his father James
I feel pretty confident that James Patrick Roddye’s father was James Joseph Roddye Jr of Lancaster County. But I’ll be honest – it’s not a guarantee. It’s the family names that lead me to believe this is the right family, though.
James Jr. had three children – the youngest, if I’m correct, was our James Patrick Roddye, born about 1742. The middle child was William, born about 1740 – and we known Our Man James had a brother William. The oldest was daughter Sidney, born about 1734, and a name that our James used for one of his own daughters. Roddyes continued to use that name for generations.
This fellow, James Jr., was in all likelihood born in Ireland in about 1706. His father, James Joseph Roddy Sr, is believed to have come to America in the late 1710s, into Pennsylvania, where a lot of Scots-Irish – the Protestants who were leaving in droves to get away from the Church of England – settled in those years.
Many of them specifically settled in what eventually became Lancaster County, naming their settlements Donegal, Drumore, Londonderry, and other monikers from their Ulster homes. They joined English Quakers, Swiss and German Mennonites, and others in the new territories of Pennsylvania.
James Jr was likely the second son of five children. William was the oldest, the others were Prudence, Barbara, and Alexander, all born in Ireland. We know these names because of James Sr.’s will — except for Barbara, who had died by the time James Sr died in about 1734, but she married a man named Joseph Work and had a son named James, both of whom were named in Sr’s will.
James Sr. and his sons were millers
Sr.’s will leaves his mill to James Jr. Interestingly, he leaves his oldest son, William – quite pointedly – an English guinea, worth a pound and a shilling at the time. That seems quite a pittance for an oldest son, so we can only assume that there’d been something of a falling out. If I had to guess, I’d guess it had something to do with the family’s departure from Ireland.
The will directs James Jr. to take care of his other siblings, Prudence and Alexander, until Prudence is married and a mill can be built for Alexander on Conowago Creek in the same area.
And that brings us to the mill on Little Chicques Creek, where James Roddy Sr built his original mill. Actually, he built another mill not far away, on Chicques (sometimes spelled Chickies) Creek. The one on Little Chicques was built in 1721 and is north of Mount Joy Township. The other was built the following year south of the township and is now called Newtown Mill. It’s really not clear which of these two mills was still in Roddys possession when he died in 1734, although it may well have been both.
Ownership notes say that Alexander Roddy and John Roddy (not clear who that is, unless it was meant to be Alexander’s brother James … ) had a hand in running the Newtown Mill until John Flory took over in 1745. The current mill on the site was built in 1804, and it ceased operations in 1922.
Notes on the other mill say it stayed with the Roddyes until Michael Horst took over in 1802, although it temporarily stopped operations just before that. Peter Horst rebuilt it in the same limestone style as many other mills in the area in 1816. This mill ceased operations in 1940.
Where did those Roddys go?
So far I’ve found no evidence of a mill built on Conowago Creek for Alexander in the aftermath of his father’s death, so it may be that he took over the Newtown Mill instead. There is some evidence that Alexander later built a mill west of the Susquehanna, a mill now called Waggoner’s in Perry County on Bixler’s Run that is owned by an Amish family and has been restored. That’s pretty far afield from the Roddy property east of the Susquehanna, but he apparently ran that mill until the mid-1780s, when he headed south with some of his children for the Spartanburg, South Carolina, area.
Some of those Roddys later moved to Tennessee and eventually to Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, while others stayed in South Carolina. These Roddys appear to be the source of Roddy ancestors from South Carolina – not a direct line to Our Man James, but cousins, a direct line to the Russellville James’s grandfather.
James Sr.’s surviving daughter, Prudence, married a man named James Hall. They moved to Iredell County, North Carolina, in 1751, where the family apparently stayed and became a prominent one.
But what about James Jr. and his children? I have him remaining in Lancaster County until his death in 1783. His wife, Mary, however, may have moved to North Carolina with her nieces and nephews, dying there in 1786, although she may have been confused with Prudence there and did not go to North Carolina at all. It’s also not clear if Mary was the mother of Sidney, William, and James. I have seen reference to a first wife for James Jr., and records so far say that he married Mary in 1745, after all three of his children were born.
As for Jr’s children, we know what we know about James. William, we know next to nothing about – he supposedly came to Tennessee with James and may have moved on to Blount County. Sidney, however, we know a thing or two about. She apparently remained in Pennsylvania, married to John McClellan (or McClelland), another Revolutionary War soldier. The McLellans lived in Pennsylvania until their deaths in 1817 and 1818.
This is, of course very early in my Pennsylvania investigations. There’ll be more to come, and as we know from past experience, any bit of this information could later be proved wrong!