Contents Chapter 3 of 17

Chapter Three

Orchards and Looms

The Immigrant Hobsons

Hobson

For the better part of two centuries, the Hobsons were an Armagh family, and for the better part of the eighteenth century they belonged to one small corner of that county: the parish and village of Loughgall, in the orchard country of Ulster. To understand the men and women who carried the surname across the Atlantic and westward through the American frontier, it helps first to picture the ground they walked.

The Orchard County

Armagh is the smallest of Ireland's counties, a landscape of low drumlin hills, hedged fields, and gently rolling farmland in the north giving way to rougher, higher ground toward the south. The northern reaches, where Loughgall sits, have long been known as the "Orchard County," a district famous for its apple trees. By the eighteenth century the slopes around Loughgall were thick with orchards, and the blossom that whitened the countryside each spring was as much a part of local identity as the fields of flax and oats. It is fertile, well-watered land, sheltered enough to reward careful cultivation, and small farmers held their few acres tightly, working them intensively.

Loughgall itself was a modest village — a cluster of dwellings, a church, and the surrounding townlands of scattered farmsteads rather than anything resembling a town. The city of Armagh, ecclesiastical capital of all Ireland and seat of both the Church of Ireland and Roman Catholic archbishops, lay a short distance to the southwest. That ancient religious pre-eminence gave the county a weight beyond its size, but for a family in the townlands the rhythm of life was set not by cathedrals but by the seasons, the market, and the loom.

The economy that sustained families like the Hobsons ran on two things: farming and linen. County Armagh sat at the very heart of Ulster's linen industry during exactly the years the Hobson children were being born. Flax was grown on small plots, pulled, retted in ponds and streams until the fibre loosened, then scutched, spun, and woven into cloth in the farmhouses themselves. This was cottage industry in the truest sense — men, women, and children of a household all had a hand in it, spinning wheels and hand looms turning through the winter months when the fields demanded less. The finished webs of linen were carried to the brown-linen markets of Armagh and the surrounding towns, where weavers sold their cloth to bleachers and drapers. The modest cash that changed hands there was what allowed a small tenant family to pay its rent. A few acres and a loom together could support a household where the acres alone could not, and this dense fabric of small farmer-weavers gave north Armagh one of the most crowded rural populations in Ireland.

A Divided People Under the Ascendancy

The character of eighteenth-century Armagh was shaped above all by its mixture of peoples and faiths. The county held a large population of Protestants — descendants of the Scots and English settlers planted in Ulster in the previous century — alongside a substantial native Catholic population, with Presbyterian, Anglican, and Catholic communities each strongly represented. The Hobsons belonged to this settler stock.

Across the span of their Armagh years, from around 1705 through the 1750s, Ireland was governed under the Protestant Ascendancy. A parliament in Dublin, dominated by Anglican landowners, ruled a country in which political power and the best land lay firmly in Protestant hands, while the Catholic majority laboured under the Penal Laws that restricted their landholding, worship, and public life. Ulster's numerous Presbyterians, though Protestant, stood outside the established church and carried their own grievances. For a farming and weaving family, these matters were felt less as high politics than as the fixed backdrop against which rents were paid and leases were held.

The first half of the eighteenth century was, for all its hardships, a period of relative stability and steady commercial growth in Ulster, driven in large part by the expanding linen trade. It was also marked by hard seasons and hunger — the region suffered severe dearth in the early 1740s, around the very time of the 1741 marriage that would bind this family together, in a year of failed harvests remembered across Ireland. Families in the Armagh townlands lived close to that margin, sustained by the double income of field and loom.

This was not a raw frontier by the mid-1700s; it was long settled, its land divided and its villages established. But it was a community living at close quarters and under real pressure. The competition for small holdings and for weaving work grew sharper as the population climbed, and the mingling of religious communities on the same crowded ground produced tensions that ran beneath the surface of ordinary life. In the decades after the Hobson children came of age, this very district would become notorious for sectarian conflict between rival agrarian factions, culminating in disturbances near Loughgall itself late in the century. The family lived here in the calmer generations before that storm broke.

The Hobsons and the Quakers

The Hobsons were a peaceful Quaker family, and their involvement with the Society of Friends reached back to the movement's arrival in Ireland from England in the mid-seventeenth century. The Quakers were a Christian group whose tenets promoted peace, simplicity, integrity, community, and equality. They were pacifists who refused to swear oaths, who believed in equal rights between the races and sexes, and who stood staunchly against slavery at a time when it was woven into both British and American society. They built no grand churches and kept no extensive clergy, holding that such things distracted from a personal relationship with God.

The first recorded Friends meetings in Ireland were held in 1654 at the home of William Edmondson in Lurgan, County Armagh. At about the same time, gatherings began at Ballyhagan, where a meeting house was soon established. Though the early Friends were persecuted and discriminated against, by the late 1600s their worship had taken root and spread. Among the first Hobsons on record to be converted were a Francis and a Lawrence Hobson, noted at a meeting in Charlemont, near Moy, in 1655, though their precise connection to the later family is not known.

One Francis Hobson, born about 1620, converted around 1655 and became a martyr for the faith. In 1665 he was sued for tithes in the Primate's Temporal Court at Armagh and had cattle and goods taken from him — five cows and a bull worth £9 in one suit, cattle worth £7 10s in another. Over several years his yarn, bedclothes, and other goods were seized toward the repair of the Kilmore parish worship-house. In 1673 he was again sued for tithes, was committed by warrant to the gaol of Armagh, and there remained a prisoner for two years and four months until his death in that gaol around the end of 1675.

A later Francis Hobson, born in 1673, appears steadily in the records of the community between the 1690s and 1717. He witnessed marriages at Lurgan, Ballyhagan, and Kilmore, took a 1698 lease of land at Cavan in County Armagh from Joshua Archer of Tullygarden, and served the meeting in matters of its own governance — drawing up minutes on the education of the young, testifying against a clandestine marriage made without a parent's consent, and being sent, in 1717, to inspect and set right disorders that had arisen among the Ballyhagan Friends.

Francis Hobson III

It is with Francis Hobson III that the direct line comes clearly into view. He was born about 1705 at Loughgall, into this world of orchards, flax fields, and the Friends' meeting. On 25 September 1741 — in the very years of the great Irish dearth — he married Ann Mackey.

Like many of his generation, Francis eventually left Ireland for the American colonies. His children carried the Loughgall birthplace with them into a new country, and his own life ended far from where it began: he died on 17 December 1777 at Menallen Township, in what is now Adams County, Pennsylvania.

The children, several born at Loughgall, scattered widely across the growing republic:

Joseph Hobson of Loughgall and Richmond

Among the sons born at Loughgall was Joseph Hobson, born in 1746, who carried the family's migration to its next stage. In 1778 he married Ann Scoggins, and over the course of his life he moved through Pennsylvania and on into Ohio, numbering Washington County, Ohio, among his settling places. He died on 9 December 1828 at Richmond, Jefferson County, Ohio.

Joseph and Ann's family was large, and the birthplaces of their children trace the family's restless movement — from Pennsylvania's frontier counties westward into Ohio, with one child born in England, a reminder of ties that still bound the family to the Old World:

Joseph Hobson Jr.

Continuing the line into Ohio was Joseph Hobson Jr., born in 1786 in Pennsylvania and settled, like so many of his kin, in the newer country to the west. He would in time marry into the Maryland Talbotts — but that union, and the son who carried the Talbott name forward, belong to the chapter that follows. Here it is enough to place him: a son of the Ohio generation, Pennsylvania-born, with the marriage that would join two family lines still ahead of him.