The Chesapeake country was a land of water and forest, its life structured by the great bay and its tributaries—the Patuxent, the Patapsco, the Severn. Movement, commerce, settlement, and livelihood all followed the rivers. Families arriving in the first decades of English occupation found an environment only partially tamed, the inland forest thick and seemingly endless, cleared ground precious and hard-won. Each homestead represented years of labor—felling timber, pulling stumps, burning brush, breaking the soil.
In that country, tobacco was money, status, and the measure of a family's success or failure. It demanded labor, land, and access to water for shipping, and its profits were unpredictable, hostage to distant London markets and to the weather. The Talbotts, who anchor the oldest documented lineage in this book, were neither great planters nor mere subsistence farmers. They occupied the substantial middle ground of colonial rural society, working land they owned or leased, growing tobacco for export, and keeping the livestock, orchards, and grain that fed a household and hedged against a ruinous season. From this Maryland ground, four generations later, a daughter named Rebecca Talbott would carry the family's inheritance west and join it to the Hobson name.
The Talbotts of the West River
The Talbott line reaches back to Richard Talbott (1625–1663), born in England and died in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. By 1659 he had been granted 260 acres in Anne Arundel—a patent he had purchased in 1656—and he married Elizabeth Ewen, daughter of Richard Ewen of "Ewen Upon Ewenton," the estate later known as Cedar Park. Their own seat, "Poplar Knowle," would in time become "Tulip Hill."
An old family tradition held that Richard was the son of Robert Talbot and Grace Calvert, daughter of George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore. It is an attractive story, but it does not hold; no Maryland source bears it out, and it is set aside here honestly. Some researchers have instead connected Richard to a Richard Talbott baptized in 1629 at Gnosall, Staffordshire, though again no Maryland record directly confirms an English birthplace.
Whatever his precise origins, Richard belonged to a tightly knit cluster of seventeenth-century Maryland families centered on the West River and Herring Creek Quaker settlement in Anne Arundel and Calvert Counties—one of the best-documented colonial Quaker communities in the province. Its institutional spine was formed by the West River Meeting, established in 1655, the Herring Creek Preparative Meeting, and the Clifts Meeting in Calvert County, established in 1662. Sandy Spring Monthly Meeting's own records describe it as the successor to the meetings at Clifts, Herring Creek, and Indian Spring.
Around these meetings a dense web of intermarriage grew up among the Talbotts, Ewens, Birckheads, Johnses, Hances, and their neighbors. The Ewens, whose daughter married into the Talbott line, held land on Herring Creek adjoining Richard Bennett and Richard Talbott. The Birckheads entered the family when Mary Birckhead, daughter of Abraham Birckhead, married Joseph Talbott. The Mears name came in when Sarah Mears, born in Calvert County in 1673, married into the next Talbott generation. And the interlocking of these households can be read directly in the surviving records: a single eighteenth-century Hance will names a daughter Elizabeth Johns, a grandson Kinsey Hance, land "where Peter Sewell lived," and a grandson Benjamin Talbot—the Hance, Johns, Sewell, Kinsey, and Talbott names all bound together in one document. In 1711, at the house of Richard Johns, Benjamin Hance and Mary Hutchins announced their first intention to marry, a Quaker record that places the Johns and Hutchins families squarely in the same social circle.
The direct line ran from Richard Talbott and Elizabeth Ewen down through their son John Talbott (1660–1707), and on to Joseph Talbott, born 5 June 1706 in Calvert County. In 1734 Joseph married Mary Birckhead, and the couple raised their family in the county where he had been born and where, nearly a century later, he would die in 1800. Their children—John, Daniel, Mary, Ann, Rachel, and a younger Joseph—were born across the 1730s and 1740s and scattered as they came of age. Daniel remained in Calvert County until his burial in 1793; the eldest daughter Mary died in Maryland in 1780; Ann made her home at Hyattstown in Montgomery County; Rachel settled at Baldwin in Baltimore County; and the younger Joseph moved farthest afield, dying at Fairfax, Virginia, in 1798.
John Talbott and Mary Elizabeth Johns
The eldest son, John Talbott, was born on 26 January 1735 in Calvert County and carried the family forward. On 22 February 1760 he married Mary Elizabeth Johns, joining two names long established in the West River orbit. Though the household began in Calvert County, John eventually moved north and west into Frederick County, in the Piedmont country of tidy fields, orchards, and dispersed homesteads, where he died on 14 June 1809.
Their children were born in rapid succession through the 1760s and 1770s, the elder ones in Calvert County and the younger in Frederick. Benjamin Talbott (1762) lived his whole life in Maryland, dying in 1846. Joseph Talbott (1764) later joined the family's migration west and died in 1852 at Richmond, Jefferson County, Ohio. John Talbott (1766), the first of the children born in Frederick County, made his home at New Market and died there in 1831. Elizabeth (1767) died in 1847. Susanna (1769) followed the westward path farther than any of them, dying in 1855 at Marshalltown, Marshall County, Iowa. Samuel (1772) died in 1825; Rachel (1774) settled in Jefferson County, Ohio, dying there in 1856; Peggy (1776) died in 1834; and Kinsey (1778) remained in Maryland until his death in 1853. Mary (1780), born at New Market, died in 1833, and Deborah (1782) moved west to Henry County, Indiana, living until 1870.
This was a family caught between the settled tobacco world of the eighteenth century and the pull of a new nation. The Revolution ran through the middle of John's long life. By 1778, when Mary Elizabeth Johns appears in the Anne Arundel records, the war was already more than two years old; Maryland's trade was disrupted, its markets uncertain, its social order scrambled. When peace came in 1783, the world these families had known was altered, and the older pattern of dispersed, family-scale farming gave way, in the next generation, to the westward drift of settlement.
Rebecca Talbott
The youngest of John and Mary Elizabeth's children, Rebecca Talbott, was born on 14 January 1784 at New Market, Frederick County, in the years just after the Revolution, when the young republic was still finding its shape. She came of age in the rolling farmland of western Maryland, her upbringing centered on the household economy—the spinning, preserving, gardening, and childrearing that fell to women of her time and place. Through her mother she carried the Johns name, which would surface again in the naming of her own children.
On 18 March 1813, at the age of twenty-nine, Rebecca married Joseph Hobson. With this marriage the deep Talbott line flowed into the Hobson name, and the Maryland inheritance began its journey west.
Joseph Hobson
Joseph Hobson was born in Pennsylvania in 1786, the son of Joseph Hobson and Ann Scoggins. His Armagh ancestry and the family's move into Ohio belong to the previous chapter; here he is picked up at his marriage. By 1806, at the age of twenty, he had already crossed into Jefferson County, Ohio—a state that had achieved statehood only three years earlier, its eastern counties still thickly wooded and thinly settled.
His marriage to Rebecca Talbott in 1813 drew him briefly back toward the eastern states, but Ohio remained the family's home, and there all of their children were born. Together they raised a large family: William I, Mary Ann, John Talbott, Joseph, Elizabeth F, Caleb P, Benjamin, and Abraham Johns Hobson. The names carried both Rebecca's heritage—Talbott and Johns among them—and the biblical resonances favored in households of Quaker sensibility. By 1820 Joseph and his family had settled in Stark County, Ohio, in the northeastern part of the state, a region of good soil and expanding settlement where new arrivals cleared forest for cropland.
Joseph Hobson died on 10 September 1828 in Stark County, at only about forty-two years of age, leaving Rebecca with a family of children still to raise. His place of burial is not recorded.
Rebecca survived him by more than three decades. In the years after her marriage she and her family had made the westward journey into eastern Ohio, settling in Jefferson County near Richmond and Salem, where her brother Joseph and sister Rachel had also made their homes. Jefferson County, on the upper Ohio River, drew a strong Quaker presence, and the townships of Salem and Richmond became gathering places for families of that faith. Rebecca was recorded living in Salem in 1830 and remained in that community through 1850. She died on 17 November 1859 at Richmond, Jefferson County, at the age of seventy-five—born in the Maryland of the founding era, she died on the eve of the Civil War, within the community she had long called home.
The Children of Joseph and Rebecca
Though Joseph Hobson had begun his life in Pennsylvania, his descendants belonged to Ohio, and several of them never strayed far from Jefferson County. William I Hobson, born 15 February 1814, was among the eldest and ranged the farthest, dying on 24 September 1891 at Valentine, Cherry County, Nebraska. Mary Ann Hobson, born 3 June 1815, died in 1860. Joseph Hobson, born 14 December 1818, shared his father's name and remained within the state, dying in 1897 at Weston, Wood County, Ohio. Elizabeth F Hobson, born 25 August 1820, died in 1887. Caleb P Hobson, born in March 1821 in Jefferson County, lived almost his entire life within a single county, dying in 1898 at Unionport. Benjamin Hobson, born 14 May 1823, lived and died at Richmond, Jefferson County, dying in 1863. And the youngest, Abraham Johns Hobson, born 18 December 1824 and named for his mother's Johns line, likewise centered his life on Richmond, where he lived to the age of eighty-six, dying on 28 November 1911.
John Talbott Hobson
Among these children, it was John Talbott Hobson who became the anchor of the American Hobson line—and who carried his mother's family name whole. He was born on 6 November 1816 in Ohio, a state that had joined the Union only thirteen years before, its townships still filling with families who had crossed the mountains from the older states. He came of age in that world of woodlots, fenced fields, and small county communities where a family's fortunes rose and fell with the seasons.
On 22 August 1839, at the age of twenty-two, John married Mary Elizabeth Brown in Belmont County, Ohio. The union proved long and remarkably fruitful, producing thirteen children: Sarah Brown, Joseph Charles, Rebecca Talbott, Benjamin Williams, James Elwood, Julia Ann, Phoebe C., Amy, another John Talbott, Mary Elizabeth, Unity Jane, Eunice, and Truman Ellsworth. The names among them echoed the older generation—Rebecca Talbott honoring his mother, Mary Elizabeth his wife—a pattern common in families who kept their kinship close and visible.
John's life traced a familiar westward arc across the Old Northwest. By 1850 the family was living in Gilead, Morrow County, in central Ohio. By October 1873 John was recorded in Clark County, Illinois, part of the broad current of settlers moving toward the newer farmlands of the western states. By 1880 the household had settled at Monroe City, in Howard County, Indiana. Each relocation meant breaking new ground and building anew, drawing on the labor of a large and by then partly grown family.
John Talbott Hobson lived to the age of seventy-six, dying on 28 August 1893. His children scattered across the heartland in the same restless pattern their father had followed. The youngest of them, Truman Ellsworth Hobson, born in 1864, would carry the line onward to Taylorville.