A virtual secret of history.

• Author: Messeder, John
• Position: USA Yesterday - Mary Jemison - Brief biography

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ABOUT TWO DECADES before 13 colonies decided to join forces to throw off the shackles of Great Britain, a young girl was snatched by a band of Shawnee from her home in the south central Pennsylvania wilderness. One Saturday in April, 250 years after the event, about 1,500 people gathered to learn about Mary Jemison, and to meet a few of her ancestors.

"They made a statement by getting off the couch and coming here today," historian and event organizer Debra Sandoe McCauslin said of the crowd. "It shows us we need to continue to feed that hunger." With the aid of several other residents of Adams County, McCauslin put together a program that offered to explain the significance of a part of the county's history until then marked only with a few roadside historical signs and a monument outside a church near where the teenage Mary once lived.

Thomas and Jane (Erwin) Jemison, the latter pregnant with, it would turn out in those days before the sorcery of ultrasound, another daughter, left Ireland in about 1742 with their children, John, Thomas, and Betsey, aboard the Mary William. They were bound for what they thought were the opportunities of the New World, a place where they had heard William Penn had created a peaceful environment where they could worship, farm, and raise children.

The Jemisons' fourth child, Mary, was born during the voyage. The family settled near Marsh Creek, Pa. There is some discussion these days about the exact location of the first Jemison homestead, and of the second, to which Thomas moved his brood about a year before the event that would fix young Mary's place in the county's lore. The French and Indian War (1754-63) was well underway when Thomas Jemison moved his family to a new location, or a short distance from the first. His reasons for the move have escaped memory; Mary later remembered the move, but she was not certain whether it was to another part of the first farm, or a completely different parcel.

On the afternoon of April 4, 1758, Mary was sent to a neighboring farm to obtain a horse. Decades later, she recalled that, on the way, she found herself accosted by a large white sheet, which wrapped itself around her. The family toward which she had been walking discovered her lying on the ground nearly lifeless, and took her home. Mary finally awoke the next morning, feeling well, and headed home with the horse she had been sent to borrow. "The appearance of that sheet, I have ever considered as a forerunner of the melancholy catastrophe that so soon afterwards happened to our family: and my being caught in it I believe, was ominous of my preservation from death at the time we were captured," Mary said in James E. Seaver's 1923 biography, A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison.

The French and Indian War...