Shortly after 1811, our Maddoxes departed South Carolina.  This was around the same time that the neighboring Gaines family also departed their Carolina home.  They might have left together.  Benjamin Maddox (III) would rejoin the Gaines family some years later, after spending some time in Kentucky.  Here’s a 1921 account of the Gaines trip from South Carolina, given by Judge Duane Gaines (Duane’s grandfather, Stephen Gaines, was the great-grandfather of John Napoleon Maddox‘s wife, Frances Gaines):

“Before I begin, I wish to introduce myself, as some of you may not know me. My name is GAINES, and I was born in the Devil’s Neck and went to school at Hell’s Half Acre. Hell’s Half Acre is a half mile east of Lick Skillet. Lick Skillet is on the Purgatory road and the Purgatory Road runs over the Devil’s Back Bone. All these are in the Town of Montgomery in the County of Crawford and State of Illinois. I may not look old enough to be on the program at an old settlers’ meeting, but I think, perhaps, that I am the
oldest man in the audience, except possibly the chairman, George N. Parker. I do not know his age but I have been in the county of Crawford 104 years – my father and I together. My father, JAMES GAINES, was born in North Carolina in 1811. His mother, before her marriage with grandfather, STEPHEN GAINES, was MARTHA WALDROP. In 1815 a small colony of WALDROPS, consisting of a half-dozen families, including my grandfather’s started from Carolina for what was then known as the Wabash country. They packed their small belongings consisting of a few bed clothes, wearing apparel, cooking
utensils and carpenters’ tools on horses. The women and children mounted and started on their long journey. The men and larger boys, laden with their rifles, powder horns, shot pouches, ammunition, hunting knives and other implements for killing, skinning and carving wild game, joined the
procession on foot. The men hunted and killed game for food as they travelled and the women cooked it when they camped for the night. They forded such streams as they could and such as they could not ford they crossed on barges made of timber growing on the banks. Their progress was necessarily slow and tiresome.

“When they arrived at a point in Kentucky where winter was coming upon them they stopped and remained one year, then took up their journey again and arrived at Palestine in 1817. All the WALDROPS and their blood relations now in this county are descendants of the members of that company of early settlers, and relatives of mine. My father had a cousin named TOD WALDROP,
who was a son of one of that company who was so shiftless that he made no attempt to provide for his own wants, and was almost too “bashful” to go to a meal when it was prepared for him. for some reason which I never quite understood, when I was a boy on the farm my father nicknamed me Tod……

“The early settlers had many hardships and inconveniences. Their implements and tools of all kinds were homemade and almost entirely of wood. Even the plows were of wood except the shares. For a number of years they had no wagons, buggies or other wheeled vehicles. When they had occasion to
transport anything they carried it or took it on horseback, and it too bulky or too heavy for a horse they hauled it on a sled whether in winter or summer. But in time a wagon maker came to Palestine. When one of these pioneer farmers bought his first wagon with wooden spindles, linch pins and
a plain box for a bed, and hitched his plug team of horses to it, placed a clapboard across the bed for a seat, got on one end of the board with his good wife on the other and the youngest child between them, and all the rest, residue and remainder of the dozen or more children in the back, and
the tar bucket hung on the coupling pole and the old yaller dog under the wagon, and he cracked his whip and started that plug team across the Grand Prairie to visit friends and relatives on Dogwood, he was filled with as much emotion and elated with as much joy as the present business man who
gets in his auto with his wife at his side and their only one child between them turns on the power, presses his foot against the accelerator and dashes across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast.

“Besides the disadvantages of having no schools and schoolhouses the pioneers had no churches. But nevertheless their religious training was not wholly neglected. Those who were members of churches in the states from which they came had their prayer meetings in their homes, and preachers occasionally came through and preached in their homes. The first of these were of the Hardshell Baptist persuasion. They taught that it was foreordained and predestined before the foundation of the world that certain of the human race were to be saved and certain others were to be lost, and that the
number was so definitely fixed that it could not be increased or diminished. But shortly the religious quiet of the elect so that they sent for a preacher to denounce the heretics and check their influence. A meeting was announced at one of their homes and when the hour arrived for the meeting to
assemble, all the men, women and children and dogs in the community were there. Only a small portion of the people could get in the house and the remainder stood or sat where they found it most Convenient. One certain young man sat upon a board across the top of a rain barrel by the side of
the house. The preacher denounced and renounced the heretics and pounded and expounded the gospel for two hours until he got to the part where he was dividing the sheep from the goats. He had placed the sheep on the right hand in that blissful home and was proceeding to dispose of the goats on the left hand in that awful abyss of fire and brimstone and made the word picture so vivid that the young man on the barrel saw the awfulness of hell and not wishing to be cast on the left side made an unconscious nudge to the right and the board slipped and he fell into the barrel and was completely
immersed and came out a Campbellite.”

The Robinson Argus

Talk given at the Pioneer Association,

Held in Robinson, Sept. 20, 1921, by Duane Gaines

Transcribed by Sue Jones

Link: http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/p/e/e/Candace-T-Peebles-NC/WEBSITE-0001/UHP-0596.html