Ancestors

Benjamin Devore Cuppy

Benjamin Cuppy was a son of the Virginia border, and his middle name is his mother's family, the Devores. He grew up in Hampshire County and then in Brooke County, on the Ohio River above Wheeling. In November 1797 the Brooke County court summoned him as a witness, and in 1799 a John Cuppy of the family sued a neighbour's estate on a debt Benjamin had assigned to him. About 1799 he married Margaret Downing, a daughter of the scout James Downing, and their first son, James Downing Cuppy, was born in Brooke County in 1800.

In 1806 he went into Ohio with his father-in-law's party and settled in the valley of the Big Sandy, in what became Stark County. His patent for a quarter section there, the southwest quarter of section 7 in township 18, range 7, is dated 19 August 1806 and signed by Thomas Jefferson. He and Margaret sold it on 9 June 1812 to John Bair of Adams County, Pennsylvania, for six hundred dollars, and moved west into Richland County. He had already bought land there in November 1811.

They arrived at the worst moment. Their cabin near the Orange road, in what is now Ashland County, was built in January 1812, and in September the Indian war came up the Black Fork. The Cuppys fled, the war party that killed James Copus burned their cabin, and the family spent the next eighteen months among the refugees at the blockhouse on the Jerome Fork. Anna was born there, or near it, in October 1812. When the settlers came back, Benjamin built the first water mill in the district, near Ashland, in the spring of 1816.

In December 1822 he joined his wife's brothers and sisters in dividing her father's estate. The family moved to Montgomery County, Ohio, near Dayton, and in September 1825 he and Margaret sold their share of the Downing land in Virginia. That year he went on to the Wabash. He bought eighty acres of government land in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, on 15 July 1825 and eighty more in 1829, and ran a ferry across the river at Lafayette. A United Brethren minister held the first services of that denomination in the neighbourhood at his house. Margaret died there before 1836, and in February 1836 he took out a licence to marry Margaret Janney, a widow. He was later in Wapello County, Iowa, where his sons Adam, Samuel and Isaac had land, and where he and Adam bought land in the 1840s. He died in 1859.

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Cite: Heirology, "Benjamin Devore Cuppy (1780-1859)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/benjamin-devore-cuppy-1780-1859-d985f3.