Henderson Cremeans
Henderson Cremeans, a farmer of the Hannan District in Mason County, died on 21 January 1909. He was buried at Fairfield Church on the Saturday, and the paper counted about six hundred people at the graveside. There is no headstone there now.
His county believed he was a hundred and fifteen, and printed it. The Mason Republican of 29 January 1909 says he was born in 1794, that he had lived in three centuries, and that he was thought to be the oldest man in the United States. It says he was strong and hearty to the end and was walking home along the road from the store when he died. For some years he had been living with his grandson Clark Cremeans. It counts his descendants: nine children, sixty grandchildren, a hundred and thirty one great grandchildren and seventeen great great grandchildren.
The 1880 census, taken while he was standing there, says something else. Hannan District, sheet 288: Henderson Cremeens, seventy six, farmer, born in North Carolina, his father born in North Carolina and his mother in Virginia. That is a birth about 1804, and a man of about a hundred and five when he died.
A hundred and five is still an extraordinary thing to have been, and it is ten years less than the town gave him. Nobody at that funeral was going to argue the family down.
He and Betsy were keeping two boys who were not theirs. The same census page has Jorney Morris, sixteen, and Henry Sharp, sixteen, both entered as adopted sons. He was seventy six and she was sixty six.
And three households along the same page is a widow of a hundred and one. Bettie Cremeens, born in Virginia about 1779, keeping house, her own parents both born in Germany. The obituary says his mother died at a hundred and twenty. Bettie may be that mother, ten years short of the legend and living three doors from her son, but nothing on the page says so, and a Sarah Cremeans who died in the same district in December 1878, aged ninety six, is another candidate.
The story about his parents.
The tradition is Reuben Cremeans and Betty Tackett, married by an army chaplain at Point Pleasant and said to be the first couple wed west of the Blue Ridge. Its written form is a 1978 compiled genealogical collection for Mason County, quoting correspondence sent in July 1976, which gives the father as Ambrose Cremeans, perhaps known as Reuben also, married to Betty Tackett, *of Rappahannock Va, parents of Henderson Cremeans*.
That compilation is not reliable on its face. In the same three lines it makes Betty Tackett live from 1766 to 1884, Henderson 1797 to 1909, and Elizabeth Angel dead at a hundred and twenty. Those are the inflated ages the censuses take apart. It is a telling of the legend, not evidence for it.
The 1850 Cabell County census gives Reuben Cremeans as born in Maryland, where Henderson's own answer puts his father's birth in North Carolina.
There is a second document and it says the opposite. West Virginia deaths, volume 1853-1865, page 2: REUBEN CREMEANS, 90 years, born 1763 in NORTH CAROLINA, married, a COOPER, died 16 May 1853 at Little Guyandotte. Same man, same county, three years after the census, and his birthplace is North Carolina, which is exactly what Henderson said of his father.
So there are two conflicting birthplaces for the same man, and only one of them disagrees with Henderson. The claim is still unproved: no record says in words that Reuben was Henderson's father, and the tradition that says so cannot be trusted about anything it can be checked on.
Sources
If Henderson Cremeans is in your family, start your own tree.
Cite: Heirology, "Henderson Cremeans (1804-1909)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/henderson-cremeans-1804-1909-9b0c7d.