Col. Jno. N. Patton

    Col. Jno. N. Patton, farmer, Monroe Township, was born in Belfast, Ireland, about the year 1750; emigrated to this country before the Revolution of 1776-83, and served in that war on the side of the Union Colonies. Among other children born to him was Matthew Patton; to Matthew was born Hezekiah E. Patton, in Bunkum County, North Carolina, July 25, 1779.

    Hezekiah migrated to Indiana in 1814, and settled in Jefferson County, at what is now the site of Mud Lick. Afterward bought Section 21, Township 10, Range 5 North, where he resided until 1850; then removed to North Madison, where he died.

    Upon this farm, the subject of our sketch, Major (as he is usually called) John N. Patton, was born August 31, 1825. He was raised on a farm, got a good plain education, the best afforded by the schools of the time. Taught school for a number of years, and was married on January 1, 1850, to Eliza Woodfill, daughter of Daniel Woodfill, of Jefferson County. After marrying he settled down to life as a farmer on the farm upon which he was born, and still resides there. The result of this union was seven children, viz: Kitty, who married George W. Altizer, and moved to Kansas, and died there; Sarah A., who died in infancy; Mary married C. Kohl; Julia A. married Frank M. McLelandell (now a widow, 1888); J. Morton married Annie Taylor; Alice Cary married to John Spann, living at New Albany, Indiana; Robert E. died an infant; Eliza h., now at home.

    June 16, 1862, he was mustered into United States service as first lieutenant of Company C, Fifty-fourth Regiment Indiana Volunteer Infantry, promoted to the rank of captain, served until August 25, 1863; then organized company in First Independent Battalion Infantry, and was made Major; at the close of service, brevetted Lieutenant-Colonel for services rendered. After close of the war settled down again to the life of the farm; and he has since lived on his farm of 100 acres of land in Monroe Township, Jefferson County. Is a member of the G. A. R., John A. Hendricks Post, No. 107. His father's mother was Kate McCollough, who was a sister to Ben McCollough, the confederate Genera, and daughter of Elijah McCollough, whose father settled in the mountains of Virginia, near the North Carolina line, in the last century, and came from the Highlands of Scotland. The mother of Col. Patton was Anna Wilson, daughter of Nathaniel Wilson, who came to this county as early as 1809; Ohioans by birth, they went to Kentucky, then Indiana.

    Margaret Patton, an aunt of Co. Patton, organized the first Sunday school in Jefferson County; all who were her pupils, except James Baxter, now in Oregon, are dead.

    Hezekiah E. Patton, the father of the subject of our sketch, was a solider in the War of 1812; was an advocate for freedom and free speech, he, with Captain Isaac Chambers and James Baxter, having held a mob of some sixty persons at bay, while a free-soil abolitionist delivered a lecture in the log school house in he year 1836. The mob were armed and equipped with all things necessary to tar and feather and ride the speaker on a rail, but so soon as they saw the three old stalwart soldier on picket, armed with their old squirrel rifles and their hunting knives in the belts, they considered discretion the better part of valor, and tried to the woods and held a picnic, and our subject, the son, is a firm believer in that theory.

    That Freedom's battle once begun, Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son.

    He died in July, 1856.

Source: Biographical and Historical Souvenir for the counties of Clark, Crawford, Harrison, Floyd, Jefferson, Jennings, Scott and Washington, Indiana. By John M. Gresham & Co., 1889.