Branches and Twigs of the Johnson County Illinois Comers

The 1860s were the most defining and tumultuous decade in the life of Lee Roy Comer and his family in Johnson County, Illinois. It was a time that shattered the quiet rhythm of farming and forced a rural boy to confront the brutal realities of a nation at war. The Last Days of Peace on the Comer Farm  The decade began with Lee Roy living the demanding but stable life of a farm boy in Johnson County. On July 10, 1860, the census officially documented the Comer household in Township 13 S Range 4 E. Sixteen-year-old Leroy lived under the same roof as his parents and his six siblings. He and his older brothers, John (20) and William (18), were the indispensable labor force on the farm. Their sisters—Mary (15), Nancy Panthea (14), Sarah (2), and baby Moses A. (8 months)—rounded out the bustling household. The Comer farm, owned by his father Moses, was a testament to their continuous labor. According to the 1860 Agricultural Schedule, the family held 65 acres of improved land and 25 acre...

Now, if you had journeyed down to Johnson County, Illinois, just after the middle of the century, you might have heard tell of the Comer place. Old man Moses Epps Comer (VA 1814– IL 1871) had brought his family up from Tennessee, following that call for good, fertile soil. And fertile it surely was. The family had settled in District No. 2, amongst the neighbors like the Davisons and the Cummings. This county was a right handsome spot, with its rolling hills and rich earth, a real farmer's dream. Most folk you’d meet there were simple, honest settlers, having come from Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, all looking to make a life on the land. By that year of 1850, the whole county held near about 4,500 souls, all of them pulling together. The farm was the main enterprise, of course. Folks here lived by the plow and the livestock, sending their crops and cattle up to Vienna, the county seat, or loading them onto flatboats down on the mighty Ohio River—that was the highway for a...

The Root in the Old Dominion (Late 18th Century) Our story begins in the very lap of the Old Dominion of Virginia, in the county of Halifax, where the sun first rose upon John Epps Comer on the fourth day of September, in the year of our Lord 1782. He was the trueborn son of John Comer and his good wife, Amy Elizabeth Epps. From them, young John inherited the bone and grit of a man who would work the earth for his living. Yet, like many men of his time, the soil of his birth could not hold him long, for the whisper of the west was strong in the air. The Early Years of Marriage and the First Trail (Early 19th Century) When the year 1804 turned to its closing weeks, John took his first solemn vow, binding himself to Sarah Wood. It was with Sarah that he began his great family, welcoming sons like Moses Moore Comer and Nathaniel Morgan Comer into the world. By 1810, the census takers found the young family no longer in the east, but in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where they worked ...