Martin Luther Hawkins’s father, James Hawkins and his brother acquired large tracts of land in Kentucky by buying bounty land rights of American Revolution veterans in the 1780s. James and Lucy Wyatt Hawkins moved to Logan County, Kentucky, in 1786, where Martin Luther Hawkins was born in 1788.
Martin Luther Hawkins
Martin Hawkins was a Captain in the War of 1812 with the Kentucky 17th Regiment (Infantry) which fought the British, Canadians and Indians, primarily in the area around northern Ohio and northwest Pennsylvania, including skirmishes around Fort Erie. After the war, he practiced law for a while, but after his marriage to Jane Curle Walker in 1823, he attended medical school. Martin wrote to Jane to propose marriage, since they were in separate states at the time. In addition to writing his marriage proposal, he also enclosed a letter to Jane’s father, asking him for her hand in marriage. It was Jane’s decision whether to give the enclosed letter to her father, depending on her view of Martin’s proposal. Such was the mechanism of a marriage proposal by mail in 1823. The original letters can be viewed in The Jane Curl Walker Letters.
Martin attended the Transylvania School of Medicine in Kentucky, starting in 1824, after which he apprenticed with a brother-in-law of his wife’s, Dr. Robert Howe Paris. Transylvania Medical School was so named because Kentucky was once a part of Virginia, and was known as the part of the state that was “across the woods”, or trans-sylvania. Today, Transylvania University survives as a small liberal arts Christian college in Lexington, but they still have on file transcripts of some of Martin Hawkins’s medical school course work from the 1820s. This gives new meaning to the old concept of one’s “permanent record” in school, in this case lasting over two centuries!
During the 1830s, Martin Hawkins practiced medicine in the newly settled Carroll/Benton County, Arkansas, where the panther incident occurred. He was also President of the County in 1833: a record of a meeting he presided over in that capacity survives. Records also survive that show he was elected County Coroner in 1837. Martin contracted pneumonia in 1841, and died at the age of 53, abruptly leaving his wife as a frontier widow with 6 young children, aged 1 to 12.
The following is proof of the Mullins family lineage through Martin Luther Hawkins:
Lucy Hawkins Freyschlag (1828-1922) was the daughter of Dr. Martin Luther Hawkins (bef 1790-1840) and Jane Curl Walker Hawkins (c 1806-1884).
Lucy W. Freyschlag’s death certificate[i] lists her mother’s last name as “Walker”, born in Kentucky, and her father’s last name as “Hawkins”, also born in Kentucky.
On 5 Apr 1878, Jane C. Hawkins applied for a pension based on the service of her husband, Martin Luther Hawkins, in the War of 1812[ii]. The application states that Jane C. Hawkins’s maiden name was Jane C. Walker; that her husband’s name was Martin Luther Hawkins; that the couple were married in Nicholasville, Jessamine County, KY on 4 Jul 1823; that the couple resided in Kentucky in 1832; that neither was married before their marriage; and that Jane never remarried after Martin’s death.
On page 3 of the application, Edward Freyschlag attests to the identity of Jane C. Hawkins, and writes that he married her daughter, Lucy, and that Jane has lived with Edward’s family for many years.
This last statement is confirmed by the 1880 U.S. Census[iii] showing Jane C. Hawkins, “mother-in-law”, living with her daughter, Lucy Freyschlag, and son-in-law, Edward Freyschlag, establishing that Jane C(url) Hawkins is Lucy Freyschlag’s mother.
Military: Martin Luther Hawkins served in the War of 1812. He enlisted as a First Lieutenant, 17th regiment of the Kentucky Infantry[iv]. He was later promoted Captain[v].
Documentation of birth, marriage and death dates and places
Jane Curl Walker’s birth year, c 1806, is established by the pension application stating that Jane was 72 years old on the date of the application, 6 Apr 1878; also confirmed by the 1880 census that gives her age as 74. Her date of death, May 1884, is established by a court document[vi] from Washington Co., AR. Jane was the administratrix of the estate of her son, James William Hawkins, who died in 1856 in Charity Hospital in New Orleans of yellow fever, contracted during a mercenary action in Mexico. James’s estate was receiving payments from a reparations fund set up by the Mexican government.
Martin Hawkins’s birth year was 1790, based on the pension application of Jane Curl Walker Hawkins which states that Martin was 21 years old at the time of his enlistment on 6 Jul 1812. We assume his birth state to be Virginia, as this was the state of residence of his parents and grandparents in 1790 (Kentucky was formed from Virginia in 1792).
Martin’s death on 28 Oct 1840, in Carroll Co., AR, is established by his wife’s pension application. Martin and Jane’s marriage on 4 Jul 1823, Nicholasville, Jessamine, KY, is confirmed by Jane’s pension application.
© W. Mullins 2013