ALGREENE-L Archives

From: ELIZABETH RUSSO <>
Subject: REV. JOHN DUBOIS Heritage Book article
Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 15:01:06 -0500

Here is my draft for the Heritage Book on my gggrandfather. Comments
welcome. Because he was a pioneer, the article is a full 1510 words.
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John DuBois : Inventor, Writer, Minister,
Cotton Gin Maker

By Elizabeth DuBois
© 1999 Elizabeth DuBois. All rights reserved.

JOHN DUBOIS (6/28/1798-1/31/1884) was born in Charleston, South
Carolina, the son of Rev. Peter DuBois and Anne Clarkson (Carne)
DuBois. Like his father before him, Rev. John DuBois was a Methodist
minister and businessman. He manufactured cotton gins, earning three
patents on improvements made to the DuBois Cotton Gin. Married 52 years
to the woman he loved deeply, John was also blessed with seven children,
including a doctor, two dentists, an inventor and one or more
teachers. Among his many descendants and their spouses are counted
doctors, lawyers, teachers and preachers, musicians, writers, and
several business entrepreneurs. Luckily for his descendants, John was
also a gifted and prolific writer of biographical letters and articles,
and it is from these that much of his life can be viewed.
In December, 1820, young John, one of ten children, left Charleston to
"seek [his] fortune in the famous land of Alabama." Traveling with his
friend and future brother-in-law, Joseph Houck, John camped in the Creek
Nation in Georgia for a month. Then, with replenished supplies they
continued, crossing the Alabama River at Washington, then the capital of
Autauga County. Thirteen miles further on they reached their
destination, the settlement called Dutch Bend.
Traveling from Mobile to Autauga County was not easy, but for young men
in their early twenties, it was nonetheless an adventure:

"We had to bring our supplies from Mobile in the ordinary flat bottom,
or pole-boats. This was, as may well be imagined, a task of no ordinary
magnitude. To make a trip from Vernon in forty days, required not only
favorable conditions of wind and weather, but the constant stroke of the
sturdy oarsman....However, the romance and novelty of such a voyage
softened many a hardship, and the stirring scenes of busy preparation
for departure always found a number of stalwart pioneers ready to share
the promised toil and fun of such an expedition."

By January 1821, John settled in Old Vernon as a boarder at the home of
Seaborn Mims, continuing his education by reading books brought in
saddlebags by Methodist preachers. In 1822, John experienced a major
turning-point in his life while stopping at a brook with a friend after
a church camp-meeting at Grave's campground, near Old Vernon.

"The Spirit of the Lord descended upon [us] and simultaneously [we
were] converted. He dropped the reins of his bridle and yelled like an
Indian. The people who had come up got out of their wagons, carriages
and buggies, shouting and praising God, and several, as I was told, were
savingly converted."

On January 6, 1825, John "consummated the most important engagement of
my life" through marriage to Miss Louisa Williams, a niece of General
John Archer Elmore. The occasion was made even more special in that it
was a double wedding. Joseph Houck, who had accompanied John from
Charleston, married Miss Nancy Williams, Louisa's sister.
The newlyweds moved to Perry County where the family grew to include
five children, although the oldest lived just over one year. John and
Louisa's neighbors included their respective parents as neighbors. Next
door were Peter and Anne DuBois, and one residence further away was
Judith Williams.
By 1834, John and Louisa had relocated to what was then Greene County
and John had received his license to preach. Rev. John rose through
the ranks of the Methodist church, being ordained Deacon, then Elder in
1841; by then three more children had been born.
In the 1850 Census for Greensborough, John's occupation was "gin
maker", with real estate value of $3000. Listed in his household are
his wife, his seven children, and ten slaves.
From the time of his early adulthood until at least 1860, Rev. DuBois,
cotton gin maker, farmer, husband, father–and slave owner–was probably
committed first and foremost to mission work "among the Africans." As a
boy, he had viewed slaves being treated in an inhumane manner while
being unloaded from ships in Charleston. And he had little sympathy for
slave traders and speculators who came time and again into Alabama with
still more slaves.
Rather than becoming a zealous abolitionist, Rev. DuBois, perhaps more
effectively, committed to preaching, teaching, and building churches for
the slaves as well as their owners. This continued a tradition that
John first experienced as a boy in Charleston's Bethel Methodist Church.
It is not clear where John and Louisa were living in 1860. If John and
Louisa were absent from the state during the War, it was not to keep
their sons out of military service. At least three of the four sons
served in the Confederate States Army: Dr. Samuel P. DuBois as Captain
and Quarter Master of the Louisiana Infantry, Consolidated Crescent
Regiment; Dr. Rufus DuBois as Private, Company H, 8th (Hatch's) Alabama
Cavalry; and John E. W. DuBois as Sergeant, Company C, 36th Alabama.
By February, 1867, John and Louisa were again living in Greensboro
which had just become a part of Hale County. In a letter to his nephew
in South Carolina, John wrote of postwar life:
My family is now in the enjoyment of pretty good health and we send our
love to you and yours. Our County has been divided and a new one formed
name of "Hale" in honor of Stephen Hale, an eminent Lawyer of Eutaw who
fell at the Battle of Gaines Mills. We also find it difficult to get
hands enough to work our rich cane Lands though this behaviour in the
general is as good as could be expected in the circumstances– Most of
the Planting furnishes every thing as I give the hands one fourth of the
produce of the Lands for their share. When wages are given it ranges
from 8 to 14 dollars per month and provisions [provide] them with fire
wood and Shelter.
By 1870, John, 72, and Louisa, 71, were again living in Greensboro,
this time with their daughter and son-in-law, Martha and Thomas
Armstrong and their children. John and Louisa spent time in all three
of their daughters' homes for extended periods. While living with
daughter Sarah Elizabeth and son-in-law William O. Monroe in Eutaw in
March, 1877, John lost his wife and a son to unrelated illnesses within
days of each other. The magnitude of the loss of his wife is very
apparent in this letter to a friend:

[I] write first to you, to acquaint you with the departure of my dear,
precious wife, Louisa DuBois, which took place on Monday evening, March
19, 1877... [S]he breathed her last as peacefully as a babe falling
asleep upon its mother's breast. God, in his mercy to me, has taken her
first, as she was better prepared; and I trust it will be a means of
grace to me...

In his family Bible that he had kept from the time of his marriage,
John lovingly wrote names and dates of the events concerning his
family. But a clipping of the above letter was the last item he placed
in this Good Book that had served him so well. On January 31, 1884,
while staying with his daughter Judith in Whistler, Alabama, John went
to meet Louisa "on the other side of the river."
John and Louisa were buried in the Mesopotamia Cemetery in Eutaw.
Until 1955, Rev. John had no gravestone. But Rev. F.S. Moseley of Eutaw
wrote of Rev. John's life in a series of articles called "Heroes of the
Cross." During his research for this article, Rev. Moseley tracked down
descendants of Rev. DuBois and organized a fund for an appropriate
monument which was placed on October 21, 1955.

Children of John and Louisa DuBois:

SAMUEL PATTON DUBOIS, (9/15/1827- 3/22/1877), doctor and apothecary;
RUFUS URBANE DUBOIS, (4/18/1829-4/17/1905), dentist;
JOSEPH CORNELIUS DUBOIS, (b. 2/13/1831), dentist and entrepreneur;
JOHN ELMORE WINBOURNE DUBOIS, (10/8/1841- 5/30/1910), teacher and
inventor;
JUDITH ANN (DUBOIS) GRACE, (1/28/1833- 1906), teacher; married a doctor;
MARTHA LOUISA (DUBOIS) ARMSTRONG, (11/27/1837-d. 6/18/1906) married a
minister;
SARAH ELIZABETH JANE6 (DUBOIS) MONROE, (8/25/1839-12/28/1891) married a
minister/editor/teacher. See separate articles on John DuBois' children
and other relatives in the Autauga, Greene, Hale, and Tuscaloosa County,
Alabama Heritage Book series.

About the author:

Elizabeth DuBois, attorney and writer, is a fourth-generation
descendant of John DuBois.

Resources:

Rev. DuBois wrote a series of biographical articles that appeared in the
Alabama Christian Advocate in the 1880's. All quotations in this
article, unless otherwise noted, are from a collection of his articles
published as Necessary Fried Chicken, Elizabeth DuBois, ed., (DuBois
Publishing Co., PO Box 332, Weatogue, CT, 06089, 1998).

More on the DuBois Cotton Gin:

A family legend asserts that Eli Whitney visited a DuBois plantation
where he saw a cotton gin already in operation, and offered to obtain a
patent–which he did. However, Eli patented his cotton gin improvements
before John DuBois was born. It is possible that Eli did visit a DuBois
plantation in SC, and it is also possible that the DuBois family engaged
in cotton gin making before John's birth.

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