Coppock family

The following was posted by Everette Coppock on Facebook in September 2020

COPPOCK FAMILY HISTORY, MIAMI COUNTY, OHIO;

At 8:35pm on Monday, February 7, 2000, Audrey Lucille Coppock died.

Her passing effectively brought to a close events that began on January 27, 1856, when Audrey's great grandparents by marriage, Samuel and Delana (Blickenstaff) Coppock, 1 purchased land that would become the Coppock family farm. Audrey was the last of at least five generations of Coppocks to live on the land since 1856, and her death triggered the sale of the land out of the Coppock family in 2001.

214 years earlier in 1787, the Northwest Ordinance was enacted by the Confederation Congress. It created a government for America's Northwest Territory and established guidelines so that persons there could petition for statehood. The Northwest Territory would ultimately become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and a portion of Minnesota.

Among the settlers coming to Ohio shortly after it attained statehood were James Coppock, his wife Hannah and their children. In 1806, they left 2 Bush River in Newberry County, South Carolina and made the long trek to Ohio. James and his family were members of the Religious Society of Friends, more commonly called Quakers. Also coming to Ohio at about this same time were Jacob and Mary Blickenstaff and their progeny. The Blickenstaffs were German Baptists, he originally from Maryland, she from Pennsylvania.

Within a few years of arriving in Ohio, James and his son Moses purchased adjacent 160 acre quarter sections of land 3 in what would ultimately become Monroe Township in the recently formed Miami County. Around this time, the Blickenstaffs had also purchased a quarter section, 4 just one-and-a-half miles from the Coppocks. Given the sparse population in the area at the time and an unforgiving wilderness environment, reliance on neighbors was critical to early settlers' survival. Presumably the Coppocks and Blickenstaffs became acquainted soon after they became neighbors.

James and Hannah Coppock's oldest son Moses married Lydia Jay in 1809, and they had eight children, including Samuel in 1817. Jacob and Mary Blickenstaff parented five children. Among them was last born Delana, in 1822.

In 1839 Quaker Samuel Coppock married German Baptist Delana Blickenstaff. Samuel was censured 5 by the Quakers in 1840 for his marriage to other than a Quaker, and in 1848 he lost his Quaker membership. 6 Samuel joined the German Baptist church in 1856, and later became an elder there.

Early in 1856, Samuel and Delana acquired the northeast quarter of Section 28 7 in Monroe Township, Miami County, Ohio. This was the land that Delana's parents had purchased and homesteaded nearly a half-century earlier. Major improvements came to the property in 1857 and 1858, with the most important among them being the brick farmhouse 8 and Pennsylvania Barn. This farm would be the home for many generations of Coppocks over the next 145 years.

In the era of the Internet, cell phones and social media platforms, it's easy to forget that just a few generations ago, things were radically different. People alive when the Coppock barn was built may have lived their entire lives without ever being photographed or seeing their name in the most prominent social media of the day, the newspaper. Today, often the only surviving tangible contemporaneous remnants of these people are the things they built, as well as a handful of legal and/or church records providing a few scant details of their lives.

All of the people that played any significant part in the building of the Coppock barn have been dead for at least 100 years. People just like us in so many ways. People that often led hard lives. People that earned the right to be remembered and respected, but who became virtually anonymous as the decades passed and the collective memory of their family and friends was lost.

It's all the more critical then that structures like the Coppock barn, the very soul of countless family farms for so many decades, not be lost. Their substantial physical presence not only serves as dramatic witness to the incredible toil necessary to build them, but by extension then their great importance to our ancestors, who went to such trouble to construct them. Construct them during a time when hundreds of tons of stone, wood and earth could only be fashioned and moved by man and horse, with wagons, ropes, pulleys, axes, saws and shovels.

That such wonderful old structures are swept aside like so much garbage to make way for the next strip mall is rightly disturbing to those attuned to their forebearers. But it happens, again and again and again. Although the need to replace old with new dates to the beginnings of the human race itself, it should be thoughtfully balanced against the wholesale obliteration of precious links to the past.