Who Was Lydia Hylton?

By John A. Stegall < johnstegall@hotmail.com 
Transcribed with permission by Samone Ratcliff on Jan 16, 2000 from an article Mr.
Stegall prepared for The Elliott County News in June of 1993.

"Who was Lydia Hylton?'
That question was undoubtedly asked many, many times during the last 100 years
or more.
Who was this woman whose remains occupy a lone grave on the farm where Opal
Porter Fults now lives on Brown Ridge?  The simple, handcarved gravestone reads:
"Lydia Hylton, Died Feb 8, 1845, Age 30 yrs., 9 mos., 2 da."  (Records indicate that she
was 37 years old.)
At the time of her death, and for a time thereafter, people knew, and remembered,
who she was, but as the decades passed by, most of her relatives and friends either died
or moved elsewhere.  By 1900 it is likely that no one in this area knew who she was. 
Perhaps "Lydia Hylton" was, by then, nothing more that just a named inscribed on a
gravemarker.
Many stories have been handed down from generation to generation concerning
her death and burial.  It was probably a fact that of the daughters of Tobias Cox were
with Lydia at the time of her death.  And, supposedly, she attempted to tell them where
she had hidden some gold coins in an orchard nearby.  Local legend inferred that her
husband, Gordon Hylton, was a heavy drinker and that she had to keep their gold coins
hidden from him.  Maybe this was true, but who knows?  Still another story that local
people often repeated for many years maintained that Mrs. Hylton had been buried with a
gold ring on each finger.  I think we can rest assured that there is no fact to this story. 
Gold was very precious at that time in our history, and I find it difficult to believe that a
considerable quantity of it would be buried on the fingers of a corpse.  At any rate, these
stories did stir imaginations from time to time, and different people searched the ground
once covered by the Hylton house.  Apparently, they searched in vain - the Hylton gold,
which would have been, at best, only a small quantity, was not found.  Also, it was a
neighborhood rumor that unknown persons had attempted to dug up Lydia Hylton's
remains and retrieve the gold rings, which probably never existed in the first place.
But once established, such rumors are prone to linger on and on.  Some of the
"old-timers" swore that disinterment efforts were made as evidenced by the sinkhole in
the grave.  This, of course, was not absolute evidence that such activity had occurred. 
We have all noticed the deep cavities that develop in very old graves where the bodies
were buried in containers made of wood.  As the wood rotted and collapsed, the dirt used
to fill the grave gradually sank to the bottom, leaving a huge depression in the surface.  I
am user that this was true of Mrs. Hylton's grave.
Other local people had another explanation for the cavity in the grave.  It was
their contention that it had resulted from bears (and there were many of them in this area
at that time) digging after the corpse.  Again, this may also be true, but most likely isn't. 
My grandfather, the late John DeHart, who passed away in 1971 a almost 83 years of age,
told me that he had always heard that the grave had been covered with hugestones to keep
bears from digging into it.  This sounds logical, and was probably done.
After Lydia's death, there is no evidence that Gordon Hylton remained in Elliott
County.  Indeed, evidence seemed to indicate that he returned to his former home in
Virginia.  But there is the possibility that he might have moved farther west into
Missouri, a possibility that I will explain later.
As season followed season, and year followed year, the memory of Lydia Hylton
did not disappear, but it certainly did grow dim.  And this it remained until recently.
In 1986, Bruce Cox, a researcher living in Michigan, contacted me and requested
my help in tracing his ancestral linkage to the Fraley, DeHart, Stegall and Cox families of
Elliott County.
During the ensuing months, Bruce and I exchanged may "bits and pieces" of
genealogical information, but the information that really caught my attention arrived
early in 1987.  Bruce was passing along information he had found on the Mastin Steagell
family of Montgomery Co, VA, a family that later settled in what is now Elliott Co.  As I
scanned down the list of Mastin's  children, I found this interesting bit of information:
"Lydia Stegall, born 1808, died 1845, married 1828 in Surrey Co, NC, Gordon C.
Hylton".  Immediately, my mind wend back to the many times I had read the name
"Lydia Hylton" on her monument when I was visiting with Porter cousins, who lived
nearby.  Could this Lydia Steagall be the Lydia Hylton who was later buried in our Elliott
Co?  I began a thorough search of my family records, and almost immediately the parts of
the puzzle began falling in place.  Lydia Steagall of VA and Lydia Hylton buried in a
grave on Brown Ridge were one and the same.  For me, her identity was no longer a
mystery.  But family researchers (genealogists) are not always content to accept identity
that is based on one or two facts.  They like to gather all the information available and
extract from that information facts that strengthen, enforce, and clarify the lineage they
are working on.





Page two of Lydia Hylton