A memorial 200-plus years in the making
The names of early settlers of Portersville are included in a planned memorial for a Revolutionary War-era fort near Wickliffe, Ky.
Kristine Sjostrom is a descendant of Andrew McMeans and Anne Jamison, formerly McMeans, who settled in Portersville in the early 1800s, and is part of the fundraising effort to place a memorial near the excavated site of Fort Jefferson in Kentucky.
Sjostrom said the family relocated to the Butler County area after being at Fort Jefferson in the 1780s.
“The fort was in existence for 13 months, from April 1780 to June 1781,” Sjostrom said. “Anne McMeans moves north of Pittsburgh because her daughter marries an Aiken, and their descendants went from Pennsylvania to Iowa to the Dakotas to the East Coast.”
Ken Carstens, a retired university professor of archaeology, is part of the group that excavated the site of Fort Jefferson in 2011, which is situated by the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.
After finally finding the fort with the help of people he called “amateur diggers,” Carstens has been planning to install a memorial for everyone who died at the fort who can be identified, including enslaved people and Native Americans.
“I can name more than 500 persons who were there over the 13 months at Fort Jefferson,” Carstens said, “including soldiers, civilian white men, women and children; free and enslaved African American men, women and children; and even several Native Americans.”
Carstens has proposed a bronze plaque that would include the names of all the people he has identified at the fort. He also said that although the fort was relatively short-lived, the number of settlers who lived there, even for a short time, influenced the placement of the population in the years following the Revolutionary War.
“It was extremely significant,” Carstens said. “It was right at the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers, hundreds of people lived there over 13 months.”
Sjostrom said there is a grave marker for the McMeans and Aiken families in the Mountville Cemetery just outside Portersville borough limits. She said her great-grandfather, Horace Hubbard Glenn, funded its placement.
Sjostrom and Carstens are still spreading the word about the Fort Jefferson memorial, and Sjostrom said she hopes other people with ties to it chip in to fund the plaque.
“The commemorative plaque is finally coming through,” Sjostrom said.
Carstens said people can send donations to the Ballard-Carlisle Historical and Genealogical Society at P.O. Box 279, 257 Fourth St., Wickliffe, KY 42087.
