Appalachian Figure
Drive the back roads of southern Wayne County and you will still see the Kelsay name on cemeteries, land records, and in local memory. It is a name that began on the Appalachian frontier, then followed the old migration routes through Tennessee into Kentucky and on toward Missouri and the Pacific coast. One branch produced a Revolutionary War veteran who helped open Greene County, Tennessee and eventually moved to Wayne County. Another branch produced a frontier gunsmith whose rifles traveled west to California. A third branch sent a Wayne County farm boy all the way to the Oregon Constitutional Convention and the state supreme court.
Those stories overlap in one confusing detail. There were two different men named John Kelsay born in Wayne County in 1819. One became Colonel and Justice John Kelsay of Oregon. The other was gunsmith John “Jack” Kelsay of the Kelsay–Harmon gunmaking family. The paper trail is scattered across court reports, cemetery stones, and family notebooks, but taken together it gives us a remarkable example of how an Appalachian family shaped places far beyond the Cumberland Plateau.
Frontier roots: John A. Kelsay and the move into Wayne County
The Kelsay story in Wayne County begins a generation before Kentucky statehood with John A. Kelsay, born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania around 1745. Compiled records on WeRelate and other genealogical sites, based on early tax lists and military records, describe him as a young man who moved south into Botetourt and then Rockbridge County, Virginia, where he married first Sarah Harris in 1773 and later Mary Anderson in 1780.
During Lord Dunmore’s War in 1774 he volunteered in Captain John Murray’s company and fought at the Battle of Point Pleasant on the Ohio. The same compiled sources, quoting early researchers and a Daughters of the American Revolution marker in Missouri, identify him as a Revolutionary era soldier whose later grave at the Kelsay family cemetery near Versailles, Missouri carries a commemorative stone.
After the war John A. followed a migration path that would become familiar to thousands of Appalachian families. In the 1780s he sold his Virginia land and purchased a 640 acre tract on Plum and Churn Camp Creeks in Greene County, Tennessee, then part of North Carolina. Around 1813 he moved again to Campbell County, Tennessee and in 1816 the family crossed into Wayne County, Kentucky. By then he had a large household that included adult children such as Alexander James Davis Kelsay (born 1783), John (born 1788), and William (born 1792).
The Greene County land on Plum and Churn Camp Creeks, the move to Wayne County, and later relocation to Missouri are all reconstructed from land descriptions and tax references quoted in RootsWeb’s “Children of John and Mary (Anderson) Kelsay” and related genealogical summaries. In other words, long before anyone called Wayne County “Appalachia,” the Kelsays were part of that layered frontier: Scots Irish Presbyterians pushing through the Valley of Virginia, into East Tennessee, then north toward the Kentucky hills.
Wayne County would not be John A.’s last home. Around 1829 he followed his son Alexander west again, this time to Missouri, and died near Versailles in 1830. Yet the family network he left behind in Wayne County created the world that shaped both Colonel John and Jack the gunsmith.
Alexander and Jane: a Wayne County household
Of John A.’s children, Alexander James Davis Kelsay is especially important for Wayne County history. A RootsWeb compilation on “Children of John and Mary (Anderson) Kelsay,” based on a family history by Tom Goldrup, records that Alexander was born in Virginia in 1783 and married Jane “Jennie” Kelly in Wayne County on 20 February 1816. That marriage is the link that ties the Revolutionary era Kelsays firmly to the next generation of Wayne County residents.
Family reconstructions from Wikitree and related sites identify Alexander and Jane’s children as including Sarah Nelson, Elizabeth Anderson, John, Margaret, and William. The colonel and judge who would later help write Oregon’s constitution appears in those trees as their son John, born in Wayne County on 23 October 1819.
That date and birthplace are confirmed by modern reference works and by grave-based genealogy. The Wikipedia entry on John Kelsay, drawing on sources such as Howard Corning’s Dictionary of Oregon History and the Oregon State Archives’ “Crafting the Oregon Constitution” project, describes him as born in Wayne County, Kentucky to Alexander and Jane Kelley on October 23, 1819 and moving with his family to Missouri at age ten. A Find A Grave memorial for “Col. John Kelsay” at Crystal Lake Cemetery in Corvallis, Oregon, likewise summarizes him as born in Wayne County, son of Alexander and Jane, and relocating to Missouri in boyhood.
So by 1830, two things are true at once. Alexander and Jane’s Kelsay household in Wayne County had produced a son, John, who would soon head west to Missouri and Oregon. At the same time, Alexander’s younger brother William and his wife Barthena Harmon were also raising children in Wayne County, including another son named John with the same birth year.
That second John is the one who would be remembered locally as Jack the gunsmith.
Jack the gunsmith and the Kelsay–Harmon rifle makers
William Kelsay, youngest son of John A. and Mary Anderson, married Barthena Harmon, daughter of the gunsmith George Harmon, and became part of an extended clan of rifle makers. A RootsWeb biography of “The Kelsay Family – Children of William and Barthena (Harmon) Kelsay” describes how several of their children were born in Wayne County and trained at the gunmaker’s bench. Their third listed child is “John Kelsay, born January 17, 1819 in Wayne County, Kentucky,” usually called Jack, who learned the gunsmith trade in the family.
Jack’s gunsmithing roots are reinforced by a specialist discussion on the AmericanLongrifles forum, where collectors and historians of long rifles trace the Harmon gunmakers from Greene County, Tennessee into Wayne County and note that brothers John and William Kelsay, Kentucky gunmakers, were trained under George Harmon before relocating north into Kentucky. In other words, the same Greene County river bottoms that once held John A. Kelsay’s land also produced a Harmon gunsmith shop whose skills were carried into Wayne County and passed down to Jack.
Modern genealogical compilations and cemetery records follow Jack further west. A Find A Grave memorial for “John Kelsay” buried at Kelsay Cemetery in Kelseyville, Lake County, California lists his birth as 17 January 1819 in Wayne County and his death in 1908 at Kelseyville. Wikitree’s category page for Kelsay Cemetery in Kelseyville likewise includes a profile for John Kelsay, born 17 January 1819 in Wayne County, Kentucky, buried there among family.
These records suggest a life that paralleled the judge’s in outline but diverged entirely in detail. Where Colonel John went into law and politics, Jack remained rooted in the craft tradition. The long rifles associated with the Harmon–Kelsay family would have been the everyday tools of hunters and settlers from the upper Cumberland to the California foothills. For local historians and material culture scholars, they offer a physical link between Wayne County and the Pacific coast that is just as meaningful as any law report.
Colonel John Kelsay: from Wayne County ridge to Oregon Supreme Court
The other John Kelsay born in Wayne County in 1819 took a different path, one that moved him from a Kentucky farm to the center of territorial politics in the Far West.
According to the standard biographical sketch maintained by the Oregon State Archives and summarized in the Wikipedia entry for “John Kelsay (judge),” the future justice left Kentucky for Missouri around 1829, when he was about ten years old. There he studied law beginning in 1842, was admitted to the bar in 1845, and soon entered politics.
The Missouri Secretary of State’s “Missouri State Legislators: 1820–2000” database lists a “John Kelsay” as a member of the Missouri House of Representatives from Morgan County in 1844, confirming what later writers like Howard Corning and Charles Carey reported. Underlying that entry is the Journal of the Ninth Regular Session of the House of Representatives at Jefferson City, where the roll of members and voting lists document Kelsay’s brief legislative service.
The move that tied him forever to Pacific Northwest history came in 1853, when he and his first wife traveled the Oregon Trail and settled near Corvallis in Benton County. Contemporary accounts and later histories remember him not only as a lawyer but as a militia organizer in the Rogue River War, where he led a regiment of volunteers in hard fighting against Native communities in southwestern Oregon. A modern tribal history of the Siletz Indians, for instance, notes that Colonel John Kelsay led an early morning charge on a Native camp in April of that conflict, reflecting his place in the violent making of Oregon.
By 1857 he had become prominent enough in Benton County politics to win election as a delegate to the Oregon Constitutional Convention. The official Journal of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Oregon, Held at Salem, Commencing August 17, 1857 lists “John Kelsay” as one of four delegates from Benton County. Claudia Burton’s exhaustive “Legislative History of the Oregon Constitution of 1857” notes that he chaired the convention’s standing committee on the militia, one of a group of committee chairs who were mostly lawyers and who would later occupy high judicial posts.
The transcribed proceedings in Charles H. Carey’s The Oregon Constitution and Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of 1857 preserve some of Kelsay’s interventions. They show him speaking on questions such as the structure of the militia article and the balance between legislative power and executive authority, and they place him among the more active delegates. In that Salem hall, the boy from Wayne County helped frame a western constitution that would govern everything from school lands and river ferries to corporations and debt.
A decade later, Oregon voters elevated him to the state’s highest court. The Oregon Blue Book and standard judicial histories list him as the eighteenth justice of the Oregon Supreme Court, serving from 1868 to 1870. During that short tenure he participated in decisions recorded in volumes 2 and 3 of the Oregon Reports, including cases that would later be treated as foundational in the law of public lands and state power. One of those, Shively v. Welch (22 Or. 410), dealt with the scope of state ownership in tidelands along the Columbia River. When the United States Supreme Court revisited that controversy in Shively v. Bowlby in 1894, it summarized the Oregon court’s holding and drew heavily on the earlier analysis, showing how Kelsay’s generation helped define the public–trust doctrine in western waters.
Legal historian Ralph J. Mooney, in his article “Governing a New State: Public Law Decisions by the Early Oregon Supreme Court,” places Kelsay among the jurists who crafted the new state’s public law in cases about school funds, county government, taxation, and corporations. A biographical sketch in the 1910 volume History of the Bench and Bar of Oregon describes him as widely known and respected at the bar, emphasizing that “he held the scales of justice evenly poised,” a phrase often reprinted in later county histories and online compilations.
After leaving the court in 1870 he continued to practice law and remained active in Republican politics. Corning and the Oregon Blue Book note that he also served as mayor of Corvallis. When he died on 19 January 1899, his grave at Crystal Lake Cemetery was far from the Wayne County farm where he was born, yet his life traced the same Appalachian-to-Oregon trajectory followed by thousands of families who carried Cumberland names into the Pacific Northwest.
Two Johns, one extended family
Because both Colonel John and Jack the gunsmith were born in Wayne County in 1819, genealogists and local historians have sometimes tangled their stories together. Online family trees occasionally merge their wives, children, or death places. The primary and near primary sources, however, support a clear distinction.
Reconstructed family lists for John A. and Mary (Anderson) Kelsay agree that they had at least six children: Sarah Nelson, Alexander James Davis, Elizabeth Anderson, John (born 1788), Margaret, and William (born 1792).
From there the line splits. Alexander James Davis Kelsay married Jane Kelly in Wayne County in 1816 and had a son John, born in that county on 23 October 1819, who moved to Missouri and Oregon, became a legislator and constitutional delegate, and died in Oregon in 1899. William Kelsay married Barthena Harmon, part of the Tennessee gunsmith family, and had a son John born 17 January 1819 in Wayne County, who learned the gunsmith trade and eventually died in Kelseyville, California in 1908.
The separate death places and occupations are especially telling. The colonel leaves a trail through Missouri legislative journals, the Oregon constitutional journal, law reports, and later judicial biographies. Jack appears instead in gunsmithing discussions, cemetery records for Lake County, California, and family narratives that tie him to Harmon riflemakers rather than courtrooms.
At the center of those two paths sits Wayne County around 1820, with Kelsay families settled on land near the Tennessee line. The fact that both branches chose to name a son John that year reflects a broader pattern in extended families that honored a patriarch or repeated favorite given names. For modern researchers, it also underscores the caution required when we follow a familiar Appalachian surname westward. The John Kelsay who signed a constitutional roll in Salem was not the same man whose rifles may have hung above hearths in California, even though both had roots in the same Kentucky ridge.
Kelsays who stayed: cemeteries, lawsuits, and oral history
Not every Kelsay left the upper Cumberland. Wayne County cemetery surveys, such as the online index compiled from the book Wayne County, Kentucky Cemeteries, show a Kelsay Cemetery near Powersburg along with Kelsay burials scattered in other local graveyards. A companion guide on Roads to Thought notes the Kelsay Cemetery’s location about eleven miles southwest of Monticello in a landscape shared with Koger and Peercy cemeteries, reminding us that Kelsays remained on the land even as cousins moved west.
The family also appears in twentieth century land law. In 1931, the Kentucky Court of Appeals decided Kelsay v. Koger, a boundary dispute involving land on the Samuel Long patent along the Wayne–Clinton County line. The published opinion recites a chain of title running through Nancy H. Kelsay and her sons and shows how the family’s nineteenth century land holdings complicated later surveys.
Even in the era of tape recorders, the Kelsay name carried local weight. On October 1, 1976, folklorist Robert M. Rennick interviewed Fount R. Kelsay of Monticello for his “Place Names of Kentucky” project. The recording, preserved at Morehead State University as “F. R. Kelsay Interview (Wayne County),” captures a twentieth century Kelsay discussing the origin and stories behind community names in the county. It is a reminder that family history is not only in dusty deed books and online charts, but also in the voices of people who grew up on those roads.
Taken together, these records demonstrate that the Kelsay family remained a thread in Wayne County history even while splitting into very different western destinies. Some became farmers, others artisans, and at least one rose to high judicial office in a state thousands of miles away. Yet all of them carried with them memories of a small Kentucky county on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau.
Wayne County’s western footprint
When we look at Wayne County on a modern map it can be easy to imagine it as a place apart, a corner of Kentucky tucked against the Tennessee line. The Kelsay story shows something different. Families who settled around Monticello and Powersburg were already connected in the late eighteenth century to Pennsylvania tax lists, Virginia militia musters, Tennessee land grants, and then to Missouri homesteads. By the mid nineteenth century that same network reached the Oregon Trail, the Rogue River campaigns, and the Oregon Supreme Court.
Colonel and Justice John Kelsay is a striking example. The constitutional journal that prints his name as a delegate from Benton County and the law reports that contain his opinions belong to a state that did not enter the Union until 1859, yet his birth certificate might as well have read “Wayne County, Kentucky, Appalachian frontier.”
Jack the gunsmith is another. Rifle stocks shaped in the Harmon–Kelsay tradition represent a craft that began on the Virginia and Tennessee frontiers, passed through Wayne County workshops, and then traveled to California mining camps and orchards.
For genealogists and local historians, following these threads turns a rural Kentucky surname into a map of the nineteenth century United States. For Wayne County itself, it is a reminder that the stories rooted in small cemeteries and court cases can reach all the way to Pacific tides and western statehouses.
Sources and further reading
Primary and near primary sources for Colonel John Kelsay include the Journal of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Oregon, Held at Salem, Commencing August 17, 1857 and the transcribed debates in Charles H. Carey’s The Oregon Constitution and Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of 1857, both of which document his role as a Benton County delegate and militia committee chair.Wikipedia+2Open Oregon+2
His judicial career appears in the early volumes of the Oregon Reports, particularly cases like Shively v. Welch as traced through the United States Supreme Court’s later decision in Shively v. Bowlby, and in Ralph J. Mooney and Raymond Warns’s article “Governing a New State: Public Law Decisions by the Early Oregon Supreme Court.”Cambridge University Press & Assessment+3Court Listener+3Justia Law+3 Biographical treatments can be found in Howard M. Corning’s Dictionary of Oregon History, the Oregon State Archives’ “Biographical Sketch of John Kelsay” in its Crafting the Oregon Constitution project, the Oregon Blue Book’s list of supreme court justices, and the 1910 History of the Bench and Bar of Oregon, which offers a contemporary assessment of his character and reputation.Willamette Heritage Center+3Genealogy Trails+3Wikipedia+3
For Jack the gunsmith and the broader Kelsay–Harmon family, key evidence lies in Wayne County marriage records and later cemetery transcriptions, in particular the RootsWeb compilations “Children of John and Mary (Anderson) Kelsay” and “Children of William and Barthena (Harmon) Kelsay,” the Wayne County cemetery index that lists Kelsay Cemetery, and Find A Grave and Wikitree entries for John Kelsay (1819–1908) in Kelseyville, California.Find A Grave+3Freepages+3Freepages+3 The AmericanLongrifles discussion on the Harmon gunmakers provides valuable context on the craft traditions that shaped the Kelsay gunsmiths.americanlongrifles.org+1
The deeper frontier background relies on genealogical syntheses such as WeRelate and Wikitree profiles for John A. Kelsay (1745–1830), his children, and their migrations from Pennsylvania through Virginia and Tennessee to Wayne County and then Missouri, supplemented by RootsWeb articles and references compiled by researchers like Tom Goldrup and Warren Carmack.Warren Carmack & Associates+3WeRelate+3Freepages+3 Wayne County context and later local memory appear in the Kentucky Court of Appeals decision in Kelsay v. Koger and in the 1976 “F. R. Kelsay Interview (Wayne County)” from the Robert M. Rennick Oral History Collection at Morehead State University.ScholarWorks+3vLex+3Court Listener+3