Nancy Bryant Agnew, Mrs. David
Nancy, fifth daughter and the fourteenth child of Catherine Woolley and David Bryant, was born December 16, 1807 on a farm near Owl Creek, Buffalo township, Washington County, Pennsylvania. She married David Agnew, December 5, 1827 at Mt. Vernon, Ohio. Margaret, Isaac and Elizabeth were born here and when the baby was scarcely two years old they decided to join her brothers Simeon, David, Samuel and families, with their aged parents, to make their future home in a much talked of frontier land now known as Lake County, Indiana. They arrived in late March or early April and settled on section to be known as the Bryant settlement at Pleasant Grove.
Imbued with the spirit of adventure, which had urged her parents to move from Springfield, Jew Jersey, where they had been born and reared and married to buy land in Pennsylvania, then later in 1816 to Knox County, Ohio, and then to Indiana, Nancy and her husband sold their farm and possessions, taking the bare necessities in a vocered wagon, pulled by oxen team, they were undaunted by privations which came. The terrible blizzard that caused David to perish, shien he was returning from Porter County with food, lists Nancy as the first to be widowed in the new settlement, and when their baby son was born the following month, May 4, 1835, he was the first child to be forn in the county. She did not falter, she made the application for the land and on the Claim Register appears the name "Nancy Agnew, wido -- Spring, 1835."
She had a house built, established her home and supported her family of two girls and two boys and did her part in the community. In the Bryant Genealogy, is a photograph of Nancy Agnew, her comley features have and expression of calm reserve, her appearance leads one to believe that she may have been not very tall, slender and active. Not much has been recorded but Timothy Ball in his chapter on Women of Lake County in his Hisroy says -- "The name of Mrs. Nancy Agnew, may be placed by itself here as belonging to a resolute, earnest woman. She did not yield to her bitter trial, but soon came to herself and carried her share of the load in the building of a pioneer community."
Nancy married in 1840 a young man of Pleasant Grove neighborhood, by the name of John Gardner Keller. It seems that they ventured their fortunes in another pioneer move to Winfield, Iowa, where Nancy died July 4, 1884. Six children were born of this union.
Timothy H. Ball's History of Lake County, Chapter IV page 129
Bryant Genealogy, pages 35 & 36
NOTE: Owl Farm, was also the birthplace fo the "Campbellite" or Christian Church founded by Alexander Campvell, aided by his siter Doerothy and her husband Joseph Bryant, brother of Nancy.
Daughters -- Margaret Jane, age 5 and Elizabeth, 2 years
P. 32 - Ball - 1834-1872
April 1935 Wayne Bryant, Simeon and Samuel D. Bryant, David Bryant and David Agnew came to Pleasant Grove -- "Bryant Settlement." Elias Bryant came in the fall. E.W. Bryant is Eliphalit Wayne (not related) named the grove. Agnew went to Porter County for supplies -- overtaken by night perished in blizzard April 4 on the prairie east of Pleasant Grove. First death -- taken back to Porter Co. for burial -- Morgan Prairie.