Peninsula In Passage

Martha Jordan Jones Pallette Martha Jordan Jones Pallette grew up in Driver on the site of the old Yeates Free School. A first cousin of Judge William Wellington Jones, her family roots go back for seven generations in the area. She tells the story of one of their ancestors, Captain John Lanier, whose portrait hangs in her home in Churchland. In the early 1960s when new homes were about to be built on the Ivins farm, once the old Lanier Plantation, on Route 58 not far from Greenlawn Memorial Gardens, workers found a gravesite almost covered with honeysuckle. The graves were that of Captain John Lanier and an unidentified woman, probably his wife, whose skull still had traces of long, red hair. The remains were reinterred at Greenlawn. According to Pallette - John Lanier was from Surry and ran away to sea at 16 sometime near the end of the Revolutionary war. He was captured at sea by the British and impressed for two years in British Navy. Then he was imprisoned and sent to France where he met Katherine LaFlatte from a town near the border of France and Switzerland. (Other sources say her name was Recelle Phlatte and they met in Fredericksburg, not France) Katherine was my great-great-great-grandmother and had one child Rebecca. Katherine was Lanier’s first wife and after her death he married twice again, to Peggy Orton in 1798 and to Comfort Tart in 1806. During the Civil War Rebecca was home alone in the house in Driver with her children when a Union officer rode up and asked for a cup of coffee. They had no coffee so he asked for tea and cake. Rebecca seated him in the sparsely furnished parlor, had the tea service brought in and served him a cup of tea. He took one sip and spit it on the floor saying, “This isn’t tea”. “I know,” Rebecca said. “Your soldiers were here before you and took our provisions - this is sassafras.” The officer left but returned that afternoon with provisions – including tea, flour and meat. Phlatte remembers a story about man named Pasco Turner who built the house that another ancestor, Dr. William E. Jordan (1835 – 1921), lived in.

Martha Jordan Jones Pallette with a portrait of her ancestor John Lanier.

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