Ohio River Explorations

 

Ohio River Explorations and John Sterling

It has been said that the Ohio River was our first Interstate Highway.  Early colonists found the Appalachian Mountains to be a major impediment to westward colonization.  But many made their way across through Cumberland Gap to the Monongahela and rafted down it to Pittsburgh and the beginning of the Ohio River.  Once on the Ohio River, colonists found the passage quite variable – it could be flooding or waters could be so low that horses and wagons could wade across in certain places.  Consequently, the were obstacles to their flatboats and log rafts, but it was a much easier passage than to pull a wagon over the multiple ridges of the Appalachians.

This is apparently the way my Sterling ancestors migrated west.  My great great grandfather John Sterling lived in Preston County, Virginia (now West Virginia) and that is where my great grandfather Andrew Jackson Sterling was born.  Andrew enlisted in the Union Army in 1863, and served with Company B, Fourth Regiment of the West Virginia Cavalry until he was mustered out in Wheeling, Virginia in 1864.  He was apparently passionate about his belief in the need to maintain the Union and to terminate the institution of slavery in the South.  The evidence for this conclusion comes from the name given to one of his sons.  Winfield Lincoln Sterling

Following the close of the war, he moved his family to Whiteside County, Illinois, as he did not wish to raise his children in the South.  They lived in Illinois until 1871, when they moved once again, this time to Kansas, traveling overland by covered wagon to Dickinson County, where they settled on a homestead about 20 miles south of Abilene, arriving there on June 17, 1871.

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