Laverne Harbison Recalls Massy Harbison:
Pioneer woman with true grit
Left: This powder horn once owned by Massy Harbison remains a beloved heirloom in the Haribson family today.
Along with a cluster of family photos, an ancient powder horn is a prized piece of Laverne Harbison's family history. His home is less than a mile from where his eighth great-grandmother Massy Harbison survived an Indian raid that killed her two young children before her eyes.
The resourceful Massy not only eluded her captors but returned to present-day Freeport, where she raised 10 remaining children, divorced, and later supported herself by publishing her dramatic memoir of the incident.
"There are still quite a few of her descendants around here," explains Laverne, a 62-year-old Alcoa retiree who traces his line to Massy's son Benjamin. The photos he treasures prove the connection. Harbison's grandchildren have inherited the reddish-brown hair and cleft chin of their 18th-century relative. Now they proudly recount the story of "Grandmother Massy," a pioneer of incredible toughness.
On the morning of May 22, 1792, 22-year-old Massy Harbison, pregnant with her fourth child, slept in her cabin overlooking the Allegheny River, where Indian trouble was brewing again.
Indian attacks were common in the Alle-Kiski region as far back as the battle of Bushy Run, 10 miles from Freeport. That's where Pontiac, the fierce Ottawa chief, was finally defeated in 1763 after terrorizing British forts throughout the western territories. After independence, the attacks flared again: A year before her 1792 capture, Harbison escaped with her children when 11 members of the neighboring Russ family were tomahawked and scalped.
As she slept with her children that morning, Seneca, Munsees and at least two whites dressed as Indians broke into the Harbison cabin with guns and tomahawks. They killed Massy's 3-year-old son in moments. Two other sons, a 5-year-old and an infant, John, were dragged from the cabin. The trio were pulled along the trail, heading north past what are now Saxonburg and Butler.
"I expected every moment to feel the deadly tomahawk," she recalled later in her memoir. Within hours, her 5-year-old was scalped and killed. Two days later, as her captors slept, she escaped barefoot from the Indian camp on the Connoquenessing Creek near present-day Butler with her infant. She crept along streams for three more days, narrowly avoiding a nest of rattlesnakes along Squaw Run and hiding at night, until she emerged on the Allegheny riverbank near what is now Fox Chapel Yacht Club. Her rescuers - her closest neighbors - did not recognize her. Battered, with her feet full of thorns, she was taken to Fort Pitt to recover. Her baby son John survived with her, and his brother James was born shortly thereafter.
"I never wept! A tear then would have been too great a luxury," Massy wrote of her ordeal. More hard times followed. When she refused to go west with her husband, John, he gave the family gristmill to their son William, who sold the property, leaving Massy and three young children homeless.
She divorced her husband in 1800. "She wanted her husband's pension," explains Marcia Harbison, Laverne's wife. The $30 benefit would have helped her family survive. When it was delayed, she wrote her Narrative of the Sufferings of Massy Harbison from Indian Barbarity, published in Pittsburgh in 1825. Finally, three years later, she was awarded a government pension for both her own suffering at the hands of the Indians and her husband's army service. The Butler County Courthouse holds both records.
Left: Massy Harbison gave the powder horn (right) to her oldest son, Benjamin, who was instructed to pass it on to his oldest son. It's now in the possession of Laverne "Verne" Harbison, who will continue the tradition. Pictured here are these Harbison relatives (left to right): Eric Weigold, Olivia Weigold, Adam Weigold, Ryan Weigold, Laverne "Verne" Harbison and Abbey Harbison.
The Harbison mill on the banks of Big Buffalo Creek is gone, except for a few old millstones along the bank. But several tributes to Massy remain. A plaque marks the site of her abduction from her 1792 cabin. After her divorce, she lived in a cabin on the site of the current Kindergarten Center in Freeport until 1837. Her remains and a gravestone were moved to the current Freeport Cemetery in 1921, when a school (now Freeport Junior High School) was built on the site of the old graveyard. That's the reason, says Marcia Harbison, for the ghost stories that persist around the school.
Some contemporary monuments are misleading. Though nearby New Kensington named a town park for Harbison, it's not clear whether or not she actually lived there. Twentieth-century descendant Francis Harbison wrote an account of the family's dangerous early years in Flood Tides Along the Allegheny in 1941. And current family members still tease out the connections among their many Harbison ancestors at reunions.
Fingering Massy's powder horn, a worn golden crescent etched with the mysterious date "Febuwary 26, 1793," Marcia Harbison ponders her husband's eighth-generation relation. "She went through so much," she says admiringly of the family ancestor, and says the toughness of the family matriarch still provides an inspiration.
Footnote: A marker showing the exact site of Massy Harbison's abduction stands on the third green of River Forest Country Club, on the south bank of the Allegheny River in Freeport.