By Rick Steelhammer, Charleston Gazette-Mail
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Prior to her death 200 years ago this week, “Mad” Anne Bailey cast a giant shadow across the western fringe of the Virginia frontier as a legendary scout and long-distance messenger during an era of bloodshed between European settlers and Native Americans.
It was an unlikely role for a woman who was born, raised and schooled in Liverpool, England, before immigrating to Virginia in 1761 at age 19 — soon after the deaths of her parents — to live near family friends who had settled several years earlier in the Staunton area.
It was there that Anne Hennis — also identified as “Ann” in some historical accounts — met her future husband, Richard Trotter, a veteran of the French and Indian War and a Virginia militiaman, whom she married in 1765. Two years later, the couple’s first and only child, William, was born, and the young family built a cabin and carved out a farmstead on the frontier west of Staunton.
As settlers pressed westward, conflicts multiplied with natives on whose lands they encroached. In an effort to assert control over the region, Virginia’s colonial government in September 1774 assembled an army of nearly 1,000 militiamen to march westward to Lewisburg in the embattled Greenbrier Valley, then north to Point Pleasant to confront native people near their villages along the Ohio River.
Image by Laura Bilson, Charleston Gazette-Mail