The Heard Family Letters, 1828–1950
Transcriptions, Modern Readings, and a Report on the Family Exchange
Prepared for Frances Ruth Jackson Freeman, Ph.D. · Heard and Nolen Family Histories · November 2026
This small bundle of papers has been passed down through the family of Zachary Taylor Heard, youngest son of John Thomas Heard and grandson of Jesse Holloway Heard (Heard Family Letters). It covers nearly a century and a half. There are three legal papers from the Berry and Hewell households of Newton County, Georgia. Four letters carry the voices of Jesse Holloway Heard and his wife, Mary Susan Hewell Heard, written to her parents in Georgia from their new homes in the Deep South. The last item is a much later family letter from Plaquemine, Louisiana. Each document is presented below with its image, a careful transcription that keeps the writer’s own spelling, a modern-English reading, and notes on the people and places it names. A report on the family exchange as a whole follows the documents.
The Documents at a Glance
| No. | Date | Place | Writer | Addressed to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Feb. 20, 1828 | Newton Co., Ga. | Jesse W. Hewell (signature torn) | McCormick Neal: conditional bill of sale |
| 2 | Sept. 15, 1829 | Newton Co., Ga. | Susannah Berry (her mark) | Grandchildren of Edmund and Elizabeth Berry: deed of gift |
| 3 | Apr. 5, 1847 | Covington, Ga. | Joe, “by his friend” | Mr. J. W. Hewell |
| 4 | Apr. 12, 1848 | Not stated | Mary Susan Hewell Heard | “Dear Father an Mother” |
| 5 | Apr. 19, 1857 | Enterprise, Miss. | Jesse Holloway Heard | “Dear Mother” (Patsy Berry Hewell) |
| 6 | Summer 1857 (probable) | Enterprise, Miss. (probable) | Mary Susan Heard; note by J. H. Heard | Her mother; Cousin James Johnson |
| 7 | July 18, 1866 | Lake Charles, La. | Jesse Holloway Heard | “Dear Mother” (Patsy Berry Hewell) |
| 8 | Dec. 14, 1950 | Plaquemine, La. | A family member (unsigned pages) | A sibling at home with “Mother” |
What the Close Reading Adds
Reading the originals at full resolution confirms most of the family’s identifications and refines several (Heard Family Letters):
- The 1828 paper is a conditional bill of sale that served as security for a loan. The text names the man who gave the $300 promissory note as Jesse W. Hewell, Mary Susan’s father, so the torn signature was almost certainly his, not Jesse Holloway Heard’s.
- The 1847 letter is dated April 5, not April 2.
- The 1848 letter was written by Mary Susan, not by Jesse. She writes that she “was confined in February” and that “Mr. Heard had not the chance to rite.” The rest of the collection belongs to her parents’ household, so it was almost certainly addressed to her own father and mother, Jesse Wyatt and Patsy Berry Hewell.
- The “1850” letter is dated 12/14/50 but belongs to 1950. It is written in pencil on ruled tablet paper, and the scan files are named “1950.” It mentions an armoire, a stove, porch chairs, batteries, and Christmas plans.
- The four pages filed as April 19, 1857 hold two letters. Pages 1 and 2 are Jesse Holloway Heard’s letter of April 19, signed “J. H. Heard.” Pages 3 and 4 are a letter from Mary Susan, signed “Mary S Heard.” Her letter speaks of rain “ever sence” the last of June, so it was written later that summer.
- In the 1866 letter, “Brother Hope” is one person: Hope H. Hewell, Mary Susan’s younger brother, who died in a Confederate hospital at Jackson, Mississippi (42nd Georgia Infantry, Co. E roster). The phrase read earlier as “my crops is ___” reads “my corn is maid,” meaning the corn crop was made and safe.
The Families in the Letters
The papers trace three intertwined families. Susannah Berry, widow of William Berry, was the mother of Edmund G. Berry and of Patsy (Martha) Berry. Patsy was born in 1795, married Jesse Wyatt Hewell in 1814, and died in Newton County in 1882 (McClure Genealogy, Berry Family). Jesse Wyatt Hewell (1793–1852) and Patsy Berry Hewell had twelve children (Royal Roots). Among them were Mary Susan Hewell (1822–1903; Heard & Nolen Ancestors DNA summary); John Wesley Hewell; and Hope H. Hewell, whose name runs through the letters. Mary Susan married Jesse Holloway Heard, and their eldest son, John Thomas Heard, married Sarah Adeline Lindsey on March 27, 1866. John Thomas’s youngest son, Zachary Taylor Heard, kept the papers (Heard Family Letters). Zachary was a younger brother of James Addison Heard (1870–1946). That makes Jesse Holloway and Mary Susan Hewell Heard the great-great-grandparents of Frances Ruth Jackson Freeman, through her mother, Myrtis Lee Heard Jackson, and Patsy Berry Hewell her third-great-grandmother.
Document 1 · Conditional Bill of Sale, 1828
On February 20, 1828, a bill of sale was drawn in Newton County, Georgia, conveying six enslaved people to McCormick Neal for $300. A second paragraph makes the sale conditional. Jesse W. Hewell had that day given Neal a promissory note for $300, due March 1, 1829. If he paid the note when it fell due, the bill of sale would be void. In practice the document was a mortgage: the six people were pledged as security for a loan. The seller’s signature has been torn from the lower right corner, leaving only a fragment of the seal, but the condition names Jesse W. Hewell as the man who must repay the note, so the torn signature was almost certainly his. The witnesses were a man whose name reads B. Hargrove [?] and Edwin Payne, Justice of the Peace (Heard Family Letters).
The paper is a stark reminder that the household Mary Susan Hewell grew up in held people in bondage, and that their lives could be pledged against a debt. Their names should be remembered with the family’s own. Buck was about fifty. A woman whose name reads Tiller was about forty-five. Westly was about twenty-two, Frances about fourteen, and Hannah about twelve. A boy of about nine is named as Wille [?]. Tiller’s name may appear again in 1857, when Jesse Holloway Heard writes of “aunt Tillar” in Patsy Hewell’s household. In that era, white Southerners commonly gave the title “aunt” to older enslaved women.
Document 2 · Susannah Berry’s Deed of Gift, 1829
On September 15, 1829, Susannah Berry of Newton County, Patsy Berry Hewell’s mother, signed a deed of gift “for the affection I bear towards my grandchildren.” The grandchildren were Sally, Peggy, Thomas, William, Daniel, and John Berry, children of her son Edmund and his wife, Elizabeth. Edmund G. Berry had married Betsy Haile in 1815 (McClure Genealogy, Berry Family). The gift was an enslaved girl named Nancy. It was to pass to the six children only after Susannah’s death, so she would have kept Nancy during her own lifetime. Susannah could not write her name and signed with her mark. The witnesses were Arch[ibal]d Berry [?] and William Morgan (Heard Family Letters). The paper was most likely kept among Patsy Hewell’s family papers.
Document 3 · Joe to J. W. Hewell, 1847
This short letter was written at Covington, the seat of Newton County, on April 5, 1847, and addressed to “Mr. J. W. Hewell.” That was most likely Jesse Wyatt Hewell, though his son John Wesley Hewell had the same initials (Heard Family Letters). The writer, Joe, was an enslaved man. Hewell had charged an account to him, and Joe flatly denies the debt. If he ever had run up such an account, he says, it was long since barred by the statute of limitations. He also points out that he never brought Hewell an order from his master authorizing credit, so Hewell had extended it “at your own risk.” Under slavery an enslaved person had no legal standing to contract debts on his own, and a merchant who sold to him on credit without the owner’s written consent had little hope of collecting. Joe closes with dry humor: he is “perfectly insolvent, as is the case with most Coloured Gentlemen.”
The letter was written out “by his friend,” whose signature appears to read G. Pinkaskin [?]. The polished hand and the legal phrasing suggest an educated scribe. Whether the words are Joe’s own, dictated, or a friend’s wry composition on his behalf, the letter preserves the voice of a man who knew where the law stood and used it.
Document 4 · Mary Susan Heard to Her Parents, 1848
This is the earliest family letter in the collection and the only one surviving in Mary Susan’s own spelling from the 1840s. It is dated April 12, 1848, and addressed “Dear Father an Mother.” The writer is clearly Mary Susan. She explains that one reason for her delay was that “I was confined in February,” the period’s phrase for childbirth, “an Mr. Heard had not the chance to rite.” The mail had also been stopped by high water. The letter does not name its place. The family’s later letters come from Enterprise, Mississippi (1857), and Lake Charles, Louisiana (1866). Because the rest of the papers belong to the Hewell household, the “Father an Mother” here are almost certainly her own parents, Jesse Wyatt and Patsy Berry Hewell, in Georgia.
Mary Susan writes with a young mother’s pride about her two boys. John T. is “a very prety little boy” with blue eyes and white hair. The new baby, James H. Hewell Heard, would be two months old on the twenty-second, so he was born about February 22, 1848. He has dark eyes and dark hair. She protests that it is “not worth while for me to try to brag on ther beauty nor smartness,” and then does exactly that. Then the tone changes. It has been so long since she heard from home that “I dont no how to rite.” She wants to see them “very bad” but cannot come, and none of them will come to her. She had hoped her brother William would visit until his letter in December “put me out of heart of any of you ever coming.” The surviving page ends as she begs them, if they cannot come, at least to write.
Document 5 · Jesse Holloway Heard to “Mother,” April 1857
Nine years later Jesse Holloway Heard wrote from Enterprise, Mississippi, on April 19, 1857, to “Dear Mother.” This was his mother-in-law, Patsy Berry Hewell, a widow since Jesse Wyatt Hewell’s death in 1852 (Heard Family Letters). Enterprise, on the Chickasawhay River in Clarke County, was then the commercial center of east-central Mississippi. The Mobile and Ohio Railroad had reached it in 1855 (Enterprise, Mississippi; Clarke County NRHP nomination), and steam sawmills were rising along the new line (Mobile and Ohio Railroad). Jesse’s letter is a window on that boom.
Patsy had written on April 6 that she was preparing to move, and Jesse urges her to come west. She should be ready to start by the first of September. If he lives, he will set out for Georgia on the first of August to bring her, but only if she will not disappoint him. Meanwhile he has contracted to haul saw logs (“stocks”) for Mr. Smith & Co.’s steam mill until August. He lays out the economics with evident satisfaction. The mill pays sixty cents a log delivered. He pays cutters ten cents a log, or fifteen for large logs near the mill. One team can haul ten to sixteen logs a day, which nets roughly $5 to $8 a day before his own costs. He will soon need a second team to supply the 20 to 24 logs a day the mill wants. For seven and a half weeks he had hauled by the day, and for the last three days by the log, earning $3.50 a day. The family will soon move out to the mill. It stands four miles from Enterprise, half a mile from a schoolhouse, and close to the railroad on the west side, and they expect to send four children to school.
The rest of the letter is family talk. Patsy wonders what to do with “aunt Tillar,” and Jesse suggests that Cousin James might take her. He asks for news of Brother Frank and sends word to Taylor. A Mr. Harrison Hindley has been murdered in Texas by Edward Rainwater, who shot him with both barrels of his own gun. Libby is as pretty as ever, and “the boy is prettyer than Libby.” Brother Hope should learn to spell quickly and write him a letter. The girls should “fly round” and get their beaux ready to come, or they “might get left behind.” He sends respects to cousins Bob, James Ross, James Johnson, and the Holloways, and signs himself “your son until death.” A postscript adds that he has written to Ben and Cousin Bob without an answer.
Document 6 · Mary Susan Heard to Her Mother, Summer 1857
The two remaining pages filed with the 1857 letter are in Mary Susan’s hand. They open in mid-sentence, so at least one earlier page is missing. She reports that the family had “the dryest spring I ever saw,” the ground not wet until the last of June, and plenty of rain since. That places the letter in July or later, most likely the summer of 1857, while the plan for Patsy’s move was still alive. Mary Susan adds her own persuasion to Jesse’s. By the time Brother Hope is grown he will want to go to some new country, so it would be best for Patsy to sell out and move now, if she can. It would not cost her much. She should write to Brother John, who was probably John Wesley Hewell, and see what he thinks. The crop looks good, and if the season holds, Mr. Heard will make corn enough “to do him an you both.”
She signs “yours untill Death, Mary S Heard, to Mother,” then turns the sheet into a note for Cousin James J. Johnson. She has not forgotten him and counts him “a near cosin and friend.” She teases him for being still single: “I think it is time you was married if you ever intend to marry, but I recon you dont intend to marry.” She also supposes the Whatleys would be glad if he never did. She asks him to write and say what he thinks of Mother moving out here. The last lines are a practical note signed J. H. Heard. “Brother” wants Patsy or Brother Hope to go to Mr. Holland & Co. and find out how much he owes them. He is sending two dollars in this letter for Mr. Holland, and the rest will follow when he knows the amount. Brother Frank, Brother John, and Brother Hope are Hewell sons, so the unnamed “Brother” here was probably the family’s name for Jesse himself, as a son-in-law.
Patsy Hewell evidently never made the move. She died in Newton County, Georgia, in 1882 (McClure Genealogy, Berry Family).
Document 7 · Jesse Holloway Heard to “Mother,” July 1866
The war separates the last two Hewell letters. By July 18, 1866, Jesse Holloway Heard was writing from Lake Charles, Louisiana. He asks Patsy to direct her letters there, so it served as the family’s post office for the Dry Creek country of what was then Calcasieu Parish. The first news is a wedding. John T. had married Miss S. A. Lindsey (Sarah Adeline) on March 27, and she is “pretty enough for any body and smart as ladyes gets to be.” The family was well except for his new daughter-in-law, who was “in bad health.” The war had cost Jesse about a thousand dollars; “ingered” is his spelling of “injured,” used in the sense of financial loss. John had been in service two years, Jesse only two weeks. Family memory holds that John Thomas, still a teenager, was at the siege of Vicksburg, walked home starved after the surrender, and later fought at Mansfield and Pleasant Hill.
The farm is doing well. He has a first-rate crop of corn, cotton, sugar cane, and potatoes; “my corn is maid,” meaning the crop had matured past danger. Some of his fodder is already pulled, the summer chore of stripping corn blades to cure for winter feed. Then comes a quiet, heavy line: “I have never heard any thing of Brother Hope.” The Georgia muster rolls supply the answer the family could not get. Hope H. Hewell had enlisted in the 6th Georgia State Troops in 1861 and in Company E, 42nd Georgia Infantry, in March 1862. The last roll on file, dated December 10, 1863, shows him absent sick in the hospital at Jackson, Mississippi, where he died (42nd Georgia Infantry, Co. E roster). The rest of the letter concerns a power of attorney Patsy had asked for. Jesse has had it drawn up, but it will cost him about six dollars to send. He advises her to write first, so he knows whether it is too late “to get the money” before he sends it. He closes as “your most affectionate Son until death.”
Document 8 · A Plaquemine Letter, December 1950
The last item belongs to a different century. It is dated “Plaquemine La 12/14/50” and written in pencil on ruled tablet paper. The blog’s scan files are named “1950,” which fits the paper, the pencil, and the contents (Heard Family Letters). Its salutation reads “Dear Snooks” or “Dear Brooke” [?], evidently a family nickname. The writer thanks the recipient for a letter that gave “no idea what pleasure.” They puzzle over how the place was cut for a bed, and suggest bringing the armoire in by the garden gate and around to the front door, since the stove was in the way. They worry that their own writing “looks like chicken scratch.” They will not be coming down for Christmas because “Donald & family” are coming, but will send the children a few things. They are glad a “little change” came in handy, and they ask whether Mother got the porch chair she was longing for and whether she is still grumbling about her job. Mr. Crawford has not yet sent the dozen batteries they ordered.
Writer and recipient share a mother, and the recipient lived with her. The pages are unsigned, but the letter belongs to a later generation of the family that kept these papers. It is included here because it travelled with them.
The Family Exchange: A Report
A Correspondence Across the Miles
The heart of the collection is a conversation that lasted almost twenty years. On one side was Patsy Berry Hewell in Newton County, Georgia. On the other were her daughter Mary Susan and son-in-law Jesse Holloway Heard, who had gone west with the cotton and timber frontier. The letters went to Georgia, so they must have been kept among Patsy’s papers and later carried back to Louisiana, where they came down through John Thomas Heard’s youngest son, Zachary Taylor Heard (Heard Family Letters). The three earlier legal papers came with them, which also points to the Hewell household as the place where the bundle was kept for decades.
Longing and the Distance of Home
The emotional center of the letters is separation. In 1848 Mary Susan, recently delivered of her second son, writes that it has been so long since she heard from home that she hardly knows how to write. No one will come to see her, and her brother William’s December letter “put me out of heart of any of you ever coming.” By 1857 the longing had turned into a plan. Jesse would travel all the way back to Georgia to fetch Patsy, and Mary Susan pressed her to sell out while she could. The letters show how far apart Georgia and the Gulf South were in the 1840s and 1850s: mail stopped by high water, a two-dollar bill folded into a letter, and a trip measured in weeks.
Children and Grandchildren
The grandchildren run through every family letter. In 1848 there are John T. with his blue eyes and white hair and baby James with his dark eyes, “as smart as common.” By 1857 there are four children ready for the schoolhouse half a mile from the mill. In 1866 comes John T.’s wedding to Sarah Adeline Lindsey, the marriage that leads directly to Zachary Taylor Heard and the keepers of these papers. In Jesse’s sentence about his new daughter-in-law, family pride sits beside family worry: she is “pretty enough for any body,” but she is “in bad health.”
Slavery in the Family Papers
Three of the documents record slavery directly. The 1828 bill of sale pledged six people, Buck, Tiller, Westly, Frances, Hannah, and a boy of nine, against Jesse W. Hewell’s debt. The 1829 deed of gift made a girl named Nancy the future property of six Berry grandchildren. In the 1847 letter Joe, an enslaved man, answers Hewell’s claim with the statute of limitations and a sharp line about insolvency. “Aunt Tillar,” whose future Patsy and Jesse discussed in 1857, may well be the same Tiller listed in 1828. If so, she had lived in the Hewell household for nearly thirty years, and her fate was being decided in a letter about a move. These names deserve a place in the family’s memory alongside its own.
Work, Land, and Money
Jesse’s 1857 letter is the most detailed account of his working life in the collection. He was a teamster and log contractor for a steam sawmill on the new Mobile and Ohio line (Mobile and Ohio Railroad). He knew his rates to the penny and was ready to put a second team on the road. Mary Susan’s letter shows the other side of the household economy: a good-looking corn crop and enough, if the season held, to feed her mother too. By 1866 Jesse was farming corn, cotton, sugar cane, and potatoes near Lake Charles, counting his war losses at a thousand dollars, and helping Patsy with a power of attorney. Its purpose was to collect money due to her or to Mary Susan, most likely from a family estate, before it was “too late.”
The Civil War
The war appears in the letters only briefly. John served two years and Jesse two weeks; the war cost about a thousand dollars; and “I have never heard any thing of Brother Hope.” Behind those lines lie John Thomas’s ordeal at Vicksburg and on the Red River campaign, and the death of Hope H. Hewell, Mary Susan’s younger brother, in a Confederate hospital at Jackson, Mississippi (42nd Georgia Infantry, Co. E roster). Hope was the boy Jesse had teased about learning to spell. In 1866 the family in Louisiana still did not know what had become of him.
Voices and Spelling
The letters preserve how the family actually spoke. They write “rite” for write, “no” for know, “an” for and, “heare” for here, “shore” for sure, “mite” for might, “hall” for haul, and “untill Death” at every closing. These are the spellings of people who learned to read and write in rural Georgia schools and wrote phonetically in the speech of the Piedmont South. Jesse and Mary Susan both closed with “until death,” a common devotional formula of the period. Coming from a son-in-law, “your son until death” shows how fully Jesse counted himself one of Patsy’s children.
Timeline
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1814 | Jesse Wyatt Hewell marries Patsy (Martha) Berry in Oglethorpe County, Georgia (McClure Genealogy, Berry Family). |
| Feb. 20, 1828 | Jesse W. Hewell gives McCormick Neal a $300 note, secured by a conditional bill of sale for six enslaved people. |
| Sept. 15, 1829 | Susannah Berry deeds an enslaved girl, Nancy, to the six children of Edmund and Elizabeth Berry, effective at her death. |
| Apr. 5, 1847 | Joe, an enslaved man, denies an account charged to him by J. W. Hewell (Covington). |
| c. Feb. 22, 1848 | James H. Hewell Heard is born to Jesse and Mary Susan; Mary Susan writes home on April 12. |
| Sept. 24, 1852 | Death of Jesse Wyatt Hewell (Heard Family Letters). |
| Apr. 19, 1857 | Jesse writes from Enterprise, Mississippi, urging Patsy to move west by September. |
| Summer 1857 | Mary Susan adds her own appeal; Jesse sends $2 toward a debt with Holland & Co. |
| 1861–1863 | Hope H. Hewell serves in the 6th Georgia State Troops and the 42nd Georgia Infantry; dies in hospital at Jackson, Mississippi (42nd Georgia Infantry, Co. E roster). |
| Mar. 27, 1866 | John Thomas Heard marries Sarah Adeline Lindsey. |
| July 18, 1866 | Jesse writes from Lake Charles about the wedding, the crop, war losses, and the power of attorney. |
| 1882 | Patsy Berry Hewell dies in Newton County, Georgia (McClure Genealogy, Berry Family). |
| Dec. 14, 1950 | A family letter is written from Plaquemine, Louisiana. |
How the Transcriptions Were Made
Each page was studied at full resolution from the blog’s original scans (Heard Family Letters), with contrast enhancement to separate ink from stains and from writing that shows through from the reverse. The transcriptions are diplomatic: they keep the writers’ original spelling, capitalization, and lack of punctuation. Square brackets mark editorial additions: [?] follows an uncertain reading, [illegible] marks a word that cannot be read, and words supplied for sense appear inside brackets. The modern readings are faithful paraphrases in standard English, meant to make the letters easy to read aloud.
References
- Frances Ruth Jackson Freeman, “Heard Family Letters & Communications,” Communicating Life2 (blog), July 2020. Source of all letter images. https://communicatinglife2.blogspot.com/2020/07/heard-family-letters-communications.html
- Frances Ruth Jackson Freeman, “Royal Roots: Heard, Jackson, Lindsey, Cox,” Communicating Life2 (blog), January 2015. https://communicatinglife2.blogspot.com/2015/01/royal-roots-heard-jackson-lindsey-cox.html
- Frances Ruth Jackson Freeman, “Heard & Nolen Ancestors: With DNA Summary and Evaluation for Accuracy,” Communicating Life2 (blog), January 2021. https://communicatinglife2.blogspot.com/2021/01/heard-nolen-ancestors-with-dna-summary.html
- “Berry Family,” McClure Genealogy (children of William and Susannah Berry, including Edmund G. Berry and Patsy “Martha” Berry Hewell). http://mcclure.freeservers.com/berry.htm
- “Muster Roll, Company E, 42nd Regiment Georgia Infantry,” Newton County, Georgia, USGenWeb Archives (entry for Hope H. Hewell). http://files.usgwarchives.net/ga/newton/military/civilwar/coe42reg.txt
- “Enterprise, Clarke County, Mississippi,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise,_Clarke_County,_Mississippi
- National Register of Historic Places Inventory–Nomination Form, Historic Resources of Clarke County, Mississippi (National Park Service). https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/64000407_text
- “Mobile and Ohio Railroad,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_and_Ohio_Railroad
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