Ernest Justus Hancock

Edward, Earnest, and James Hancock
No date on the photo, but must be in the early to mid 1860s

This is part 3 of my series on my great-great grandparents. Ernest Justus "E.J." Hancock, and his wife, Julia Etta Kinney, could not have been more different from the subjects of my first two posts, David and Jennie (Brattain) Dean, although their children married. The Deans and Brattains were descendants of Midwestern farmers, from families that been earlier colonizers of the areas that had been conquered from Native peoples in Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa. In some cases, earlier generations of Deans/Brattains had left the South because of their opposition to slavery. The Brattains, for example, were original Quaker. Some members of both families were active members of the abolitionist movement. Although their lineages included Revolutionary War soldiers and other brave and resourceful men and women, they didn't come from a background of particular wealth or fame.

The Hancocks and Kinneys, on the other hand, came from older and more patrician stock. They were descendants of the Jamestown and Plymouth colonists, respectively, with all of the positives and negatives such descent implies. Ernest and Julia met and married in the state of Washington, as some of the first members of their family to leave Virginia or New England.

Ned, Ammon, Ernest, Charlotte, and Lilly Hancock
Around 1865 (Lilly was born May 1864)

Ernest Justus "E.J." Hancock was born November 24, 1854, in Lynchburg, Virginia, the son of Ammon Goode and Elizabeth Charlotte (Hewitt) Hancock. I won't write much about his childhood because I discussed his father in great detail in an earlier post. Suffice to say, he was born seven years before the start of the Civil War into a family with a tobacco factory, large tobacco plantations and, therefore, they had enslaved a large number of people. The Hancocks were wealthy. E.J.'s father had to petition President Johnson for a pardon in 1865 because he owned more than $20,000 in property. I don't know exactly how much his father was worth, but $20,000 in 1865 is worth nearly $300,000 today. In other words, the Hancocks were one of the families whose wealth was based on forced labor, who had the most to gain by keeping their workers enslaved, and who were in a position to finance the fight to maintain the slave economy. Although E.J. and his siblings were too young, and his father was apparently too old, several of their cousins were officers in the Confederate army.

Despite Gone-With-the-Wind-inspired fantasies of poor white folks devastated by war (a war, remember, that they had started because labor extracted through terror was cheaper than paying people), the Hancocks were clearly well off after the war. Undoubtedly, some of their wealth was lost, (wealth, again, extracted through violence from the bodies of enslaved people), but in 1870, they were still living in the same house, still owned the same tobacco factory, still owned at least some tobacco plantations (I'm not sure about all of them), and still employed Black servants (1). Ernest. and his brothers could afford to go to college; both Ernest and his younger brother, Ned, attended the Virginia Military Institute, matriculating in 1875. Ned graduated in 1879, but E.J. left the university without graduating and moved west to Coupeville, Washington (2).

Why did he go there? His uncle, Samuel Hancock was on Whidbey Island by 1860, and in the Pacific Northwest significantly earlier (3). Another uncle, Francis "Frank" Hancock, who was married to Hester Hewett, likely a cousin of E.J.'s mother,  lived there from 1862-1870, before moving to Stillaguamish flats (4). Presumably, the good reports from his family, and having a support network already in the region, inspired Ernest's choice of location.

Aloha Farm in 1899. The people are E.J., Julia, and Vera Hancock.
The woman in the center was a local teacher.

According to his profile in An Illustrated History of the State of Washington by Harvey Kimball Hines, (published 1893, p. 568), Ernest moved to Washington in 1879, then returned to Virginia in 1881. He apparently spent the next couple of years making arrangements for a permanent move back to Washington, which took place in 1883. He bought 45 acres on Whidbey Island and built Aloha Farm. My great-aunt Lillian, his granddaughter, wrote that the family no longer remembers why the farm was named "Aloha". E.J.'s wife, however, had some connections to Hawai'i, so it's possible that the farm got its name after their marriage.

There were plenty of racial tensions in Washington, just as there had been in Virginia. Most centered around the status of Chinese immigrants. Like many immigrant groups, the Chinese community on the west coast met with social and political barriers put up by white Americans. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the most significant anti-Chinese legislation of American history. Interestingly, Ernest denounced the Act, writing, "The Chinese, by industry, pay strict attention to their own business, and studying their employers' interest, have created a demand for their labor, and it is only justice that they be allowed to fill the demand." (6).

Justus, Virgil, and Vera Hancock, who all miraculously
survived to adulthood

Ernest married Julia Etta Kinney on March 3, 1886. Julia has a fascinating history of her own, which I'll discuss in another blog post. Genealogically speaking, though, their marriage combined the Hancock's First Families of Virginia line (going back to Jamestown) with the Kinney's Great Puritan Migration lineage (going back to the Mayflower). Ernest and Julia had four children. Their three sons were Eugene Ammon, Justus "Jut" Lee [that Lee middle name just kills me], and Virgil Kinney. Their only daughter, Vera Houghton, was my great-grandmother. 

Ernest. was clearly successful in Whidbey Island, no doubt helped along by his family's ill-gotten money. He was one of the founders of the Island County Bank of Coupeville in 1892, and elected its first vice-president. Unfortunately, the bank closed in 1893, when "the cashier absconded with the funds, spending them in the 'most disreputable dives in Seattle'" (7). The bank building itself still stands, however. Ernest also owned "an immense amount of city property, and [had] many other profitable investments" (5) in addition to Aloha Farm. 

Ernest died on August 1, 1924, in Coupeville. He was 69 years old.
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References:

1) "United States Census, 1870," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MFLK-NVT : accessed 25 September 2015), S G Hancock, Virginia, United States; citing p. 62, family 468, NARA microfilm publication M593 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.); FHL microfilm 553,137.

2) VMI Roster Archives, available here: http://archivesweb.vmi.edu/rosters/index.php?LastName=Hancock&FirstName=&VMIClass=&keyword=

3) https://qmackie.com/2010/02/20/samuel-hancock-witnesses-smallpox-among-the-makah-1853/

4)  http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=98503324

5) An Illustrated History of the State of Washington by Harvey Kimball Hines, 1893, p. 568

6) quoted in Coupeville, by Judy Lynn, Kay Foss, and the Island County Historical Society.. . Arcadia Publishing, 2012.

7) Self-Guided Walking Tour of Historic Coupeville - National Park Service