Lewis Tune Pounds

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Lewis Tune Pounds (1792–1878), a 5× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Virginia birth, Pound–Tune parentage, marriage to Margaret 'Peggy' Lois Johnson, son Henry Albert, his death in Hendricks County, Indiana, and the broader era context of Virginia-to-Indiana westward migration in the early nineteenth century.

Lewis Tune Pounds (1792–1878) was born on the twelfth of April, 1792, in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, a tobacco-growing region nestled along the southern border of the Old Dominion. He was the son of William H. Pound (1749–1814) and Mary Elizabeth Tune (1756–1846), from whose maternal surname Lewis took his distinctive middle name — a common practice of the period by which families preserved a mother's lineage within the given names of her sons.

Lewis came of age in the early decades of the American republic, a generation that witnessed the War of 1812, the steady westward push beyond the Appalachians, and the opening of the Northwest Territory to settlement. Born in Virginia and laid to rest in Indiana, his life traced precisely the migratory arc undertaken by countless families of his generation, who left the older tidewater and piedmont counties of the South to take up new land in the free states of the Ohio Valley. Hendricks County, Indiana, where he ended his days, had been organized in 1824 and drew a steady stream of settlers from Virginia, Kentucky, and the Carolinas throughout the antebellum decades.

Lewis married Margaret B. "Peggy" Lois Johnson, who became the mother of his son Henry Albert Pounds (1821–1893). Through Henry the Pounds line would continue down into the families later joined to the Hyten lineage.

Lewis Tune Pounds died on the second of February, 1878, in Danville, the county seat of Hendricks County, Indiana, having lived eighty-five years — a remarkable span for a man born when George Washington still served as president and ended in the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes. He had outlived his wife's generation and seen the republic through its Civil War and into Reconstruction.

Lewis was the compiler's 5× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.