When he was 18 months old, William Fulkerson traveled with his family on a flatboat from his native Virginia to the early settlements of Ohio. His parents, Richard Fulkerson and Clarinda Moore, were among the earliest settlers in what would become Greene County, Ohio. As a child, William often watched his father, Richard, make barrels, and he certainly worked. William later learned from him the craft of coopering which he one day put to use in the management of his own farm. Little is known of William’s youth in Greene County, Ohio.
At the age of 24, William Fulkerson married 19-year-old Eliza Jane Maffett in Spring Valley, Greene County, Ohio, on Nov. 30,1837. Eliza Jane was a native of the new state of Ohio, having been born there Jan. 18, 1818. Four of William and Eliza Jane's nine children, were born in Greene County. These four were Hannah Caroline (born in 1839), Amos Newton (born in 1840), Sarah Elizabeth (born in 1842) and William Lee (born in 1845). Sarah Elizabeth would live only two years. She died Feb.14,1844.
In 1837, the year that Eliza Jane Maffett and William Fulkerson were married, two men from Greene County, Ohio, journeyed through the forests into Indiana where Jay County had just been formed. These adventurous brothers-in-law, Isaiah Sutton and William Shrack, went there to lay claim to land in this new area that had just opened up for settlement. Sutton and Shrack claimed 340 acres in Jay County, Indiana, and then walked 50 miles to the land office in Fort Wayne through almost unbroken forest, carrying the purchase price of their land in silver with them. Returning to Greene County, Ohio, Sutton and Shrack brought their own families by wagon to their new lands in Indiana in September 1837. To complete the last three miles of the journey, it was necessary for the women and children to remain at a farmhouse while the men made a road through the forest by cutting saplings close enough to the ground that the wagon axles would pass over them. In October, the new town of Dunkirk's first residents moved into their hastily-built log cabins, which had no floors or chimneys.
The pioneer characteristics of Richland township, Jay County, Indiana, at the time these rugged individuals arrived, can be visualized by noting that the county auditor's record indicates that only six persons had entered 80 acres each of the township's land prior to 1836. The isolation of the region can be described by noting that close neighbors ranged in distance from three to eight miles, and that the nearest mill for grinding grain was nearly 35 miles away. For several years the square-mile site of Dunkirk contained only the families of three pioneer families who migrated from Greene County, Ohio.
