William Lee Fulkerson

William Lee Fulkerson was the fourth child of William and Eliza Jane (Maffet) Fulkerson. He was born January 5, 1845, while his family was living in Spring Valley Township of Greene County,Ohio, near the 1816 homestead established by his grandparents, Richard and Clara (Moore) Fulkerson. Shortly after Grandfather Richard's death (1847), William Lee’s family moved to Jackson Township, Blackford County, Indiana, to join a sizable contingent of pioneers from Greene County. This migration must have been facilitated by the all-weather macadam surface of the new National Road, which was completed to Vandalia,Illinois just 7 years earlier. William Lee was but three years old when his family settled into a farming life near Dunkirk, Indiana; fifty miles north of the new highway, on land which had been frontier less than a generation earlier.

Little is known with certainty about William Lee’s Hoosier youth, except that he surely must have kindled ongoing social ties with folks in Greene County, Ohio. Perhaps he regularly visited his uncle, Amos Fulkerson, who was living on Grandfather Richard's pioneer homestead and continuing the barrel-making business. However, distance proved no impediment to romance and on May 3, 1870, William Lee married 23 year old Nancy Ann Krepps,a native of Greene County. Nancy Ann was born in the Ludlow area northwest of the county seat of Xenia on August 24, 1846. She was the daughter of George and Nancy (Baughman) Krepps. George Krepps was a Pennsylvania-born blacksmith who at the time operated a shop in Trebein, a most pleasant site at the crossing of the Little Miami River and the Dayton-Xenia Pike. His wife, Nancy Baughman, was originally from Maryland; and her brother, George Baughman, became a successful mill owner and banker in Greene County.

Shortly after their marriage, William Lee and Nancy Ann Fulkerson set up housekeeping near his parents in the vicinity of Dunkirk, Indiana. About 11 years after their marriage, William Lee and Nancy moved their farming operation to a new piece of land about 5 1/2 miles north of Dunkirk, in Jackson Township, Blackford County. Of this union, eight children were born, only six of whom reached adulthood. The six offspring achieving majority included the following: George Walter (b. 4/26/1871), Clista Irene (b. 9/9/1878), Harvey Earl (b. 1/30/1881),Charles Merrill (b. 2/13/1884), Ivy Foy (b.5/4/1888), and Andrew Selvey Krepps (b.1/21/1890). The two children who did not survive infancy were Mary Caroline (died 12/22/1874; age 1yr, 7mo) and Minta Gertrude (died 3/24/1877; age 1yr, 7mo, 16d). The earthly remains of Mary Caroline and Minta Gertrude are buried in the Mount Tabor Cemetery (Dunkirk,Indiana) very near their grandparents, William and Eliza Jane.

After a little over twenty years in Indiana, the William Lee Fulkerson family returned to their Greene County, Ohio roots in the early 1890’s. Deed records indicate that Nancy Ann Fulkerson purchased the 95 acreDavis farm for $7,113.75 from the widow Mary A. Davis on November 21, 1891. This farm, on the Lower Bellbrook Pike a little southwest of Xenia, remained in the Fulkerson family over half a century with the families of several different sons occupying the land after William Lee and Nancy retired to Xenia in 1914. The 1920 census shows William Lee and Nancy (in their seventies) living with Nancy’s remaining sister, 83 year old spinster Henrietta Krepps, in the large house on King Street that had previously belonged to the Krepps girls’ uncle, George Baughman.