Robin Postell · Cook County, Georgia · The Parrish Line
PHILADELPHIA
The Parrish Line
Henry Parrish 1740 · Robert N. Parrish · Buffalo Bill · Dora Agnes · Me
In 1873 a Parrish sat in J.T. Wilkes’ store, covered eight letters on the word Philadelphia, and gave this town its name. He was my cousin, not my grandfather — and it took me a while to get that straight. This is the line as the documents have it.
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Early 1873 · Puddleville, Georgia
How a Town Gets Its Name from a Grain Sack
The man who named Adel was Joel “Uncle Jack” Jackson Parrish, 1819–1897. For a long time I had him down as my direct ancestor. He isn’t. He is a cousin — our lines part four generations before him and do not meet again. The man who descends straight down from him is Alan June Parrish, who is ninety-two years old and who transcribed, by hand, most of the documents on this page.
I am telling you that first because the story is better when the record is straight, and because getting it wrong is exactly the thing this whole project exists to stop doing.
It was early 1873. The settlement was still called Puddleville — named for the standing water after rain. Berry Wells thought it needed something better. He found Joel Jackson Parrish at J.T. Wilkes’ store and told him the community needed a post office. If Parrish would agree to serve as postmaster, Wells would use his friendship with a Congressman to get him appointed.
Wells got the application papers and a register of every post office in the United States. The instructions were clear: the name could not already be in use anywhere in the country. For several weeks, every name they suggested was already taken.
Then, during another meeting at the store, Parrish was looking through the register. He pointed to the name Philadelphia. He covered the first four letters — P, H, I, L — and the last four — P, H, I, A. What was left in the middle was: A · D · E · L.
They checked the register. Adel was not listed anywhere else in the country. They filled out the application together, right there in that store, and submitted it to Washington. The town has been Adel ever since.
Source: Berry Wells Family Master document · project archive Corroborating: Valdosta Daily Times, June 4, 1954 — “Brotherly Love Combination Furnished Basis for Naming of Cook’s County Seat” Corroborating: Wikipedia / Adel, Georgia (citing family history sources, 2016)
PHILADELPHIAPhiladelphia · 1873 · J.T. Wilkes’ Store · Puddleville, Georgia
What it was written onThe sources do not agree on the object. The Berry Wells account says a federal register of post offices. Wikipedia’s family-sourced entry says a croaker sack. Alan’s own biography says a sack of flour. All three agree on the eight letters.
Valdosta Daily Times, June 4, 1954 — newspaper documentation of the naming of Adel, 81 years after it happened. “Brotherly Love Combination Furnished Basis for Naming of Cook’s County Seat.”
New Adel Post Office — the institution Joel Jackson Parrish founded when he became Adel’s first postmaster in 1873.
Descendants of Joel Jack “Uncle Jack” Parrish, Adel — the line that runs down to Alan.
“The original name of the city was Puddleville. The city’s first postmaster, Joel ‘Uncle Jack’ Parrish, wanted to change the name of the city. It is believed that he saw the name ‘Philadelphia’ on a croaker sack and struck out the first and last four letters to create the present name of Adel.”— Wikipedia, Adel, Georgia · sourced from family history records, 2016
1873
Year Adel Was Named
In J.T. Wilkes’ store, Joel Jackson Parrish and Berry Wells submit the name to Washington
1889
Adel Incorporated
As a Berrien County town. Became county seat of Cook County when the Legislature created it in 1918, city in 1919
150+
Years the Name Has Held
Eight letters taken off a word in a store have outlasted everything — the railroad, Puddleville, the founders themselves
The Line
Where the Line Actually Runs
Two Parrish branches come out of the same Virginia trunk and end up in the same South Georgia county, farming within a few miles of each other for a hundred and fifty years. One of them names the town. The other one is mine.
Henry Jackson Parrish Sr.B. 23 JUNE 1740 · SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY, VIRGINIA MARRIED MARY ANN MONK · THE SHARED TRUNK
My line
Henry Jackson Parrish Jr.b. 1786, Duplin County, North Carolina. War of 1812. Married Nancy Williams.
Josiah Parrishb. 1820, Bulloch County. Married Mary M. “Polly” Sutton. Moved west into Berrien County.
William Wesley “Buffalo Bill” Parrish3 Sep 1848 – 29 Mar 1924. Married Rosalyn Nebraska Juhan, 3 April 1870. My great-great-grandfather.
Dora Agnes ParrishMarried Jesse S. Wright, 5 June 1910. Lived at 401 E. Fourth Street, Adel. My great-grandmother.
Jesse Giddens Wrightb. 1911, Adel. Married Bernice Sirmans.
Judith Rae Wrightb. 1939, Adel – d. 2012. My mother.
Robin PostellJournalist. Six continents. Home now, and writing it down.
Alan’s line
Robert N. ParrishSettled seven miles west of Adel. Married Nancy McCranie, 14 February 1828. Wounded at the Indian Wars of 1836 and carried the ball in his arm the rest of his life. U.S. Census enumerator for Lowndes County, 1840.
Joel “Uncle Jack” Jackson Parrish1819–1897. First postmaster of Adel. Named the town in 1873. Attended the 1909 Little River reunion with his wife Molly Wilkes Parrish.
Julian Hartridge “J.H.” Parrish1861–1947. Lived on E. Tenth Street, Adel, per the 1940 census.
June Jackson Parrish1884–1975. The family historian. Author of the Parrish Family Record — the book this page keeps quoting.
Alan June Parrishb. 30 August 1934, Adel. Navy, Georgia Tech, and thirty-three years at the Kennedy Space Center. Ninety-two years old and still transcribing.
Open — the generation above RobertAlan’s descent places Henry Parrish (1740–1800) directly above Robert N. Parrish. The Parrish Family Record makes Robert the son of Joel Parrish, who went to live with his uncle Henry after his mother died — but that Joel is given as born 1787, which would make him twelve when Robert was born. One of those is wrong. Until it is settled, the exact cousinship between Alan and me is stated here as: the lines converge at Henry Parrish, born 1740.
My Great-Great-Grandfather
William Wesley Parrish “Buffalo Bill” · 1848–1924
He was born 3 September 1848 in Berrien County and died 29 March 1924. On 3 April 1870 he married Rosalyn Nebraska Juhan, who was fifteen or sixteen years old. They had ten children. He outlived her by twenty-eight years.
In early 1909 his family gathered at the Little River near Adel and somebody made a photograph of all of them. That photograph is the centrepiece of this page, and for a while I had it captioned as somebody else’s reunion that my family happened to attend. It is the other way around. It is his reunion. Uncle Jack is in the back row, listed as “Joe Parrish,” there as a cousin — the man who named the town, thirty-six years later, standing in my great-great-grandfather’s family picture.
He was the son of Josiah Parrish, born 1820 in Bulloch County, and Mary M. “Polly” Sutton — the couple who carried this line west into Berrien County. This is the only portrait of him the family kept.
He is number 3 in the reunion below: the back row, in the middle of everything he made.
The Fourteenth Census of the United States, Cook County, Adel City, enumerated 12 January 1920, lists a William Parrish in a household as “Father,” age 72, widowed, born Georgia of Georgia-born parents, occupation laborer, gardens. The age and the widowhood both fit. The head of that household is on the line above the one scanned, so whose roof he was living under at seventy-one is still open.
William Wesley Parrish Family Reunion · Little River, near Adel, GA · Early 1909
The typed roster names the rows. Joe Parrish and Molly Wilkes Parrish are in the back. Molly’s maiden name is almost certainly connected to J.T. Wilkes, in whose store Adel got its name — which would mean the woman at this reunion may have grown up in the very store where this town was born. Click to enlarge.
Everyone in the Picture
The Little River reunion, named row by row
A typed roster and a hand-drawn key came down with the photograph. Between them, every one of the twenty-five people standing at Little River that day has a name. Almost nobody gets that. Here they are, in the order the key numbers them — written out in full so that anyone searching for one of these names can find them.
Gold marks my own line: 3, my great-great-grandfather, and 11, my great-grandmother Dora — here as Mrs. Zadoc W. Pettaway. Zadok had died in 1906; she would marry Jesse Stancil Wright the following year. Numbers 20 and 21, Lewis and Lawrence Pettaway, are her boys.
1W.H. (Henry) ParrishSon
2Rohema Summer (Mrs. W.H.) Parrish
3WILLIAM WESLEY PARRISHFather
4Florence Parrish (Mrs. W.H.) BarberDau
5Myrtle Barber
6W.H. (Henry) Barber
7Roy Barber
8W.J. (Billie) McCranie
9Bessie Parrish (Mrs. W.J.) McCranieDau
10E.E. (Ras) DeVane
11Dora Parrish (Mrs. Zadoc W.) PettawayDau
12Lucy Barber
13Blanche Marie ParrishDau — later Mrs. G.L. Doster
14Elizabeth Barber
15Ida Parrish (Mrs. W.C.) RentzDau
16W.C. (Carl) Rentz
17Rosalind McCranie
18Willie J. McCranie
19Evvie Parrish (Mrs. E.E.) DeVaneDau
20Lewis Pettaway
21Lawrence Pettaway
22Henry Barber, Jr.
23Willie H. Parrish
24Bernice DeVane
25Baby Finous DeVane
The hand-drawn key · Parrish family archivesThe typed roster · Parrish family archives
Captioned on the clipping itself: SALEM (LIMESINK) PRIMITIVE BAPTIST CHURCH, ADEL, GA. SPRING 1909. The roster names Mrs. Joe (Molly Wilkes) Parrish and Joe Parrish, with Hutchinsons, Sikes, Nobles, DeVanes, McCranies and Carraways. Whether this is the same gathering as the Little River reunion is not yet settled.
Adel News-Tribune, Jan 24, 1990 — Cook County Scrapbook. Robert N. Parrish as first postmaster of Ava; a William Parrish succeeded him in 1886. Father and son held Ava’s post office; Joel held Adel’s.
Early Adel newspaper page — Town of Adel notices and merchant advertising from the years the family was farming here.
My Great-Great-Grandmother
Rosalyn Nebraska Juhan Parrish June 10, 1854 – August 27, 1896
ROSALYN NEBRASKA JUHAN PARRISH JUNE 10, 1854 – AUGUST 27, 1896 Parrish Family Scrapbook · Wright collection
She was named Nebraska in 1854, thirteen years before Nebraska was a state. The caption card in the scrapbook is written out in a careful hand, and it is the whole of her life in six sentences:
“Rosalyn was born and raised in Georgia and was the second of four children. Her father died in the Civil War. Rosalyn married William Wesley Parrish on April 3, 1870. They had ten children, two sons died as infants. She died suddenly at the age of 42 of a possible aneurism. At that time Ida Viola (age 6) went to live with her sister Dora and Blanche went to Moultrie, Ga. to live with her sister Florence.”
— Parrish Family Scrapbook, caption card. A later typed addendum adds: she died five months after giving birth to Tommy, cause still unsure; the 1900 census shows Ida and Blanche in Wm. W. Parrish’s house alongside a pregnant second wife and her four children from a first marriage.
Six daughters — Ida Viola, Dora, Blanche, Evie, Bessie, Florence — and sons Henry E. and Tommy. Forty-two years old, five months after a birth, and the household came apart and redistributed itself among the girls. The sisters took each other in. That is the part I keep going back to.
Dora Agnes Parrish married Jesse S. Wright on 5 June 1910 and lived at 401 E. Fourth Street in Adel. She is my great-grandmother. Everything on this page comes down to me through her.
There is only one Dora. She eloped at fifteen with Zadok William Pettaway, who was twenty-nine. He died six years later, in 1906. She buried him across the street, built 309 E. Fourth Street, and lived the rest of her life looking at his grave out of her own front windows. In 1910 she married my great-grandfather Jesse Stancil Wright, who kept a hardware store downtown and belonged to the Three Score & Ten Club — founded by June Jackson Parrish and his cronies, seventy years old to join, and no planned activities whatsoever. The Atlanta Journal’s Sunday Magazine ran a piece on it.
A girl of fifteen who ran off, was widowed at twenty-one, built her own house with the view she chose, and married the hardware man. That is not a footnote. That is a chapter.
Sworn, Lowndes County, May 1845
The Ball in His Arm
Robert N. Parrish settled about seven miles west of Adel and married Nancy McCranie on 14 February 1828, in country that would not be Cook County for another ninety years. In 1836 he was a member of Captain Archibald McCranie’s militia company. Nine years after the fight, he stood in front of a county clerk named Duncan Smith and swore out what happened, in order to claim a pension. This is his voice, not a historian’s:
“…the Indians had nearly surrounded me not more than 50 paces from me as I run with my Rifle in my left hand my arm was struck by a gun shot about 4 inches above my elbow joint. I had 100 yards to run with my arm swinging, it was fractured very bad… I was confined with my arm for 75 days, that the ball is yet in my arm, that my arm still continues to hurt me in my labors and is very painful by spells ever since it was broke as above set forth.
That during the time I was confined with my arm the Indians plundered my house of all I had in household affairs. That all I ever received was pay for about 15 days service and a Rifle Gun ($35) which the Indians got when I was shot.”
Sworn before Duncan Smith, Clerk of the Inferior & Superior Court, Lowndes County, Georgia, May 1845. Robert N. Parrish appointed C.H. Blood of Tallahassee, Florida his attorney to collect a pension from the Government of the United States. Transcribed from the original by Alan June Parrish, 2025–2026. Spelling and punctuation follow the transcription; obvious scanner artefacts silently corrected.
He was shot running with his rifle in his left hand. He ran a hundred yards with a broken arm swinging. He lay up for seventy-five days while the men who shot him emptied his house. The State paid him for fifteen days of service and gave him a gun, and the ball stayed in his arm until he died.
Then the country he was shot for took the pension away. The Act of February 4, 1862 struck pensioners in the seceded states off the rolls, and Robert N. Parrish — wounded in 1836 in the service of the United States — was one of them. On 9 December 1872, aged sixty-five, he stood in front of a clerk in Berrien County and swore that he had not borne arms against the government of the United States, nor in any manner encouraged the rebels, nor manifested a sympathy with their cause, and asked for his pension back. William Smith and Hamilton W. McCranie swore he was who he said he was.
Thirty-three years earlier, in 1839, he had written four lines on the flyleaf of one of his memorandum books and signed his name under them:
Days, months, and years must have an end Eternity has none. It always has as long to spend A[s] when it first begun.— Robert N. Parrish, memorandum book, 1839
APPLICATION FOR RESTORATION OF PENSION — “By Pensioner dropped from Pension Roll under Act of Feb. 4, 1862.” Berrien County, Georgia, 9 December 1872. Robert N. Parrish, aged 65, swears he has not borne arms against the government of the United States, nor in any manner encouraged the rebels nor manifested a sympathy with their cause. Witnesses: William Smith and Hamilton W. McCranie.
The file itself. Pension Application File, Miscellaneous Service, Old War Series — The National Archives. File No. 5890. Veteran: Robert N. Parrish, 1836. Grade: Pvt. Service: Capt. Sharp’s Fla. Vols. Bundle No. 421, Can No. 31.
The Parrish origin document — Absolom Parrish on Lott’s Creek, Bulloch County, and the founding of Upper Lott’s Creek Primitive Baptist Church in his home, 1831. Henry Parrish died 1800.
Open — the date he was shotThe affidavit puts the engagement on 14 July 1836. The Parrish Family Record puts the Battle of Brushy Creek on 9 July and Robert’s wounding on the day after, about seven miles north of Adel. Alan’s biography gives 15 July. Three sources, three dates, one arm.
Half-settled — the pony and the promiseThe Parrish Family Record has Robert giving a boy a pony in the summer of 1888 on the promise he would never smoke cigarettes, and names the boy as June, who wrote the book. I flagged that as impossible. It is not. The 1872 restoration application on this page gives Robert’s age as sixty-five, which puts his birth around 1807 — so in the summer of 1888 he would have been about eighty-one, and June would have been four. Eighty-one and four is exactly the age at which a man gives a boy a pony. What is wrong is the word: June was his great-great-grandson, not his grandson. Robert’s birth year is still given variously as 1799 and 1806; the 1872 document favours the later one.
The Living Source
From a Flour Sack to the Cape
Alan June Parrish was born 30 August 1934 in Adel, the fifth of five children of June Jackson Parrish — who wrote the Parrish Family Record — and Ada Belle Sirmans. He was the last person to graduate from the Adel Institute, the town’s grammar school. He finished Cook High in 1952, spent four years in the Navy, and took a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 1960.
In 1964 he went to work for NASA at the Kennedy Space Center as a television systems engineer, and stayed thirty-three years — through Apollo, through the Shuttle. Chief of the NASA Communications Control Office. Director of Ground Engineering. In 1990 the Center Director made him Director of Safety, Reliability and Quality Assurance, which meant the astronauts’ lives were his file. On 4 February 1994 he was appointed Associate Director of the Kennedy Space Center — the third-ranking official at the Cape.
His great-grandfather took eight letters off a sack in a country store and gave a town a name. His great-great-grandfather ran a hundred yards through a swamp with a broken arm and carried the bullet for the rest of his life. Four generations later a man from the same house was signing off on whether it was safe to fly.
He is ninety-two. He transcribed the 1845 affidavit on this page himself, correcting his own draft as he went — the working notes read “It was not in the original document. I’ll correct it.” That is a ninety-two-year-old man holding a line on accuracy in a family record. Everything on this page that comes from the pension file comes from him.
Primary transcriptions on this page: Alan June Parrish · Adel, Georgia · 2025–2026
Open — the Sirmans questionAlan’s mother was Ada Belle Sirmans, born 1900, daughter of Joseph Sears Sirmans and Zula Valera Lindsey. My grandmother was Bernice Sirmans, born 1911 in Valdosta. Ada Belle does not yet appear in any of the four family trees I have. If those two Sirmans lines join, Alan and I are kin twice — once in 1740, and once inside living memory.
Primary Sources
The Paper Trail
Affidavit · May 1845
Robert N. Parrish Pension File
Sworn before Duncan Smith, Clerk of the Inferior & Superior Court, Lowndes County. Transcribed from the original by Alan June Parrish.
Family Record
Parrish Family Record · June Jackson Parrish
Dedicated to his great-grandfather Joel Jackson Parrish. Pages 150–152 carry the Robert N. Parrish biography quoted here.
Scrapbook · caption card
Rosalyn Nebraska Juhan Parrish
Parrish Family Scrapbook, Wright collection. b. June 10, 1854, d. August 27, 1896. Marriage to William Wesley Parrish, April 3, 1870.
Naming Record · 1873
First Postmaster of Adel, Georgia
Berry Wells and Joel Jackson Parrish submit the name “Adel” to Washington in early 1873. Source: Berry Wells Family Master document.
Newspaper · June 4, 1954
Valdosta Daily Times
“Brotherly Love Combination Furnished Basis for Naming of Cook’s County Seat” — documentation 81 years after the naming.
Photograph · Early 1909
Little River Reunion
William Wesley Parrish family, near Adel. Typed roster names the rows; Joe Parrish and Molly Wilkes Parrish in the back.
Post Office Record
Ava Post Office · Robert N. Parrish
Robert N. Parrish first postmaster of Ava; a William Parrish succeeded him in 1886. — Adel News-Tribune, January 24, 1990.
Every red-flagged item on this page is an unresolved conflict between sources, published here rather than smoothed over. If you can settle one of them, I want to hear from you.
