After Thomas English entered the army his wife was taken to one of the American forts near by, where her first child, Thomas, was born.

THOMAS ENGLISH

Thomas English moved to Cape County, Missouri, in 1804, and settled in four miles of Cape Girardeau. As this was the next year after the Louisiana Purchase, the family had to endure all the hardships of the earliest pioneers. Simeon English, who was six years old at the time, told us that St. Louis was only a village at that time.

It has been handed down to us that he was a very quiet man who knew how to do the various duties of the pioneer, including that of making shoes for the family. He had a small cotton patch to raise cotton for quilts. It was picked off the seed by hand, as there were then no gins in Missouri, and each child, black and white, was required to pick the seed from a sack full of cotton each night.

Thomas English carried slaves with him to Missouri, though it is not known how many. One of these was Pompey, a Negro evidently near his own age, as it is family history that he had played with Pompey when they were boys.

Negro Overseer

Instead of employing a white man as overseer, he used "Old Pompey". Simeon English often said that when his father, Thomas, was asked