Doc and Mollie met and married in Olathe. With their marriage, there was a convergence of two strands of pioneering Americans. Doc’s Mahaffie ancestors were Scots-Irish who pioneered west from Pennsylvania through the Midwest, each generation moving further westward.
Mollie’s Williams roots lay in the upper South, with her ancestors migrating to colonial Maryland, then into Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri. They were slaveholders from early in their time in America, and Mollie’s father, Oscar F. Williams, worked as a young man as an overseer on the farm of a Kentucky slaveholder.
But by moving to Kansas, and serving in the Union, not the Confederate army, Oscar broke his family’s ancestral pattern. He chose to homestead in what was then or soon became a free state, as the Mahaffies, not themselves enslavers, had also done.
Charles Mahaffie’s cousin Art Julien wrote years later that the Mahaffies, and his Julien forebears, had made that move deliberately. They “looked pro-slavery Missouri over, and came out to Kansas that was to become Free State, under the Missouri Compromise act of Congress. Grandfather once told me that in those days some of the “free state” people had a secret “sign” of recognition.”1)Letter from Art Julien to Charles D. Mahaffie, Sr., January 28, 1950.
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