In Search of Robert Evans

Figure was passed through a bewildering number and array of hands during his lifetime. Some early sources refer to him not as "the Morgan horse" but as "the Goss horse" because he beloved to various members of the Goss family for over ten years - and to Justin Morgan for just over three.

Morgan historians have traditionally pieced together Figure's history through a variety of sources. There are timelines floating out there that place him with anywhere from 10-15 owners every two or three years. Sometimes his actual ownership is murky; was he leased as a breeding stallion or a working horse, rather than directly transferred?

It's not clear to me what historical basis there is for the various owners, beyond Linsley or Battell's collecting of secondary sources many years later. Betty Bandel did a great job of tracing the first 2-3 owners in her biography of Justin Morgan, and was able to provide sources. Beyond that? I will grant that I have a lot more reading to do, but so far, nothing is jumping out at me.

All that is a very long way of saying that I'm more or less starting from scratch. I'm using the timelines provided in secondary sources and online as a jumping off point, and taking an attitude of "trust but verify." Though perhaps "trust" is a strong word to use in this situation.

Justin Morgan has been pretty well documented by Betty Bandel, so I'm starting with the next name classically associated with Figure: Robert Evans.

In Morgan mythology, Evans is the hired man who leased Figure from Morgan to clear land for his employer. He was the one who discovered Figure's extraordinary strength; he was the one who was supposed to have set up the pulling contest at the mill. Most sources put that sometime between 1792 and 1795. Later, after Figure passed through a few other owners, he was purportedly owned by Evans from 1801 - 1804.

So, what do we actually know about Evans? Not a whole lot, as you may have guessed. Again, starting from scratch. I started with the absolute basics and treated it like a genealogy problem. Off to Ancestry.com, where I turned up my first bit of evidence: the 1800 census.

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Here's the census for Randolph, VT, in 1800. Because it was 1800, sigh, all we get are white male heads of household and a tally of others in the household. In this case, we see a Robert Evans (and a few other Evans families; possibly he was not a lone hired man but someone with larger community connections?). 

In his household were a white male under 10, a white male between the ages of 10-15, a white male between the ages of 26-44, and a white female between the ages of 26-44. That puts Robert Evans as a younger man with a wife and two sons in 1800. It doesn't appear they had any extra family members, servants, or slaves living with them, given that the total number of household members was 4 and they are all enumerated. (Though Vermont had nominally outlawed adult slavery with its constitution, de facto slavery persisted and does show up on the 1800 census from time to time.)

After some of the other rabbit holes I've gone down on this project, it's encouraging to see Robert Evans as a real person who really existed!