Submitted by Descendant: Tally Sanborn BROWN
Zilphia Hicks was born 26 January 1806 in Camden County, Georgia, the daughter of John Hicks. She married Robert Sandlin from North Carolina 12 December 1822.
About 1827 they moved to a homestead in forested land near Blounts Ferry, Florida. There on their homestead she lived the next 52 years, raising her eight children, living a life of faith in god, surviving years of war and its devastating effects, and on through the years of her widowhood.
She was a charter member of two Hamilton County churches, Concord and Prospect.
Her life, indeed, was touched by “wars and rumors of wars”. Robert was a veteran of the War of 1812, and during the Indian Wars he was away from home much of the time. Their home being on a route sometimes taken by the Indians on their way to and from the Okefenokee Swamp, there were sometimes raids made on her home. There were times when he home was attached with bullets, arrows or attempted burning.
Three of her sons, Jesse, Henry, and Wiley went to fight in the Civil War; only Wiley returned home. Her husband Robert died just three weeks after Jesse’s death and she was left a widow in war time with a 13 year old son and her homestead devastated by the effects of the war.
At the age of 76 she moved into the home of her youngest son William Yules Sandlin in Hamilton County, Florida, where she died 26 November 1880.
She is buried next to her husband in an iron-fenced family plot in Hopewell Cemetery, Columbia County, Florida.
Zilphia Hicks was first established as a Florida Pioneer in 2002