Mrs. Essie Barton Balch was a great grand daughter of Major William Bobbitt. She remembers Elizabeth Oliphant Bobbitt and many of the legends regarding the family in Mississippi. The following letter was written to me when Essie Balch was 92 years of age in 1972. She treasured a table left by President Polk and kept a picture of Major William Bobbitt on the table.

"Major William Bobbitt was a Major in the Mexican War, he married twice and had nine children to each wife, who lived to maturity. My grandmother was the first child by his second wife, Elizabeth Saunders Oliphant, a descendant of Pocohontas. She was born in Virginia.

"Great grandfather and President James Polk came to Mississippi together and bought a plantation near Coffeeville.

President Polk never established a residence there. He stayed with my great grandfather, Major Bobbitt, while he attended to business and to his farm. They both had a large number of slaves. When one of my great grandfather's children would get married, he would give them a farm, and four slaves. When my grandmother married William Lester Barton, he gave her four slaves. My grandfather Barton lived only four years after his marriage and left his widow with three children, my father, Edward William Barton, the eldest was only six years old.

"My grandmother lived alone with her three children and several slaves. in the middle of the night someone hit her with an ax and broke four ribs. She went to the servants quarters for help, not knowing that they were the ones who had hit her. The next morning they found the blood and ax under her window and the slaves confessed to the act.

"The soldiers came by the next day and took Anderson and his wife, Darcus, out in the back yard and hung them on a limb of a tree. They had been told that if they would kill my grandmother that they could take her three children, cross the Mason-Dixon line and the children could ransom their freedom.

"Major William Bobbitt would not allow one piece of furniture moved from the room where President Polk stayed, as long as he lived. I have the table that President Polk used as his writing desk. I was back home some fifteen years ago and took pictures of the home place, the next year a cyclone came and blew the home away. I copied all the names of the family from a cousin's Bible, Polk Walker. Major William Bobbitt was a Methodist and gave the ground for the cemetery and the Goshen church. My great grandparents and grandparents are buried there. I have always been interested in and proud of my Bobbitt relatives."