When John Ford came to Marion County and settled in the area now known as Sandy Hook, there was another family with him: his wife’s.
As reenactments take place this weekend as part of the annual Ford’s Encampment, one descendent of the Ard family will be there. Barry S. Mason of Hattiesburg recently discovered his ties to the historic family and home.
“It was Catherine Ard and her parents, Thomas and Elizabeth, and all of her brothers and sisters - she had seven,” Mason said. “They all came over here together with John Ford and his brothers and their wives. The left South Carolina in 1805 and arrived in Mississippi in 1807 and found the Ford Home, where they were going to live. By 1809, they were all living here.”
Many descendants are still in the area, according to Mason.
“The Ards settled on this side of the river,” he said. “They were on the Mississippi and Louisiana side of the 31st parallel. Two of the Ford brothers went to the east side of the river on the ferry, Joseph and Stephen, and one brother went to Louisiana, Ebenezer. He was a judge.”
Seeing the John Ford Home preserved and shown as a historical site means a lot to the new member of the Marion County Historical Society.
“This is the house that my family used to live in,” Mason said. “I didn’t know this until last year. Mr. Kenneth Koch brought it to my attention. He had been over here and taken a tour.”
Koch said he and Mason began talking about the Ford Home one day.
“I went to school with his mother at USM, Jimmie Ard,” Koch said. “She was born and raised in Tylertown. I put it all together one day. I said to myself, Jimmie was an Ard and Catherine was an Ard, so I asked him, how are you related to Catherine Ard? You know what his reply was? ‘Who is that?’ He knows now.”
Mason said it was then he was able to put the pieces together.
“I started doing some research last year and got our family history, the Ard family,” he said. “Catherine was on our family tree. I put the connections together that the Ard family stayed here and just moved west over to Tylertown. Most of the Fords left and went to Jackson, Louisiana and Texas.”
Marion County Museum and Archives Curator Chris Watts said having a direct descendent of the residents study the home is significant.
“”One thing I find very interesting about a lot of the research that he’s done is that most people are tunnel-visioned when they conduct research,” Watts said. “They all focus on the Ford family, but he’s looking at it from the Ard family perspective. That leads him in some directions that I don’t know that people have really researched very much in the past. For example, you get across the state line into Louisiana into Washington Parish, and Thomas Ard owned a big pile of land and they are all part of this family, too. It’s really neat.”
Koch said he also has ties to Marion County history through the Rawls Plantation that burned during the Civil War.
“My daddy used to say when he was little he used to come over here and hunt squirrels. We lived in Hattiesburg, and he hunted where the plantation house once was,” he said. “There were big pine trees growing where the ashes were, and the columns were still there. I can’t find the columns, but we’re going to find them one day. We’re still exploring.”
Encampment
• Events at the John Ford Home begin at 9 a.m. Saturday, with free parking and shuttle service available from Sandy Hook Baptist Church and Sandy Hook United Methodist Church. John Ford’s Encampment features historical reenactments from Andrew Jackson’s stay during the War of 1812 to the Civil War.
Pictured Above: Barry S. Mason talks about his family connections to the John Ford Home. Mason’s family are the Ard family and the Rev. John Ford married Catherine Ard. The Fords and Ards lived at the home in the Sandy Hook area after relocating from South Carolina. | Photo by Mark Rogers
