Early History of Dr. I.B. Payne

Isaac B. Payne was born in Wilkinson County, Georgia in 1837.  He was one of seven children of Joseph Payne and Senia or Seney Crumbley Mitchell.  He was the grandson of Joseph Payne, Sr. and Mary Brassfield who moved from the area near Camden, South Carolina to Wilkinson County, Georgia  around the turn of the nineteenth century.  Isaac B. Payne was the great-grandson of Philip Payne and Mary Flannegan.  Philip Payne apparently had roots among the many Virginia Paynes, while Mary Flannegan was an immigrant (and probably an indentured servant in her early years in the South Carolina colony) from Northern Ireland.

Isaac B. Payne’s maternal line is still much of a mystery.  His mother was supposedly of full or mixed-blood Creek.  She was born a Crumbley and was legitimated and adopted in 1819 by a fairly prosperous Wilkinson County, Georgia couple, Isaac and Elizabeth Mitchell.  State records imply that Isaac Mitchell was Seney Crumbley’s birth father.  In later years, it appears that Isaac Mitchell had little confidence in his son-in-law, Joseph Payne. His will written in 1840, well before his death a decade later, specifies that under no condition should Joseph Payne be an administrator of or in control of assets left to his adopted daughter Senia and their children, which would have included the 15-20 slaves that the 1840 census indicates were held by the Mitchells.

The older children of Joseph and Seney Crumbley Mitchell Payne appear in the 1840 federal census, but the 1850 census shows three of these children under the household of Isaac and Elizabeth Mitchell, then 78 and 79 years of age.  Something happened to Isaac Payne’s parents between 1840 and 1850 that left three of the male Payne children, including Isaac, in the household and care of the Mitchells and other Payne children listed in other nearby households.  Based on her research, Peggy Payne has indicated that Joseph Payne lived for some years beyond 1850 and appeared in a county court later in the divorce of one of his daughters.  Perhaps Seney died in childbirth with her last child or from disease.

Apparently Seney’s Indian heritage was present in her children.  There are stories of difficulties for her youngest son, Joseph B. Payne, assimilating into white culture and his stated intention to resettle in the Indian Territories in Oklahoma.  He apparently left a family in Georgia under troubled circumstances and accusations of misconduct and started a new family in Louisiana.

Upon Isaac Mitchell’s death in the early 1850s, the administrator of his estate, Thomas N. Beale, reported periodically on the expenses and disbursement of the Mitchell estate to the Payne children.  During these years, Isaac attended local schools.  He boarded for a short time with his older brother, James W. Payne, who was a young schoolteacher in Wilkinson County (Davidson, 1930, Chapter 24) as well as boarded with a Dr. James T. Hudson, M.D., who practiced medicine in that county.  Isaac B. Payne completed his education in 1857 at the Albany Medical School in New York.  Why did he attend medical school, and why so far away from his native Georgia?  What influence, too, did young Isaac’s exposure to a far different culture in Albany, NY have on his later life in Louisiana?