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Note: Esther Rhode, the elder daughter and fourth child of John and Mary Lewis Rhode, was born on March 17, 1794 on her parent's plantation on the Edisto River in Dorchester Co., South Carolina, near the small town of St. George. She married Daniel Summers; the date of the marriage is uncertain. It seems that she was unmarried when her oldest brother, William, left for Ohio in northern Ohio near Lake Erie. Her brother Jonathan also left, either with William or shortly afterwards. The Rhodes were Quakers, and many Quakers, like her brothers, left the South after 1800 because they decided slavery was wrong. Although Rhode family historians say that Esther Rhode Summers was married (and perhaps a mother) by the time her parents, John and Mary Lewis Rhode, and her other brothers, Caleb, Thomas and Seymour left South Carolina for Ohio in 1814, it is possible that a still unmarried Esther stayed in South Carolina with her sister, Mary. This seems likely, as the eldest of Esther's children was born much later, in 1831. It is quite possible that Esther, then of probable marriageable age when her parents left, decided to stay in the south but did not marry until the late 1820s, when she was about 25 years old. John and Mary Lewis Rhode's daughter and Esther Rhode Summers' sister, Mary Rhode Murray, may have just married in 1813 about the time her parents left for Ohio. She and her husband William Murray, and her husband's four children from his previous marriage, also stayed in South Carolina on their own plantation in Dorchester Co. Esther Rhode Summers and her husband had at least four children, John, William, George and Elizabeth. George died in November of 1864. In 1866, Elizabeth's husband, Richard Hiram Appleby, petitions the probate court regarding George's estate, saying that he is the only living heir (by marriage) to George's sister. So, in any case, by 1866, all of Daniel and Esther's children were deceased with no issue except for Elizabeth. Her three sons, William, John and George, all seemingly unmarried) either died young or, in George's case particularly, may have died fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War (more research is needed on this point). In 1860, Hester or Esther Summers is living with her son George, 22, and daughter Elizabeth, 15, in St. George's Parish, Dorchester (then Colleton) Co., South Carolina. George is listed as the head of the household. Under Ancestry.com, the name is mistakenly listed as "simmons." Living nearby are Elizabeth and Catherine Rhode, widows of Henry and William Rhode, respectively. Daniel and Ester/Hester "Hessie" Rhode Summers and children are mentioned several times in David Gavin's diary. This diary, now in the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill library, is considered a primary source of information for Dorchester and Colleton counties from 1850-1870.
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