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My Own Private Rosetta Stone

December 17, 2020

Doing this ARC-based historical/genealogical research and writing is hard work. Like with being an organic beekeeper and gardener (my “other” job), tremendous patience is required.  Sometimes I find myself humbled and frustrated when I discover that someone whose “past” life I have spent many hours researching turns out to be someone else entirely: a different person with the same name: for example, John Reid.

When that happens, an entire narrative must be drastically revised so that the truth can finally be told.

These inevitable revisions are inherent to the practice of weaving together genealogy, public history, and kinship studies. I don’t resent them at all.

Along with the frustrations, there are also great joys to be found in this line of work, and some of them can be profound, even life-altering. To be honest, these highly pleasurable experiences don’t happen as often as the frustrating “revisions”; however, when they do happen, they are amazing, like an unexpected rainstorm after six months of drought. They give you a deeper appreciation for what Explorer William Clark wrote in 1805, upon first seeing the Pacific, after months of hardship and travel across unfamiliar terrain: “Ocean in view! O! The joy!”

Being a native Texan, I might be exaggerating a bit here, but not by much.

Recently I had one of these “peak” research experiences when I came across a single page from the old handwritten records of the Chauga Creek Baptist Church of Franklin County, Georgia. I was able to get this church’s records on microfilm from Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. The page that I found dates from 1796, and it is part of a longer list of the church’s members from that specific year.

When I saw these four specific names listed together in consecutive order on this page, my pulse quickened and my heart sang. I already knew who these men were and a fair amount about them, but seeing this particular grouping of their names was like a bolt of lightning. Although the flash of light was not entirely “out of the blue,” for a brief instant it illuminated the long, dark corridor that connects the past, present, and future within linear time. As such, the names listed on this specific page have become a kind of personal “Rosetta Stone” of history, a master key to understanding the past.

Along with other documents, this primary historical document has become a means to deciphering some of the mysteries of my own family’s history. By extension, it is also helping me to understand some of the mysteries of early American history, circa 1800.

Below, I will briefly describe and “show and tell” interwoven stories about each of the four men whose names were written on that piece of paper in 1796. Charles Bond, Clerk of the Chauga Creek Baptist Church, wrote these records with a feather ink pen. I read his cursive writing 224 years later, on a roll of microfilm being read and scanned by a computer, the microfilm having been shipped via Interlibrary Loan from the archives at Furman University to the Cline Library at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff:

James Blare (Blair)

David Barton

William Wilburn

John Cleveland

1. James Blair was a 19-year-old horseback messenger who was shot in the shoulder on his way to the pivotal Battle of Kings Mountain during the American Revolution (1780). Nevertheless, Ensign Blair delivered his message and participated in the battle, which turned out to be a major victory for the rebellious United States of America. Sometime after the Revolution, Blair moved down from North Carolina to the Tugaloo River area along the South Carolina/Georgia border, where he became a “close friend” and business partner with James Vann.

Vann was a wealthy mixedblood Cherokee entrepreneur and headman who in 1801 invited German-speaking Moravian missionaries to establish a school and mission at Diamond Hill, his slave plantation in the Cherokee Nation, in what is now northern Georgia. Vann and Blair were also business partners in the lucrative slave trade.

Colonel Blair, as he was later called, had several children with his two white wives. He also had three known children with two Cherokee women. One of his daughters was born out-of-wedlock with the Cherokee wife of his friend John Ward. George Blair, one of Blair’s mixedblood children, married two sisters who were daughters of Jonathan Blythe, a white man, and his mixedblood Cherokee wife. George Blair was one of the approximately 12,000 Cherokees who survived the Trail of Tears. One of the Blythe sisters died on the way west, while being force marched to “the Arkansas.” She was one of the approximately 4,000 Cherokees who “cried and died.”

George Blair’s father-in-law Jonathan Blythe was a direct ancestor of William Jefferson (Blythe) Clinton, on his white side. Hillary Rodham’s husband has no Cherokee “blood,” but he does have ancestral connections to prominent Cherokees, like the Blythes.

2. David (Oldham) Barton was the grandfather of Private Jesse Calhoun, Arkansas, CSA, who is buried alongside several of my Gentry relatives in a small family graveyard near Wolf Creek/Antoine, Arkansas. Next to Jesse’s tombstone are the graves of two brothers, William Carroll Gentry and John Hamley Gentry. Their niece was Martha Ann Gentry (b. 1846), who is one of my sixth maternal grandmothers.

Martha Ann Gentry was of Cherokee descent: her great-grandmother’s name was Delilah Gentry, maiden name likely Vann, meaning that Delilah was a close blood relative of James Blair’s good friend and business partner, James Vann. Delilah’s biological father John Vann III (the Interpreter) was the clan father (maternal uncle/mother’s brother) of James Vann. If so, then Delilah and James Vann were members of the Blind Savannah/Wild Potato Clan. James Vann’s first daughter was named Delilah. She was born in 1785. In 1801, she married a Scots American named David McNair in Knox County, Tennessee.

In 1989, I also got married to a Scots American in Knox County, Tennessee. At that time I knew none of this history.

In 1777, 16-year-old James Blair purchased a “swingletree” at the estate sale of David Barton, Jesse Calhoun’s great-grandfather. The Blairs were good friends of the Barton family in Wilkes County, North Carolina (British colony). David Oldham Barton’s father David Barton was supposedly killed by Indians (probably Shawnees, if true), while exploring the Cumberland Gap in Caintuck (Kentucky).

Barton Hills Elementary School in Austin, Texas, is the school I graduated from before moving on to junior high. I attended the fourth and the sixth grades there. This school and several other places in Austin like the famous Barton Springs are named for William Barton, one of the earliest pioneers to settle in the Texas Hill Country, and a close cousin of David Oldham Barton. “Billy” Barton’s older brother was also named David Barton!

3. William Wilburn also purchased an item at David Barton’s estate sale in 1777. He was also a resident of Wilkes County and a good friend of the Bartons and Blairs. At least three of Wilburn’s siblings married David Oldham Barton’s older siblings. In 1796, Wilburn apparently gave Delilah Vann and her husband Tyree Gentry their first known land parcel in Franklin County, Georgia, on the Tugaloo River near “Hatton’s Ford.”

This was a 150 acre portion of Wilburn’s original 200 acre land grant from the state of Georgia, which he received as payment for services rendered during the American Revolution. Wilburn and Blair were both Rebels against the tyranny of the British Monarchy and Empire. Their older friend David Barton died just as the Revolution began.

4. John Cleveland was the Pastor of Chauga Creek Baptist Church, and the brother of Colonel Benjamin Cleveland, commander of the “armed and dangerous” militia from Wilkes County, North Carolina, that helped to win the day at Kings Mountain. The Second Amendment explicitly refers to militias such as this one. At Kings Mountain, Cleveland served as Chaplain in his brother’s unit. The Clevelands, Bartons, Wilburns, and Blairs (et. al.) were all close friends and relatives who lived in Wilkes County before and during the Revolution.

As soon as the United States of America won its independence and became a sovereign nation, Colonel Cleveland and about one hundred other families from Wilkes County moved down into what is now the far northwest tip of South Carolina, in the area between the Tugaloo and Keowee Rivers. This was about 1784. At that time, the region between the two rivers was considered part of Franklin County, Georgia. In 1787, Georgia ceded this area to South Carolina.

The Georgia and South Carolina grants that these Revolutionary War veterans settled upon were lands that the Cherokee Nation had recently been forced to cede to the USA, in various treaties. The specific area where the Clevelands, Blair, Wilborn, and Barton settled encompassed most of the Cherokee Nation’s former “Lower” Towns. Revolutionary forces had burned and pillaged these villages during the war, including Tugaloo, Estatoe, Keowee, Qualache, and many others.

Because of this violence, the Cherokees abandoned most of these towns, moving further west and southwest. The Cherokee Nation’s Lower Towns were adjacent to the Creek Nation’s northern border. There were still boundary disputes, retaliatory raids, and horse stealing incidents happening during this time period on Georgia’s “wild frontier” (1785-1795).

In 1789, Revolutionary War hero General Joseph Martin of Virginia wrote a letter to the Governor of Georgia asking for guns, ammunition, and men to help the “inhabitants on Tugaloo River” who were being “distressed by the late mischief done by the Indians in our neighborhood.” The letter was signed not only by General Martin, but also by other local residents, including Elijah Isaacs and Bryant and Samuel Ward. Isaacs, another veteran of the Wilkes County Militia, was a good friend of James Blair. In fact, Isaacs had purchased the most items at David Barton’s estate sale, by far, probably because he was in the process of building a fort that would later be called “Fort Defiance.”

William Martin, a son of General Martin, was baptized in the Tugaloo
River by Reverend John Cleveland in 1791. According to Martin, who was also a member of the Chauga Creek Baptist Church, Pastor Cleveland had a long mane of flowing white hair.

Like James Blair, General Martin was also a Rebel against the British Empire’s tyranny. Like Blair, he also had a Cherokee wife. Her name was Elizabeth Ward, and she was the mixedblood daughter of Martin’s neighbor Bryant Ward and Nanyehi of the Wolf Clan, Beloved Woman of the Cherokee Nation. Nanyehi collaborated with her son-in-law during the Revolution and gave him useful intelligence to use against the British and their Cherokee allies, who fought with the Tories against the Rebels. If they were successful in gaining their independence from King George, the Revolutionaries knew that they would be able to continue expanding westward, re-settling upon ceded Cherokee and other indigenous people’s lands.

It is unclear about why Nancy Ward (Nanyehi) was pro-USA. Her brother Dragging Canoe was the Ho Chi Minh of the Cherokees, a guerilla warrior who terrified and killed many white settlers, including women and children. These Chickamaugan separatists took no prisoners. Encroaching white settlers no doubt considered “Dragon Canoe” a “terrorist.” The settlers were equally as violent and ruthless.

In any event, Nanyehi, or Nancy Ward, a woman of color, played a key role in the successful American Revolution “heard ‘round the world.” That is an important fact to remember, especially as Kamala Harris, a woman of color, becomes Vice President of the United States, for the first time in our nearly 250-year old history.

I believe and have evidence to the effect that James Ward, husband of Tyree and Delilah’s oldest daughter Mildred Gentry, was a white grandson of Nanyehi’s second husband Bryant Ward. James’s father was likely Samuel Ward, one of Bryant’s two sons. Along with General Martin, Colonel Isaacs, and his father, Samuel also signed the 1789 letter to Governor William Matthews of Georgia, asking for the state’s help in dealing with the Indians.

Bryant Ward and Samuel Ward lived next door to one another on Walton’s Creek of the Tugaloo River in Franklin County, Georgia, from about 1785 to 1815, when both men died around the same time, the father first. There was some controversy about Bryant Ward’s will. Samuel’s brother John Ward, who lived in the nearby Cherokee Nation, hired a lawyer and contested it. John Ward’s Cherokee wife, granddaughter of a prominent Cherokee leader whom the British called “Old Hop,” had a daughter out of wedlock with James Blair around 1805.

In 1818, Blair was one of two men who had Letters of Administration upon the estate of John Ward’s brother Samuel Ward. His will is missing, at least for now.

Around that time, James and Mildred Ward and their Gentry relatives were living on Standing Rock Creek in Stewart County, Tennessee, but in 1817 they moved to Wolf Creek in the Arkansas Territory. In the same year, Tyree Gentry’s younger brother David Gentry, David’s father-in-law John Rogers, Sr., and other Hiwassee Cherokees also began moving to Arkansas, although they settled north (instead of south) of the Hot Springs, on the Arkansas River, near Dardanelle Rock, upstream from Little Rock.

About a decade later, in 1828, David Gentry died. Shortly thereafter, Samuel Houston of Tennessee showed up unexpectedly, re-connecting with a community of people whom he had lived with twenty years earlier, after running away from home (1808-1811). Before moving to Arkansas, this Cherokee community lived in the mouth of the Hiwassee River at its confluence with the Tennessee River, on “Jolly’s Island.”

Before Houston showed up again, running away this time from his failed first marriage, the Hiwassee Cherokees had since been forced to move west from their Arkansas “Rez” to the Indian Territory, under terms of the Treaty of 1828. There Houston married David Gentry’s widow Diana Rogers in a traditional Cherokee wedding ceremony, held at the home (slave plantation) of John Jolly, Principal Chief of the Arkansas/Western Cherokees. Jolly was Diana Rogers Gentry’s uncle and Houston’s adopted father.

In June 1803, at Southwest Point in Tennessee, my seventh maternal grandfather Samuel Norwood/Narrad received permission and a passport from the federal agent to the Cherokee Nation to visit and work with John Rogers, Sr., David Gentry’s father-in-law, for a period of six months. This would have been on Jolly’s Island in the Cherokee Nation. Samuel’s daughter Jane Narrad and her husband William Gentry, oldest son of Delilah Vann Gentry and Tyree Gentry, are also buried in the small Gentry family graveyard on Wolf Creek, a few feet away from the grave of Jesse Calhoun, grandson of James Blair’s friend David Oldham Barton.

Like Jesse Calhoun, I am an Irish American, and proud of it. I am also a proud Cherokee descendant, not enrolled.

As the cliche goes, “what comes around, goes around.” At some level, all things are interrelated. Because of my own personal “Rosetta Stone,” a single page from history that lists four consecutive names, I now know “the rest of the story.” This information seems relevant and important right now, as an upcoming run-off election for two U.S. Senate seats on January 5, 2021, in Georgia will profoundly affect how the future unfolds.

It would seem that the state of Georgia, its early history, and people of indigenous and African American descent are still at the heart of things: “here we go again.”

P.S. Several dozen other church members are listed in the Chauga Creek Baptist Church record from 1796. They all have different first names, but I noticed that these church members all share the same surname: Blackman, or Blackwoman, such as “Lucy Blackwoman.” These Baptists were the slaves of James Blair, John Cleveland, David Barton, William Wilburn, and many of the other Americans who also belonged to this church on the Georgia “frontier.”

Black, White, Brown, and Native American: they were “all in it” together then, and we are all in it together now. To the “future,” what is “now” to us will be the “past.” History matters.

Saluda!

Patrick Pynes, Ph.D.

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Proprietor, Ancestral Roots Consulting

patrickpynes@gmail.com

Copyright 2020 by Patrick Gordon Pynes

Note: All genealogical and historical claims made in this blog (essay) are supported with more than 40 primary historical documents, including deeds, letters, tax records, census schedules, photographs, drawings, maps, Bible records, etc. All of these supporting documents are available as a separate PDF file. If interested in purchasing a copy of this PDF document, please contact the author.