December 17, 2020
Doing this ARC-based historical/genealogical research and writing is hard work. Like with being a beekeeper (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 but 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 doing history, genealogy, and kinship studies. I don’t resent having to make these changes at all.
However, there are also great joys to be found in this line of work, and some of them are profound, even life-altering. To be honest, these 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 of what Explorer Meriwether Lewis wrote upon first seeing the Pacific, after months of hardship and travel across unfamiliar lands, hoping to find it: “Ocean in view. Oh, the joy.”
Being a native Texan, I might be exaggerating a bit here, but not very 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/Shoal 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 four specific names shown together consecutively on this page, my pulse quickened and my heart sang. I already knew who these men were and a fair amount about their lives, but this particular grouping of their names was a bit like a bolt of lightning, not entirely “out of the blue,” but illuminating the long, dark corridor that connects the past, present, and future.
As such, the names listed on this specific page have become a kind of personal “Rosetta Stone” of history, a key to understanding the past. This single primary historical document has become a kind of decoding device that is helping me to decipher some of the mysteries of my own family’s history, and, by extension, to also solve some of the mysteries of the history of the early United States.
Below, I will briefly describe and tell a story about each of the four men whose names were consecutively written on a piece of paper in 1796. Charles Bond, Clerk of the Chauga 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 Furman University’s archives to Northern Arizona University’s Cline Library in Flagstaff:
James Blare (Blair)
David Barton
William Wilburn
John Cleveland
James Blair (b. 1761) 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. Immediately after the Revolution, about 1785, 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 headman and entrepreneur 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 and also three 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.
His 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.
David (Oldham) Barton was the grandfather of Private Jesse Calhoun, Alabama, CSA, who is buried alongside several of my Gentry relatives in a small family graveyard near Wolf Creek/Antoine, Arkansas. Next to Jesse’s grave are the graves of two brothers, William Carroll Gentry and John Hamley Gentry. Their niece was Martha Ann Gentry, who is one of my sixth maternal grandmothers.
Martha Ann 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 Wild Potato Clan. James Vann’s first daughter was named Delilah Vann (b. 1785).
In 1777, in Wilkes County, North Carolina, Jesse Calhoun’s great-grandfather David Barton died. At Barton’s estate sale, sixteen year old James Blair purchased a “swingletree.” The Blairs were good friends of the Barton family. David Oldham Barton’s father David Barton was supposedly killed in the Cumberland Gap by Indians, while exploring Caintuck (Kentucky) with Daniel Boone. (If so, they were probably Cherokees or Shawnees).
In my creative imagination, the fast horse that messenger boy “Jimmy” Blair is riding to Kings Mountain has on the same swingletree that he had purchased from the Bartons three years earlier. (How long do swingletrees typically last?).
Coincidentally, 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 other places in Austin like the famous Barton Springs are named for William Barton, one of the earliest pioneers in the Texas Hill Country. “Billy” Barton was a close blood relative of David Oldham Barton. His father’s name was also David Barton!
William Wilburn also purchased an item at David Barton’s estate sale. In 1777, he was also a resident of Wilkes County and a close friend of the Bartons and Blairs. In 1796, Wilburn apparently gave Delilah Vann and her husband Tyree Gentry their first known land parcel in Franklin County, Georgia, along the Tugaloo River at “Hatton’s Ford.” This was a 150 acre portion of the original 200 acre land grant that Wilburn received from the state of Georgia, which he was given as payment for services rendered during the American Revolution. Wilburn and Blair were both Rebels against the tyranny of the British Empire and Monarchy. Their friend David Barton died just as the Revolution was beginning.
John Cleveland was the Pastor of Chauga Baptist Church, and the brother of Colonel Benjamin Cleveland, commander of the “armed and dangerous” Wilkes County, North Carolina militia at Kings Mountain. The Second Amendment refers not to an individual’s right to bear arms, but to militias like theirs. At Kings Mountain, Cleveland served as Chaplain for his brother’s unit. The Clevelands, Bartons, Wilburns, and Blairs (et. al.) were all close friends and relatives living in Wilkes County before and during the Revolution.
Upon Independence, Colonel Cleveland and about a hundred other families mainly from Wilkes County moved down into what is now the western tip of South Carolina, in the area between the Tugaloo River and the Keowee River. 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 land grants on both sides of the Tugaloo River that these Revolutionary War veterans settled down upon were indigenous lands of the Cherokee Nation that the federal government had recently forced the Cherokees to cede to the USA. The specific area where the Cleveland brothers, Blair, Wilborn, Barton, and many others settled encompassed many of the Cherokee “Lower” Towns that Revolutionary forces had burned and pillaged during the war. These were villages like Tugaloo, Estatoe, Keowee, and Qualache, among others.
Because of the violence, Cherokees abandoned most of these villages, moving further west and southwest. The Lower Towns were adjacent to the Creek Nation’s northern borderlands. There were still boundary disputes, retaliatory raids, and horse stealing going on during this time period on the “wild frontier” (1785-1795)….
Reverend Cleveland had a long mane of flowing white hair, and he baptized many people in the Tugaloo, including William Martin in 1791.
Martin was one of the white sons of General Joseph Martin of Virginia, another Rebel against the British Empire’s tyranny. Martin also had a Cherokee wife. Her name was Elizabeth Ward, and she was the daughter of Bryant Ward and Nanyehi of the Wolf Clan, a 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-allied Cherokees, who fought with the Tories against the Rebels. If they could gain their independence from King George, these Rebels knew that they would be able to settle upon Cherokee lands even further to the west.
It is unclear about why Nancy Ward (Nanyehi) was pro-USA. Her brother Dragging Canoe was the Ho Chi Minh or Guerilla Warrior of the Cherokees, and he and his warriors killed many white settlers, including women and children. These Chickamaugan separatists took no prisoners. No doubt the encroaching white settlers considered him a “terrorist.” They also took no prisoners, and killed women and children indiscriminately.
In any event, it is important to remember that Nanyehi, or Nancy Ward, a woman of color, played a key role in the successful Revolution “heard ‘round the world,” especially now, as a woman of color becomes Vice President of the United States, for the first time in our long 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 Nancy Ward’s white husband Bryant Ward, James’s father being Samuel Ward.
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 to contest his father’s will. Around 1805, 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.
In 1816, Blair was one of two men who had Letters of Administration upon the estate of Samuel Ward, John’s brother. Samuel’s will is missing, for now.
Around that time, the Gentry family (including James Ward) were living on Standing Rock Creek in Stewart County, Tennessee, but in 1817 they moved to Wolf Creek in the Arkansas Territory. Beginning in the same year, so did David Gentry and other Hiwassee Cherokees, although they settled north (instead of south) of the Hot Springs, on the Arkansas River, near Dardanelle Rock, upstream from Little Rock.
Twelve years later, in 1829, David Gentry was dead, and Samuel Houston of Tennessee showed up unexpectedly, re-connecting to a community of people he had lived with for about three years, twenty years earlier. Houston married David’s widow Diana Rogers Gentry in a traditional Cherokee ceremony at the house (slave plantation) of John Jolly, Principal Chief of the Arkansas Cherokees. He was also Houston’s adopted father. The Gentry/Houston wedding happened just west across the border between the Arkansas Territory and the newly created Indian Territory, which the USA had recently created for the Arkansas Cherokees to move to after their own reservation lands in the Arkansas Territory were dissolved, by the Treaty of 1828.
In any event, because of my own personal “Rosetta Stone,” a single page found in a primary historical document that includes four consecutive names, I now know “the rest of the story.” This information seems relevant and important right now, especially because the results of an upcoming run-off election on January 5, 2021, for two U.S. Senate seats in Georgia will profoundly affect how the future unfolds.
It would seem that Georgia’s past history involving indigenous people and people of African American descent is still at the heart of things. The past is prologue to the future, and perhaps we have “forgotten to remember to forget.” As a Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation once remarked, “Our courage is our memory.” (–Wilma Mankiller)
P.S. Several dozen other church members are listed in the Chauga Baptist Church record from 1796. All have different first names, but I noticed that they 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 “frontier.”
Saluda!
Patrick Pynes, Ph.D.
honeybeeteacher@gmail.com
Proprietor, Ancestral Roots Consulting
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