The Emerald Lyle

      The story of our branch of the Lyle family begins in Scotland in the 1600s and terminates a century ago in Jackson County, Georgia, with my grandmother Bettye Widener’s great-great-grandmother. This essay chronicles the first part, up to 1814. It is a multigenerational concatenation of people at the mercy of historical forces like migration, religious persecution, and the vagaries of pre-modern agriculture. The Lyles faced such an array of challenges that it brings to mind Eliphaz’s speech in the Book of Job: “Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground; yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward” (5:6-7). The Lyles may not have pondered the provenance of their problems as these verses do, but they probably coped as best they could, such that a retrospective of their lives reads like a saga.

Don’t that road look rough and rocky?
      The etymology of “Lyle,” like numerous other surnames in the British Isles, can be traced to the Norman conquest of England in 1066. William the Conqueror ordered a census in 1085, compiled the next year as the Domesday Book. This document references a man of the name Hunfridus de Insula, “de Insula” being Latin for “of the island.” The French translation reads “de l’Isle,” and after Norman rule ended in England the “de” was dropped and its spelling gradually evolved into innumerable variations, one of which was “Lyle.” An early Scottish exponent of place begetting name was Ralph de l’Isle, who built Duchal Castle at the confluence of two rivers, dug a moat connecting them, and sealed off his residence as an island fortress. His name first appears in an 1170 grant to monks in nearby Paisley as the Latinized “Radulphus de Insula, Dominus de Duchal.” The castle fell in the 1500s, by which time “Lyle” was a common name in the area.
      The authoritative text on Lyle genealogy, Oscar K. Lyle’s 1912 study Lyle family: the ancestry and posterity of Matthew John, Daniel and Samuel Lyle, pioneer settlers in Virginia, locates our Lyle ancestors in western Scotland on the Kintyre Peninsula, a narrow landmass 30 miles long that stretches southward into the North Channel towards Ireland. In 1606, the Lyles left Kintyre to settle in Ulster, the northern province of Ireland. The reasons for this migration reach back several decades and reinforce the British historian G. M. Trevelyan’s dictum that the interaction between Scotland and Ireland is “a constant factor in history.”
      For most of the Sixteenth Century the English fought to establish hegemony over Ireland. As they encroached into Ulster in the 1590s they ignited the resistance of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. In the Nine Years’ War (1594-1603), O’Neill and his Irish allies battled to halt the invasion of their territory and were defeated by a large English army. Both sides employed such devastating scorched-earth tactics that Ulster was left a howling wilderness, depopulated and famished. A treaty was signed on March 30, 1603, six days after the death of Queen Elizabeth. She was succeeded by King James, a Scot, whose ascension unified the crowns of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Hugh Montgomery, a Scottish aristocrat and friend of the new sovereign, saw an opportunity to consolidate the English position in Ulster by resettling tenants from the crowded Scottish Lowlands. Along with James Hamilton, secret agent to the crown, and Conn O’Neill, an Irish landowner who had to be broken out of jail and granted a royal pardon, Montgomery submitted the scheme to King James. He accepted the deal in April 1606 and divided between the three men vast holdings in Counties Down and Antrim, on the eastern shores of Ulster. Thanks to Montgomery and Hamilton’s robust recruitment, the first wave of settlers reached Ulster the next month.

The Scots are a middle temper, between the English tender breeding and the Irish rude breeding and are a great deal more likely to adventure to plant Ulster than the English.
—King James I

      As this sweeping policy was enacted the government punished another rebellion by the earls in western Scotland by expropriating and evacuating their lands. Oscar K. Lyle’s book asserts the Lyles were made refugees by this punitive action and resettled in Ulster on Randall MacDonnell’s land. MacDonnell, the son-in-law of the Earl of Tyrone and a Catholic, joined his fellow Irishmen in the Nine Years War but halfway through switched sides, for which treachery he was rewarded 333,907 acres. The Scottish refugees to Ulster crossed the Northern Channel from Kintyre to County Antrim, points just thirty miles apart and within sight on a clear day. It was a short journey as migration routes go, but its effects would resound into the New World.

 The Glens of Antrim

Don’t that sea look wide and deep?
      The Scottish tenants set about cultivating the land, which even in 1575, decades before the most recent spasm of rebellion and conquest, Sir Sydney Smith described as “all desolate and waste.” Fortuitously for this risky enterprise, there was a bumper crop in 1606 and another the next year, at which time occurred the Flight of the Earls. For reasons still subject to historical debate, many Irish nobles who were vanquished in the Nine Years War and yet were treated leniently nonetheless feared English persecution and fled to Spain. The section of MacDonnell’s colossal bounty on which the Lyles settled was southeast of the Glens of Antrim, a region of uneven agriculture and breathtaking natural beauty. In the parish of Larne in the town of Browndodd the Lyles lived and farmed and worshipped as Presbyterians and around midcentury Samuel Lyle was born to parents of unknown appellation or avocation.
      Samuel became a landholder in Browndodd and in 1680 married Janet Knox of Knoxtown, daughter of John Knox and Sally Locke. Oscar K. Lyle describes their idyllic home in his 1912 book:

A lane leads to the house, which is still standing and occupied by one of his descendants. It is of stone, two stories of height and has now a slate roof. In earlier days the roof was thatched, as was the method of the Scotch…. In it is the cradle in which were rocked three of the four Lyle pioneers to Virginia and the father of the fourth one. This cradle was in service for seven generations.

This cradle was built by James Lyle, one of Samuel and Janet’s six children. In 1700 he married Margaret Snoddy, also of Scots-Irish extraction, possibly at Raloo Presbyterian Church, where it is believed the family worshipped and are buried. Three of their sons would immigrate to America, but the oldest, Robert, remained in Ireland. He married Ann Jane Locke and according to Oscar K. Lyle’s book worked as a “linen lapper at Larne bleach-green, one who takes charge of the linen and sees it packed up.” They lived on his wife’s farm in Toreagh and later on her father’s farm called “Pullendoes” and, when John Wesley toured Ireland, he preached an open-air service at their home—much like the preaching he and his brother Charles had done under the moss-draped live oaks on St. Simons Island years before.

…the young men of Ireland who wish to be free and happy should leave it and come here as quick as possible. There is no place in the world where a man meets so rich a reward for good conduct and industry as in America.
—John Dunlap, in a letter home to his brother-in-law

      Drought, poor crop yields, rising rents, and the Penal Laws of 1704, which targeted Catholics but also disadvantaged Presbyterians, triggered massive Scots-Irish immigration to America. Between 1717 and 1776 as many as 200,000 Scots-Irish crossed the ocean, lured by letters from family and reports in newspapers, both of which insinuated cheap land and limitless possibilities. Against this tumultuous backdrop David Locke Lyle, son of Robert and Ann, married Mary Blair in Larne on December 27, 1735. Over the next decade his brother Samuel and their uncles Matthew, John, and Daniel immigrated to Virginia and settled on Timber Ridge near the Shenandoah Valley. David and Ann arranged passage to South Carolina with their two young children and set sail in 1746. Some researchers have conjectured they were passengers aboard the Good Hope that sailed from Dublin to Charleston, but the vessel's name would be the cruelest of ironies: when the ship dropped anchor in Charleston harbor Mary was the widowed mother of two fatherless children, the hapless head of household having died at sea.

The Lyle House in Browndodd, ca. 1912

A New Life in America
      Tragedy did not end with the loss of David Lyle. Soon after their arrival one of the two children, a daughter, died, leaving Mary to look after her only remaining son Robert, named for his grandfather. Robert was born on March 14 of 1736 or 1737 in County Antrim—a quarter of a millennium before my own birthday. Mary and Robert appear to have joined their kindred in the Virginia backcountry following these tragic losses. For reasons about which researchers have only speculated (such as a religious epiphany), Robert changed his name before his 21st birthday to the longest name in the Bible: Maher Shalal Hashbaz Lyle. He drew this moniker from the Book of Isaiah:

Moreover the Lord said unto me, Take thee a great roll, and write in it with a man’s pen concerning Mahershalalhashbaz. And I took unto me faithful witnesses to record, Uriah the priest, and Zechariah the son of Jeberechiah. And I went unto the prophetess; and she conceived, and bare a son. Then said the Lord to me, Call his name Mahershalalhashbaz. (8:1-3)

Perhaps the Lyle formerly known as Robert saw in this prophetic name an homage to the country he left behind, as “Maher” is an Irish surname meaning “kindly” or “generous.” Perhaps he understood the Hebrew translation of the name, “The spoil speedeth, the prey hasteth,” and identified with its immediacy. Or perhaps this was an instance of reinvention and self-fashioning of the sort that has given America a reputation as the place to start over as a self-made man. We will never know the motivation for this change, only the life he lived under its banner.
      Maher’s name is found on a record in Bedford County, Virginia, in 1756 and as witness to a deed in Halifax County in 1763, the same year he married Elizabeth Gibson (she was called Betty), born on February 15, 1741, in Virginia to parents of Scots-Irish origin. Within a few years Maher purchased 166 acres on Cheese Creek in what became Campbell County, south of present-day Lynchburg. Between 1764 and 1784 they had twelve children, the last several born during the Revolutionary War. The Scots-Irish had a pivotal role in securing America’s independence from British rule, which had oppressed them in their former country and now in their new home. The Sons of the American Revolution have recognized Maher a Patriot for selling on credit 275 head of cattle to the army and for serving under George Washington in the Virginia Lines of the Continental Army when Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. The stock from whence Maher came had settled the wilds of the Virginia frontier before the war and persevered through the following crucible such that Washington remarked, “If defeated everywhere else, I will make my last stand for liberty among the Scots-Irish of my native Virginia.”
      In September 1782 Maher was compensated for supplying the American army, and on November 6, 1783 he and Betty sold their land to John Ward Sr. for £150. Per the indenture the Lyles lived there another year, after which they moved to upstate South Carolina. Betty’s family lived on an adjacent lot. Researchers have drawn attention to an apparent fracas between the families: on June 2, 1794, Maher and one of his sons brought suit against three of the Gibsons for breach of the peace. The matter was resolved in court when the defendants agreed to “a promise of good behavior toward the Lyles by the Gibsons for a period of twelve months and one day.” In 1799 Maher served on a jury in Union District and the 1800 census records him as the head of household. An unlikely bonanza drew them to Georgia before the ink had dried on the census form.

      According to a story supposedly carried in an Atlanta newspaper in the 1930s, Maher’s son Dilmus traveled to Jackson County, Georgia to survey land and water suitable for building a mill. When he returned he announced to the family he had instead found gold. His spellbinding tale and the lure of precious metal convinced the family to make haste to the site of the incipient goldmine, but Dilmus failed to locate the jackpot he had left just months before, dashing their hopes of easy riches. He reverted to his original plan and built the first grain mill in the area. Maher and Betty and many of their children settled along the Mulberry River, a tributary of the Middle Oconee River known to the Cherokee as Kuwa yi and the Creek as Tishmaqgu that rises near Braselton and weaves southeastwards between Hoschton and Winder. Maher and Betty lived with their son William and in the tax digest of 1809 owned a single slave.
      Maher Shalal Hashbaz Lyle died on January 30, 1814, in Jackson County; Betty followed on January 15, 1831. They are buried in Lyle Cemetery in a section shaded and overgrown by the woods, kith and kin nearby in eternal sleep. Two years ago Maher’s descendants conducted a 21-gun salute in his honor. A community called Mulberry grew where the Lyles first settled and in 1884 became a stop on the Gainesville, Jefferson, and Southern Railroad, later part of the Gainesville Midland Railroad. Though frontiers of geography and technology shifted and progressed and left Mulberry and the Lyle homestead behind, the inimitable Scots-Irish spirit endured. It was this spirit that animated the Lyles as they crossed the seas and settled the frontiers and shaped America into an empire of liberty unfolding across a whole continent.

Troubles and trials often betray those
Causing the weary body to stray
But we shall walk beside the still waters
With the Good Shepherd leading The Way.

Going up home to live in green pastures,
Where we shall live and die never more.
Even The Lord will be in that number,
When we shall reach that heavenly shore.

—H. W. Vanhoose, “Green Pastures”