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”

Some Thoughts on Genealogy

      Having spent several months delving into my familial origins many questions have been answered. Most of my ancestors hail from the British Isles. My great-great-grandparents Widener lived around the corner from my high school alma mater in the 1920s. A staggeringly large number of past generations lived and are buried within 30 miles of where I grew up. I learned that great-great-grandmother Tucker adjusted the soil composition with rusty metal fencing to change the colors of the hydrangea mopheads, and great-great-grandmother Tate stewed tomatoes in a huge vat in the backyard before canning them. Some kinfolk were upholders of the law, others frequently violated it.
      Yet many questions remain. Why did my great-great-great-grandfather Delamater, a physician and planter from New York, die at age 42 in Walton County, Georgia, leaving a wife, young son, and vast estate? Why did my great-great-great-grandparents Russell emigrate from England to Colorado in the 1870s? Why did their son George William Russell leave Colorado and come to Atlanta, and how did he meet his wife Lucile Lee Rogers, a girl from Montgomery, Alabama? How did my great-great-great-grandmother Sudie Bilbo, née Luckie, widowed at a young age with two children, have two more babies with no trace of a father? And is the rumor true that she is buried in an unmarked grave outside the churchyard? Some of these questions may be answered, but others will remain forever a mystery.

Always remember there was nothing worth sharing
Like the love that let us share our name.
—The Avett Brothers, “Murder in the City”

      Assembling one’s genealogy begins with names. They are the structure around and within which further information is situated, contextualized, compared, and verified. The surname identifies a family and links past and present, while the given name identifies an individual link in the chain. These names often disclose surprising revelations. For example, after I told Memaw (Charlotte Ann Brayton, née Williams) that her great-great-grandmother was Charlotte Ann Peers, née Pomfrey (1818-1881), the pieces fell into place, and she said knowingly, “So that’s why Mother always wanted to call me Charlotte Pomfrey, but [sisters] Betty and Jean convinced her not to.” Memaw’s sisters’ names also honor their ancestors: Betty Frances for their aunt Cora Frances Delamater and Jean Wycliff for their great-great-great-grandparents the Wickliffes.
      I discovered a remarkable uniformity of names in my paternal grandmother’s family. Each of Nana’s (Bettye Jane Widener, née Tate) four great-grandmothers was named some form of Jane: Mattie Jane Potter, Willantha Jane Rogers, Mary Jane Mayhew, and Rosella Jane Doster. Nana’s mother was Mary Jane Russell, and Nana continued the tradition with her daughter Debrajane. Then there are names that, rather than following tradition, seem to be newly invented. The strangest names tend to be the women’s, and the strangest of all include Cresserious Elizabeth Hancock (1822-90), who married my great-great-great-great-granduncle Robert Jackson McKown; Thermutis Mote (c. 1926-?), my first cousin twice-removed; and Caldawood “Woody” Tate (1890-?), my great-great-grandaunt. I find no obvious explanation or origin of “Cresserious” and “Caldawood,” but “Thermutis” was the name of Pharaoh’s daughter who found baby Moses afloat in the Nile.

The Shores of Amerikay

      In the countryside southwest of Washington, Georgia, at the end of a rugged gravel road garlanded with yellow wildflowers and spangled with sunbathing butterflies, War Hill rises above Kettle Creek. In this woodland on Valentine’s Day 1779, 400 Patriot militiamen commanded by John Dooly, Andrew Pickens, and Elijah Clarke surprised and defeated a Loyalist force nearly twice their number in the Battle of Kettle Creek. These frontiersmen confirmed the moniker bitterly applied to the area by the British: “hornet’s nest.” Today on the hilltop an obelisk hails the great victory with words etched in stone. In a graveyard across the clearing white marble tombstones memorialize some of the veterans of the fight. This is the final resting place of my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Jacob McClendon and his son-in-law, my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather William Heard.

 

Sketch of the Battle of Kettle Creek. The original inscription reads,

"Engagement between the Whigs and Tories."

The McClendons
      The unlikely chain of events that would see these two men on the same colonial battlefield began with an oceanic voyage from Europe to the New World. According to the McClendon DNA Project, families with this surname originate in Northern Ireland. This area was called Ulster until 1921, when it was annexed by Great Britain and the rest of the island became independent Ireland. Ulster comprised approximately the same land area as metropolitan Atlanta and was divided into counties. Two of these, County Armagh and southeast County Down, are the earliest geographic origins of the McClendon name, a variant of “McAlinden,” which is the English translation of the Irish Gaelic “Mac Giolla Fhionnain.”
      The McClendons first set foot on American soil in present-day northeastern North Carolina. The area was colonized by Virginians moving south in the 1650s. Its reputation developed such that many in the Old Dominion called it Rogues Harbor because it was a haven for debtors and sundry miscreants, yet Quaker missionaries also traversed the region in its early days. The Carolina colony was founded in 1629 and stretched from Virginia to Spanish Florida. A division was made in 1712 between north and south, with the north becoming a royal colony in 1729 after the former proprietors were bought out by the crown. Native American resistance was overcome in several wars as migrant Europeans, many of Scots-Irish, German, and Huguenot derivation, poured into the colony.

Into my heart on air that kills

  From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

  What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

  I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

  And cannot come again.

—A. E. Housman

      The farthest into history for which the Y-DNA evidence has accounted is Dennis McClendon, born in 1641 in parts unknown (presumably Ulster or Scotland). He and his family settled in this region along the Albemarle Sound and Roanoke River in the 1690s. Part of a deed in Chowan Precinct reads, “Elizabeth Lewerton to Dennis Mackclenden this 3 April 1699 in ye 11th. year of ye Reign of our Sovereign Lord King William of England…” Dennis’ wife Elizabeth, born around 1660, predeceased him, and he remarried. The court of Perquimans Precinct was held at his home in 1704 and 1705 and at the home of his widow Deborah Whedbee McClendon on July 11, 1706, meaning he had expired within the preceding year.
      One of Dennis’ sons was Thomas McClendon, born in 1690, possibly in Barbados, a nexus of Atlantic travel and trade. He married Elizabeth Bush in 1716 in Chowan Precinct, the selfsame division where she was born on June 1, 1691. In 1717 there is a record of a “Thos. Macklindon” purchasing land from James Wilson in Chowan Precinct. In 1725 he served as executor of his brother’s will in Bertie Precinct. In 1729 Elizabeth died; Thomas married Mary Bryan the following year. Tax records indicate they moved to the southern end of the Pamlico Sound in Craven County in 1741 and 1742. He died in 1757 in Cumberland County, contemporary site of the city of Fayetteville.

       One of Thomas and Elizabeth’s sons was Jacob McClendon, born near the Albemarle Sound in northeastern North Carolina. His tombstone gives his birth year as 1715, the Sons of the American Revolution records put it at 1725 or 1726, still other sources as disparate as 1702, 1730, and 1731. Jacob married Martha Travis, born around 1736 in North Carolina, between 1748 and 1751, and they had eleven children. The births and baptisms of Isaac and Jamima were recorded in 1753 in the register book of Prince Frederick Parish, Winyah, an Anglican church. The next year the French and Indian War began, bringing intermittent battles between the colonists and France’s Native American allies to the frontier. During the war the family probably lived in Cumberland County, about halfway between the coast and the frontier. As the conflict wound down, Jacob was commissioned on March 11, 1761, as a lieutenant in the North Carolina militia in Dobbs County, but a reproduction of the list indicates his name was removed and does not give a reason. In 1774 Jacob set out for the Georgia frontier, where his daughter Nancy, born around 1760, would marry into the Heard family.

The Heards
      When personal taxation was imposed in Medieval England surnames became necessary. Various spellings of “Heard” were used by families engaged in herding animals. Some researchers have connected the Heard name to William the Conqueror, but there is no established link to our Heards. We can definitively trace them to Ulster, present-day Northern Ireland, where they were English settlers who spoke the local language. One legend about the Heards claims the paterfamilias was the Earl of Tyrone who, in an argument over tithes, threw a pitchfork at someone and was forced to make haste to America. However, no evidence for this story has been produced.

I’m bidding farewell to the land of my youth

and the home I love so well.

And the mountains so grand round my own native land,

I’m bidding them all farewell.

With an aching heart I’ll bid them adieu

for tomorrow I’ll sail far away,

O’er the raging foam for to seek a home

on the shores of Amerikay.

And when I am bidding my last farewell

the tears like rain will blind,

To think of my friends in my own native land,

and the home I’m leaving behind.

But if I’m to die in a foreign land

and be buried so far far away

No fond mother’s tears will be shed o’er my grave

on the shores of Amerikay.

—Irish folk song

      What we do know is there was a Heard man whose first name is lost, born around 1665 in County Tyrone. His sons inscribed the family in the pages of American history when they crossed the Atlantic in 1719-20. One of the sons was Charles, born around 1691 and married in 1718. They settled in Sansbury in Pennsylvania Dutch Country. On August 30, 1744, Charles received a land grant of 225 acres on the South Hardware River, a tributary of the James, in newly-formed Albemarle County, where in the previous year Thomas Jefferson was born. In a 1746 note to creditor Henry Cary we learn that Charles was a blacksmith and able to sign his own name legibly. By July 1748 he was dead, and the will in which he bequeathed his acreage to one of his sons, Charles Jr., was challenged in court by said Cary. Charles Jr. craftily maneuvered to sell the land to his brother, prompting a lawsuit for non-payment of his father’s debts. The court ordered the seizure of his property, in this case an iron knife and ring, which by the time they were sold by the sheriff in 1749 Charles Jr. and his family had evacuated the state and fled to Carolina.
      Charles Jr. was born around 1718 in County Tyrone and married Isabella in the early 1740s in Pennsylvania. They had six boys and one girl from 1743 to 1764. After their abrupt relocation to North Carolina they lived on 100 acres in Cumberland County. Through the 1750s and 60s Charles Jr. bought and sold hundreds of acres and served on several juries. In April 1768 he again fell into debt, and his property was seized. This latest entanglement saw him decamp to South Carolina, wherefrom in October 1768 he deeded 100 acres to one of his sons in exchange for fifteen pounds. The militia roll call in his former home county pointedly described the fiasco when in November 1770 it declared him to be “gone.” Charles Jr.’s dubious sojourn in the Palmetto State ended when he moved to Georgia. His departure for the thirteenth colony coincided with that of the McClendons. Both families lived in Cumberland County at the same time, and they became neighbors again in the frontier forests on the western bank of the Savannah River.

 

Wilkes County
      The land settled by the McClendons and Heards and thousands of other adventurous pioneers was originally Cherokee and Creek territory. A 1763 treaty between the Southern colonies and the natives limited settlement to south of the Little River. Subsequent commerce between traders and natives left the latter owing about £60,000. Sir James Wright, the royal governor, seized the opportunity and convened a congress on June 1, 1773, at which the Creek and Cherokee ceded two million acres in a wide swath along the western banks of the Savannah River extending northward to the confluence of the Keowee and Tugaloo Rivers. The land, known as St. Paul’s Parish until it was divided into counties, was opened for settlement in parcels from one to 100 acres. Farmers of good character were exhorted to tame the wilds and were assured the soil was suitable for indigo, Indian corn, cotton, tobacco, flax, and hemp. On December 7, 1773, at Wrightsborough, a Quaker community near Augusta, Charles Heard Jr. received his tract: “Herd, Charles--S. C. a wife 2 sons and 1 dau. from 17 to 9 years old. 200 acres on head of Fishing creek at Isaac Goldsbee's cabbin.” Jacob McClendon was granted land on October 10, 1774, at Dartmouth, later known as Petersburg, in the fork of the Broad and Savannah Rivers: “McClendon, Jacob--N. C. a wife 4 sons and 4 daus. from 18 to 1 years old. xxx acres on Fishing creek including xxx acres surveyed for Thomas Richardson including improvements made by Richardson and Nemh. Killcres.”

Stephen Heard and his horse Silverheels, from the 1913 collection

"Grandmother Stories from the Land of Used-to-Be" by Howard Meriwether Lovett

      Charles Jr.’s first cousin Stephen Heard, born in 1740 and a veteran of the French and Indian War, also settled in the ceded lands along with his father and brothers. The family came from Virginia where their land abutted the property of George Washington, from whom they purchased Arabian horses. On New Year’s Day 1774 the family and other settlers began constructing a stockade on the future site of Washington called Fort Heard or Heard’s Fort. Stephen homesteaded north of there on Fishing Creek. Jacob McClendon and Charles Jr. also settled the area, which today is ten miles north of Washington near the ghost town of Danburg. On February 5, 1777, a convention at Savannah officially named the land Wilkes County in honor of the British parliamentarian and proponent of the American cause John Wilkes.

Soon after the conference a party of surveyors, chain carriers, markers, artisans, guards, and astronomers, as well as a few adventurers and Indian braves, set out from Augusta. Crossing Little River, the company entered a country of magnificent forests abounding in deer, black bear, wolf, wildcat, and such small game as squirrel and rabbit. Quail rose whirring from the underbrush, and the clear, rapid streams were full of fish.

—Writers of the Works Progress Administration, The Story of Washington-Wilkes, 1941

This territory, called the New Purchase, contains about two millions of acres, lying upon the head of Great Ogechee, between the banks of the Savanna and Alatamaha, touching on the Ocone and taking within its precincts all the waters of Broad and Little rivers, comprehends a body of excellent fertile land, well watered by innumerable rivers, creeks and brooks.

—William Bartram, Travels, spring 1776

      The frontier in those days was hardly peaceful. Besides the outbreak of war there were Cherokee and Creek raids, one of which in 1777 resulted in Charles Jr.’s house being burned down, his property and belongings ransacked, and a slave woman stolen. In 1802 his sons were still seeking restitution in court. In January 1779 Augusta fell to the British, and the maneuvers which culminated in the Battle of Kettle Creek began. After the Patriot victory there Wilkes County was delivered from further British and Loyalist incursions. The county’s attitude towards the revolution was made clear when the first court met at Jacob McClendon’s house on August 25, 1779. Nine Loyalists were sentenced “to be hanged by the Neck till their bodies are Dead.” The following year Heard’s Fort was called Washington, the first city named for the revolutionary hero. On February 5, 1780, it was declared Georgia’s seat of government, and on February 18 Stephen Heard was elected acting governor for a one-year term.
      One of Charles Jr.’s sons William, born around 1751 in North Carolina, had also won a land grant of 100 acres and settled at Fishing Creek. He accumulated and sold hundreds of acres during and after the war, and around 1779 he married Jacob McClendon’s daughter Nancy. Charles Jr. lost his wife in this period and remarried a landowning widow, Margaret Brady. In Wilkes County’s first tax digest in 1785 it records he owned 615 acres there and another 200 in Greene County. Charles Jr. died in late 1797, and to his wife he left:

…my riding horse, Britton, also two cows, white, black and white face, together with the increses that they have had and to come. Also my household furniture, my feather bed excepted and bed quilt, also I give to my said wife the tract of land I now live on, all at her disposal, also I lend to my said wife my negro woman, named Rody, also my negro man, named Mingo, during her widowhood, providing that said negros are not moved out of this state.

In 1793 Jacob died and in his will divided his estate of more than a thousand acres and many slaves among his sons; to his daughter Nancy he bequeathed £25 payable in tobacco. His wife Martha lived for many more years in Wilkes County and died there in 1827. Nancy’s death followed on her father’s in the late 1790s, and William remarried Rachel Griffin, with whom he had several children. They moved to Harricane Creek in Jackson County in 1814. William died there in 1825.
      One of William’s daughters with his first wife was named Nancy, born on July 29, 1785. She had a brief marriage to Azariah Bostwick before he died as a young man, and she lived most of her nine decades as a widow. She died on July 2, 1876 and is buried at Macedonia Baptist Church in Oxford. Nancy Heard Bostwick was the great-great-grandmother of my great-grandmother Grace Tucker Brayton, yet there is no indication she or anyone else in our immediate family knew of this branch of their family tree. In 1790 Wilkes County contained one-third of Georgia’s population and counted as residents Meriwether Lewis and Eli Whitney, but today the area is depopulated and remembered mostly for its rich history. Now that we know about our Heard and McClendon ancestors we can remember our own connection to this rich history.