WATAUGA COUNTY, NC - HISTORY - A History of Watauga County, North Carolina
			       Chapter 1
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A History of Watauga County, North Carolina

John Preston Arthur

Chapter I
Page 1

Our Home and Heritage.--Our home is a very small part of that vast region
known as the southern Appalachians, which a recent writer, Horace Kephart, has
aptly called Appalachia. This elevated section covers parts of eight States,
all of which are south of Mason and Dixon's line. It is in the middle of the
temperate zone and, for climate, is unsurpassed in the world. The average
elevation is about two thousand feet above tidewater. Blue Ridge is the name
of the range of mountains which bounds this highland country on the east,
though the western boundary is known by many names, owing to the fact that 
is bisected by several streams, all of which flow west, while the Blue Ridge
is a true water-shed from the Potomac to Georgia. The various names of the
western ranges are the Stone, the Iron, the Bald, the Great Smoky, the Unaka
and the Frog mountains. the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey has,
however, of recent years, given the name Unaka to this entire western border,
leaving the local names to the sections which have been formed by the passage
of the Watauga, the Doe, the Toe, the Cane, the French Broad, the Pigeon, the
Little Tennessee and Hiawassee rivers. With the exception of a few bare
mountain-tops, which are covered by a carpet of grass, these mountains are
wooded to the peaks. Between the Blue Ridge and the Unakas are numerous cross
ranges, separated by narrow valley's and deep gorges. Over the larger part of
this region are to be found the older crystalline rocks, most of which are
tilted, while the forests are of the finer hardwoods which when removed, give
places to luxuriant grasses. The apple finds it's home in these mountains,
while maize, when grown, is richer in proteins than that of the prairie lands
of Illinois.

Character of the Inhabitants in 1752. --Bishop Spangenberg, in the Colonial
Records (Vol. IV, pp. 1311-1314), Wrote from

Page 2

Edenton, N. C., that he found everything in confusion there, the counties in
conflict with each other, and the authority of the legislature greatly
weakened, owing largely to the fact that the older counties had formerly been
allowed five representatives in the general assembly; but, as the new counties
were formed, they were allow buy two. It was not long, however, before the
newer counties, even with their small representation, held a majority of the
members, and passed a low reducing the representation of the older counties
from five to two. The result of this was that the older counties refused to
send any members to the assembly, but dispatched an agent to England with a
view to the having their former representation restored. Before any result
could be obtained, however, there was "in the older counties perfect anarchy,"
with frequent crimes of murder and robbery. Citizens refused to appear as
jurors, and if court was held to try such crimes, not one was present. Prisons
were broken open and their inmates released. Most matters were decided by
blows. But the county courts were regularly held, and whatever belonged to
their jurisdiction received the customary attention.

People of the East and West. --Bishop Spangenberg, in the same letter, divided
the inhabitants of the eastern counties into  two classed --natives, who could
endure the climate, but were indolent and sluggish, and those from England,
Scotland and  Ireland and from the northern colonies of America, the latter
being too poor to buy land there. some of these were refugees  from justice,
had fled from debt, or had left wife and children elsewhere--or, possibly, to
escape the penalty of some crime.  Horse thieves infested parts of this
section, but he adds in a postscript written in 1753: "After having traversed
the length and breadth of North Carolina, we have ascertained that towards the
western mountains there are plenty of people who have come from Virginia,
Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and even from New England." Even in 1752
"four hundred families, with horses, wagons and cattle have migrated to North
Carolina, and among them were good farmers and very worthy people".  These, in
all probability, were the Jersey Settlers.

Page 3

The Great Pennsylvania Road. --On the 15th of February, 1751, Governor
Johnston wrote to the London Board of Trade that inhabitants were flocking
into North Carolina, mostly from Pennsylvania, and other points of America
"already over stocked, and some directly from Europe," many thousands having
arrived, most of whom had settled in the West "so that they had nearly reached
the mountains." Jeffrey's map in Congressional Library shows the "Great Road
from the Yadkin River through Virginia to Philadelphia, Distance 435 Miles."
It ran from Philadelphia, through Lancaster and York counties of Pennsylvania
to Winchester, VA., thence up the Shenandoah Valley, crossing Fluvanna River at
Looney's Ferry, thence to Staunton River and down the river, through the Blue
Ridge. Thence southward, near the Moravian Settlement, to Yadkin River, just
above the mouth of Linville Creek, and about ten miles above the mouth of
Reedy Creek. It is added that those of our boys who followed Lee on his
Gettysburg campaign in 1863 were but passing over the same route their
ancestors had taken when coming from York and Lancaster counties to this State
in the fifties of the eighteenth century. (Col. Rec. Vol. IV, p. xxi.)

Our Yankee Ancestry. --Our Yankee Ancestry.-- As, to Southerners, all people
north of Mason and Dixon's line are Yankees, there seems to be no doubt, if
the best authorities can be trusted, that we are the sons of Yankee sires.
Roosevelt (Vol. I, p. 137) tells us that as early as 1730 three streams of
white people began to converge towards these mountains, but were halted by the
Alleghenies; that they came mostly from Philadelphia, though many were from
Charleston, S.C., Presbyterian-Irish being prominent among all and being the
Roundheads of the South. Also that Catholics and Episcopalians obtained little
foothold, the creed of the backwoodsmen being generally Presbyterian. Miss
Morley says that so many of the staunch northerners --Scotch-Irish after the
events of 1730, and Scotch Highlanders after those of 1745--"came to the North
Carolina mountains that they have given the dominant note to the character of
the mountaineers" (p. 140). Kephart says that when James I, in 1607,
confiscated the estates of the native Irish in six counties in Ulster, he
planted them

Page 4

with Scotch and English Presbyterians, giving long leases, but that as these
leases began to expire the Scotch-Irish themselves came in conflict with the
Crown, and then he quotes Froude to the effect that thirty thousand
Prostestants left Ulster during the two years following the American evictions
and came to America. Many of these finally settled in our mountains, among
them being Daniel Boone and the ancestors of David Crockett, Samuel Houston,
John C. Calhoun, "Stonewall" Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. He might have added,
also, those of Cyrus H. McCormick, Admiral Farragut, Andrew Johnson, James K.
Polk, John C. Breckenridge, Henry Clay, John Marshall and Parson Brownlow.

Huguenots, Germans and Swedes. --But others came also: French Huguenots,
Germans, Hollanders and Swedes, who settled the British frontier from
Massachusetts to the Valley of Virginia, the mountain men who counted more
coming from Lancaster, York and Berks counties, Pennsylvania. "That was true
in the days of Daniel Boone and David Crockett, and also in the days of John
C. Calhoun and William A. Graham, of these of Zeb Vance and Jeter C. Pritchard.
There has not been one whit of admixture from any other source. Blood feuds
have always been absent. The Tiffanys have been able to draw on these
mountains for some of their most skillful wood-carvers--a revival of their
ancient home industries. I have heard in Pennsylvania within the last thirty
years every form of expression with which I am familiar in Western North
Carolina, and some of them occur today around Worcester, Mass." (note 1)
Hence, we have in these mountains the sauerkraut of Holland and the cakes of
Scotland.

Scum or salt? -- So much has been written in detraction of the Southern
mountaineers that ignorant people conclude that they are the very scum of the
earth. In all the admirable things Horace Kephart had to say in his "Southern
Highlanders," the Northern reviewers found but a few sentences worthy of their
notice, and these were, of course, of an unfavorable nature.

Note 1 - Dr. Collier Cobb in an address before the National Geographic
Society, in New York City, in April, 1914.

Page 5

These were quoted and commented on by a reviewer in the Review of Reviews for
July, 1914. In the same number of this periodical (p. 49) there is a picture
under which is printed: "Center Peak of Grandfather Mountain, in Pisgah
Forest, recently acquired by the Government from the Estate of George W.
Vanderbilt." As the Grandfather mountain is at least ninety miles north of
Pisgah Forest, the ignorance of the publishers of this magazine of conditions
in our mountains is apparent. Kephart's few remarks which caught the eye of
Northern reviewers were that "although without annals, we are one in speech,
manners, experiences and ideals, and that our deterioration began as soon as
population began to press upon the limits of subsistence." An examination of
the statistics of population and wealth of Buncombe, Haywood, Jackson, Swain
and Cherokee counties in 1880, before the railroad was built, and of 1910,
will convince anyone that "population has not yet pressed upon the limits of
production." Kephart also said that our "isolation prevented them from moving
West . . . and gradually the severe conditions of their life enfeebled them
physically and mentally." As opposed to that, Archibald D. Murphey says
(Murphey Papers, Vol. II, p. 105) that North Carolina "has sent half a million
of her inhabitants to people the wilderness of the West, and it was not until
the rage for emigration abated that the public attention was directed to the
improvement of their advantages." This was written prior to November, 1819.
Besides, anyone who will read the "Sketches of Prominent Families" in this
volume will be convinced that Watauga County at least contributed its quota to
the winning of the West. Miss Morley graciously records that, instead of
deteriorating, the late George W. Vanderbilt put his main reliance on the
native mountaineer in the development of his fairyland estate, Biltmore (p.
149). "They were put to work, and, what was of equal value in their
development, they were subjected to an almost military discipline. For the
first time in generations they were compelled to be prompt. Methodical and
continuous in their efforts. And of this there was no complaint. Scotch blood
may succumb to enervating surroundings, but at

Page 6

the first call to battle it was ready. Not only did the men do the manual
labor, but, as time went on, the most capable of them became overseers in the
various departments, until finally all the directors of this great estate,
excepting a few of the highest  officials, were drawn from the ranks of the
people, who proved themselves so trustworthy and capable that in all these
years only three or four of Biltmore's mountaineer employees have had to be
dismissed for inefficiency or bad conduct."

Won the Revolution and Saved the Union.-- Line Tennyson's "foolish yeoman," we
have been "too proud to care from whence we came," and it is a singular fact
that in spite of all that has been written against us, no Southern mountaineer
has taken the trouble to answer our detractors. And, when it is said that we
have no annals, Mr. Kephart merely means that we have not written them, for he
proceeds to prove that we have annals of the highest order. He credits the
mountaineer with having been the principal force which drove the Indians from
the Alleghany border (p. 151) and formed the rear-guard of the Revolution and
the vanguard in the conquest of the West. He says: "Then came the Revolution.
The backwoodsmen were loyal to the American government -- loyal to a man. They
not only fought off the Indians from the rear, but sent many of their
incomparable riflemen to fight at the front as well. They were the first
English-speaking people to use weapons of precision -- the rifle, introduced
by the Pennsylvania Dutch about 1700, which was used by our backwoodsmen
exclusively throughout the war.  They were the first to employ open-order
formation in civilized warfare. They were the first outside colonists to
assist their New England brethren at the siege of Boston . . . They were
mustered in as the first regiment of the Continental Army (being the first
troops enrolled by our Congress and the first to serve under a Federal
banner). They carried the day at Saratoga, the Cowpens and King's Mountain.
From the beginning to the end of the war, they were Washington's favorite
troops." As to the Civil War, he says (p. 374): "The Confederates thought that
they could throw a line of troops from Wheeling to the Lakes, and Captain
Garnett, a West Point

Page 7

graduate, started, but got no further than Harper's Ferry, when mountain men
shot from ambush, cut down bridges, and killed Garnett with a bullet from a
squirrel rifle at Harper's Ferry. Then the South began to realize what a long,
lean, powerful arm of the Union it was that the Southern mountaineer stretched
through its very vitals, for that arm helped to hold Kentucky in the Union,
kept East Tennessee from aiding the Confederacy and caused West Virginia to
secede from Secession!" There was no Breed's Hill nor Bull Run panic among
them in the Revolution or in the Civil War period! Has New England, which has
a super abundance of annals, any that will compare with these? And yet, it took
an outsider to tell us of them!

"Not the Poor Whites of the South". --According to Kephart (p. 356), the poor
whites of the South descended mainly from the convicts and indentured servants
which England supplied to the Southern plantations before the days of slavery.
The cavaliers who founded and dominated Southern society came from the
conservative, the feudal element of England. "Their character and training
were essentially aristocratic and military. They were not town dwellers, but
masters of plantations . . . These servants were obtained from convicted
criminals, boys and girls kidnapped from the slums, impoverished people who
sold their services for passage to America (p. 357). It was when the laboring
classes of Europe had achieved emancipation from serfdom and feudalism was
overthrown, that Africa slavery laid the foundation for a new feudalism in the
Southern States.  Its effect upon white labor was to free them from their
thraldom; but being unskilled and untrained, densely ignorant, and from a more
or less degraded stock, these shiftless people generally became squatters on
the pine barrens, and gradually sank lower in the scale till the slaves
themselves were freed by the Civil War. There was then and still is plenty of
wild land in the lowlands and they had neither the initiative nor the courage
to seek a promised land far away among the unexplored and savage peaks of the
western country."

Page 8

McKamie Wiseman's View. --This shrewd old mountaineer of Avery County, who is
a wise man not only by name, but by nature also, had the true idea of the
settlement of these mountains. He said that as population drifted westward
from the Atlantic and downwards from western Virginia and Pennsylvania between
the mountain troughs, the game was driven into the intervening mountains, and
that only the bravest and the hardiest of the frontiersmen of the borders
followed it and remained after it had been exterminated. Tradition and early
documents bear out this view, the first settlers of the mountains having been
almost without exception the men who lived on the mountain-tops, at the heads
of creeks and in out-of-the-way places generally, disdaining the fertile
bottom lands of the larger streams, preferring the most inaccessible places,
because of the proximity to them of the game. Others, with more money and less
daring, got the meadows and fertile valleys for agriculture, while the true
pioneers dwelt afar in trackless mountains, in hunting camps and caverns, from
which they watched their traps and hunted deer, bear and turkeys. The
shiftless and disheartened poor whites would soon have perished in this
wilderness, but the hunters waxed stronger and braver, and their descendants
still people the mountain regions of the South. And he thought, also, that
many came down from the New England States because of the religious unrest and
dissensions which marked the earlier history of that region, and came where
men might worship God in their own way, whether that way were the way of
Puritan or Baptist. To use his words, "It was freedom that they were seeking,
and it was freedom that they found in these unpeopled mountains." Kephart puts
it in another form only when he says (307), "The nature of the mountaineer
demands that he have solitude for the unhampered growth of his personality,
wing-room for his eagle heart." As another said of the Argonauts, "The cowards
never started, and the weaklings died on the way." Mr. Wiseman died in July,
1915.

No Festering Warrens for Them. --Mr. Kephart also tells us (309) that "our
highlanders have neither memory nor tradition of ever having been herded
together, lorded over, persecuted

Page 9

or denied the privileges of free men," and that, "although life has been one
long, hard, cruel war against elemental powers, nothing else than warlike
arts, nothing short of warlike hazards could have subdued the beasts and
savages, felled the forests and made our land habitable for those teeming
millions who can exist only in a state of mutual dependence and cultivation."
And, more marvelous still, he adds, "By compulsion their self-reliance was
more complete; hence, their independence grew more haughty, their
individualism more intense. And these traits, exaggerated as they were by the
force of environment, remain unweakened among their descendants to the present
day."

Co-operation Has Ceased. --In the early time, co-operation was the watchword
of the day. Neighbor helped neighbor, freely, gladly and enthusiastically.
But, according to Kephart, all this has ceased, and we have become non-
sociable, with each man fighting for his own hand, recognizing no social
compact. Each is suspicious of the other. "They will not work together
zealously, even to improve their neighborhood roads, each mistrusting that the
other may gain some trifling advantage over himself, or turn fewer shovelfuls
of earth. Labor chiefs fail to organize granges or unions among them because
they simply will not stick together . . ." He quoted a Miss Mills as saying,
"The mountaineers must awake to a consciousness of themselves as a people."
Including all the Southern highlanders, we constitute a distinct ethnic group
of close on to four million souls, and with needs and problems identical. The
population is almost absolutely unmixed, and completely segregated from each
other (p. 311). The one redeeming feature is a passionate attachment for home
and family, a survival of the old feudal idea, while the hived and promiscuous
life in cities is breaking down the old fealty of kith and kin (p.312). "My
family, right or wrong" is said to be our slogan, and it is claimed that this
is but the persistence of the old clan fealty to the chief and clansmen.

Moonshining an Inheritance?. --Kephart seems to have made a study of
blockading and moonshining, and to have reached the conclusion that they are
really an inheritance, coming down to

Page 10 us from our Scotch and Irish ancestors, who resented the English
excise law of 1659, which struck at the national drink of the Scotch and
Irish, while the English themselves were then content to drink ale. Our
forebears killed the gaugers in sparsely settled regions, while the better-to-
do people of the towns bribed them. Thus the Scotch-Irish, settled by James I
in the north of Ireland, to replace the dispossessed native Hibernians,
learned to make whiskey in little stills over peat fires on their hearths,
calling it poteen, from the fact that it was made in little pots. Finally,
these Scotch-Irish fell out with the British government and emigrated, for
the most part, to western Pennsylvania, where they brought with them an
undying hatred of the excise laws. When, therefore, after they had helped to
establish a stable government, an excise law was adopted by Congress, these
Scotch-Irish were the very first to rebel. And it was to George Washington
himself that the task fell of suppressing their resistance to the United
States!

The Pennsylvania Whiskey Rebellion. --Owing to bad roads and the want of
markets, there was no currency away from the seaboard. But, condensed into
distilled spirits, a ready sale and easy transportation were found for the
product of the grin of the mountaineers. For they could carry many gallons and
a single horse or in a single wagon and get a fair price from people living
where money circulated. When, therefore, they were required to pay a heavy tax
on their product, they rebelled. When the Federal excise men went among them,
they blackened themselves and tarred and feathered those intruders on their
rights.  These "revenuers" then resigned, but were replaced by others. If a
mountaineer took out a license, a gang of whiskey boys smashed his still and
inflicted bodily punishment on him. All attempts to serve warrants resulted
in an uprising of the people, and, on July 16, 1794, a company of
mountain militia marched to the house of General Neville, in command of the
excise forces, and he fired on them, wounding five and killing one. The next
day a regiment of 500 mountain men, lead by Tom the Tinker, burned Neville's
house and forced him to flee, one of his guard of United States soldiers being
killed and several

Page 11

wounded. On August 1, 1794, 2,000 armed mountain men met at the historic
Braddock Field, and marched on Pittsburg, then a village. A committee of
Pittsburg citizens met them. The mob of 5,400 men were then taken into town
and treated to strong drink, after which they dispersed. The Governor of
Pennsylvania refused to interfere, and Washington called for 15,000 militia to
quell the insurrection. He also appointed commissioners to induce the people
to submit peacefully. Eighteen ring-leaders were arrested and the rest
dispersed. Two of the leaders were convicted, but were afterwards pardoned.
Even a secession movement was imminent, but as Jefferson soon became
President, the excise law was repealed and peace restored. There was no other
excise tax until 1812, when it was renewed, only to be repealed in 1817. From
this time till 1862 there was no tax, and after that time it was only twenty
cents a gallon. In 1864 it was raised to sixty cents a gallon and later in
that year to $1.50, to be followed in 1865 by $2.00 a gallon. The result was
again what it had been in Great Britain -- fraud around the centers of
population and resistance in the mountains, the current price of distilled
spirits even in the North being less than the tax. In 1868 the tax was reduced
to fifty cents, and illicit stilling practically ceased, the government
collecting during the second year of the existence of this reduced tax three
dollars for every one that had been collected before (p. 163). Since then
every increase has resulted in moonshining in the mountains and graft in the
cities. The whiskey frauds of Grant's administration invaded the very cabinet
itself. So it seems the spirit of resistance makes moonshiners of us all, just
as Shakespeare said that conscience makes cowards of us all.