IX. Vanderpool – Chastain

We now turn to the line of Glenn {Vanderpool} Neal's father, Samuel Green Vanderpool. Samuel's father was JAMES VANDERPOOL, who was born on April 2, 1813 – probably in Rockcastle County, Kentucky. He died in Washington County, Indiana, on September 11, 1854. One wonders if an accident or disease caused his early death: he was one of the shortest-lived males of all those in the family whose life spans we know.¹ Samuel's mother was SARAH² {CHASTAIN} VANDERPOOL, born on November 25, 1819 (possibly 1820).³ Both James and Sarah were born in Kentucky, according to later censuses.⁴

The marriage records in Washington County, Indiana, inform us that James and Sarah were married there on July 18, 1837.⁵ The officiating minister was the bride's maternal grandfather, Abraham Stark, a man we will meet in due course. James Vanderpool is buried in Friendly Grove Cemetery in Lewis Township, Clay County, Indiana.⁶ As we observed during out earlier examination of the brief sojourn of Samuel Green Vanderpool and his family in Kansas, his mother Sarah died on July 22, 1885, probably in Chautauqua County, Kansas. She is buried in Cloverdale Cemetery, five to six miles north of Cedar Vale, Kansas, near the boundary between Elk County and Cowley County.⁷

Our first definite sighting of James and Sarah Vanderpool comes with the census of 1840, although as we shall see both of them can be tentatively identified in their parents' households in earlier years. In 1840, James is 20 to 30 years old and Sarah is 15 to 20 years of age. They live in Posey Township of Washington County, Indiana. Ten years later, the 1850 census shows them (37 and 30 years old, respectively) in Marion Township of Lawrence County, Indiana; James Vanderpool is a farmer with real estate valued at only $150. A search for deeds for any property for him in that county was fruitless; nor is there any record of James Vanderpool entering public land. Perhaps the census enumerator was confused about who owned the property where the Vanderpools lived. About 1852, James and Sarah moved to a place two miles west of Coffee, Indiana, which is located in Lewis Township of Clay County, but by January 1853 they evidently were living in Orange County, Indiana: a son is said to have been born there in that month and year.

James Vanderpool died in 1854, and the 1860 census shows his widow Sarah living near Coffee in that year. Either the Vanderpools went back to that township from Orange County in 1853 or 1854, or else their move to Coffee, Indiana, actually occurred later than 1853 – only after their stay in Orange County. On the 1860 census, Sarah is 40 years old and described as a weaver. Although most people did their own weaving at home, almost every neighborhood or community had a weaver for things like coverlets and dress clothes. This was typically an older woman, either a "spinster" or a widow like Sarah. In the case of Sarah {Chastain} Vanderpool, however, she may have been part of a widespread weaving "cottage industry" in the southern part of Clay County, for virtually every woman in rural Lewis Township and even beyond is described on the 1860 census as a spinster, a weaver, or a seamstress. Sarah herself must have been doing reasonably well in that year, for her property was valued quite a bit higher than that of James Vanderpool ten years before.⁸ Sarah lives in the same township in 1870, when she is said to be 50 years old. No longer a weaver, she is apparently not employed at all.⁹

As the earlier section describes, by 1880 Sarah has left Indiana and gone to live in Kansas – probably because a couple of her sons had decided to move there.¹⁰ In that year Sarah, now 59 years of age, is living with a Joseph Vanderpool (almost certainly her son George) in Jefferson Township of Chautauqua County, seven or eight miles north of the Oklahoma line (which may explain why her granddaughter Birdie remembered that Sarah was living in Oklahoma itself).¹¹ Sarah was still living with George in mid-March, 1885, but died a few months later (July 25, 1885), probably at his home.

The father of James Vanderpool was JOHN M.¹² VANDERPOOL.¹³ He is first listed in Rockcastle County, Kentucky, on an 1814 tax list. One Vanderpool researcher states that John arrived in that county in 1811, not long before James was born there in 1813, but I have seen no specific evidence to verify that he arrived then. During his first few years in Kentucky John may have been farming someone else's property on Renfro Creek, but by 1815 he had arranged to purchase 122 acres in the Renfro Valley and he is on the tax list again in that year. What became of this property is not clear (perhaps he could not pay for it), and before long John M. Vanderpool is found owning 152 acres on the West Fork of Skegg Creek. He is consistently listed there through 1853, and then never again.¹⁴

John M. Vanderpool's first wife was a woman named RIGGS, and it was she who was the mother of James Vanderpool. We know nothing more about her – given name, birth year, when she died, or where she married John M. Vanderbool. It is possible that her father was a man named James Riggs, since the given name James had not previously been used in the Vanderpool family before it was bestowed on her first son. There are two men named James Riggs in North Carolina in 1790, both in the Hillsborough area of Orange County – not far from where the Vanderpools lived during the 1750s, but it is not possible to determine the ages of these two men to see if one of them might have been her father.

It is possible that the father of John M. Vanderpool's wife was a man named James Riggs, since the given name James had not previously been used in the Vanderpool family before it was bestowed on her first son. There are two men named James Riggs in North Carolina in 1790, both in the Hillsborough area of Orange County – not far from where the Vanderpools lived during the 1750s, but it is not possible to determine the ages of these two men to see if one of them might have been her father. It seems more likely, anyway, that John's wife would have come from a closer Riggs family.

Another possibility is the Samuel Riggs who also lives in Surry County, North Carolina, in 1790 – a decade or so before John M. Vanderpool would have married a Riggs woman: of all the Riggs males residing in the general vicinity of the Vanderpools (though not in their tax district), Samuel is the only one whose given name was used in later Vanderpool generations. (The other Riggs males were named Zadok, David, and Hiram.) Samuel Riggs apparently has no young females in his household in 1790, however, whereas the other three Riggs males mentioned here have at least two young females each.

According to the will of Samuel Riggs, he had at least four daughters (presumably all born during the 1790s and thus conceivably married to the man who fathered James Vanderpool in 1813). Most of these Riggs daughters were not yet married when their father's will was drawn up and probated in 1798. These young Riggs females, however, also bore given names that were not used in the later Vanderpool family, except for John M. Vanderpool's daughter Elizabeth — but she was his daughter with his second wife. Thus Samuel Riggs does not seem to be a strong candidate after all as the possible father of John M. Vanderpool's wife, though he cannot be entirely ruled out. At best, the evidence from Surry County, North Carolina, is inconclusive.

There are other possibilities to consider, however. After his father's death in 1794, as we shall see, John M. Vanderpool very likely went to live with his brother Hezekiah in Russell County, Virginia. If we assume that John met and married the Riggs woman who was his first wife when he was in his late teens, that would place him in Virginia and not in North Carolina when he married. Owing to the absence of complete census records for Virginia for the time period we are interested in, we do not have enough information to determine whether there is a Riggs male who might have fathered John's wife. There is a William Riggs in Scott County (neighboring Russell County) who may be old enough (over 45 years of age in 1820) to have been the father of the unknown Riggs female, but he seems like a weak candidate because of his distance from the Russell County Vanderpools. There are no Riggs wills in either Scott or Russell County, Virginia, that shed any light on this problem, and neither could I find any marriages there for a Vanderpool male. Once again, the evidence does not identify a clear Riggs candidate for the father of John M. Vanderpool's wife.

We ought to consider Rockcastle County, Kentucky, too. Although John M. Vanderpool is not on the census there in 1810, two Riggs males are: Hiram and Silas, from their given names almost certainly members of the Surry County, North Carolina, Riggs group. Although again there is nothing — on tax lists, for example — to suggest that the Riggs and Vanderpool families in Surry County were near neighbors, this general proximity suggests a possible link between them, either in North Carolina or later in Virginia and Kentucky. Indeed, we see Hiram (the older of the two) on the Surry County census in 1800. From his age on the two censuses, we can tell that he was old enough (born 1755 to 1765) to have fathered the unknown Riggs woman who married John M. Vanderpool: she must have been born sometime around 1790 if she married him about 1810-12. Since Silas was born between 1765 to 1784 (judging from the 1810 census) he too is a plausible candidate to be the father of the unknown Riggs female we are looking for, but the fact that he is not on the Surry County census in 1800 probably rules him out as being too young in 1790. On the other hand, a Silas Riggs is on the 1815 tax list in Rockcastle County, Kentucky, as John M. Vanderpool was, so we can surmise that the two families probably did know one another If Silas were found as an adult in Surry County in 1800, he would have to be considered the prime candidate for John's father-in-law. Otherwise, Hiram Riggs emerges as the leading contender, especially if we disregard any candidates in Russell County, Virginia.

In light of the history of the Vanderpool family in New Jersey, which we will explore later, it is interesting to note that the North Carolina Riggs family also lived in New Jersey, specifically in Elizabeth. But Joel Riggs and Elizabeth {Miles} Riggs came to New Jersey from England and not from New York. Here they had three sons, David, Hiram, and Reuben, before moving to North Carolina about 1770. Joel Riggs is on the tax rolls in Surry County, North Carolina, in 1771 and 1772. Thus we have a plausible family from which the wife of John M. Vanderpool could have come, but there is still too much we do not know and we must await the findings of further research before making a definite connection between Hiram or any other Riggs male and the Vanderpool family. Unfortunately, no Riggs researcher I have yet encountered has any record of a Vanderpool male having married a Riggs female.¹⁵

Setting aside our speculation about the Riggs family, we turn back to the Vanderpools in Rockcastle County, Kentucky. On the 1820 census John is listed as J.M. Vanderpool; he is 26 to 45 years old and a farmer. There is a boy under 10 years of age in the household, and this matches our understanding: James is 7 years old that year. There is just one woman in this household, and the age shown for this woman – 45 years old or older (and so born in 1775 or before) – indicates that she is somewhat older than J.M. Vanderpool, who was born in 1783. These circumstances, along with the absence of any children younger than James, suggest to me that John's first wife, the unknown Riggs woman, probably died sometime before the 1820 census.

Who, then, was the woman over 45 years of age in John Vanderpool's household in 1820? She could be his mother-in-law, but a better possibility would seem to be his own mother, Margaret. We believe that Margaret Vanderpool was present in Pulaski County, Kentucky (adjoining Rockcastle County), in March 1813 when she signified her consent to the marriage of a female we think was her daughter, Rhoda. Margaret is not living with Rhoda and her husband in 1820 (when they are residing in Rockcastle County), and neither does she seem to be on any other census in that year. Thus it seems quite plausible that she would be the older woman living with John Vanderpool. Perhaps she moved to Kentucky with him between 1811 and 1823, or perhaps she came to live with him when John's first wife died and he needed someone to care for young James.

In 1830, when John (as he is now identified) Vanderpool is listed as being 40 to 50 years of age, he appears to have remarried: there is a woman in his household who is 20 to 30 years old who is not matched with a male about that same age. There are also six young children, in addition to the male 15 to 20 years old we presume is James Vanderpool (17 years of age that year). All of this is consistent with John M. Vanderpool's second marriage, which was to a woman named Sarah E. Cummings.¹⁶ She may have brought some of the children with her when they wed, but some of them are also their own. There is no older woman living with John and Sarah, which suggests that Margaret Vanderpool – if that was indeed her in 1820 – has died. Perhaps it was her death that led to John's seeking out a second wife.

Ten years later, in 1840, the census describes John M. Vanderpool as a farmer who was 50 to 60 years old. The woman who must be his second wife (for once again there is no other male to match with her) is now listed as 30 to 40 years old. Ten years later, on the 1850 census, John M. Vanderpool – still living and farming in Rockcastle County, Kentucky – is listed as having been born in North Carolina and 67 years of age. The census shows him without a wife, though, which is correct: Sarah died in 1846.¹⁷ Vanderpool family historians believe that John M. Vanderpool died in Rockcastle County, Kentucky, in 1854, which is consistent with his disappearance from tax lists after 1853. but the appraisal of his estate was delayed until March 1862. It shows that John M. Vanderpool was a prosperous farmer: he had both a clock and a watch, for example, and at his death he was owed money by more than a dozen other men. It is interesting to observe that John M. Vanderpool and his son James both died in 1854, and one wonders if the survivor knew of the other's death so many miles away.

Perhaps this is the best place to ponder an interesting piece of family lore that Birdie Vanderpool related in the memoir we have encountered before in this narrative. She opens it with the statement that her father, Samuel Green Vanderpool, lived with his mother in Kentucky until he was 14 years old, either during or shortly after the Civil War. When his mother moved to Oklahoma with the other children, she says, Samuel "ran off to Indiana" by boat, up the Mississippi River, living only on the raw peanuts that were being transported on that boat. Little of this fits the facts. Samuel Green Vanderpool's mother did move to Kansas, near Oklahoma, in later years, but the 1860 and 1870 censuses reveal that she was living in Indiana; Samuel – born in Indiana – was living with her in 1860 and near her in 1870, when he was listed as 11 and 22 years old, respectively.

I suspect that Birdie, who was 95 years old when she wrote down her memories, got confused and mixed into this account some Vanderpool family lore about Samuel Green Vanderpool's own father, James Vanderpool – the son of the John M. Vanderpool we have just met. Such an explanation is buttressed by the presence of another family tradition that James Vanderpool did not get along with his father's second wife, Sarah Cummings. In addition, one of Birdie's cousins remembered that his grandfather, James Vanderpool, left Kentucky as a boy because he could not get along with his stepmother.

Thus it must have been James Vanderpool, who was indeed born in Kentucky, who ran away to Indiana riding a boat full of peanuts sometime after his mother, John M. Vanderpool's first wife (who was named Riggs), died. This would have been sometime after 1830, when James is still listed in his father's household. If this interesting lore does pertain to James Vanderpool, he probably traveled along the Kentucky River across Kentucky and then up the Wabash River into Indiana.

Where is J.M. Vanderpool in 1810 and before? No one with that name is listed in the Kentucky census index in 1810, and I did not find him through a name-by-name search of the census for Rockcastle County that year. Information contributed to the LDS IGI shows a John M. Vanderpool born in North Carolina in 1783, probably in Surry County where his older brother Josiah is thought to have been born. This must be the J.M. Vanderpool we encounter in 1820 and (as John) in later years, who says he was born in this state about this year. Most Vanderpool family researchers agree with this interpretation. We must look a generation earlier in order to ascertain where John M. Vanderpool might be in 1810 and before.

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The limited evidence we have seems to indicate that the father of the John M. Vanderpool born in North Carolina in 1783 was ABRAHAM VANDERPOOL, whose date of birth is uncertain but was probably sometime between 1743 and 1750. Most Vanderpool researchers believe that Abraham Vanderpool was married to MARGARET {SHEPPERD} VANDERPOOL. We know very little about this woman — and nothing at all about her family — except that she may have been born in Virginia and is not recorded in North Carolina after 1797.¹⁸ If my speculation below about the older female in John M. Vanderpool's household in 1820 is correct, we can estimate that John's mother Margaret died in Rockcastle County, Kentucky, sometime between 1820 and 1830 we can estimate that she died in Rockcastle County, Kentucky, sometime between 1820 and 1830.

Abraham and Margaret were probably married during the 1760s, but we have no information at all about the date or place of their marriage. The link between John M. and Abraham Vanderpool comes from the latter's will. Dated March 1, 1794, and probated on November 10, 1795, this will lists Josiah, Hezekiah, and John as his sons. Each of these sons was to receive 50 acres, with the remainder of Abraham's property to be divided among the children, presumably including some not listed. (Abraham's wife was also not listed by name.) The North Carolina census for 1790 confirms that Abraham Vanderpool in Salisbury District of Surry County (the only man with that name in the entire state) has three males under the age of 16 years old living with him.¹⁹ John, born in 1783, must be one of them.

Nor is there any solid information about where John M. Vanderpool is living between 1790 and when he appears in Rockcastle County, Kentucky, sometime between 1811 and 1814. He cannot be living with either parent in 1800: Abraham died a year or so after writing his will in early 1794, and Abraham's wife disappears from the records a few years later; whether or not she died is an open question, as we shall see. Only 16 or 17 years old at the time of the 1800 census, John is too young to be heading his own household and so is probably living with a Vanderpool relative. In any case, none of the three men named John Vanderpool in North Carolina in 1800 has a male in the column (16 to 26 years old) in which John should be listed. In fact, in the entire state in 1800 there are only two males in Vanderpool households who are in this age column. One lives with a Winen²⁰ Vanderpool in Ashe County, who is a half-brother of Abraham Vanderpool; the younger male living with him, though, is thought to be his son. The other is Anthony Vanderpool, also in Ashe County, who is the only male in his household.

It is possible that John M. Vanderpool has left North Carolina for Kentucky or Tennessee by 1800. He would seem rather young at 16 or 17 years old to be striking off west on his own, but we know that around 1800 a large contingent of Vanderpools left North Carolina for Tennessee, first, and then Missouri and points even farther west. Perhaps young John M. Vanderpool took the opportunity to travel with them as far as Tennessee and then turned north into Kentucky, where he settled in Rockcastle County. If he did arrive in Kentucky during these years, there is no record of his being there: he is listed neither on that state's census for 1810 nor in the tax records that substitute for a census in 1800. Unfortunately, Tennessee has no census for 1800 and no census index for 1810, so we cannot determine whether he might be living in that state during this time period.

It seems more likely that John M. Vanderpool was still in North Carolina all or some of this time period, perhaps living with a relative on his mother's side.²¹ A good candidate, judging from the males who were John's age in 1800, would be Robert Shepperd of Wilkes County, who has two males 16 to 26 years old when, based on his children in 1790, he should have just one, but the most likely explanation for John's whereabouts from about 1795 onwards (after his father's death, in other words) is that he was living with his brother Hezekiah in the Sinking Creek area of Russell County, Virginia, which is not far north of Surry County, North Carolina. Hezekiah evidently moved here about 1797, since only Josiah Vanderpool is listed on Surry County or other North Carolina county tax records in 1798 and after. This, and the fact that Josiah is shown with 250 acres, would seem to indicate that Hezekiah and John turned over to him the 100 acres their father had left to them. Because Abraham's widow, Margaret, also is not listed in those records after 1797, she may well have begun to live with Josiah or with Hezekiah. Once again missing census information frustrates us: there is no census for Virginia as a whole for 1800, and unfortunately the Russell County census for 1810 no longer exists; nor is there any information in Russell County (or Scott County, formed from it in 1814) about Hezekiah Vanderpool.

Thus we have no way of knowing whether John M. Vanderpool is living in Russell County, Virginia, or not, either with his brother or otherwise. We can only suppose that John lived with a relative or relatives of some sort somewhere for a dozen years or more after 1794 until he was ready to make his way in the world, after which (probably about 1810 or soon after) he struck out for Kentucky. Whether John married in Virginia or after he arrived in Kentucky we have no way of knowing, just as we have no sure information about the name of his wife.

We turn our attention now to the movements of John M. Vanderpool's father, Abraham, who as we have seen was born sometime during the 1740s. Our task is complicated by the fact that Abraham's father (who was born in 1709) also bore that name, which makes untangling documentary evidence and the references to father and son in North Carolina something of a challenge. The narrative that follows is based on my best efforts to sort out which reference applies to which man.

Other than a couple of fleeting glances of an Abraham Vanderpool in North Carolina in 1757, which we will deal with later, the North Carolina chapter of the Vanderpool story begins when a man of that name is listed as a road overseer in Rowan County, North Carolina, on July 15, 1767.²² At that time, Rowan County covered much of what is now western North Carolina. Then, twice in 1768 and again in 1769, Abraham Vanderpool is described as a constable charged with collecting taxes in the Belews Creek area of the county (a portion that became part of the new Surry County in 1771, Stokes County eighteen years later, and Forsythe County in 1849). These positions would almost certainly have been held by the older of the two Abraham Vanderpools, even though we are not aware of any documentary evidence he owned land as these positions required. It should be noted, however, that a dispute over a crown grant to Lord Granville held up the usual land transaction process from 1763 to 1778, and this may account for there being no record that Abraham Vanderpool the older owned any land. Sometime later during this period, Abraham does seem to have secured a land grant on Old Field Creek and Elk Creek in what was known as the Town Fork settlement (originally in Rowan County, then Surry County in 1771, and Stokes County in 1849).²³ These positions would almost certainly have been held by the older of the two Abraham Vanderpools, who was then in his fifties or sixties, and not by the younger one, who even in 1769 was barely into his twenties. We are not aware of any documentary evidence Abraham Vanderpool owned land as these positions required. It should be noted, however, that a dispute over a crown grant to Lord Granville held up the usual land transaction process from 1763 to 1778, which may account for there being no record that Abraham Vanderpool the older owned any land.

One Abraham Vanderpool is taxed in the new Surry County (north of Rowan County, out of which it had been created) in 1771, 1774, and 1775; the other (unnamed) adult male in his household on the earliest of these lists is quite likely his oldest son, Abraham, who would have been over 21 years old by then but is not listed elsewhere. When a second Abraham Vanderpool shows up on different Surry County tax lists in 1774 and 1775, we are probably seeing that the younger Abraham is now living apart from his father. The tax list this younger man is on covered the upper part of Surry County that would eventually become Stokes County. The older Abraham is shown as before in those years, except that two more sons — William and John — are shown living with him in 1774 and William again in 1774.²⁴ There is then a gap in extant tax lists for Surry County between 1775 (when the elder Abraham had reached his early sixties, and so would typically have gone off the tax rolls) and 1782 (three years after he died). The gap means we do not know where the older Abraham Vanderpool was living during the last four years of his life. Any Abraham Vanderpools on these lists after 1782 are, of course, the younger one.

By 1778, perhaps earlier, the older Abraham may have joined the younger one on the south side of the Yadkin River in the new Wilkes County, North Carolina, which had just been carved out of the far western section of Rowan County. An Abraham Vanderpool (whether the older or younger man is not known, but probably the latter) had filed for and received (on March 3, 1779) a state grant for 150 acres in this area. Because Abraham Vanderpool sold this land within a year (on March 1, 1780), as the terms of the grant required, there is no assurance that he or his father ever lived there.²⁵

In any case, the senior Abraham appears to have died sometime in 1778. Afterwards, his widow, Rebecca, evidently moved in with her daughter and son-in-law, Teter Nave, across the mountains in an area soon to become Washington County, Tennessee. Here, she too soon died. We will return to this older couple, the younger Abraham's parents, once we have finished looking at what we know about the son and his movements during the 1780s and 1790s.

In June 1781, the younger Abraham Vanderpool obtained another state grant, this one for 100 acres on the head springs of Tantrough Creek, near its mouth at the Dan River and the town of Danbury in what is then Surry County but is now Stokes County; whether he actually lived here or held it for speculation cannot be determined, but he did not sell this 100 acres until August 1793. According to a county historian, he also owned property near Bethesda Church and Dillard (now in Stokes County), but I have seen no documentation for this assertion. And in September 1790 an Abraham Vanderpool of Stokes County purchased 240 acres on the south side of the Yadkin River, an acquisition difficult to fit into the sequence of developments shown here. Some of these land transactions could well have been speculative ventures, but imperfect documentation does not enable us to get a very clear picture of them.²⁶

It does seem apparent that Abraham Vanderpool remained in Surry County after 1781. Tax lists in 1782, 1784, and 1785 show him owning two properties, one of 211 1/2 acres (on Old Field Creek) and another of 80 acres (on Elk Creek) near Walkerton and Germanton. This may be property that he inherited from his father, since this was where the elder Vanderpool had served as constable two decades earlier, but it is not clear how either Vanderpool obtained these lands or the younger one eventually disposed of them. We do know that Abraham Vanderpool purchased 150 acres on Pilot Creek in August 1787, and tax lists beginning in 1790 and the 1790 census show that he and his family were living there. This location was near Pilot Mountain and Pilot Shoals on the Tarrarat (Ararat) River. The circumstances that led to these several moves are not known.²⁷

An interesting sidelight on Abraham Vanderpool the younger is that on July 31, 1782, he was allowed payment from the government of North Carolina for expenditures he had made during the Revolutionary War, perhaps for supplies he had provided to the state's soldiers. Interest was credited to him until October 25, 1783, probably about when Abraham sold the voucher (doubtless at a substantial discount, as was common) to someone who used it as a credit toward the purchase of state land in Tennessee, then still part of North Carolina.

In 1793 or early 1794, Abraham evidently encountered a fatal health problem — probably a disease, from the way his will is worded — that induced him to write the will dated March 1, 1794, that was described earlier in this section. (Interestingly, the tax list shows no tithable in his household in 1793, which suggests that he might have been exempted from the tax that year due to illness.) As we have seen, in this will Abraham specified the equal shares of his land that were to pass to his three sons, with the proviso that Abraham's wife could remain on this property unless she chose to marry again.²⁸ As this will was filed in February of 1795, we can date Abraham's death between March 1, 1794, and about a year later.²⁹ Abraham's widow, Margaret, is listed as paying taxes in Surry County in 1795 and 1797. As we have also seen, she then disappears from the records.³⁰

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We can now return to the man we think was the father of the Abraham Vanderpool who died in 1794. This man was ABRAHAM VANDERPOOL, who was born in Albany, New York, in 1709. Over the years considerable effort has gone into tracing his life and ancestry, for he is regarded as the principal source of the "southern line" of Vanderpools and so has many, many descendants scattered throughout North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, and beyond. Doubtless other Vanderpools accompanied him as he meandered from his native state of New York to North Carolina, but Abraham is certainly the linchpin in the Vanderpool family history for those who want to trace their southern Vanderpools to the New York and Dutch elements of the family. Before we can explore those elements, we must follow Abraham as he works his way southward from Albany to North Carolina.

Abraham was baptized in the Dutch Reformed Church in Albany³¹ on February 13, 1709. Because Dutch practice was to baptize the newborn as soon as possible, it is likely that Abraham was born sometime in February of 1709, but some Vanderpool researchers estimate his birth as early as 1707. Abraham's father, who was a younger son, moved to New Jersey sometime during the early 18th century – by the second half of the 1720s at the latest – as part of the settlement of that colony by Dutch and other inhabitants of what was now New York.

Dutch custom was for such migration, often prompted by the needs of such younger sons for their own land, to be done in groups. Not only was Abraham's father without much hope of inheriting property, but the peculiar conditions in New York encouraged him and many like him to leave: speculators and others controlled vast holdings of acreage, preferring to hold title for future profit instead of selling it to those who wanted to farm – meanwhile, renting it out to tenants. Those who wanted to own their own land, therefore, had to look to relatively unsettled New Jersey and elsewhere.

There could have been special conditions attached to the moves of the Vanderpools, most particularly in those of Abraham himself, for the family may have been one of miners who were in constant search for new ore deposits. Abraham's life reflects a pattern of short, frequent moves as he appears to be inexorably drawn to the west and south throughout the first half of the 18th century, whether in search of metals to mine or simply better opportunities we cannot say for certain.

Judging from various church record (chiefly baptisms), Abraham seems to have been living in New York City by June 30, 1725, then in Belleville, Essex County, New Jersey (north of Newark), by July 13, 1729. He apparently belonged to the Second River Dutch Reformed Church, an offshoot of the Acquackanonk (now Passaic) church that was organized in 1700.³² Abraham Vanderpool married Jannetje {Weibling} Vanderpool, possibly in Albany and probably by early 1734 since the couple seems to have had a child later that year. Jannetje's family name is spelled variously (from Weblin to Wibling to Welling or even Wallings). Her father and mother might have been Thomas and Elizabeth Welling of Jamaica, New Jersey,³³ who had a daughter named Jane who was baptized there on January 1, 1712. Most Vanderpool researchers have concluded that Jannetje was born in New York or New Jersey, but there is no specific evidence linking this Welling family to the Vanderpools.³⁴

Abraham and Jannetje may have been living in Newark, New Jersey in 1736, when the child born in 1734 died and was buried in that city, but they could have been living in Belleville at this time. In 1736 Abraham leased a lot in Newark for a period beginning in 1737, but he did not execute the lease. By May 14, 1738, Abraham and Jannetje can again be located in Belleville, where another child was baptized. Possibly in search of economic opportunity, perhaps because the proprietor of New Jersey was trying to eject those (like the Vanderpools?) who were squatting on his land, or for reasons we cannot guess, Abraham and his family decided to leave the settled area of New York and New Jersey.

The first leg of a journey that would ultimately take them hundreds of miles into a southern colony was west, to the Delaware River Valley, which was already home to many Dutch families. We find them here at least by early 1740: a court order issued on May 16 of that year, most likely in or near Newark, noted that Abraham Vanderpool was now living in Wallpack, New Jersey – an unorganized area (now in Sussex County) that then extended about thirty miles along the Delaware River from the New York border below Port Jervis to the Delaware Water Gap. Other documents in Virginia confirm that Abraham was in Wallpack during the early 1740s. In 1741, we find Abraham in church records in Smithfield, Pennsylvania, just across the Delaware River from New Jersey; Smithfield is two miles above the present village of Shawnee in Monroe County. The Smithfield church, organized in 1737, served Dutch settlers in the entire valley, so Abraham might in fact still be living in New Jersey at that time.

Sometime before 1743, though, the Vanderpools moved south. They would make at least two distinct forays into frontier Virginia, moving to two literally uncharted valleys in what are now Hardy and Greenbrier Counties of West Virginia. The Vanderpools helped to form the leading edge of European civilization, which was pushing steadily westward from the Atlantic seaboard communities. In this sense the actions we are about to detail here are quite consistent with those of later and earlier Vanderpool generations, which were among the first people to push into new and lightly inhabited territories.

It is possible that one of the opportunities Abraham Vanderpool in particular was pursuing was mining. At about the same time he and his family were showing up in Virginia, early 1743, the death of Abraham's younger brother, Melgert, was featured in America's two leading newspapers, John Peter Zenger's New-York Weekly Journal and Benjamin Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette. Young Melgert unfortunately fell 114 feet to his death in a mine near Newark, which has led to speculation that Abraham Vanderpool might also have been involved in mining.³⁵ Whether or not this is so, we can be confident that he took his family south for greater opportunity of some sort.

Abraham Vanderpool's history during the next decade, from the mid-1740s through the mid-1750s, is unusually well documented – in part because of good luck in the preservation of records and in part because of his encounters with the young George Washington. Our first evidence Abraham is in Virginia comes in February 1743, when he begins to appear – first as defendant, later as plaintiff – in nearly a dozen court cases in Frederick County (which then contained a large area west of the Blue Ridge Mountains including the South Branch of the Potomac River, later in Hampshire County and now in Hardy County, West Virginia). The cases seem to involve disputes over debts, but the details of these cases have not been preserved. In January of the next year, 1744, Abraham is on a fee list – he owed 342 pounds of tobacco as tax – in that same county. Abraham continues to be involved in court cases (at least one of them with Lord Fairfax presiding) from time to time through November 1745. Then, with one minor exception in 1752, his name never appears again on the docket, although as we shall see there is other evidence that he was living on the South Branch.

How did the Vanderpools happen to live in Virginia? Did Abraham come alone at first, perhaps to select or establish a place to live, or perhaps as a trader of some sort? We do not know, but it would appear he knew the right person: John Van Meter, who had lived in the Esopus Settlement in New York and later in New Jersey. Van Meter visited numerous areas west of the Blue Ridge in the course of his trading with the Indians, after which he discussed with the governor of Virginia how to encourage people to settle this region. Van Meter was especially impressed by the fertile valley that lay along the South Fork of the South Branch of the Potomac River, sometimes known as the Wappaconnee, which he had seen in 1725.

Van Meter and his sons subsequently spread the word of the opportunities to be found on what became known as the South Branch, and at least one of those sons actively recruited settlers for it in the Dutch communities in New York and New Jersey – including the Wallpack and Minisink areas in which the Vanderpools lived. Friends, neighbors, relatives, and in-laws seemed to have moved at the same time, in the Dutch manner, to the South Branch. (Among them were the Westfalls and the Deckers, two families the Vanderpools knew well.) The younger Van Meter was there by 1744 and others by 1745. The evidence we have suggests that Abraham Vanderpool was in Frederick County as early as 1743, so perhaps he lived somewhere else before moving to the South Branch about 1745. Perhaps his home was the Frederick County crossroads town of Winchester, the usual point of departure and re-supply before the long trek down the Shenandoah Valley toward the Carolinas; perhaps he was involved in doing business there. Beyond that we can only speculate.

By all accounts, life on the South Branch was rather primitive: subsistence farms and not much else, although there were also the beginnings of an extensive cattle-raising industry that increasingly produced beef for Eastern markets. (We do know that there were no churches on the South Branch.) From 1743 through mid-1751, Abraham Vanderpool is mentioned several times in the surviving records, one of which, in October 1746, identifies him as a resident of the South Branch area. He was evidently a man of some standing, as he appraised the estates of two deceased neighbors and provided surety for the administrator of another estate.

It was also in October 1746 when surveyors for Lord Fairfax came upon the South Branch community as they were plotting and marking the so-called "Fairfax Line," the southern boundary of Lord Fairfax's vast domain. The surveyors, William Lewis and Peter Jefferson (father of Thomas), ran short of supplies near the South Branch and headed down the river — north, in other words — in search of inhabitants who might furnish some assistance. Lewis's journal notes that they saw "but one familey of poor Duch people" who could not even provide food for the surveyors' horses. A close reading of the journal, along with its editor's comments, shows that he and Jefferson encountered these Dutch people just about where we know the Vanderpools resided at that time. Do we dare think that he was actually describing Abraham and his family?

More surveyors came to the South Branch a year and a half later, in the spring of 1748. Among them was a young (16 years old) apprentice named George Washington, who was making his first trip west. Since the settlers were on Fairfax's land (probably without knowing that), the survey team went ahead and laid out the bounds of the various properties that were already being improved and farmed. Abraham Vanderpool's land, which like most of the others straddled the river, became Tract 10 of what was called the South Fork, one of several estates Fairfax had carved out of this wilderness but then decided to have laid out in lots.³⁶ From the records that survive and the testimony of the surveyors, we can not only reconstruct the settlement here but trace some of its members to the Dutch communities in New Jersey from which they had come – and, as well, to the North Carolina communities in which the Vanderpools would subsequently reside.

On April 2, 1748, the survey crew ran the lines for Vanderpool's lot (which, however, has another man's name on it). After finishing this patch of surveying, young Washington commented on the people he had met. He was not impressed, telling his diary "We did two Lots & was attended by a great Company of People Men Women & Children that attended us through the Woods as we went shewing there Antick tricks. I really think they seem to be as Ignorant a Set of People as the Indians. They would never speak English but when spoken to they speak all Dutch."

Later in that same year, on October 19, 1748, Abraham Vanderpool patented from Lord Fairfax, in return for an annual rental payment, his 432 acres on the South Branch of the Potomac – Lot 10.³⁷ Additional evidence shows that Vanderpool owned more property in this area (Lots 34 and 35, at least), but the documentation is incomplete and we do not know the circumstances through which he obtained and disposed of this other property. We do have evidence that Vanderpool was a highly respected member of this small, isolated community. A trader's license issued about this time in Frederick County bears an endorsement – possibly in Abraham Vanderpool's own hand – identifying him as a "collector" in Augusta County. This suggests that he had been deputized to collect fees further up the South Branch where it originates in what was then Augusta County. Moreover, on April 15, 1749, he was one of several South Branch men who investigated the accidental death (by penknife) of one Samuel Decker. The record comments that Abraham and the others had come to the area from New York about 1740.

Further evidence of Vanderpool's standing, and his involvement in Augusta County affairs as well, can be seen in the fact that during 1749 Abraham Vanderpool served briefly on the commission of the peace for Augusta County. This incident suggests, too, that Vanderpool may have been involved in the county's political doings more deeply than the surviving evidence tells us. A commission's magistrates, typically one to two dozen men in all, gathered at the county seat (in this case Staunton) quarterly in order to hear and decide upon infractions of the laws; any four of them constituted a quorum for cases. New magistrates were recommended by the sitting commission to Virginia's governor and council, which made the actual appointments.

At the time of Vanderpool's appointment, the Augusta County Commission of the Peace was controlled by a man named James Patton, who had large land interests. In an apparent attempt to solidify his control, Patton had the existing commission recommend fifteen new magistrates – including Abraham Vanderpool – on February 17, 1749. Governor William Gooch and his council made the appointments on May 9 but added an additional five magistrates to the new commission of the peace. Then, on June 14, Gooch and his council appointed another group of magistrates – Vanderpool not among them – to replace the commission named just a month before.

A scholar who has studied Augusta County politics in this era has concluded that these maneuverings were part of a factional struggle between Patton and certain allies of Lord Fairfax from his Northern Neck property in the South Branch area (especially land speculators) who were eager to expand their influence in Augusta County, which had bountiful land to the west. The anti-Patton faction persuaded Gooch and the council to add the additional five magistrates in May 1749, and when the Governor's communication listing the expanded group was read at the May 19 court Patton immediately halted the proceedings. Another justice took the chair, however, after which Gooch's communication was read again and the court resumed its deliberations – albeit without Patton and his allies.

Patton was not defeated, though: he countered by getting Virginia's leaders to appoint a different (and thoroughly pro-Patton) slate of magistrates in June. Thus the May 1747 met only briefly (in all, for two and one-half days), giving Abraham Vanderpool –- who lived many miles north of Staunton – no opportunity to take his seat on the commission, assuming he even knew he had been appointed to it. He is never listed among those sitting in court, and it is most likely that he never appeared in Staunton in order to take his oath as magistrate.

Where Abraham Vanderpool stood in this factional dispute is not easy to determine: he had been recommended over Patton's signature in February but was purged (presumably by Patton) from the June list along with Fairfax's allies. Although he lived on property located in Fairfax's manor, there is no evidence that he had any ties to Fairfax or the speculators who were maneuvering against Patton. It is clear that his position as collector in 1748 made him a good candidate for magistrate the next year. Perhaps his original selection was a gesture to the South Branch community, part of which was in Augusta County, and that when Patton perceived a challenge from rivals there he preferred to take no chances about Vanderpool's loyalties. There are other possible explanations (did Patton not realize that Abraham Vanderpool actually resided in Frederick County?), and we are left to guess about what actually happened. That he was appointed to the commission of the peace at all, though, underscores the fact that he was known to have considerable standing and influence throughout the South Branch community.³⁸

In August of the following year, 1750, a group of the South Branch residents, Abraham Vanderpool included, were ordered to be added to the Frederick County list of tithables – and so became eligible for taxation.³⁹ Not long thereafter, however, he and his wife left the South Branch: in May 1751, Abraham Vanderpool and his wife sold their property to a relative. Although there are two more references to Abraham in the records, during that same month and the next, to indicate he was still in the area, we are probably correct to think the Vanderpools left the South Branch within months of selling their land there.

Where did they go? The evidence suggests that they went farther into the frontier, to the Greenbrier River in Augusta County (now in Greenbrier County of West Virginia): a court judgment in May 1753, not executed, was filed with the comment that Abraham Vanderpool was living on the Greenbrier River. He and his family did not seem to be retreating from possible Indian attacks, for their new home was at least as exposed as the South Branch was.

Evidently the Vanderpools went to the Greenbrier area along with members of the See and Yoakum families, who were closely related to them. We know that a land company was surveying in this part of the Greenbrier area as early as 1746 (the year after it received its enormous land grant) and that a visitor reported settlers there in 1750. The surveyed lots were being sold by 1753 and 1754, though as late as 1755 there were still only a handful of families living there. The first surveys show the Sees and Yoakums (in 1750) but not the Vanderpools. The absence of any documents showing that the Vanderpools purchased or sold land on the Greenbrier suggests that they were either squatting here as they had been, originally, on Fairfax's land, or else living with another family on its property. Was this move to the Greenbrier area connected to Abraham's abbreviated political career? For instance, did he receive some land to repay him somehow for being a loyal supporter during the imbroglio over the commission of the peace? Did he fall out with his neighbors and decide to move away? Again we can only speculate.

Presumably the Vanderpools lived on the Greenbrier River for at least a few years during the early part of the 1750s – until (as related below) the area was temporarily abandoned after Indian attacks in the fall of 1755. The next reference to them is in a letter from Captain Peter Hog to (now Colonel) George Washington dated May 14, 1756, in which Hog mentions that his unit had tracked a band of Indians to a certain Vanderpool's house. This house was described as being close to the head of the Jackson River and near Back River in what is now Highland County, Virginia – some miles east and over a ridge from the Greenbrier area. Thus the Vanderpools must have retreated here from the Greenbriar in 1755, as the Sees and Yoakums did. The Jackson and Back Rivers area includes both Vanderpool Gap (whose discovery is credited to Abraham's brother, John) and today's hamlet called Vanderpool, but it is impossible today to determine exactly where the house in question was located in any of the places described.⁴⁰

Around this time a New Jersey court was again seeking to find Abraham Vanderpool. This time, the holder of a bond he had signed back in that state in 1740 was trying to collect it. The court learned from its inquiries in Virginia that Abraham Vanderpool was living on the South Branch. In fact the court was at least one step behind Vanderpool, for he had already left the South Branch for the Greenbrier area – and may have been dislodged from there, too, by the time the court was looking for him.

What had dislodged Abraham Vanderpool and his family from the Greenbrier was the growing hostilities between settlers and Indians along the far frontier to which the Vanderpools were clinging – hostilities that would soon develop into what we know as the French and Indian War. This decade-long war, a major turning point in American history, grew out of both the rivalry between the English and French for North America and Indian resistance to western settlement along the frontier from New England to the South. It would have enormous consequences, and some historians contend that it helped to bring about the American Revolution. It removed the French threat from the American mind, it encouraged the British to have Americans pay the costs Britain incurred administering its American colonies, it led to a most unpopular royal proclamation forbidding settlement west of the Alleghenies, it showed Americans that they could fight as well as (and perhaps better than) the British could, and it made the colonists realize the benefits of acting together on the issues they had in common.

In addition, the conflict between the French and the British forced the Indians of the west (into the Ohio Country) to choose between the two powers; those who chose the former acted to take advantage of the situation. Especially following the defeat of General Edward Braddock in 1755, these Indians made terrorizing raids on frontier settlements – particularly those that were isolated and lightly defended – in order to drive the newcomers back, capture persons who could be adopted into their tribes, acquire abandoned goods and cattle, and enable younger warriors to prove themselves in battle. Over the next ten years, one scholar has estimated, perhaps 2,000 settlers were captured and thousands more were killed. Thousands more fled, until, as George Washington said, perhaps fifty miles of frontier was virtually depopulated (although some families dug in and survived). The Greenbrier area was especially vulnerable to these raids, many of which were led by an Ohio Delaware leader named Shingas, and so it is not surprising that they would recur there frequently between 1755 and 1764. This often-overlooked violence on the Pennsylvania and Virginia backcountry was a bloody aspect of the American westward movement, and we will see here how it affected Abraham Vanderpool and his family.

Although there had been increasing Indian raids during 1753, the war can be said to have begun at the close of that year when the British sent George Washington into the wilderness to warn the French they should stay out of the area we now know as western New York and Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky. The French, who had their own claims to this territory, responded with a similar warning to the British. When both nations sent troops to occupy the Forks of the Ohio (now Pittsburgh), the result was a humiliating defeat of a force led by Washington at Great Meadows in 1754 and then an even more disastrous defeat of the renowned British army under Braddock just east of the Forks (where the French had built Fort Duquesne) in 1755. The effect of this defeat was compounded by a precipitous retreat of the surviving forces that left the frontier from New York to the Carolinas totally exposed. The Indian allies of the French, angry at Anglo-American land hunger and the increasing numbers of settlers, now engaged in wave after wave of attacks on those exposed western settlements throughout 1755 and 1756. These Indian attacks, many of which were inspired or even led by French officers, drove settlers back all along the edge of the most advanced frontier. The Vanderpools – exactly the kind of settlers the Indians were objecting to and the British government was trying to restrain – were among those who fled in the face of the attacks.

One attack came on Boughman's Fort, built on the east bank of the Greenbrier River (near what is now Alderson, West Virginia) by 1754, where some sixty settlers sheltered in August 1755.⁴¹ During a four-day siege, a dozen were killed and eight more were captured. We do not know if the Vanderpools were among those who took shelter in Boughman's Fort – it is possible that they had departed the Greenbrier area before the attacks began, but surely they left soon thereafter and so got out in advance of further raids in September 1756 and again during 1757, some of which extended to the Jackson River area where Hog had reported "Vanderpool's house."

By the time of these latter, the Vanderpools may well have left the Jackson and Back Rivers area too. It would appear that they enjoyed for at least a time the relative safety of Frederick County after they left the Jackson and Back Rivers area: a fee list there in May 1757 once again included Abraham Vanderpool's name. Assuming this list is correct (the clerk may simply have had outdated information), we can suppose that the family lived there from late 1756 until mid-1757. Thus they may have been among the many inhabitants of the back country who, Washington said, were "flocking in" to Winchester during the fall of 1755. The town was forced to provide what we would today term a "refugee center," in which the Vanderpools may have sheltered for at least some of their time in Frederick County.

Winchester, the only town west of the Blue Ridge Mountains (but a small one, with only a few hundred residents), would have appeared relatively safe to the Vanderpools because of the presence of Colonel Washington's soldiers of the Virginia Regiment, who had just arrived there to construct Fort Loudoun as the Virginia back country's major bastion, barracks, supply center, and center of operations along that colony's western frontier. It could have been that Abraham Vanderpool was among the one hundred or so men Washington recruited (through handsome wages) in 1755 and 1756 to help in the construction of Fort Loudoun, but the extant lists of these "artificers" do not include his name.⁴²

From this point forward, things become uncertain: our last sighting of Abraham Vanderpool for about a decade is his presence on a surveying crew in Orange County, North Carolina, in August of 1757. We have no way of knowing whether or not his family is with him in North Carolina at this time. Did Abraham leave the others somewhere in Frederick County – perhaps in Winchester itself – while he went off to North Carolina? If so, did he go there principally to seek employment or to look for a new home in a colony where the Indians were less hostile than in Virginia? Or had all the Vanderpools paused in Winchester (now emerging as the principal source of supplies in western Virginia) during late 1756 and early 1757 primarily only in order to prepare for their mid-summer 1757 trek along the Great Wagon Road that led from that town to North Carolina, living in Frederick County just long enough to be noted in the fee book? We know that some Vanderpools lived in South Carolina during this same period. Might Abraham and his family be there too?

I think the best explanation is that the Vanderpools took the Great Wagon Road only as far as Salem in Augusta (now Roanoke) County, Virginia, where the Sees and Yoakums had bought land after leaving the Jackson and Back Rivers area in 1756, moving with them to Bedford County, Virginia in about 1758. This explanation helps to explain Abraham's presence on the Orange County, North Carolina, surveying crew in 1757, since that county (in those years much larger than it is now) encompassed a large section of North Carolina just over its border with Virginia – and so was not that far from his family in Roanoke County.

One reason I am inclined to believe that the Vanderpools stayed in Virginia after 1757 is that the Sees and Yoakums went back to the Greenbrier area between 1760 and 1763. If the Vanderpools had accompanied them for a decade or so – and perhaps even lived on See or Yoakum land, since there is no evidence the Vanderpools bought or sold land of their own during this decade – they would most likely do so again. By 1759 the British under General John Forbes had captured the Forks of the Ohio, replaced Fort Duquesne there with their own Fort Pitt, and so had struck the decisive blow that would within a few years see the French lose forever their dominion in North America. The success of Forbes severely weakened France's Indian allies, who no longer could look to the French for support, but during that year and the next, 1760, there was a flare-up of fighting with Cherokees in southwest Virginia. Indian attacks along the frontier would continue for many years after the French were gone, however, owing to continuing Indian grievances as the flood of settlement pushed them further and further from the lands they considered their own.

By 1760, however, the Greenbrier area would have appeared attractive again to the Vanderpools and others like them, and the land companies with large holdings there encouraged settlers to return after 1761 in order to buttress their claims to the land. Among those known to have returned were the Sees, who lived on Muddy Creek. This peace was not to last: in 1763 renewed attacks on the Greenbrier came during what was called Pontiac's War, and some of the Sees and Yoakums were killed and captured at this time. These raids forced settlers eastward from Big Levels (near present-day Lewisburg, West Virginia) and Muddy Creek.⁴³

The raids in 1763 evidently were the final straw for the Vanderpools: they now moved to North Carolina – relatively free from Indian attacks, though still a raw and lawless place during the 1760s – not long afterwards. A royal proclamation in late 1763 may have sealed the decision to look elsewhere. This notorious Proclamation of 1763 prohibited land sales and settlement west of the crest of the Allegheny Mountains – which would include the Greenbrier area – and commanded those already living in what the English government now regarded as an Indian preserve to withdraw "forthwith." Although this proclamation would be widely disregarded, its issuance doubtless discouraged some settlers, and it seems the Vanderpools were among them.

In addition, there is one indication that the Vanderpools may be living on the Greenbrier in 1763: when William Lewis obtained a patent for 270 acres of land in that year, the land was described as being "on the head springs of the James River and the Potomac known by the name of Vanderpool's place." The James and the Potomac both rise in what is now Greenbrier County, West Virginia, twenty to thirty miles west of the Jackson River, the town of Vanderpool, or Vanderpool Gap – all of which are in the general area where Captain Hog had located "Vanderpool's house" in his 1756 letter to Washington. The 1763 reference implies, I think, that Abraham is then living near the head springs of those two rivers, which would mean that he had returned to the Greenbrier area after things had settled down.⁴⁴

Thus the Vanderpools might have lived first on the Greenbrier River (by 1753), then on the Jackson River (by 1756), possibly in Frederick County (during the winter of 1756-57), then in Roanoke and Bedford Counties (from 1758 through 1760), and then back on the Greenbrier again (from about 1760 until about 1763) – after which they left Virginia for good and headed for North Carolina, where we sight them again in 1767. Such frequent dislocation might help to explain why there are no records of the Vanderpools during this decade.

Our guesses as to the exact sequence of the movements of Abraham Vanderpool and his family between 1740 and the 1760s may, like shadows on a wall, only hint at the reality, but it is the best we can do at this time. It is clear from what we do know, however, that the Vanderpools experienced a remarkable episode in not only their own lives but the history of Virginia.

Turning to what was happening within the Vanderpools family history during this time, we find that Abraham's wife Jannetje appears to have died sometime during the first half of the 1740s. Some Vanderpool researchers think she could have been the victim of an Indian raid, but there is no solid evidence to support this idea. Abraham may have remarried as early as 1742, but it seems clear that he had done so by 1748: in this year, he bought the South Branch property that, when sold in 1751, required the assent of his wife Rebecca – an indication that this woman had been a partner in the purchase three years before.

Some Vanderpool researchers believe that Rebecca's family name was Westfall or Bogart, since these two families (both possibly Dutch in origin) were closely associated with and neighbors of the Vanderpools in Virginia and may have moved with them from New York or New Jersey.⁴⁵ Other researchers contend that Rebecca's name was Isaacs or that she was a widow.⁴⁶ It is conceivable that Abraham was married more than once after Jannetje's death – we just do not know more except that a woman named REBECCA was almost certainly the mother of the younger Abraham Vanderpool. If her son, young Abraham Vanderpool, was in fact born anytime from about 1743 to 1750, as we suspect, he probably was born on the South Branch of the Potomac in Frederick County, Virginia (now Hardy County, West Virginia).

Whether Abraham Vanderpool moved south to North Carolina alone or with his family, he himself is there by August 20, 1757: on that date he is mentioned as a certified chain-carrier for a surveyor in Orange County, North Carolina.⁴⁷ Another document shows him to be there on November 5, 1757, as well, but then there is nothing for ten years. When Abraham Vanderpool emerges from this decade of invisibility, he is listed in 1767 as a road overseer and the next year as a constable, both times in Rowan County, North Carolina. He probably would not have been given such prominent responsibilities if he had not been residing in the area for some time, and if he was not highly respected by his peers.⁴⁸ Abraham and Rebecca Vanderpool must have continued to live in Rowan County⁴⁹ throughout the 1770s, but as we have learned it is difficult to determine whether it is the Abraham born in 1709 or his son Abraham who appears on tax lists and land grants and the like. Very little is known about the Vanderpools during this period – not much, in fact, than is known about the time from 1757 onwards to 1767.⁵⁰ We can be fairly sure that both Abrahams were still present in what was now Wilkes County, North Carolina, on June 12, 1778, but soon thereafter the older man evidently died.

On May 12, 1779, Rebecca Vanderpool wrote her will. It mentions a variety of items of personal property (six "neat" cattle with swallow forks cut into their ears, a "mouse-colored" mare, some kitchen utensils and dishes, two plows, a half-dozen chairs, some "small books," and a little money)she was bequeathing to her son-in-law, Teter Nave. Because the will was recorded in Washington County, Tennessee (then part of North Carolina) during the August term of the county court, we know that Rebecca died sometime between May 12 and early August of that year.

Rebecca Vanderpool's will does not mention her husband Abraham, which leads us to suspect that he has died by the time she wrote it, May 12, 1779. Confirming this suspicion is a 1779 tax list for Washington County, Tennessee (still part of North Carolina), which notes that Abraham "Vanderpole" is deceased. An estate being taxed in 1779 would indicate that the individual had died the year before.⁵¹ The Washington COunty court minutes also show that Teter Nave was made the administrator of Abraham's estate during the same August 1779 term that Nave was serving as Rebecca's administrator under the provisions of her will, so the two Vanderpools must have died at about the same time.

Why is Abraham Vanderpool's property in North Carolina not mentioned in Rebecca's will? Some Vanderpool researchers believe (and I tend to agree) that Abraham – or, later, Rebecca – gave it to their daughter, Ann, possibly in return for Ann's agreement to care for her parents in their old age, but Rebecca's bequest of her personal property to Teter (and Ann) Nave seems to undercut this idea. As we have seen, Ann and her husband lived near Lynn Mountain and Elizabethton in Washington County, Tennessee, where Rebecca presumably was also living, but they might have owned the North Carolina property without living on it.⁵²

In my view the chances are good that both Abraham and Rebecca died in what is now Tennessee. Perhaps they had relocated their household there, having bought in about 1778 the 100 acres that is mentioned in the report of his estate the next year. Perhaps they were simply residing at their daughter's home either temporarily or permanently. Many Vanderpool researchers continue to believe, however, that Abraham died in Wilkes County, North Carolina. We do know that Rebecca died soon after writing her will, which was the very first one filed in Washington County, Tennessee.⁵³ Ann's husband Teter Nave served as administrator, perhaps because of all the Vanderpool males who were serving in the militia he was the closest one at hand.

Rebecca's will mentions only daughter Ann and son Abraham, Jr. (who is said to have "money in his hands," which presumably means he has already received his inheritance). This may indicate that only Ann and Abraham, Jr., were Rebecca's children and that the older ones were the product of the union between Abraham and Jannetje, or it may indicate that the other children had previously received their share of the estate – we cannot say. For all the research that has been done on Abraham Vanderpool born in 1709, there is still frustratingly little that we actually know about him and his life.

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rev. 6/20/10

Notes

¹Another source gives his dates as February 4, 1813, to November 9, 1854, but these dates are clearly reversals of the actual ones in the numerical shorthand method (2/4 for 4/2 and 11/9 for 9/11) and so are probably mere recording errors.

²Sarah was customarily called Sally.

³The evidence is inconclusive. Information contributed to the LDS IGI estimates her year of birth as 1820, and that found on later (1840-1880) censuses varies enough to be unreliable. Most of the censuses suggest that she had gained the next decade number (30, 40, and 50 years old) at census time, which means that – if November is accurate as her month of birth – 1819 is probably correct. In 1840, however, Sarah is in the column for 15 to 20 years old, so she could be only 19 years of age and so born in 1820. In 1880 her age is given as 59 years old, which also works out to 1820. If we could find the census listing for her father's household in 1820 and 1830 (see below), the age categories in which she is listed in those years might help us to resolve this issue. The fact that her grave marker lists her date of birth as November 25, 1819, argues for her birth in that year but is not in itself conclusive evidence.

⁴Some researchers state that James Vanderpool was born in Clay County, Kentucky. Return to text

⁵Their oldest son, Abraham, reported his birth date as September of 1836, but the error is probably in his information.

⁶See the USGS map for Jasonville/Indiana for the location of this cemetery and slide 11958 for a view of the headstone of James Vanderpool in 2006.

⁷See the USGS map for Cloverdale/Kansas for the location of this cemetery. Return to text

⁸ In 1860, Sarah's real estate was valued at $400 and her personal property at $800. It is possible that there was no distinct weaving cottage industry at all, but that the census enumerator – for reasons we can only imagine – simply assigned one of the three terms (spinster, weaver, and seamstress) to the women in the township. The 1850 and 1870 censuses for the same township – indeed, in many cases the same women – do not mention these occupations, and the 1870 census in fact describes most women as "keeping house." A weaving industry as widespread as the one the 1860 census seems to record ought to be recorded as well in histories of Clay County, but so far I have found no references to it.

⁹The property on which Sarah was living in 1860 and 1870, located west of Coffee, was property that she had inherited from her father, Peter Chastain: the northeast quarter of the northwest quarter of Section 18, Township 9 North, Range 7 West. Presumably she and husband James had been living there during the 1850s as well, but we cannot be sure of the timing. (Peter Chastain's will was probated in mid-1852.) See slide 11956 for a view of this location in 2006 and the USGS map for Jasonville/Indiana. Her personal property is now valued at only $240, but her real estate has risen in value to $800. In both 1870 and 1880, incidentally, Sarah is described as being unable to read and write. Return to text

¹⁰According to their applications for pensions for their Civil War service, at least two of Sarah's sons had lived and worked in Missouri and Arkansas before the 1870s, and when they decided to move to Kansas she probably elected to accompany them. Undoubtedly these sons also became acquainted with the many Vanderpools who lived in Missouri especially, and that might have been an additional reason why she decided to relocate from Indiana. (These Missouri Vanderpools, a numerous group, had gone due west at the time the father of Sarah's husband, James Vanderpool, had gone northwest into Kentucky and Indiana.) It also appears that quite a body of Starks moved to the Cedar Vale area, and undoubtedly the presence of her mother's family influenced Sarah's move to Chautauqua County. It is interesting that one of Sarah's youngest sons was named Jasper Newton Vanderpool, and some members of the "Missouri" Vanderpools are known to have lived in Jasper, Newton County, Arkansas. This child's naming is unlikely to have been a coincidence, and so one wonders if James and Sarah {Chastain} Vanderpool themselves might have lived in Arkansas for a time. Perhaps it is only that their older sons lived in Jasper and the parents liked the sound of the names of the town and county – nothing more.

¹¹The Joseph (37 years old in 1880) with whom Sarah is listed in 1880 is almost certainly her son George, who was 39 years old that year. Sarah did not have a son named Joseph – or a son born in 1843. In addition, her son Jasper, whose name also might have been garbled into Joseph, is listed elsewhere in Chautauqua County. Further evidence that Sarah is living with George comes from information (in a Civil War pension application) that Anabel {Zink} Vanderpool was visiting this household when George's wife bore a child in 1885. Sarah's daughter, Mahalia, is also thought to have been living in Kansas in 1880, but I did not search for her. It will be very difficult to learn whether or not Sarah {Chastain} Vanderpool ever resided in Oklahoma, but we cannot rule out the possibility entirely because there were a number of Vanderpools among the early (illegal) settlers of the Indian territory that would become that state. There is no official census of Oklahoma (still Indian territory) in 1880 – and of course no census at all for 1890 – to help us. Settlement in Oklahoma before 1889 consisted of a few "boomers" who sought to occupy land in central Oklahoma called the Oklahoma District that was not yet assigned to any specific Indian tribes. When the boomers repeatedly sought to open up Oklahoma during the early 1880s – when Birdie says that Sarah was already living there, it will be recalled – they were just as frequently chased out by troops enforcing the Indian treaties. Congress did not authorize negotiations with the Indians to release this section of Oklahoma territory until 1885 (the year Sarah died), and these negotiations were not completed until 1889. Even after that, there were numerous white "intruders" into the area set aside for Indian tribes. There were related Vanderpools among these intruders, and it is logical to assume that there were Vanderpools among the earlier boomers as well. Were Sarah and her children among the boomers (at her age?), or was Birdie just confused by the fact that Sarah was living so close to the border between Kansas and Oklahoma? We may never know, but I think the chances are very strong that Sarah lived in Kansas, and only in Kansas, from the mid-1870s until she died in 1885. Return to text

¹²The name for which M. stands is unknown. Some Vanderpool researchers speculate that it might be Mack, since one of John M. Vanderpool's sons used that name for his own son. Another possibility is Meadows or Medders, a name used by the branch of the Vanderpool family that passed through Kentucky en route to Missouri. Melgert, an old Vanderpool family name (as we shall see), is yet another possibility.

¹³A minority opinion among Vanderpool researchers holds that James may have been the son of Samuel and Susanna Vanderpool, who lived in North Carolina and Tennessee. I have seen no evidence to support this idea.

¹⁴Some of Renfro Creek is now part of an artificial lake and the lower part of it is dominated by the Renfro Valley Gathering, an entertainment complex, so the area looks quite different today. The upper portion of the creek is quite extensive; see the USGS map for Wildie/Kentucky and slides 12957-59 (2008) for views of both sections. See the USGS maps for Billows/Kentucky, Maretburg/Kentucky, and Mount Vernon/Kentucky for Skegg Creek. Slides 12960-63 and 12970-71, also taken in 2008, show various portions of its West Fork. Return to text

¹⁵Even though Hiram is not used in the Vanderpool family later on, several other names found in the Surry County Riggs family are. Return to text

¹⁶Some Vanderpool researchers believe she was a widow whose original name was Sarah Elizabeth Easter. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any record of the marriage of John M. Vanderpool and his second wife, either in Rockcastle County or the surrounding counties of Kentucky, and neither have I learned anything about the identity of that woman. Return to text

¹⁷In 1850, John M. Vanderpool's children with his second wife do live with him. The agricultural census that year (which specifies that his farm was in the southern part of Rockcastle County) shows him with 80 improved and 72 unimproved acres worth $600; his farm equipment and implements are valued at $85. He has 6 horses, 3 milch cows, 3 other cattle, 20 sheep, and 32 swine, all of which are worth $283. His farm produced in the previous year 45 bushels of wheat, 500 bushels of Indian corn, 50 bushels of oats, along with various smaller quantities of wool, peas, potatoes, butter, flax, and flax seed. John M. Vanderpool also seems to have sold a large amount of maple sugar. Return to text

¹⁸There was a Shepperd family in Surry County, North Carolina, at the same time the Vanderpools lived there: a James Sheppard who died there between 1779 and 1781 would seem to be a contemporary of the Abraham Vanderpool who was John M. Vanderpool's grandfather, and a Jacob Sheppard died there in 1808. (The spelling of the Shepperd family name differs and is not consequential.) As with the Riggs families in Surry County, the tax lists show that the Sheppards lived in the general vicinity of the Vanderpools but were not necessarily close neighbors. There were also abundant Sheppards in Orange County, North Carolina, when we think Abraham Vanderpool showed up there during the 1760s. Some Vanderpool researchers think that Abraham's wife was named Margaret Stone, in part because an Enoch Stone witnessed his will and in part because the given name Enoch began to be used in the Vanderpool family at about this time. Still another opinion (including information contributed to the LDS) has Abraham's wife as Margaret Denny, born in Surry County, North Carolina, about 1758. She was possibly the daughter of Hezekiah Denny, who is listed in the Salisbury, North Carolina, area on the 1790 census. It is noteworthy, perhaps, that Abraham's eldest son was named Hezekiah, and we know that many Dennys lived near Abraham Vanderpool in the Pilot Mountain area. The consensus among Vanderpool researchers is that Abraham's wife was named Shepperd, and I have chosen to accept that. Return to text

¹⁹Surry County originally included much of the western part of North Carolina – from Guilford County in the central part of the state to the Blue Ridge Mountains and from Virginia on the north to Rowan County (another large county) – until the latter half of the 18th century. In succession more than half a dozen new counties were then formed out of it. One of them was Wilkes County (1778), which included what would become still later Ashe County and then part of Watauga County. It was this area in North Carolina where the Vanderpools lived. Return to text

²⁰This name is actually Winant, the way the southern branch of the Vanderpool family usually spelled a long-standing Vanderpool given name, Wynant. Return to text

²¹Hezekiah is not found on the North Carolina census in 1800. As early as 1803, and probably before, he is described as a "planter" (then meaning an ordinary farmer who worked in the field himself) in Virginia and evidently resides there the remainder of his life. Return to text

²²Before modern highways, built and maintained by the county or state, roads were typically constructed and kept in repair by residents of the area affected. They were expected to contribute six or so days of work per year to this work. The local jurisdiction appointed a road overseer to organize and supervise the work. One researcher states that by April 6, 1756, Abraham Vanderpool is living in the Parish of St. Matthew in Orange County, North Carolina, but I have seen no evidence for this statement. We do know that in 1768 Winant Vanderpool was living in the portion of Orange County that would later become Guilford County, and it is possible Abraham was living with him.

²³Belews Creek, now in the northwest part of Forsythe County, is just south of the Stokes County line; Town Fork is north of that line. Abraham's property was not far from Walkerton and Germanton. See the USGS maps for Walnut Cove/North Carolina and King/North Carolina and digital images 00816-00823 and 00825-00826, taken in 2010, for general views of the waterways and adjacent areas where Abraham Vanderpool must have lived — and collected taxes. Return to text

²⁴John Vanderpool evidently died after the 1774 tax list was created. Return to text

²⁵The property in Wilkes County on the south side of the Yadkin River was approximately three-quarters of a mile upstream from where Kings Creek flows into it. This area, close to Lewis Fork and Grandin, is now in Caldwell County near its boundary with Wilkes County. (Teter Nave's land grant was near Lynn Mountain, just east of Elizabethton — then in North Carolina but now in Carter County, Tennessee, and so not all that far from the Vanderpool property on the Yadkin.) Several decades later, a man named Tom Dula lived very close nearby to the Vanderpool grant in Wilkes County. The celebrated "Tom Dooley" of popular song, he was also buried there after being hanged for murder. The road that runs through or near the Vanderpool land today is called Tom Dula Road. See the USGS map for Grandin/North Carolina and digital images 00804-00808 (2010) for this area. Return to text

²⁶The Tantrough grant lies just outside the boundary of Hanging Rock State Park. See the USGS map for Danbury/North Carolina and digital image 00799, taken in 2010, for a view of the approximate area of this grant. It is worth noting that a Sheppard's Mill was nearby. For the property near Bethesda Church, see the USGS map for Ayersville/North Carolina and digital image 008824, also taken in 2010. Return to text

²⁷The state census of 1787 also shows Abraham Vanderpool and his family in Surry County. See the USGS map for Siloam/North Carolina for a general view of the area of the Pilot Mountain grant. Also see digital images 00810-00815, taken in 2010. Return to text

²⁸A "historical" map evidently published during the 1970s purports to locate Abraham's property on Logan Creek in what was then Surry County and is now Yadkin County. The map places the date 1790 next to Abraham's name and shows the names of the three sons with 1795 next to each of their names. The accuracy of this map is not known, and I have seen nothing in documentary records to substantiate this map.

²⁹Abraham's will was proved on November 10, 1795. Abraham Vanderpool may not have lived to be 50 years old. Given his early death, and that of his grandson James (dead at only 41 years old), one might be tempted to think that the Vanderpool males tended to die young. But we must also take into account James's son Samuel Green Vanderpool, who came close to reaching the century mark, and another member of the Vanderpool family who is reputed to have died at the age of 115 years.

³⁰There is further confusion because a third Abraham Vanderpool is sometimes in the picture we have sketched here. This man, born in 1766, was probably a grandson of the older Vanderpool we have been examining, although the father of this third Abraham Vanderpool is not known for certain. Since this branch of the family has a tradition that they are descended from three Abrahams in a row, one possibility is that the one born in 1766 was the product of an unrecorded first marriage of the younger Abraham we have been considering — that is, the one born around 1750 who died in 1794. The Abraham born in 1766 does not appear to be part of the direct line we are exploring, I have concluded, but he is mixed into the references and records pertaining to the two Abrahams who are part of that direct line. The Abraham born in 1766 seems to have lived in the Cove Creek area of North Carolina (presently in Watauga County) and eventually migrated to - of all places — Indiana. He died in the Indianapolis area in 1831. It is possible that James and his family kept in touch with this Abraham. In view of the paucity of information, we cannot entirely rule out the possibility that this Abraham Vanderpool born in 1766 was the father of the John M. Vanderpool we have been considering, but I know of no evidence that supports this idea. That a cluster of Vanderpools lived in the Cove Creek area is shown by the number of landmarks — including a creek, a church, and a road — named for them. See the USGS maps for Sherwood/North Carolina and Zionville/North Carolina. Return to text

³¹This church was built in 1656 at the corner of what is now Broadway and State in Albany. (See slides 08773-74, taken in 1997.) The original structure was demolished in 1715, and the one that replaced it was razed in 1806. The current Dutch Reformed Church, some blocks away, contains the pulpit brought over from the Netherlands in 1656 – the oldest pulpit in America. (See slide 08822, also taken in 1997.) Before 1656, there was a church within Fort Orange, the core of what was to become Albany. This church was in a warehouse that the patroon had donated in 1648. It typically flooded in the spring, however, and by 1654 most of the residents of the town had relocated north of the Rutten Kill; thus a new church was built. See slide 11632 for a photograph of the rooster weather vane that stood atop the original church within Fort Orange. Return to text

³²The name Second River refers to the Passaic, the next river after the Hackensack that the Dutch encountered as they moved westward from the Hudson River.

³³I have not been able to locate this place, which suggests that it may actually be Jamaica, New York, instead.

³⁴Dutch naming patterns would suggest that Jane's parents were named John and Sarah, not Thomas and Elizabeth. Some Vanderpool researchers continue to believe that Abraham's first wife was born in Virginia, but this seems improbable. Return to text

³⁵See Appendix I for a discussion of this topic. Zenger's paper reported Melgert's accident first, on April 4. Franklin's paper picked up the story and (as was customary then) repeated the account of the accident, word for word, on April 7. The report noted that Melgert lingered for ninety minutes before expiring, being conscious almost to the end, whereas another (which called him Malachi) stated that he died immediately. Journalism then and now was much the same, it seems. Return to text

³⁶Washington's notes state that a Michael Catt lives on Lot 10. (The editors of the notes name this man Michael Liveran owing to a misreading of Washington's writing.) A researcher familiar with Catt believes that he was merely squatting on this land, but it is possible that Catt was farming it for Abraham Vanderpool – who we know was living on the South Branch in 1748, and who patented Lot 10 a few months later. By then Catt had wandered off somewhere else. Why Washington named Catt when he did not name any other persons living on unclaimed land on the South Branch suggests to me that he was actually working the land even if it was not his. Return to text

³⁷Fortunately, a modern researcher has translated the metes and bounds descriptions of these tracts, and we can locate Abraham Vanderpool's property on current maps. See the USGS map for Lost River State Park/West Virginia and my files for the exact location. See slides 09998-10002 for views of his property in 2002. Return to text

³⁸Two months after Patton's successful counterstroke, the governor and council appointed yet another commission of peace for Augusta County – its third in 1749. This was a compromise slate that satisfied all the factions in the county, and stability returned. Vanderpool was never again appointed a magistrate. Return to text

³⁹Since Vanderpool was not a resident of Frederick County, this order is puzzling. Did he own land there that we have not yet identified? Did those making the tithable rolls simply ignore county lines and sign up men indiscriminately? Did they think that some of this area would soon be shifted to Frederick County and add the residents in question to the list prematurely? There is no good explanation. Return to text

⁴⁰See the USGS maps for Mustoe/Virginia and Monterey SE/Virginia, along with slides 09876-81, for a general view of this area. See slides 09873-05 for Vanderpool and Vanderpool Gap. These photographs were taken in 2001. How this town got its name – from its proximity to the gap or from Vanderpools who founded it or lived there – is not known. Hog's reference to "Vanderpool's house" may suggest that it was among the dozens of fortified houses along the Virginia frontier that Washington considered a part of his defensive line. The locations of only some of these houses are known today. More likely, in my estimation, Hogg's use of the term Vanderpool's "house" signifies that the family had abandoned it during the Indian raids that will be outlined during the next several paragraphs. Return to text

⁴¹The site of Boughman's Fort is now occupied by a federal women's prison and so is inaccessible. See slide 10577 (taken in 2003) for a general view of its location on the Greenbrier River. Return to text

⁴²If so, Abraham Vanderpool might have reminded Colonel Washington that they had met before, when the latter was just a young surveyor. It should be noted that the South Branch area the Vanderpools had left behind when they moved to the Greenbrier had also suffered repeated attacks by Shingas's Indians from 1755 onward, so they would have been no safer had they remained there. Return to text

⁴³This appears to be the Muddy Creek on which John and Elizabeth {Griffith} Rickabaugh lived during the 1790s. Return to text

⁴⁴Landmarks cited in the several land grants Lewis received at the same time and in subsequent deeds by which he sold off most of this land include places called Sugartree Bottom, Falling Run and Back Creek, but the references are not specific enough for us to locate "Vanderpool's place" with any precision. My estimate places it near Thorny Creek and Lewis's Run near the Greenbrier River. Unless we discover a deed of purchase or sale, we probably will never be able to identify what was Abraham Vanderpool's property. Return to text

⁴⁵An Abel Westfall, an immediate neighbor, purchased land from Abraham in 1755 but died intestate soon afterwards, provoking a landmark lawsuit involving Lord Fairfax's rights that went to the Virginia Court of Appeals. Abraham Vanderpool was not involved in the suit. The property at issue in this case was not Lot 10 but Lot 35, which indicates that Vanderpool owned more land in South Branch Manor than we had suspected.

⁴⁶A Samuel Isaacs (the name may have been Essex originally) received a land grant from Lord Fairfax at about the same time Abraham Vanderpool did. There was also an Isaacs family in Wilkes County, North Carolina, and an Elijah Isaacs of this family served as a road juror with Abraham in 1776; members of that Isaacs family lived near and attended the same church as some of the Vanderpools. There is no Rebecca Isaacs in New York, New Jersey, or Virginia that we can identify as Abraham's wife, though, so we are at a dead end. Return to text

⁴⁷This area was later Guilford County, North Carolina, and is now the northeast part of Randolph County, North Carolina.

⁴⁸Nonetheless, some Vanderpool researchers believe that it was Abraham's son, Abraham, who had moved to North Carolina first, and that it was the younger man who served as constable. The area of North Carolina in which the Vanderpools lived was infused with the activity of the Regulators (westerners who objected to a lack of equitable representation in the colonial government and to what they saw as unfair economic treatment by wealthy and powerful easterners), but we do not know whether either Vanderpool was associated with the Regulators.

⁴⁹They lived in a section that became Surry County in 1771 and then Wilkes County in 1777 as western North Carolina rapidly developed.

⁵⁰Like many others in the area, Abraham may have worshipped occasionally at Mulberry Fields Church, which was organized by Baptists in Wilkesboro but used by many other religious groups because it was for long the only nearby church. One of the Abrahams, perhaps the one born in 1766, was living on the Yadkin River about where the Lewis Fork enters. See the USGS maps for Purlear/North Carolina and Boomer/North Carolina for the mouth of Lewis Fork. Return to text

⁵¹The record lists Abraham's property as 100 acres, a horse worth $100, five cattle worth $50, no ready money, and no slaves. There is no other Abraham Vanderpool with whom this man could be confused.

⁵²Teter Nave's grant is now in Carter County, Tennessee. He was in fact one of the earliest settlers in this part of Tennessee, having been one of the signers of the Wautauga Petition in 1776. One of the witnesses to Rebecca's will, Thomas Houghton, was also a signer of that document. Return to text

⁵³It is on page one of the first book of wills. Return to text

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