A visit to Campbell and his 400

East Tennesseans have more or less claimed the Battle of King’s Mountain as their own.  And little wonder.  The architects of the expedition lived in what’s now Tennessee, and the victory over Ferguson was the most dramatic and direct contribution that Tennessee settlers made to American independence.

But the Tennessee troops under John Sevier and Isaac Shelby weren’t the only men who gathered at Sycamore Shoals in September 1780 to march over the Appalachians.  About four hundred Virginians under the command of Col. William Campbell also made the trek to King’s Mountain.  These frontiersmen from the Old Dominion mustered at present-day Abingdon—Wolf Hills, as it was known in the 1700s—for the rendezvous at Sycamore Shoals.

Today you can stroll across the spot from which Campbell and his men set out at Abingdon Muster Grounds.  Having made the Overmountain Victory National Historic Trail pilgrimage from Sycamore Shoals to King’s Mountain a few years ago, my cousin and I decided to wrap up the holiday season by hitting the trail’s Virginia leg.

A state historical marker stands across the street from the muster grounds.

Hey, who’s a good boy?  He’s a good boy!  And you can find him standing under the interpretive signage at the site’s entrance.

This festooned canine mystified us, but after a bit of Googling, I think it’s part of a local art project.  Check out the map of the Battle of King’s Mountain on his back.

I was really looking forward to the exhibit in the small interpretive center at the muster grounds.  Alas, I neglected to call ahead and make sure they’d be open on the day we visited.  But seeing the place where Campbell’s men mustered was still worth the trip.

Abingdon is justly proud of its history.  A downtown mural depicts scenes from the region’s frontier era, including Campbell and his militia’s involvement in the Revolution.

Since we were in the area, we made the short drive up toward Marion, VA to see the site of Campbell’s home and his final resting place.  They’re a bit hard to find, and they’re also on private property.  If you decide to visit them yourself, be sure to obey the posted signage and be considerate of the folks who live nearby.

Campbell and his relatives are buried in a small cemetery on a hill overlooking the Aspenvale monument.  After King’s Mountain, Campbell went on to lead backwoods riflemen into battle at Guilford Courthouse and then fought in Virginia under Lafayette before his unexpected death in August 1781.  Relatives moved his remains back to the site of his old home in 1823.  The slab over the grave is a modern replacement, but the epitaph is a copy of the text on the original stone.

Campbell’s wife, Elizabeth, was the sister of Patrick Henry.  After Campbell’s tragically early death in 1781, she married Gen. William Russell.  Now her remains lie near the foot of her first husband’s grave.

Buried alongside Campbell is Francis S. Preston, the congressman and brigadier general who married the Revolutionary War commander’s daughter.  The Preston family were prominent in the history of southwestern Virginia, and were zealous defenders of Campbell’s memory in nineteenth-century disputes over the legacy of King’s Mountain.

After leaving the cemetery, we headed back to Abingdon and drove the Overmountain Victory motor route to Bristol.  We stopped along the way to see the historical marker near where John Pemberton’s men mustered for the march to Sycamore Shoals.

The Virginia segment of the trail passes through one of the most beautiful parts of Appalachia, and it’s definitely worth a visit if you’re interested in the early history of the frontier.

Southern Rev War site news

Some of my favorite national parks are joining forces:

Southeast Regional Director Stan Austin announced that four National Park units in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia will begin to consolidate operations on or about September 1. The four units represent significant stories of the American Revolution in the southern United States.

“This action will ensure financial sustainability, provide more efficient use of resources, and help these parks to better serve the visiting public,” Austin said. “The units share historic backgrounds, missions and geographic proximity, and this provides an opportunity to share employees who perform identical or similar functions at each of the parks.”

Kings Mountain National Military Park, Cowpens National Battlefield, and Ninety Six National Historic Site are located in South Carolina. Overmountain Victory Trail spans parts of Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. As part of the National Trails Program, it is a partnership entity and does not own land.

The four units will be formed into a “group” under one general superintendent who will manage all four units. The National Park Service has begun the hiring process for a general superintendent. It is expected that the position will be filled by September 1, and the new superintendent will begin the process of combining park functions. The new superintendent will also be responsible to promote the individual identity of each park and build coalitions within each of the parks’ surrounding communities. It has not yet been determined where the new superintendent will be stationed, but it will be at one of the three existing park units.

It’s a move that makes sense, I think.  KMNMP and the OVT are inseparably intertwined, Cowpens is one of the stops on the trail, and Ninety Six in the same general neck of the woods.  I just hope this isn’t a sign that any of these parks are having major financial trouble and needing to cut back on operations.

Meanwhile, Historic Brattonsville has unveiled some big changes at the site of Huck’s Defeat (or the Battle of Williamson’s Plantation, if you prefer):

The new quarter-mile gravel trail, which is part of the attraction, features a series of interpretive kiosks that illustrate the details of the battle and tell the story of the Williamson and Bratton families.…

Lynch [no relation to yours truly] said a wood frame has been erected at the site where the Williamson home stood. Painted cutouts of soldiers representing the British and American forces have been placed on the battle field to illustrate what happened, he said.

The CHM also commissioned Charlotte painters Don Troiani and Dan Nance to visually capture the story of the Battle of Huck’s Defeat.

Seven original paintings will be on display in Brattonsville’s Visitors Center during the opening weekend festivities. Prints of the artwork will be sold year-round. Nance will be on hand to sign prints both days, Lynch said.

Lynch said the Visitors Center will also feature a new 14-minute documentary that will help visitors understand the events that played out during Huck’s Defeat.

“It enriches the experience,” Lynch said. “You have the battlefield trail and the video you can watch to augment the experience.”

When I visited Historic Brattonsville a few years ago there was a trail to the battleground and a short pre-recorded narration, but it’s great to see that they’re telling the story more fully.  If you haven’t been to HB, I heartily recommend it.  It’s a wonderful place to learn about the early South Carolina backcountry.

Here’s an update on the Overmountain Victory National Historic Trail

…from BlueRidgeNow.com.  Makes me wish I was back where I was about a month and a half ago, enjoying the stops along the way for myself.

Over the mountains and back again

As promised, here are some highlights from the trip my cousin and I took along the Overmountain Victory National Historic Trail, or at least a good-sized chunk of it.

We kicked things off with a visit to Sycamore Shoals State Park in Elizabethton, TN.  The Overmountain Men assembled here to begin the march that culminated in Ferguson’s defeat at King’s Mountain.  This was my second visit, but it had been several years since I’d been there.  We scoped out the reconstruction of Ft. Watauga, site of a failed Indian attack in the summer of 1776.

Walking on, we came to the shoals for which the site is named.  The Overmountain Men crossed the river here.

Then we passed the open ground where the muster took place.  Before the militiamen set off, they heard a sermon by Rev. Samuel Doak, one of the most prominent ministers of the early frontier.  Sycamore Shoals was also the place where Richard Henderson bought the territory between the Kentucky and Cumberland Rivers from the Cherokee in 1775.

While we were in Elizabethton, I took the chance to swing by the original site of Ft. Watauga, which I didn’t get to see the last time I was there.  A monument atop a small mound in a residential neighborhood marks the location.

After snapping a quick photo, we set off along the OVNHT commemorative driving route, which approximates the path the Whigs took into the Carolina backcountry.  This was the first time I’d avoided the interstates on a King’s Mountain pilgrimage, and it was nice to see some different scenery zip by the window.

The NPS runs a small mineral and mining museum near Spruce Pine, NC along the Blue Ridge Parkway, in the area where the Overmountain Men split into two parties to cross the mountains.  A monument on the grounds commemorates their campaign, as well as an Indian battle at Etchoe Pass in which Franics Marion participated.

The marker also refers to more recent military history: “It was the North Carolina and South Carolina and Tennessee troops—the 30th Division—in the World War that broke the Hindenburg Line.”  In the nineteenth century it was common for East Tennessee Unionists to invoke King’s Mountain when writing about the Civil War, but this was the first time I’d seen this theme applied to WWI.

In Burke County, we paid a visit to Quaker Meadows, home of Charles and Joseph McDowell, where Whig partisans from North Carolina joined the units from over the mountains.  Historic Burke maintains an exhibit in the old courthouse building, and also operates Charles McDowell’s 1812 brick home.  The house was closed, but we walked around the grounds and snapped a picture.

Just a stone’s throw from the house is a monument to the Council Oak, where the militia commanders got together to plan the next stage of the expedition.

The original tree is gone, and in fact this isn’t the exact spot where it stood, but a replacement now grows over the monument, right next to a steakhouse where I consumed enough salmon patties to founder an elephant.

The Whigs expected to find Ferguson in Gilbert Town, near present-day Rutherfordton, but by the time they arrived there the Scottish commander had begun his retreat southward.  We stopped there for the night, and then drove by the field where the militia camped, and I would’ve snapped a photo, but there was no space to pull off the road.

While we were in that neck of the woods, we made a brief side trip to Biggerstaff’s Old Fields.  The victors of King’s Mountain camped there with their prisoners on the night of Oct. 14, 1780, during their return march back into the mountains.  That evening, some of the Whigs conducted an impromptu trial and hanged nine of the Tories, three at a time.  The marker is in the middle of nowhere, and to get there you have to take  a series of winding back roads, each one narrower than the last.  There was barely enough space in the grass alongside the road to park the car.  Even in the daytime, it’s a somewhat eerie place, with that vaguely sinister, ominous vibe you sometimes pick up at isolated locations where awful things happened.  (We could hear, but not see, crows cawing in the surrounding trees. Maybe that had something to do with it.)

Back on the OVNHT, and just a short distance from Biggerstaff’s, is Brittain Church.  The Whigs passed by the site on their march southward and again on their return, leaving some of the wounded behind to recover.

For some of the injured militiamen, this was the last stop.  Thomas McCullouch was a lieutenant in Campbell’s regiment; mortally wounded, he died at Brittain Church, and his final resting place is in the graveyard behind the sanctuary.

There are other Rev War veterans buried in the same graveyard.  Most of them are militiamen from the Carolinas, but we also found a tombstone belonging to a Maryland soldier.

We skipped the next segment of the OVNHT, which crosses into South Carolina, in order to have enough time to walk the field at Cowpens, where the Whigs stopped on October 6 and joined up with additional men from the Palmetto State before moving on to King’s Mountain.  Just a few months after their victory over Ferguson’s Tories, some of them would return to Cowpens and help Daniel Morgan inflict another defeat on the British.

After taking in the battlefield, we drove a short distance to the town of Gaffney to see the gravesite of Col. James Williams, the controversial officer who suffered a mortal wound while leading a contingent of South Carolinians at King’s Mountain.

We spent the night at my usual motel near Crowders Mountain, and made the short drive to King’s Mountain National Military Park after a hearty breakfast.  I’d never been to the park this late in the year, and I was surprised at how much easier it was to appreciate the terrain with fewer leaves on the trees.  Here’s a view of the crest from Isaac Shelby’s sector of the battleground:

Lt. McCullough’s name, we noticed, was listed on the U.S. Monument.  Seeing a name on one of these engraved lists is a lot more poignant when you spent the previous morning looking at the grass growing over the bones of the man who possessed it.

Someday I’m hoping to go back and tour the McDowell House and fill in a few other blank spaces we had to skip, and of course I’ve still got to drive the northern leg from Virginia and the eastern leg which follows the route of Cleveland and Winston’s men to Quaker Meadows.  But this was a very satisfying trip, and something that had been on my bucket list for a long time.

If you’re interested in exploring the trail for yourself, let me encourage you to pick up the OVNHT guidebook by Randell Jones, published earlier this year, which includes maps, directions, photos, and background information on what you’ll find along the way.  We took a copy along with us and it came in quite handy.  I’d also recommend you take some sort of GPS device and print out the list of latitude and longitude coordinates of the waypoints along the route which is available here.

Oh, and speaking of my bucket list, we devoted the last day of the trip to another site I’d wanted to visit for a while.  This particular battleground isn’t a stop on the Overmountain Men’s route, bit it’s inseparable from the story of how they ended up at King’s Mountain.  I’ll talk about this place in my next post.

Hitting the trail, or at least a close approximation thereof

My teenage cousin has morphed into a bona fide history fanatic, and I’ve promised to take him to my favorite historic site, which of course is King’s Mountain. I’ve got two extra days off this week, so we’ve decided to bypass the direct route and take the Overmountain Victory National Historic Trail, which approximates the route taken by the Whig militia on their march to intercept and defeat Ferguson’s Tories. (We’ll be starting at Sycamore Shoals in Elizabethton, TN, but there are additional branches of the trail that start in Virginia and North Carolina.) As a certified King’s Mountain fanatic, driving the trail has been on my personal bucket list for a long time, and I’m pretty excited.

The only problem is that I’m a horrible navigator, and since the OVNHT doesn’t necessarily follow the shortest route from point to point, I can’t rely on my GPS to show me which roads to take. The NPS has an official map of the trail, but it doesn’t provide specific directions and road names. I’ve plotted out the main stops on an online mapping program and adjusted the directions to follow the trail, but my track record with this sort of thing is less than stellar. I therefore predict one of two possible outcomes:

1. We’ll have to give up on the official driving tour and just navigate from stop to stop using whatever route the GPS indicates, or
2. We’ll try to stick to the trail come heck or high water, get irretrievably lost, and neither of us will ever be heard from again.

Anyway, we’re setting off for Elizabethton tonight to get an early start on the tour tomorrow morning. Assuming we come out of this alive, I should be able to post some interesting pictures and site reports in a few days. If not, at least my demise will come in the midst of some serious historical touring, so I’ll die happy.