The Catawba Valley Settlements

From History of the McDowells and Connections, by John Hugh McDowell, pub. 1918, C. B. Johnston, page 232:

Amongst the earliest settlers in the valley of the upper Catawba, in the old county of Burke [then Rowan],* were Joseph McDowell the elder [b. 1715], a grandson of Ephraim, the founder of the family in Virginia, Kentucky and our own State, and his cousin, known as "Hunting John," who was near the same age. They migrated somewhere about the year 1760, and during the French-Indian war, from the old home of Ephraim McDowell, in Rockbridge** [then Augusta] County, Va., and because the country west of the Catawba was rendered unsafe by roving bands of Cherokee and Catawba braves, went with their families through Rowan and Mecklenburg counties to some point in South Carolina, near the northern boundary line. Their sturdy Scotch-Irish friends had already drifted from Pennsylvania, where they, with thousands of Germans, were first dumped by the English land agents upon American soil, to upper South Carolina, and had commemorated their first American home by naming the three northern counties of that State York, Chester and Lancaster.

*Burke was formed from Rowan County in 1777

**Rockbridge was formed in 1778 from Augusta and Botetourt counties in Virginia. Botetourt had been formed from Augusta in 1770. Augusta was formed from Orange County in 1738.

Silas McDowell (1795-1879)

Silas McDowell was a pomologist and botanist who discovered or introduced at least fifteen new apple varieties during the 1850s. He was a farmer, scientific observer, mountain guide, clerk of the Superior Court, and a man of letters. Born 16 May 1795 in York District, South Carolina, he was a cousin of Colonel Joseph McDowell of Pleasant Gardens, for whom McDowell County, North Carolina, was named. Son of Elizabeth McDowell (b. 1772) and an unknown (or undisclosed) father, Silas was raised mostly by his maternal grandfather “Pacolet William” McDowell. In 1812 he went to Asheville, where he was educated at the respected Newton Academy. Two years later he returned to South Carolina for an apprenticeship with a tailor in Charleston.

From 1816 to 1846, Silas McDowell worked as a tailor, first in Morganton, North Carolina, and later in Macon County, North Carolina, where he also served a clerk of the Superior Court for nearly sixteen years. On his farm near Franklin, he raised and sold apples, fruit tree grafts, and rhododendrons. He also experimented with native American grape varieties. In addition, he served as a guide to John Lyon, Moses Ashley Curtis, and several other botanists, touring and collecting specimens in western North Carolina.

McDowell was largely a self-taught scientist. He wrote extensively on a wide variety of scientific and literary subjects, including botany, horticulture, mineralogy, geology, zoology, and local and state history. He is perhaps best known as the originator of the "thermal belt" concept (which is a zone on a mountainside where frost and freezes are less common than in the valleys and on the mountaintops).

He gained fame as a writer and storyteller, and was the source of much of Eoneguski, "the first North Carolina novel," written by Senator Robert Strange. McDowell's writings were published in such widely diverse places as Harper’s, The North Carolina Planter, The Raleigh Observer, and Southern Cultivator. His prose landscape sketches were highly praised by James Wood Davidson in The Living Writers of the South (1869).

McDowell married Elizabeth Erwin in 1828. They, along with Silas' mother Elizabeth, moved to his farm in Macon County, North Carolina, which he had purchased in 1820. He had learned about the area from a former landlord, who had been part of General Griffith Rutherford's 1776 Cherokee expedition, and bought the land after the Cherokee cession in 1819. McDowell wrote about this farm in an 1873 letter to Lyman Draper, and said that he had “resolved to buy the Hiddintown in the Cullasajah Valley" while a "romantic youth" in school. He lived on the farm, which he variously referred to as Hiddintown, Sugartown, and the Vale of Cullasajah, until his death in 1879. The name Cullasajah, today spelled Cullasaja and used to designate a small river between Highlands and Franklin, North Carolina, has been variously spelled over the years as Cullasajah, Cullasaga, Cullasaja, and Callasaga. One of the apple varieties developed by McDowell, which is still cultivated, bears the name Callasaga.

(Sources: “Silas McDowell & Southern Apples,” compiled by T. Duane Phillips; and "Silas McDowell and the Early Botanical Exploration of Western North Carolina," by Gary S. Dunbar, North Carolina Historical Review, 1964)

Martha McDowell, Colonel Buford & the Butcher

My cousin Martha McDowell, daughter of Colonel Samuel McDowell and Mary McClung, was born 26 June 1766 in Augusta County, Virginia. I don't know much about Martha, except that she married Colonel Abraham Buford, a military man caught in a terrible, terrible situation still argued about in history circles.
Abraham Buford was a Continental Army officer during the Revolutionary War, most known as commanding officer during the "Waxhaw Massacre." Born in Culpeper County, Virginia, Buford quickly organized a company of minutemen upon the outbreak of war in 1775, eventually rising to the rank of Colonel by May 1778. Assuming command of the 11th Virginia Regiment in September, he would be assigned to the 3rd Virginia Regiment in April 1780 and sent south to relieve regiments during the British siege of Charleston, South Carolina.
Banastre Tarleton [pictured, portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds] was a British officer and politician. His reputation for ruthlessness earned him the nicknames "Bloody Ban" and "Butcher" amongst American revolutionists. On May 29, 1780, Lieutenant Colonel Tarleton, with a force of 150 mounted soldiers, overtook the detachment of 350 to 380 Virginia Continentals led by Colonel Buford near Lancaster, South Carolina. Buford refused to surrender or even to stop his march. Only after sustaining heavy casualties did Buford order surrender. The battle has always been controversial, since after breaking Buford's line Tarleton's men slaughtered many of the Virginians who surrendered, literally hacking them down with their sabres. Some sources, such as Buford's Adjutant Henry Bowyer and Surgeon's Mate Robert Brownfield, claim that Buford belatedly raised a white flag, but was ignored by Tarleton. In Tarleton's own account, he virtually admits the massacre, stating that his horse had been shot from under him during the initial charge and his men, thinking him dead, engaged in "a vindictive asperity not easily restrained." In the end, 113 Americans were killed and another 203 captured, 150 of whom were so badly wounded that they had to be left behind. Tarleton's casualties were 5 killed and 12 wounded. The British called the affair the Battle of Waxhaw Creek, while the Americans knew it as the Buford Massacre or the Waxhaw Massacre.
Colonel Buford escaped on horseback with his remaining men and would hold no further commands for the remainder of the war. He and Martha eventually settled in Scott County, Kentucky.

(Sources: Wikipedia - Waxhaw Massacre, Banastre Tarleton, Abraham Buford)

"The Mountain Men," per Teddy Roosevelt

From The Winning of the West, Vol. 3, by Theodore Roosevelt, published 1900, G.P. Putnam's Sons:

"Having reduced South Carolina to submission, the British commander [Major Patrick Ferguson] then threatened North Carolina; and Col. [Charles] McDowell, the commander of the whig militia in that district, sent across the mountains to the Holston men praying that they would come to his help. Though suffering continually from Indian ravages, and momentarily expecting a formidable inroad, they responded nobly to the call. Sevier remained to patrol the border and watch the Cherokees, while Isaac Shelby crossed the mountains with a couple of hundred mounted riflemen, early in July. The mountain men were joined by McDowell, with whom they found also a handful of Georgians and some South Carolinans; who when their States were subdued had fled northward, resolute to fight their oppressors to the last. The arrival of the mountain men put new life into the dispirited whigs." 

The Call for the Overmountain Men

From King's Mountain and Its Heroes, by Lyman Copeland Draper, published 1881, P.G. Thomson, page 84:

When Colonel [Charles] McDowell became convinced that Ferguson's movement to the north-western portion of South Carolina, threatened the invasion of the North Province also, he not only promptly raised what force he could from the sparsely populated settlements, on the heads of Catawba, Broad and Pacolet rivers, to take post in the enemy's front and watch his operations; but dispatched a messenger with this alarming intelligence to Colonels John Sevier and Isaac Shelby, on Watauga and Holston, those over-mountain regions, then a portion of North Carolina, but now of East Tennessee; urging those noted border leaders to bring to his aid all the riflemen they could, and as soon as possible.
Sevier, unable to leave his frontier exposed to the inroads of the Cherokees, responded at once to the appeal, by sending a part of his regiment under Major Charles Robertson; and Shelby, being more remote, and having been absent on a surveying tour, was a few days later, but joined McDowell, at the head of two hundred mounted riflemen, about the twenty-fifth of July, at his camp near the Cherokee Ford of Broad river.

Gen. Charles McDowell (1743-1815)

From Reminiscences and Memoirs of North Carolina and Eminent North Carolinians, by John H. Wheeler, Columbus Printing Works, 1884:

On the commencement of our Revolutionary troubles, he [Charles McDowell] was the commander of an extensive district in his section of country, and was a brave and daring officer.
It was not until the year 1780 that western North Carolina became the field of military operations in the Revolutionary war. After subduing the States of Georgia and South Carolina, the British forces advanced to this State and commenced making demonstrations. McDowell was active in counteracting their movements.
In June, 1780, having been joined by Shelby, Sevier, and Clarke, of Georgia, near Cherokee Ford on Broad River, McDowell determined to attack the British at a strongly fortified post on the Pacolet River, under command of Patrick Moore, which he gallantly performed and compelled him to surrender.
He also attacked the Tories at Musgrove Mill on the Enoree River and routed them.
Many other brilliant affairs in this section marked his energy and efficiency as a soldier. We have recorded the facts of his missing a participation in the battle of King's Mountain.
As the several officers held equal rank, by a council of officers McDowell was dispatched to headquarters, then near Salisbury, to have General Sumner or General Davidson, who had been appointed brigadier general in place of General Rutherford, taken prisoner at Gates' defeat.
This closed his military career. The people of his county were not ungrateful to him for his long and successful military service. He was the Senator from Burke from 1782 to 1788, and he had been also in 1778, and member of the House 1809-'10-'11.