Visiting Our Past: 21st century WNC families trace roots, traditions back 800 years
Recent immigrants generally know the old-country town that harbored and shaped their families. But America's oldest families often have a harder time verifying a definite place of origin.
Nonetheless, a community even 800 years in a family's past can have an effect on latter-day personalities. A search of Western North Carolina genealogies provides some clues.
Talmadge L. Burnette, Swannanoa Valley author of "Looking Back," connects to his great-great-great-grandfather, Jesse Burnette, who moved here from Virginia in the 1770s. Jesse's brothers, Thomas and Joseph, got cut down early, the former executed by Tories on his way to the Battle of King's Mountain and the latter killed in the battle.
June Baldwin Bork's genealogy, "The Burnetts and Their Connections," almost certainly traces Jesse to Alexander Burnard, a 14th-century Saxon who supported Robert Bruce's kingship in independent Scotland and was rewarded with the title of King's Forester in the woods near Dundee. He received a coat of arms, distinguished by a hunting horn and the motto, "Virtue flourishes from a wound."
Two centuries later Burnard's descendant, Alexander Burnet, began building Crathes Castle on a crannog (artificial island) in Loch Leys, contained within the Forest of Drum. Thus we have an example of a distinctive environment and history seeping into the making of Burnettes.
Though the Burnards/Burnets maintained their forest, it was open to the king and his retinue as a deer park and was gated. The reverence of this privilege relates to the stubborn independence American Burnettes felt when they settled the unreserved wilderness west of the Blue Ridge.
The Burnettes of the 20th century experienced a washing-over of their connection to their family legacy, as far as Talmadge's book tells. His father, William Elmore Burnette, truck-farmed in Mills River and Swannanoa in the 1910s and 20s and added dairy production when Beacon Manufacturing provided a village and a market in 1925.
Then, Burnette writes, "North Carolina passed a law that milk had to be 'Grade A' to be sold in the state. In other words, you had to have a barn with a concrete floor to milk on and several other requirements that we could not do on a rented farm. So we went out of the milk business. ... He only planted a family garden, and the fields grew up in weeds."
When Edwin Wiley Grove began building Grovemont, Talmadge's father got employment as a carpenter. Then the Depression hit, and work ended. William and his wife, Grace Condrey Burnette, went back to their preferred way of living. Until his death in 1960, William kept cattle. He consorted with Bascom Lamar Lunsford and danced in the Asheville Folk Festival.
His Baptist preacher insisted he repent. William replied, "Preacher, if I never do anything worse than dance in the Folk Festival, I don't think I have anything to worry about. I have no intention of getting up in the front of your church and confessing anything. I have not been in your church in over a year, and I will never set foot in it again."
William asserted his independence. Talmadge was out hunting squirrels, mink, and groundhogs near the North Fork reservoir.
Sherrill family histories attach to Cornwood, England, and reveal an inherited look: blue eyes and black hair. Cornwood borders the Dartmoor National Park, which had been established as a royal forest by King Henry III in 1239. The area is also a famous Bronze Age archaeological site, once again indicating the influence of both forest preserves and pre-Norman ancestry on Appalachian heritage.
In "The Sherrill Saga," Wanda L. Clark spells out various lineages for William Sherrill, dubbed the "Conestoga fur trader." The most likely one is that he is the son of Samuel Sherrill of Cornwood, whose family had resided there for at least 150 years.
Samuel settled along the Potomac River in Maryland. William went further up the Chesapeake Bay to become a registered "Indian trader" west of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania.
Here's a rough thesis: Saxon overseers of forests become trailblazers of the American wilderness, merging their cultures with Indians. Adam Sherrill, William's son, spoke Indian dialects. In 1747, he migrated with a large group of friends and family across the Catawba River at a place now named Sherrills Ford, establishing the first permanent white settlement that far west. Here, he adopted another aspect of American culture: slavery. His stately house was built by African American twins. He died where he settled, dividing up his property, including slaves, among eight sons.
Rob Neufeld wrote the local history feature, "Visiting Our Past," for the Citizen Times until his death in 2019. This column originally was published Nov. 19, 2008.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Visiting Our Past: WNC families trace roots, traditions back 800 years
