Visiting Our Past: Early settler got a piece of the Promised Land
If we wish to comprehend our region's history, we've got to get a handle on early land grants.
Let's humanize the subject, starting with Captain William Moore.
In 1787, Moore paid North Carolina 45 pounds for 450 acres "on both sides of Hominy Creek." It was one of the first grants in what is now Buncombe County.
Calculating the grains of silver in a pound, and the value of those grains today, that's a price of about $2,250.
Why wasn't Moore paying in American dollars? After all, we'd won the war. It's because an American dollar, called "a Continental," was nearly worthless, as the saying, "not worth a Continental" implies.
"In 1780, a sheep," David Stewart pointed out in his book, "The Summer of 1787," "could be purchased for $150 in paper money, or $2 in hard currency."
Eye on the prize
Moore settled on Hominy Creek a year before Burke County was carved out of Rutherford and five years before Buncombe was formed from Burke.
It was also 11 years after he first scoped out the place.
His brother-in-law, Brigadier General Griffith Rutherford, had called on him in 1776 to lead a cavalry unit to hunt down and destroy Cherokees, whose frustration with American treaty-makers and claim-stakers had led Dragging Canoe to call for raids on settlements.
At the beginning of September, Moore had his men camped on a hill above Hominy Creek, awaiting orders to march.
There are two accounts of the location of that camp.
Cursed site
Gail Tennent, in his 1950 booklet, "The Indian Path in Buncombe County," placed Moore's camp at the present site of Crossroads Assembly's Pentecostal church, not far from the French Broad.
This is in accord with a story that Tennent had heard from "the late Edward Henry," a "grandson of Robert Henry."
(I am still looking for this Edward. Richard Russell, in his authoritative 2013 biography of Robert Henry, refers to a grandson named Edmond L. Henry, who was the one who'd reported how his grandfather had prophesied the hour of his own death.)
At any rate, according to "Edward," Capt. Moore, "annoyed by dogs that came at night and stole venison brought in by hunters (for Moore's soldiers)," poisoned some of the meat and inadvertently killed "an old Indian spy" who "in his death agony laid a curse on the land around Sulphur Springs, thinking the water had poisoned him."
The Sulphur Springs Hotel had originally been a Robert Henry property. Over many years and a few owners, it suffered three fires.
The allegedly cursed place was located near where Tennent mapped it.
Pisgah land
Jack K. Cole, a Moore descendant, states in his book, "My People and the Promised Land," that the camp was 7 miles farther upstream, which corresponds to the location of Moore's home and gravesite in what is now Sand Hill.
The "Promised Land" in the title reflects local geography as well as family psychology.
The Moore home had an impressive view of Mount Pisgah to the southwest. Cole connects with this happenstance in an epigraph: "Then Moses climbed from the plains of Moab to Pisgah Peak in Mount Nebo ... and the Lord pointed out to him the Promised Land."
The American ethos of manifest destiny matches the Moores' ages-old inspiration that, as its coat of arms proclaims, "The brave may fall, but cannot yield," and as a family "Battle Hymn" exults, "The blood of Moores is mingled with the royal bloods of old. / Each century our numbers have increased a hundred fold. ... The clan goes marching on."
The clan, J.B. Moore reveals in his 1988 genealogy, traces back to a Celtic ancestor named "maolmordha," or "proudhead."
The bloodline branched out in Ireland, England and Scotland to produce such luminaries as Sir Thomas More, author of "Utopia," and Elizabeth Moore, wife of Robert Bruce.
The religious wars of the 1600s and 1700s tested the Moores' steel and strengthened their mountain-bred, Presbyterian, independent spirit, making them perfect candidates for roles in the American Revolution, which many of them would come to fight.
"An aged ancestress of mine," J.B. Moore wrote, survived the 1688 Catholic siege of Londonderry (in Ulster), during which many Scots-Irish died of starvation and disease.
She "told of how her husband ... died while eating grass. It was in this environment that my ... grandmother five times removed gathered up her brood of nine boys and shipped them off to America," in 1739.
One of those boys was 13-year-old William Moore.
Pinnacle
So now picture William Moore, age 50 — with seven children, ages 6 to 21, back in Rowan (now McDowell) County — surveying his troops on the Hominy hill, gazing at the landscape about him and, as legend has it, affirming, "This is a fair valley, and when we finish this war, I am coming to make my home here."
You may want to recheck Moore's birthdate. Could he really have been 50? It seems pretty certain. His gravestone says he died in 1812 at age 86.
And he had plenty of life left in him. After his first wife, Ann, died, he married Margaret Patton, who was in her mid-20s. By the time the war ended, he had had five or six children with her (there is confusion, in genealogies, about when one of the children was born).
War against the Cherokee
The impulse to live freely, find the Promised Land and populate it involved coming to terms with the enemy.
There was a dual strain in colonial society, as evidenced by the number of European-Indian marriages on the one hand and the violence of racial hatred on the other.
Gen. Charles Lee, Continental commander in the South, stated in July 1776, "It seems to me absolutely necessary to crush the evil," and Rutherford called for various states to join his campaign so that there would be "no Doubt of a Finel Destruction of the Cherroce Nation."
The Blue Ridge Mountains were the hot spot for conflict, marked by a trio of forts. Moore and other early land grantees — William and James Davidson (Swannanoa River settlers) and the families that came to Cathey's Creek (north of present-day Brevard) — had their enmity stoked by bitter experience.
Moore acted the soldier as he cut a swath with Rutherford to the Tuckaseegee and Little Tennessee rivers, destroying 36 Cherokee villages at the peak of harvest season.
He went back again a month later, at Rutherford's command, to inflict further damage.
We have Moore's report, which tells of coming to Stecoah (above present-day Whittier), having too few men to surround it, and rushing in.
"The enemy," Moore wrote, "fled, save two, who trying to make their escape, sprang into the river ... and as they were rising the bank on the other side we fired upon them and shot one of them down." Moore's men pursued the other up the mountain, caught him, and "killed and scalped him with the other."
Aftermath of war
Though Moore didn't get his grant, signed by Gov. Richard Caswell, until 1787, he prepared his Hominy Valley land before that.
He built a line of blockhouses, which, Nancy Brower reported in a 1973 article (citing Moore descendant Owen Gudger), held back the Cherokee from reinforcing the British at the Battle of King's Mountain.
Moore sent two of his slaves, Daddy Jim and Mamie Susie, to live on the land until Moore got the grant, and they played host to many settlers using the safety of the forts to settle the area.
Moore's slaves lived in homes near the main house and were recognized, Mary Gudger Moore — wife of William's grandson, William Hamilton Moore — told her daughter, Lucy, as being "descended from the African Kings."
Moore constructed a frame building and established the Sand Hill Academy to educate children of the community. His son Charles, inheritor of the estate, enlarged upon the school.
All of the original buildings have been torn down. Stone from the blockhouses went toward the foundation of the Oak Forest Presbyterian Church. Descendants of William Moore have included many prominent men, including Dan K. Moore, state governor, 1965-69.
Rob Neufeld wrote the weekly "Visiting Our Past" column for the Citizen Times until his death in 2019. This column originally was published May 5, 2014.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Visiting Our Past: Early settler got a piece of the Promised Land
