Visiting Our Past: Proctor family history reveals how memory works

Somewhere in a thicket along Hazel Creek, in the shadow of Pinnacle Ridge in Swain County, lies a rusted scissors that Walt Proctor had thrown away, during a "Moses fit," in the 1940s.

The scissors belonged to Walt's grandfather, Moses Proctor, first settler, in 1830, of a remote cove called Indian Cove, situated above the present day town of Proctor.

Proctors, according to descendant Duane Oliver in his book, "Remembered Lives: A Narrative History of Our Family," liked "to blame their behavior on an ancestor (who was) known to have had a bad temper."

The scissors is like a detail from a dream — the dream of a family navigating the currents of history with the instruments of inheritance.

Ocean traveler

Navigation was on the mind of John Proctor, brother of Moses' three-times-great-grandfather, Joshua, when the ship on which he was crossing the Atlantic — the "SS Sea Adventure" — ran into a four-day storm on its way to resupplying the Virginia colony at Jamestown in 1609.

The ship's seals broke, water filled the hold, and passengers pumped and bailed water without having access to food. When the weather cleared, the admiral, Sir George Somers, spotted land — but it was Bermuda, called Devil's Island because of its ship-wrecking rocky coast.

Somers steered the ship into a coral wedge and, from that parking spot, ferried people and supplies to the uninhabited, paradisical island.

Over the next few months, two ships got built from salvage and local lumber, and the colonists made it to Jamestown, as per their Virginia Company contract, to be greeted at a broken gate by skeletal victims of "The Starving Time."

Next chapter

William Shakespeare wrote his play, "The Tempest," in 1610 and 1611 based in part on the tale of the "Sea Adventure." According to the next memorable family legend, John Proctor's son, also named John, moved to Salem, Massachusetts, where he and his wife were hanged for witchcraft and eventually immortalized in Arthur Miller's play, "The Crucible."

I have in my copy of Oliver's family history an inserted page on which he states, "Correction! Recent research shows that the John Proctor hanged in the 1692 Salem witch trials was not of our family. But it's still a good story."

What does it mean that generations of belief in the Salem connection is overturned at such a late date? Has a family world view already been shaped by the embraced myth?

How do a family's core stories relate to a world view; and how does that world view shape the actions of descendants?

The pieces of family history that survive sometimes seem like flotsam and jetsam — random. And yet, there are counterexamples, testaments and epics that guide, inspire, and bind ethnic sub-groups for millennia.

Inspired self-sufficiency

Without much material to go by, one might assume that the Proctor family legacy includes disdain for authority and faith in hard work.

After all, those original Jamestown colonists, with their privileged English backgrounds, couldn't find a way to feed themselves.

Moses, however, moved with his wife, Patience Rustin, and an infant son, William Crow Proctor, to a place (Hazel Creek, then in Macon County) where he had no neighbors except for a few Cherokees, and where he would develop a prosperous farm without grown children or any slaves.

He had previously pulled up stakes three times — migrating from Rutherford County to north Georgia (where a gold rush had started); then to Monroe County, Tennessee (where he met Patience) and Cades Cove (which was already filling up) before coming to the valley that Proctors would populate.

The Biblical spirit of Moses and his followers can't be ignored.

Along Hazel Creek, a new story was being written, which would merge the old family myths with a new world order.

Mountaintop

"With all of Hazel Creek to choose from," Oliver writes, "why Moses chose to build his cabin on the spot he did is something of a mystery. He built (it) on top of a steep ridge, much too far from a spring."

Oliver surmises that Patience and baby William had not yet arrived. We can begin to imagine a religious inspiration for Moses, working alone, perhaps with help from Cherokees.

(You can make a pilgrimage to the cabin site, now the site of William's and Patience's graves, as did hiker and writer William Hart Jr., first taking a boat from the Fontana Marina. "We were on sacred ground," Hart notes in his book, "3000 Miles in the Great Smokies.")

When Hazel Creek's second family, the Cables, arrived, the religious feeling found a nucleus. Peter Cable, an engineer who drained swampland and made it arable, also made the establishment of a Primitive Baptist Church a top priority.

After the Civil War, Moses' son, William, would help organize the Panther Creek Baptist Church; and William's son, Ranz, would become an ordained minister and circuit riding preacher.

The parallel paths of Baptist revivalism and southern mountain settlement stemmed from pre-Revolutionary War experience, for as British governors punished tax protesters during the Regulator Movement, they also persecuted independent Baptists, who made an exodus west.

New world genealogy

The French Broad Baptist Association was formed in 1807; and a decade later, Humphrey Posey was extending his Baptist mission to the Cherokees in the Valley Towns.

Moses' paternal grandfather, Nicholas Proctor Jr., married Nanny Smith, a woman believed to be Cherokee.

Patience's family had been "Black Dutch," that is, German or Dutch people probably descended from intermarriage with 16th century Spanish invaders, who, in turn, probably had Moorish blood from an earlier invasion of Spain by African Arabs.

The new world order included the blending of many heritages fused by economic and religious commonality.

From here, the Proctor family legacy would require much more space (and will be taken in up in future columns). It would involve not only the growth of the Baptist faith in the mountains, but also the Civil War, the removal of trees by lumber companies, the establishment of the Great Smokies National Park, acquaintance with Horace Kephart, and the building of Fontana Dam through the use of eminent domain.

That last event occurred in the 1940s — at the time that Walt Proctor, in his early 70s, threw his heirloom scissors, ineffectually dulled, into the bushes.

Rob Neufeld wrote the weekly "Visiting Our Past" column for the Citizen Times until his death in 2019. This column originally was published May 26, 2014.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Visiting Our Past: Proctor family history reveals how memory works