Thomas Frye:
Young Man with a Candle, from Life-Sized Heads
(1760)

My Scotch-Irish ancestory stretches back to House of de Vere, part of William The Conquerer's entourage in 1066. Scotch-Irish immigrants to the New World colonies resulted from failed immigration policies implemented by the British government in Ireland since at least Henry VII's reign in the first half of the seventeenth century. The English Civil War a century later served to exacerbate further the difficulty as both Oliver Cromwell and his successors fought to subdue the Irish and their infernal Catholicism. One continuing strategy had been the creation of The Ulster Plantation, a plan to overwhelm the native Irish chieftains by resettling their ancestral lands with Scottish Presbyterians. The Chieftains felt obligated to fight back, which they did with great ferocity, continually losing, resulting in The Troubles. Northern Ireland remained unstable and hostile, resulting in multitudes of fleeing Presbyterians. It would have to have been that some of those who would ultimately become my forbears would have come from the Ulster Plantation. No shortages of them came to this country during the early eighteenth century.

My Scocth-Irish forebears, Robert and Martha Ware, and family came to this continent under Rev. James MacGregor during Queen Anne's War to escape religious persecution in Ulster. What had begun with the importation of Scottish Protestants into Ulster to squeeze out the native Catholics devolved into persecuting not just Catholics but also Presbyterians because their form of Protestantism didn't conform to the newer Church of England. They planned to settle in Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1718, but the Puritans refused them entry because they were the wrong sort of Protestants for them, too. They created a Presbyterian colony, Nutfield which they renamed Londonderry, in New Hampshire, across the Merrimac River from the Puritans, and stayed for a decade or so, leaving after some controversy within that Presbyterian community. By 1730, the Wears (they changed the spelling of their surname during this generation) relocated to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, near Neshaminy Creek. Robert and Martha's son Robert, Jr. married Rebecca Carrell in about 1740 in the Neshamin Presbyterian Church; She lived on an adjacent farm. Rebecca's mother's family was Dutch, Verkerk, with a history stretching back to the 1400s in The Netherlands and over a hundred years in New Amsterdam, America.

Like many families, Robert and Rebecca migrated further South along The Great Highway down the Shenandoah Valley to Old Augusta County, Virginia, where Robert purchased land in The Borden Grant in 1753. So many Scotch-Irish settled there that the tract became known as The Irish Tract. Their sons John, my direct forebear, and his brother Samuel had moved on to Washington County, North Carolina, by 1778. Robert, John, and Samuel all served in the Continental Army, and Robert reportedly signed on immediately following the Battle of Lexington. Robert served as a Captain, Samuel as a Colonel, and John as a private soldier, each seeing action at the Battle of Kings' Mountain. John also went on to serve in the War of 1812.

John married Agnes Nancy Moore before leaving Augusta County. Nancy's father, Capt. Moses Moore was the rare exception in my Fambly history, for he was a Tory, a colonial supporter of the British government. According to the 1788 Census, he lived in the Tombigbee Settlement, Mississippi Territory, and his occupation was listed as Land Speculator. He had been among the earliest settlers of western North Carolina. "His name first appears in the area records in August 1755 when he purchased land on Reynolds Creek, later known as Indian Creek, near present-day Cherryville, N C. He was an extensive landowner and served as a Captain in the North Carolina colonial militia. He was a signer of the document known as the Tryon Resolves, or Tryon Association. His son, Col. John Moore, was the leader of the Tories in the Battle of Ramsour's Mill during the Revolutionary War. Following the Revolutionary War, Moses Moore moved to the Mobile District of Spanish West Florida to escape persecution as a Tory. He received a Spanish land grant on the Tombigbee River in the present-day state of Alabama. He died there about 1791." [Geni.com]

John Wear and his brother Samuel were part of the group that tried to create the State of Franklin. The country they moved into, Washington County, North Carolina, was situated across the Alleghennies from the rest of the colonies. They were considered Overmountain Men who ignored the warnings from both the British and Colonial governments to stay out of what both considered land reserved as Indian Hunting Grounds. The Overmountain Men negotiated separate treaties with the natives, or most of them, moving in and building blockhouses for defense. The Wears built Fort Wear, which consisted of a rough log blockhouse large enough to house five or six families, on the banks of Pidgeon Forge Creek, near present-day Dollywood in Sevier County, Tennessee. Robert and Rebecca followed their sons there, dying at Fort Wear in 1790.

John Wear went on to father twenty-one offspring by four wives. Agnes Nancy died in Cape Geradot, Luisana, Reino de Nueva España, possibly of malaria, in October 1800. I do not know what she was doing there!  John died in 1835 at 94, back in Sevier County, Tennessee, probably near Fort Wear. John's daughter, Jane Wear, married Thomas Lovelady on October 14, 1792, in White County, Tennessee. Their daughter, Elizabeth, would marry my great-great grandfather John Bird Bounds there before dying in childbirth along the Applegate Extension of The Oregon Trail on November 13, 1846, at the age of 42.

These Scotch-Irish were tenacious. They insisted upon having their way. A Wear is the mayor of Pidgeon Forge, Tennessee, today. The family was mentioned along with the Mayfields in a book describing prominent Southern Families before the Civil War. Samuel Wear helped draft the constitution of the failed state of Franklin and the state of Tennessee, which was eventually carved out of what had previously been North Carolina territory, which initially stretched to The Mississippi. The stories continue unfolding. I see the fierce Scotch-Irish temperament in my nephews and even in myself when I experience another injustice. It seems unlikely, but I suspect that some Famblys carry an especially sensitive sense of justice and cannot tolerate its absence for long. This story's already too long.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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