David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [152]
26 Swann, “Early Life & Times.”
SIX • A BOY’S LEARNING
1 Swann, “Early Life & Times.” Greene County Deed Book, vol. 3, 320, November 27, 1792, John Crockett from St of NC 197 acres Stogdons Fork, Lick Creek, Grant #1243.
2 Alice Daniel, Log Cabins of the Smokies (Gatlinburg, TN: Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association, 2000), 3.
3 Crockett, Narrative, 20.
4 Fred Brown, “The Stoneciphers,” Knoxville News-Sentinel, September 22, 1996. The Stonecipher family had come to America from Germany by way of Rotterdam in the mid-1700s. They were hired by the governor of Virginia to cut stone for buildings in the expanding Tidewater lands and in 1777 the family moved to the new frontier that would become Tennessee.
5 Ibid.
6 Crockett, Narrative, 21.
7 Brown, “Stoneciphers.”
8 Ibid.
9 Crockett, Narrative, 21.
10 Brown, “Stoneciphers.” Absalom and Sarah Stonecipher raised ten children. When Absalom died at the age of eighty-two in 1851, he had outlived David Crockett by fifteen years.
11 Kay K. Moss, Southern Folk Medicine, 1750–1820 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 2, 27.
12 Ibid., 8. For example, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a renowned Philadelphia physician, knew enough to counsel his aspiring students to seek out practitioners of domestic medicine. “When you go abroad always take a memorandum book and whenever you hear an old woman say such and such herbs are good, or that a compound makes a good medicine or ointment, put it down, for, gentlemen, you may need it.” Before his death in 1813, Rush was professor of the practice of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, America’s preeminent medical school at the time.
13 Swann, “Early Life & Times.”
14 Michal Strutin, Gristmills of the Smokies (Gatlinburg, TN: Great Smoky Mountains National History Association, 2000), 3.
15 Ibid., 7.
16 A millstone believed to have been removed from the site of the Crockett gristmill destroyed in the 1794 flood was eventually donated to the Crockett Tavern Museum in Morristown, TN, where it can still be seen.
17 Crockett, Narrative, 21.
18 From the Crockett Tavern and Pioneer Museum files. Swann, “Early Life & Times.
19 Jones, Crockett Cousins, 39: Grant of 300 acres in Jefferson County, TN, to John Crockett, April 14, 1792. Estle P. Muncy, People and Places of Jefferson County (Rogersville, TN: East Tennessee Printing Co., 1994), 3, 5–8. Formed by Territorial Governor William Blount in 1792 and bounded by the French Broad and Holston rivers, the county was named for Thomas Jefferson. The following year Dandridge, established in honor of Martha Dandridge Custis Washington, the wife of President Washington, was named the county seat. Mossy Creek, named for the profusion of long, vividly green moss fronds waving in the currents of the stream, was first settled in the 1780s. The community retained its name for almost 120 years, until 1901, when it became Jefferson City
20 William Douglas Henderson and Jimmy W. Claborn, Hamblen County: A Pictorial History (Virginia Beach, VA: Donning Company, 1995), 85.
21 Crockett, Narrative, 22.
22 Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, 7.
SEVEN • COMING OF AGE
1 Warren Moore, Mountain Voices: A Legacy of the Blue Ridge and Great Smokies (Chester, CT: Globe Pequot Press, 1988), 39.
2 Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, 7.
3 Henderson and Claborn, Hamblen County, 85. A development of private residences was built on the 1,952-foot-high Crockett Ridge starting in the early 2000s.
4 Crockett, Narrative, 22.
5 June 14, 1797, Bent Creek Day Book, May 1796–June 5, 1800.
6 Crockett, Narrative, 22–23.
7 Wallace L. McKeehan, Sons of DeWeitt Colony Texas, 1997–2006, The Sylar Family, www.tamu.edu/ccbn/mckstorysylarframe.htm. His family surname means “ropemaker” in German. It was spelled a variety of ways in America, including Sylar, Seiler, Silor, and Siler, the spelling used by David’s new employer.