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Wilkes

March 30, 2023

Boones on Beaver Creek

I’ve recently had the opportunity to spend time with a group of Daniel Boone enthusiasts who are searching for information about the site of one of his cabins in Wilkes County. Last weekend, Mary Bohlen with the North Carolina Daniel Boone Heritage Trail coordinated the gathering of more than a dozen people near the mouth of Beaver Creek in the western part of the county at a spot where Daniel Boone is thought to have had a cabin. It was an impressive collection of knowledge and enthusiasm!

By the end of the day, ground penetrating radar identified a line 25 feet long that could represent the edge of a cabin. The data will be analyzed, and more testing will be done at the site at a later time.

Page 23 of the book Home on the Yadkin, printed in the 1950s.

The photo above shows the site in question during the 1950s. The bush and stones are no longer present, making it more difficult to know the exact spot to search. I went to the county records to see if they revealed any additional clues.

William Allison’s Deposition

I found something in the records of the Moravian land dispute. On August 28, 1806, William Allison gave his deposition in which he remembered events from forty years earlier. He said that he arrived in North Carolina in October 1765, and he stayed two weeks with Francis Reynolds who lived four miles east of the Wilkesboro courthouse. (At that time, there was no courthouse and no town of Wilkesboro yet.) He had planned to settle on the vacant land near where the courthouse was later built, but he soon discovered that it was claimed by the Moravians. To avoid any potential controversy over future ownership of the land, he opted to settle a few miles further west, off of the Moravian land, on the south side of the Yadkin River along Beaver Creek.

Part of the first page of William Allison’s deposition.

The Moravian case files are available on FamilySearch. William Allison’s deposition begins at image 542. It continues through image 549.

Allison said that he purchased his place in the Fall of 1765 from Nicholas Angel for £27, 10 shillings in trade. He still lived in the same place in 1806, and he estimated that the value of his land had increased to $3,000.

He said that in 1769, the place where Mrs. Triplett now lives containing about 400 acres was sold by Benjamin Angel to George Boone for £70, part money and part trade. At that time there was only a cabin. “And in time of making the second crop, said Boon sold said land to Ross” for about £100, mostly in money. When Boone sold it, there were about four or five acres cleared.

Two pages from William Allison’s deposition (image 548 and image 549).

I also made a transcription of these two pages.

William Allison’s deposition shows that George Boone lived near him on land that was owned by Mrs. Triplett in 1806. So where did William Allison and Mrs. Triplett live? Let’s see what the land records show.

Wilkes Deeds on Beaver Creek

The first Wilkes County deeds and land grants were issued in 1778. William Allison waited until 1790 to get a warrant for the land on Beaver Creek that he had been living on since 1765. The mouth of Beaver Creek isn’t as clearly defined as many other creeks and rivers. While the creek’s headwaters begin eight miles away on the slopes of the Brushy Mountains, the last mile as it approaches the Yadkin River is often two or three branches that run parallel to each other. The bottomland near the river is very flat, and the branches of Beaver Creek run around the edges of fields. I wonder how farming and cultivation over the past 250 years has changed the path of the creek in this area. Also, the construction of Kerr Scott Dam seven miles downstream in the 1960s must have affected the mouth of Beaver Creek in some way.

The site of the Boone cabin is located among these parallel branches of Beaver Creek about a half mile away from the Yadkin River. It is on the eastern portion of an original land grant of 400 acres issued to Elijah Isaacs in 1782. This tract is shown in yellow below. On the south side of that grant are two grants issued to William Allison/Ellison in 1790.

The cabin site is located on the old Elijah Isaacs grant. (Larger version)

Elijah Isaacs sold his 400 acre tract to Thomas Harbin in 1784.

Thomas Harbin sold the northwest 230 acres to “Elenor Triplett” a few months later. She was Eleanor Harbin Triplett, widow of William Triplett who had died during the Revolutionary War. Eleanor was certainly related to the man who sold her the land, and perhaps he was her brother or father.

Thomas Harbin sold the southeast 170 acres to Thomas Linville. In 1788, Linville sold 50 acres of it to John Norris, but I wasn’t able to find a deed where Norris later sold the land. Linville sold the southern 120 acres to Thomas Holeman who later sold it to William Triplett in 1800. (Yes, that’s three different men named Thomas who owned the land in succession. As if this wasn’t confusing enough already!)

Ownership of the original 400-acre grant as it was divided through 1800. The first three owners are based on William Allison’s deposition. The others are based on county deeds.

By 1800, Eleanor and William Triplett owned at least 350 of the original 400 acres. I suspect they also owned the other 50 acres, but the deed from Norris is missing. (It’s not unusual for deeds from this time period to be missing from the records.) I also suspect that this William Triplett is Eleanor’s son, but I’m not familiar enough with the Triplett family to know for sure. Either way, the land is in the Triplett family.

The 400-acre Isaacs grant was divided beginning in 1784. (Larger version)

The map above shows the 400-acre Elijah Isaacs grant with the approximate cabin location at the shaded circle. The thin black lines with metes and bounds show the approximate division with the 230 acres in the northwest, the 50 acres somewhere in the middle, and the 120 acres in the southeast. Yes, it looks messy! But unfortunately, the associated deeds don’t provide enough details to fully draw the boundaries of these deeds. It’s not clear which of these parcels was the site of the cabin, but that’s not necessarily relevant if the Triplett family had consolidated them. Perhaps the more important point is that these deeds provide the names of the landowners during the late 1700s.

Records and Family Stories Come Together

Looking again at William Allison’s deposition, he said that Mrs. Triplett’s 400 acres is where George Boone’s cabin was. I’m starting to believe that Mrs. Triplett was Eleanor who had acquired all (or most) of the old 400-acre grant. William Allison would certainly know who had lived there because he had lived on the south side of this land for the past 40 years. Also, it’s hard to imagine there being another “Mrs. Triplett” who lived on a 400-acre farm on Beaver Creek.

When we consider William Allison’s testimony, the old deeds, and the family story about the long-remembered Boone cabin, they all come together to suggest that the cabin might have belonged to George Boone, Daniel’s younger brother. There was certainly a cabin there as shown in the 1950s photo. At that time it was a pile of rocks, and they were removed in the 1960s. Landowners in the years since verified the location of those rocks.

Another piece of circumstantial evidence is the fact that Thomas Linville acquired the southeast portion of the old grant. George Boone was married to Ann Linville who was born about 1744. With the same last name, she must be related to Thomas Linville who was buying and selling this land in the 1780s. Perhaps they were siblings? Even though George and Ann had moved to Kentucky by the 1780s, it’s interesting that one of Ann’s relatives had bought part of the land where they had lived.

I had another thought. This isn’t based on facts, but I’m just thinking out loud. Daniel Boone was in Wilkes County from 1767 until 1773, or about six years. There are at least four places between Wilkesboro and Ferguson that are suggested as former homesites of Daniel Boone. Would he have moved his family to a new cabin every year or two while he was here? Maybe, but it seems as if that wouldn’t be necessary or practical for a man who was more interested in spending his time exploring and making frequent trips into the wilderness of Kentucky. Perhaps one or two of these suggested homeplaces weren’t actually his, but instead belonged to other members of his family. Perhaps the stories were passed down through generations that a particular site was “the old Boone place”, and over time that story innocently evolved into being “the old Daniel Boone place”.

Records show that Daniel Boone lived in at least two locations in Wilkes County: one at the mouth of Lewis Fork, and the other at the mouth of Elk Creek. Both were on the north side of the Yadkin River. He very well might have lived at other places along the river, but I haven’t seen documentation for those yet. It’s exciting that we have evidence of his brother living at this site on Beaver Creek, and Daniel surely would have stopped by to visit him here, telling stories about his adventures across the Blue Ridge Mountains. I’m sure there are more records hidden away that will give a more complete picture about Daniel Boone’s time in Wilkes County, so we’ll need to continue searching. Knowing where his family lived – including his brother George Boone – will be helpful in learning more about Daniel, himself.

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