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Wilkes

October 2, 2024

The Homes of Robert and Benjamin Cleveland

Robert and Benjamin Cleveland were two of the nine children of John Cleveland and Elizabeth Coffey. In the 1760s, they left Virginia and came with at least three of their siblings to the area that would soon become Wilkes County. When they arrived, they selected suitable locations to settle, built a cabin there, and started a farm. But one thing that they did not do immediately was purchase land. The British land office that was operated by Lord Granville closed about 1763 soon after his death. The North Carolina state land office opened in 1778 during the Revolutionary War, and many early settlers were quick to begin the process of purchasing land that they had been living on for years. If they didn’t buy it, someone else might beat them to it, forcing them off the land that they called home. There were often disputes amid the confusion over who the rightful landowners should be. Meanwhile, with everyone preoccupied with the ongoing war for independence, it must have been an extremely stressful and chaotic time for the entire family.

The 1798 Direct Tax List

After the war ended, the new United States established taxes to pay for the operation of a government, to fund the creation of public buildings, and to repay both foreign and domestic debts. In July 1798, the U.S. Congress passed a bill to collect $2 million through a direct tax from the 16 states to fund a military expansion. North Carolina’s portion was determined to be $193,697.96. Landowners were taxed based on the total value of land, dwelling houses, cabins, barns, mills, and other buildings on the property. Slaves were taxed as well. Each county was responsible for collecting the tax and sending it to the state.

According to the National Archives, most of these tax lists have been lost and no longer exist. For North Carolina, only Iredell County is listed as having an existing 1798 tax list, and these pages are scanned and online as part of the UNC Wilson Special Collections Library, collection number 03919-z. As of 2024, these Iredell County records can be viewed online.

While browsing through records among the Lenoir Family Papers recently, I found county documents that included the Wilkes County Direct Tax List from 1798. Within the collection, these papers are in subseries 6.1.2, folders 672 through 674, and the originals are held in the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This was an exciting discovery!

The Wilkes County tax list was recorded by William Lenoir beginning in 1798, and it certainly continued into 1799. The list of landowners was made before Ashe County was created in the November 1799 session of the North Carolina General Assembly. Any soon-to-be citizens of Ashe County are included in this Wilkes County list.

This tax list is an extremely valuable resource for anyone interested in the history of northwest North Carolina soon after the Revolutionary War. When combined with the 1800 census, it becomes possible to reconstruct what this part of the state looked like and how the population was dispersed among the various watersheds. This will help genealogists determine where their ancestors lived and what their homesites were like. Archaeologists and historians can use this information to determine how buildings were constructed and how they varied in size among different communities. Mapmakers will find information that identifies the names of creeks and branches on larger waterways. This is a treasure trove of information that is rare for this time period.

I transcribed the entire 1798 Wilkes Tax List and compiled it into a book that is available for purchase at the Wilkes Heritage Museum gift shop and online from Lulu.com. A link to purchasing the book online is on my website.

Robert Cleveland’s Log Home

Capt. Robert Cleveland settled on the North Fork of Lewis Fork, and his home is said to be the oldest home in Wilkes County, having been built in 1779. In the late 1980s, the house was disassembled and moved from its original location and rebuilt in downtown Wilkesboro. Today, museum visitors can tour the home as part of the Wilkes Heritage Museum property. And now, the 1798 Tax List provides more details about what this home was like when the family lived there.

Robert Cleveland has four taxable properties in this 1798 tax list, with a total of 441 acres of land. His homesite included a dwelling house, a kitchen, and two slave cabins. He owned 13 slaves, but only four of them were taxable. That is, four of his slaves were between the ages of 12 and 50. The majority of his other nine slaves were likely young children.

1798 tax entry for structures on land owned by Robert Cleveland.

Cleveland’s dwelling house is described as being 36 feet by 18 feet, two-stories, made with hewed logs, and a plank roof. Today, the cabin measures 35 ft by 18 ft, and the two chimneys add a few more feet to the length. The hewed logs allowed them to fit together more closely to create a more insulated wall. The plank roof is an interesting detail because most homes at the time had a shake roof. In fact, when the home was reconstructed at the museum location, it was built with shakes. Before the house was moved, it had a tin roof. I imagine that the plank roof consisted of boards laid horizontally across the rafters, with each one overlapping the one below.

Robert Cleveland owned 507 acres. His home was 1.5 miles up Parsonville Rd on Lewis Fork.

This was an especially large house in 1798. It was one of only eleven houses in the county that were two stories high. By square footage, it was the fifth largest house in the county. Wilkes County was much larger then, extending north to Virginia and west to the Tennessee border so that it was two and a half times the size it is today. This home would have seemed huge to most others who lived in the county.

The Cleveland family needed a large house! In 1798, Robert and his wife Sarah had ten children still living at home assuming that the fifth child Presley (age 19) hadn’t moved out yet. The youngest child Fanny was one year old.

Robert Cleveland home on Lewis Fork, 1980s, courtesy of the Wilkes Heritage Museum.

Benjamin Cleveland’s Roundabout Home

Benjamin Cleveland famously lived at the roundabout of the Yadkin River where the town of Ronda is today. He had “the Great Roundabout” tract surveyed in 1778, and he was issued a grant for this land in March 1779. Between 1778 and 1785, he purchased 3,520 acres in land grants from the state of North Carolina. During that time, he was constantly buying and selling tracts of land on both the Yadkin River and New River.

Cleveland left Wilkes County and moved to South Carolina about 1785. He had been in the midst of a court battle over his Roundabout tract for several years, dating back to before he was even issued the the land grant. In September 1778, William Terril Lewis brought a case before the Wilkes Superior Court claiming that he was the rightful owner of this valuable land. Things were said and accusations were made, but Lewis won the case. Cleveland experienced a rare loss, and he was forced to give up Roundabout in 1786.

I like to think that Cleveland was so angry at losing this picturesque property that he stormed out of the county, never to return. But that’s probably not what happened. Benjamin Cleveland owned a few thousand acres in what is now Wilkes and Ashe Counties, and he certainly wasn’t homeless or destitute after losing Roundabout. The more likely story is that during the war he was really impressed with land in the Tugaloo Valley in present day Oconee County, SC, and he decided to make this his new home. He seems to have moved there a year or so before the conclusion of his Roundabout case. By the summer of 1785, he already owned more than 2,000 acres near the Tugaloo River.

Benjamin Cleveland fought for his Roundabout plantation for eight years, and I’ve often wondered what his home looked like. I imagine it was much more substantial than most of the homes in the area, and even after he left the state, such a prominent home would still be used by the later occupants.

By the time of this 1798 tax list, Cleveland had been gone from the state for 13 years. For most of that time, the Roundabout farm had belonged to William Terril Lewis. On November 9, 1797, James M. Lewis and William Terril Lewis Sr, both of Tennessee, sold 560 acres “on the North side of the Yadkin River called the Round About” to James Shepherd (Wilkes DB D, p318). James Shepherd was the owner when the tax list was made in 1798.

James Shepherd – written as James Sheppard – has two entries in the tax list. One entry is for the land, and the other is for the structures on the land. Shepherd owned 638 acres on the north side of the Yadkin River, and an extremely large barn was on that land. In fact, it was the second largest barn in the county, measuring 60 feet by 24 feet. Maybe this had been Benjamin Cleveland’s barn!

In 1798, the first entry for James Shepherd shows his 638 acres of land and his 60’ x 24’ barn.

The other entry for James Shepherd shows that his homesite consisted of three buildings spread across two acres of land. In addition to a modest kitchen and a small meat house, he owned a dwelling house that measured 24 feet by 15 feet. It was a one-story structure, sealed and weatherboarded, with a shingle roof. Very few houses were described as being “sealed and weatherboarded, so this was a nice house even though it wasn’t especially large. It also had a “PH” that was 8 feet wide along the length of the house. I can only guess that this was some type of porch. Only two other houses in the tax list were described as having a “PH”.

1798 tax entry for structures on land owned by James Shepherd at Roundabout.

Could this have been Benjamin Cleveland’s house? I’m undecided, but I’m tempted to think that it was. With Cleveland’s large, powerful, and commanding personality, I want to give his home the same characteristics. Surely, he must have lived in one of the nicest and most expensive homes, ready to entertain influential guests with the latest amenities whenever the need arose!

But we don’t have enough information to make a fair comparison between Ben’s house and others in the area. The best we can do is to compare Benjamin Cleveland’s (possible) 1785 home to all of the homes in the county in 1798. Over those 13 years, a lot had changed in this part of the state. People had begun to set up stable homesteads after the end of the war. They were transitioning from frontier settlers to growing families with towns and a stable government. The average home in 1798 was almost certainly larger and nicer than the average home in 1785. Likewise, the grandest home in 1798 would have been much more substantial than the grandest home in 1785. Going one step further, Cleveland’s home was likely built long before 1785, perhaps in the 1770s or even in the late 1760s soon after his arrival. With that in mind, Cleveland’s first house – and perhaps his only house – along the Yadkin River would have appeared much less impressive when compared to all of the other homes in 1798. Simply put, it was becoming outdated.

It was during and soon after the war that Cleveland gained increased distinction and glory. That is when we would expect him to build a new, larger home that would make a powerful statement among his neighbors and celebrate his success. As an example, William Lenoir was a captain who served under Col. Benjamin Cleveland at the Battle of Kings Mountain. They lived only a few miles from each other during the war. Afterwards, Lenoir moved westward up the Yadkin River and began building his impressive Fort Defiance home in 1788. But since Cleveland moved away, he wasn’t here to renovate and improve his plantation like his neighbors were. Perhaps this 1798 home WAS Cleveland’s old home, and in the years since he left, it was no longer remarkable. His old home was merely average when compared to others built over the next 13 years.

Finally, I can’t imagine the next landowner tearing down Cleveland’s comfortable house and building this 24’ x 15’ house in its place. That seems wasteful and not really much of an improvement to justify the cost. Of course, there’s always the possibility that a fire destroyed Cleveland’s Roundabout house sometime after he left. In that case, the house listed in 1798 would have been a replacement for the one that Cleveland had lived in.

Whether this was Cleveland’s home or not, I’m confident that he lived in a very comfortable house for the time period. It would have been warm, weatherproof, and well-built. After all, he was the colonel of the county militia, and he held several high-level government positions that paid very well. Until more documents are found, this might be the closest we get to learning about Cleveland’s home at Roundabout.

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