WILLDEN FAMILY--IMMIGRANT, PATRIOT, MILITIA MAN

British Col. Ferguson grave at Kings Mtn

Hominy Creek NC the Moore home

Balsam Gap NC on Indian route

Tonya with Capt Moore and wife

Tuckasegee River home of Cherokees

William Hamilton Moore was a civic and military leader in the American Revolution...with ties to the  Scottish colonists loyal to England. William had been born in Ulster County, northern Ireland, in 1726, with Scottish parents who had fled the Roxburghshire area of Scotland to Ireland due to persecution of the Protestant Presbyterians there. He and his brothers left Ireland as teenagers, and came to the American Colonies in 1739, after their father, and grandfather, had been killed in the Protestant-Catholic Irish Wars. It would seem likely that their future did not shine bright. William came to Philadelphia...later to be the seat of power and the heartbeat of the American Revolution, and home to many other Scotch-Irish immigrants. Family tradition says that upon arriving in America, William and his brothers "entered a tavern, bought a round of drinks, and toasted to a colorful past and a promising future"....true or not, it is always the hope of the immigrant to America.

William traveled south and settled in Augusta County, Virginia, where he married a girl 17 years his junior, Ann Cathey, around the year 1760...they had five children and moved to present day Burke County, North Carolina, on Muddy Creek about 38 miles east of Asheville, NC. Here, less than 30 years old, William's wife Ann died of causes unknown to us. But it is not Ann Cathey that is the direct ancestor in our family, it is William's second wife Margaret Patton that gives another angle to our story in North Carolina.  Margaret Patton, born 1749, married William Hamilton Moore, 23 years her senior, in then Rowan County, NC (now Burke) on a hot, humid day in August of 1774.  Some researchers claim that Margaret's mother was a full-blood Cherokee, but DNA testing in 2014 shows zero Native American for her descendants. Her parents were Robert Patton, and Charity.   Margaret Patton Moore, and  William had an uncertain number of children (at least 8) during their 38 year marriage.  One of those daughters was named Charity Moore, after the baby's grandmother.....and this baby would later marry Jesse Ballew, moving to Missouri and creating a whole story of their own to write later. But I digress....

William and Margaret Moore lived on the western edge of the American colonies....the western border was confusing but generally understood to be the Appalachian range of mountains from North Georgia to Pennsylvania. William and Margaret Moore were there at the start of the American Revolution, surrounded by Scottish immigrants  loyal to England on the East, the Spanish watching the British in Florida, and the Cherokee Nation to the West, being armed by the British to keep the western settlers busy. William knew by 1775 that he would be called to fight against the Cherokee in the mountains of western North Carolina. In late 1775, William Moore became a Captain of a Militia Company in the 2nd Rowan County Regiment under Col. Chris Beekman. A few months later, Captain Moore and his men marched to confront Scotch-Irish British sympathizers in the Battle of Moore's Creek Ridge (no relation) near Wilmington, North Carolina, on Feb 27, 1776. This Patriot victory gave a needed push to the American recruitment of southern colonists, and stopped the British from being able to depend on their local soldiers.  Captain Moore returned home and built a stockade/fort, which came to be called "Moore's Fort" in western Burke County to help defend the settlers from Cherokee attacks, which soon developed in July of 1776.  In August of 1776 General Griffith Rutherford was ordered to organize an Expedition to attack and destroy the Cherokee Villages in the western mountains, and to put an end to Indian raids on the frontier settlements.

Captain William Moore enlisted his men on Oct 19, 1776, and when equipped marched to Cathey's Fort to join other militia forces under General Rutherford, totalling about 2500 men. Capt. Moore took 97 men and headed out as assigned to find the Cherokee and punish them enough to discourage any further attacks. The route he travelled on a current North Carolina map would go from Black Mountain on I-40 east of Asheville, along the Swannanoa River to Asheville, then west to Canton, south to Bethel, west to Waynesville, then followed U.S. 74 to Whittier, then Hwy 19 to Cherokee, NC. Captain Moore wrote a detailed report of the Expedition to General Rutherford, giving his route and skirmishes.(You can read his report online if you "google" the book "Southern Indian Studies" and go to page 56). In his report, Captain Moore stated that they burned several villages and the Cherokee crops set aside for the winter, and captured some horses and a few Cherokee,  but the Cherokee villagers would flee each time before they arrived, avoiding any major fighting. After this Expedition, the Cherokee would never be a major problem to the settlers of western North Carolina again.

Captain Moore returned the next year, 1777, and built a log cabin along Hominy Creek about 7 miles west of present-day Asheville, NC, but before he could settle-in, the American Revolution called again.  The British Army led by Lt. Col. Patrick Ferguson had marched British troops and Loyalist sympathizers to a point near King's Mountain, South Carolina.  William Moore commanded a Company of militia in Colonel William Campbell's Regiment, who surrounded the British and after several hand-to-hand combat charges, the British Colonel Ferguson was dead, and the rest surrendered to the Patriots. Captain Moore's Regiment lost 13 officers and 18 enlisted men (some reports say 1 enlisted men), one of the wounded being Captain Moore himself.  A "Captain William Moore" had taken a lead ball through the leg, it was amputated on the field of battle, and he was taken to a nearby farmhouse. When his wife heard this, she mounted a horse, brought him back home, and nursed him back to health. There are some sources that say this Capt Moore was from Virginia or east Tennessee, and all we know for sure was that our William Moore was in Campbell's Regiment.  The Battle of King's Mountain was called "a great advantage" by General George Washington, as it turned the tide in the Southern Colonies against the British.
The War ended in 1781, and in 1783 the North Carolina Legislature opened the lands west of the Blue Ridge Mountains for settlement, and in 1784 William and Margaret Moore received 640 acres from Governor Richard Caswell for Revolutionary War service. William and Margaret returned to the cabin built during the War, bringing the first wagon ever to cross the French Broad River, and built their home on the lands they owned on both sides of Hominy Creek, just west of the Creek's junction with the French Broad River.  William and Margaret Moore grew in wealth along Hominy Creek, and William served as Sheriff of Burke County until 1785, and was a Trustee on the Board of the Morgan Academy school as well. William died Nov. 11, 1812, at age 86. Margaret died Aug. 27, 1814.  Both are buried in the Captain William Moore Cemetery, on Captain's Drive, Asheville, North Carolina. The Militia man and his  wife....another good chapter in the family history.  William Hamilton Moore is the 5th great-grandfather of Tonya Kim Willden Martini, on her mother's side.