Ancestors

Capt. George Walker

George Walker was born in 1745 in Virginia, in what he called Fauquier County. Fauquier was cut out of Prince William County in 1759, so at his birth the place was still Prince William. His gravestone gives the day as 20 November 1745. He told the Bledsoe County court in 1832 that he had kept "a record of his age" in his possession since he was 14.

He settled on the South Fork of the Catawba River in Burke County, in the western hills of North Carolina. His memorial gives his wife as Eleanor Hicks, and a lineage application approved in 2010 says they married in North Carolina in 1767. Their son Jesse was born in Burke County in December 1770.

When the Revolution came he volunteered for the Burke County militia. He served first as lieutenant to Captain John Hardin, for three or four tours of duty. Hardin then went south to the battle of Stono Ferry in South Carolina, and the company elected George its captain. He said he went into service about the time of the Cross Creek expedition, the march of early 1776 against the Highland Scots Loyalists gathered at Cross Creek, now Fayetteville. In a later statement he dated his lieutenancy from February 1776 and his election as captain to July 1779.

His best remembered fight was Ramsour's Mill in Lincoln County, on 20 June 1780. There the backcountry Patriot militia attacked about 1,300 Loyalists gathered at a mill on the South Fork of the Catawba, his own river. Most of the men on both sides were neighbors, and it broke the Loyalist rising in that part of North Carolina. Fifty years later he still remembered that Captain Galbraith Falls of the light horse was killed there, and Captain Patton, and that Captains Wilson and Reid were wounded. He also fought in a skirmish at Blackstock's and in "several battles with the Indians and Tories". He knew Generals Charles McDowell and Griffith Rutherford, remembered Nathanael Greene, and said that Daniel Morgan had once given him orders to carry out.

He was discharged on 16 February 1782 at Davidson's Fort, on Crooked Creek near the Catawba, by General Charles McDowell. He reckoned he had served every year from 1776 to 1782, ten months as a lieutenant and eighteen months as a captain. He held two commissions from a governor of North Carolina whose name he had forgotten, and lost both of them "from accident, removing about and length of time".

In 1796 he left Burke County for Knox County, Tennessee, and in 1807 moved on to Bledsoe County, near Pikeville, where he lived the rest of his life. On 15 August 1832, aged 87, he appeared in open court before the justices of Bledsoe County to claim a pension under the act of Congress of 7 June 1832, the first that paid militia veterans. He admitted that his memory had become "very defective" and that he might be mistaken in some of the facts. Jesse Walker Esq., a justice of the peace of Bledsoe County, swore that he had known him from infancy and that he had been a captain at Ramsour's. Congressman James Standifer, the attorney James A. Whiteside, the Pikeville merchant John Bridgmon and a George Walker, clergyman of Marion County, vouched for him. He was granted $230 a year from 4 March 1831, drawn at Knoxville.

He died in Bledsoe County on 12 October 1833. His wife had died before him. In March 1852 his son William, 60, his administrator, asked for the pension to be raised to a captain's full rate. William said his father had also been at the fight at Colson's Mill and probably at the Cowpens, and that when the battle of Kings Mountain was fought in October 1780 he was marching his company toward it and did not arrive in time. William named the children living at the captain's death: Ephraim Walker, Sarah Matlock and himself, still living in 1852; and Dicy Howard, Jesse Walker, Charlotte Cherry and Buckner Walker, who had since died and left heirs.

He is buried in the Howard Walker Cemetery near Pikeville. A granite monument there, placed by the Daughters of the American Revolution, reads "Capt. George Walker, Nov. 20, 1745, Oct. 10, 1833" and says he was born in North Carolina, enlisted as a private and was promoted to a captaincy "in war with England in which our independence was established".

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Cite: Heirology, "Capt. George Walker (1745-1833)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/capt-george-walker-1745-1833-c23560.