Ephraim Sargent
Ephraim Sargent spent the second half of a very long life at Six Mile, in the Pickens District of the South Carolina upcountry. He married in Virginia about 1783 and raised twelve children. He died at Six Mile on 1 May 1853, in his nineties.
Where he was born is a real question. A genealogy of the whole Sargent family, printed in 1899, makes him a Massachusetts man, born at Amesbury in May 1757. The federal census taken three years before his death says he was born in North Carolina. Neither source settles it alone.
The genealogy is Edwin Everett Sargent's Sargent Record. Its entry for him reads in full: "EPHRAIM (Thomas, etc.) b. Amesbury, Mass., May 9, 1757, m. abt. 1783, Mary Dore, or Dove, Albamarl, Va., there. She was b. April 8, 1755, in Va., d. Aug., 1858; he d. May 1, 1853, both at Six Mile, S. C., and bur. at Pleasant Hill church. He enlisted from N. H. in 1778, and by Weare hist. received a bounty in 1777 for enlisting in the revo. war. His c. four were b. in Va. and eight in S. C. Order?" In the book's shorthand "c." means children and "revo. war" is the Revolution. "Weare hist." is the town history of Weare, New Hampshire.
The compiler knew the names of all twelve children but not the order they came in, and his question mark says so. His list runs: Susan, who married John Gilstrop; Mary, who married Peter Gilstrop; Sarah, who married Milton Damold and then James Dodd; David, born in 1790; Nancy, who married John Brewer, a farmer; John, born 14 September 1793; Henry, born about 1796; Ephraim, who married a Miss Gipsom; James; Rachel, who married Franklin Druyman; Elizabeth, born 1 January 1806, who married Benjamin Chandler, a miller; and Abraham, born 23 December 1817.
The sons spread across the upcountry and into Georgia. David became a miner and died in Lumpkin County, Georgia, in February 1893. Lumpkin County was the heart of the Georgia gold rush. John was a carpenter who moved to Cherokee County, Georgia. He sat as a justice of its county court and drowned in the Etowah River at Canton in 1834. Henry stayed at Six Mile as a blacksmith and was buried at Pleasant Hill in 1879. Abraham Benson, the youngest, farmed in Pickens District and kept his father in his house in old age.
The census of 1850 was taken by assistant marshals of the federal courts, who went from house to house. On 24 July 1850 F. N. Garvin, working the Eastern Division of Pickens District, came to dwelling 28. He wrote the head of the house as A. B. Seargeant, thirty three, farming, with eleven hundred dollars in real estate. Then came Rachel, twenty four, and three children: Mary, seven, Sarah F., five, and Bryan B., three. Below them he wrote Ephraim, ninety, and Sarah, eighty five. The last three in the house were a Rachel of thirty five, John C. Watkins, fourteen, and James A. Darnold, thirteen.
That house is the family the 1899 book describes. The book gives Abraham Benson Sargent a wife, Rachel L. Boroughs, married on 1 March 1842. It gives them children born in 1843, 1844 and 1846, and the census has three children at those ages. The Rachel of thirty five is very probably Ephraim's daughter Rachel. The book gives his daughter Sarah and Milton Damold a son James, so James A. Darnold is very probably a grandson. A man of ninety in that house is the father the book says died at Six Mile three years later.
The census asked where each person was born. For Ephraim the answer is "N C", North Carolina. It is written in the same hand and the same letter forms as the "N C" for Edy Russell at the next dwelling. Sarah's birthplace is "Va", Virginia. Everyone else in the house was born in South Carolina. Somebody in the house gave those answers, very probably his son, and a man of ninety may not have been asked at all. Still, it is a record made in his own lifetime, and the Massachusetts birth rests on the compiler alone.
The Amesbury family the book gives him is real. The town's printed vital records list "Ephrim, s. Thomas and Mary, May 19, 1757", and a brother Benjamin born to the same parents on 9 May 1757. The book makes the two boys twins born on the 9th. The same records hold the marriage of Thomas Sargent and Mary Barnard in January 1751. What no record does is follow that Amesbury boy to South Carolina.
Other details pull in other directions. The book's own entry has its Ephraim enlisting from New Hampshire in 1778, and the History of Weare lists an Ephraim Sargent paid for nine months of service. The name was not rare in the South either. An Ephraim Sargent of Person County, North Carolina, a son of Stephen, married there in 1792 and was still there in 1814. He is a different man.
The Daughters of the American Revolution accept him as patriot A100279. They rest that on the Massachusetts service of the Amesbury man, and they list John as his proven child. The Amesbury service is well recorded and is set out below. The federal list of pensioners taken in 1840 has no Ephraim Sargent in Pickens or Anderson districts, so the man at Six Mile drew no pension that would have tied him to it.
He died at Six Mile on 1 May 1853 and was buried at Pleasant Hill church, the Pleasant Hill Baptist Church. No stone for him is known. His son Henry's wife Temperance died in 1878 and Henry in 1879, and both were buried there.
Children
Sources
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Cite: Heirology, "Ephraim Sargent (d. 1853)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/ephraim-sargent-1853-3c5506.