James Spilman
James Spilman lived in Culpeper County, Virginia, and died there about 1787. Almost everything known of him comes from a Spilman family genealogy printed at Forestville, California, in 1965. Its author called him "James, the Squatter," "because he was twice dispossessed of the land he was living on and to distinguish him from others of the same name." His ancestry is unknown.
The book places him on the Culpeper rent roll of 1764, occupying some 400 acres "he got from the Greens." A rent roll listed the people who owed quit rents, the small yearly rent due on land to the holder of the original grant. His title turned out to be defective. That same year a patent issued to William Tapp took the land from him.
He moved to the neighbourhood of Jeffersonton and settled on 1,304 acres a little northwest of the town. The rent roll of 1779 shows him fifteen years in arrears on that land. He stayed on it anyway until his death.
He first appears in the Culpeper tithable lists in 1782. These were the county's lists of the people each household paid levies on. From 1783 to 1785 they show him with a son under 21. In 1786 they show two tithables, which the book reads as the son coming of age. His son Benjamin was born on 6 March 1765 and turned 21 in March 1786.
His wife "is thought to have been named Sarah." The book knows of a son Benjamin and possibly another son, Thomas. After James died, "a cousin appeared with quit-rent receipts for his land and forced her off the property." She took the family to Mercer County, Kentucky, about 1788. Benjamin went with her, aged twenty-three. He married Nancy Rice there in 1790.
There was another James Spilman in Culpeper at the same time, James Spilman Sr. of the Little Fork. His will of 7 May 1784 names his wife Alice and sons Nathaniel, Charles, Thomas, William, John, Henry and Phillip, and no Benjamin. A history of Illinois Presbyterians printed in 1879 called Benjamin "the youngest son of James Spilman, of Culpepper," which is right about the name. The 1965 genealogy explains the confusion. Benjamin's son Jonathan Edwards Spilman had written down his grandfather's sons as Nathaniel, Charles, Thomas, William, Robert, Frank and Benjamin. The book rejected that list because it "duplicates the names and order of the children of James Sr. of the Little Fork so closely that it is practically certain he has confused the two families."
Benjamin Spilman's Find a Grave memorial also calls him "the son of James and Sarah Spilman," and says that after his father died in 1787 he and his mother moved to Mercer County.
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Cite: Heirology, "James Spilman (d. 1787)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/james-spilman-1787-927ea7.