Ancestors

Lt. Enoch Furr

Enoch Furr was born in Fauquier County, Virginia. He did not know the year. In 1836 he told the Loudoun County court only that he had been 25 years old, perhaps a little over, when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in October 1781. That points to a birth in the middle 1750s. Other ages he gave run older: the court recorded him as past eighty in 1836, and the federal census of pensioners took him as 95 in 1840. His descendants have given the year as 1752.

When he was about six his father moved the family across the line into Loudoun County, and he lived there for the rest of his life. He had at least one brother, Moses, who was a married man by 1777.

In November 1775 he volunteered for a year in a company of minute men raised by Captain George Johnson of Loudoun. They marched from Little River, near Aldie, to Williamsburg, then to Suffolk and on to the Great Bridge south of Norfolk. There, in December 1775, Virginia troops beat back an attack by Lord Dunmore's men, in the first real battle of the war in Virginia. His company was in General William Woodford's brigade and his colonel, as he remembered, was Spotswood. He then marched to Norfolk and was there when the town burned at the beginning of January 1776. He spent the rest of his year scouting around Williamsburg.

After that he made a journey into western Virginia. In September 1777, after the Americans were surprised at Paoli in Pennsylvania, Loudoun was ordered to draft men. His brother Moses was drafted for three months. Moses did not want to go, being married, so Enoch volunteered in his place. He served the three months in New Jersey under officers he later recalled as McMicken, Hancock and Read. By June 1781 he was an officer himself: that month the Loudoun County court named Enoch Furr and George Rust as lieutenants of the county militia.

On 5 March 1787 he gave bond in Loudoun County to marry Sarah Clawson, with James Urton as his surety. She was born about 1768. Their neighbours remembered the wedding as taking place in 1786. They raised their family in western Loudoun, and their son Newton was born there in 1797. Their son Jeremiah, born in 1801, called Sarah his mother in a sworn answer of 1845. When his daughter Charity married Benjamin Wills in April 1809, and when his daughter Elizabeth married Mazariah Thomas in June 1829, Enoch gave his written consent as the girl's father.

In 1822 Enoch and Sarah, still of Loudoun County, sold land in Mason County, Kentucky, to William DeBell. It was their share, five sixteenths, of an 800 acre tract that had been surveyed and patented in 1780 for Edwin Furr of Mason County. Enoch signed the deed and Sarah signed as Sally Furr.

On 9 May 1836, aged and making his mark, he went before the Loudoun County court to claim a pension under the act of 1832. His discharges were long lost and his memory, he said, was "bad and defective." The neighbours he named to vouch for him were Sydnor Bailey, Cuthbert Powell, Joseph Fred, George Rust senior, John Beavers, Tenly Murphy and James Leke. A Spencer Davis of Hampshire County, whose mother was a connection of the Furrs, and a Mrs. Nancy Furr of the same county also gave statements in his support. The pension was granted at 50 dollars a year as a private of the Virginia line, paid through the agency at Richmond.

He was living in Loudoun at the census of 1810 and at Leesburg in 1820. About 1824 he contracted with Benjamin Grayson for a tract of about 131 acres, and a neighbour later swore that the house Enoch lived in at his death stood on that Grayson tract. With Sarah he gave about 134 acres to his son Jeremiah, keeping a rent of 100 dollars a year from it for life, and the two of them conveyed 78 acres to Edward B. Grady for the benefit of their son Newton. He died at home in Loudoun on 3 April 1845 and was buried at Ebenezer Baptist Church near Bluemont. Sarah applied for a widow's pension on 4 February 1846, aged about 78, and it was granted from the day of his death. She died about 1847.

He made his will on 30 July 1831 and signed it with his mark. To his son William Gilmore Furr he left 150 acres. The rest of his land went to his daughter Hannah, the wife of John K. Littleton, and his son Jeremiah, to be divided between them by quality and quantity, with Hannah's share laid off on the south side. His daughter Betsy had already been given "a considerable portion of my property," so he made no further provision for her. His daughter Basheba got his claim on money owed by her husband, Norman Urton. His daughter Tacy Berkley and her husband had already had a fair share, so he gave up a note of 650 dollars he held on her husband, "for which I hold a deed of trust on a black man and some other property." His son Edwin got 200 dollars, to be spent by the executors for him and his family. His wife Sarah was to have 60 dollars a year for life in place of her dower, 20 from each of the three children who took his land. Everything else was to be divided equally among all his children. Newton is not named in it. He made John K. Littleton and Joseph Humphrey his executors.

The will was proved in the Loudoun County court on 14 April 1845, eleven days after his death, and Littleton qualified as executor. Five days earlier, on 9 April, Sarah had signed a deed with her mark refusing the provision it made for her. She chose instead the share the law gave the widow of a man who died without a will, and in July 1845 she and her son William sued Littleton, Hannah and Jeremiah for her dower in about 502 acres.

Enoch owned four or five enslaved people when he died. In July 1846 the widow and the heirs asked the court to sell them, because, as their bill put it, there were nine heirs and an equal division "in kind" was impossible. The sale brought 1,508.50 dollars. The court set aside 155 dollars to Richard C. Littleton for the keep of an old woman named Nann, and the rest was split nine ways, about 141 dollars a share.

In September 1848 most of the children went to court against the will itself. Their bill charged that for many years before his death Enoch "was not of sound and disposing mind and memory," that Littleton had run his farms, sold his cattle and crops and collected his debts, and that he had held the old man "in a sort of moral and corporeal duress." Littleton was, they said, the principal devisee as well as the executor. By August 1853 they could tell the court that a jury had found the paper null and void, and that Enoch had died without a valid will. His estate was afterwards settled by his son William G. Furr as administrator, and the suits over it ran on into the 1880s.

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Cite: Heirology, "Lt. Enoch Furr (1752-1845)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/lt-enoch-furr-1752-1845-8f954b.