From the managing editor, February 2018

On a recent Sunday my wife and I piled the dogs in the car and headed up Cove Creek Road in Haywood County, North Carolina, to see what was to be seen in the Cataloochee Valley.

The drive was inspired by David Oakes’ feature on page 26 which shares a first-hand experience of visiting the elk in the remote valley located in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

However, the drive across the mountain also made me think back—again—to the lives my forebearers lived in these mountains.

I say ‘again’ because all my life, my brain has been quietly processing the stories I had heard about my ancestors as a child when I stayed evenings or weekends with my maternal grandmother, May Ray, in the Riceville section of Buncombe County, North Carolina.

We called her Nanny but for some reason spelled it Nana. I was not her youngest grandchild, but I probably spent the most time with her due to the fact that my parents had divorced and Nana was one of my mother’s many relatives who helped watch over me after school, when my mother was working or off at Mars Hill earning her teaching degree in the evening.

Time with Nana was often spent doing chores, watching television, or just sitting and talking. 

I loved to hear her stories.

Nana was born in 1889 and told me many stories of her family and community from a time when everyone rode horses, wagons or walked to get anywhere. Water was drawn from a nearby spring; food was grown in a garden or on trees; meats came from farm animals penned around the property.

Nana was born in the Reems Creek area of North Buncombe. In her childhood, she spent time with her Aunt Liz. “Not Elizabeth—that was another aunt—but Liz,” Nana would say.

As I did with her more than 60 years later, Nana heard stories about family from her Aunt Liz.

It is probably from Aunt Liz that Nana heard stories of Peter and Rebecca Brank, my fifth great-grandparents.

Modern interpretations may differ about Peter and Rebecca, but an oft-repeated event is that Rebecca was injured in a frontier skirmish along the Catawba River in North Carolina when Cherokee—aligned with the British—attacked and scalped several women, leaving some dead and others badly injured.

Rebecca was scalped but lived, though she couldn’t take care of her young son, Robert Houston Brank. He was sent to live with Peter’s sister Pricilla Brank Vance, and her husband, David.

For those who know their North Carolina history, David and Pricilla were the grandparents of North Carolina’s Civil War Governor Zebulon Vance.

Rebecca survived, but the war edged closer. Peter Brank joined his neighbor, Charles McDowell, a colonel in the militia, as the men of the mountains gathered to challenge the British army after Gen. Charles Cornwallis captured Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1780 and dispatched troops westward to defeat the frontier rebels.

We know Peter Brank was injured in combat in September 1780. 

Some think he died at King’s Mountain that October as the patriot militia defeated Major Patrick Ferguson’s troops. However, Peter is not listed as a casualty on the King’s Mountain memorial.

Two different Revolutionary veterans filed for war pensions years later and wrote that Peter was killed in a skirmish with Ferguson’s troops a couple of weeks before the battle at King’s Mountain.

A 1915 booklet published by the Daughters of the Revolution in Raleigh refers to him as “a Whig patriot” but gives no details of his death.

Regardless, Rebecca married again to James Andrew Miller, a Revolutionary soldier who had been friends with Peter and Rebecca and who had lost his wife sometime after the war.

Stories suggest Miller had been one of several men who had gone after the Cherokee after Rebecca was scalped, to avenge the attack on the women.

The boy, Robert, grew up with the Vance family, moving with them to Reems Creek in what in 1791 would become Buncombe County.

Rebecca lived to be nearly 80. She and her second husband had moved to the Rugby community of Henderson County, North Carolina, near the French Broad River. Their graves are still marked there, though the cemetery is overgrown by forest.

Those are the kind of the stories that fill my brain, memories of extended family history conversations with my loving grandmother.

Having recently re-read two marvelous books by North Carolina’s own Sharyn McCrumb—“The Ballad of Tom Dooley” and “King’s Mountain”—I feel compelled to write about my people, both these Europeans I have mentioned and the Cherokee mountain folk from my father’s side.

Perhaps first I will write it all here, for you.