Further Back Blackshears (Week 14)

Tracing Back the Blackshear Line, part 27

The last time we looked at Alexander Blackshear (it seems like ages ago!) I gave a big lead-up to the Revolutionary War, thinking that I would somehow cover the entire decade of the 1760's in one post.  Unfortunately, we only managed to get through the year 1762. (I should have known better!)  So, we are going to pick things up in 1763 today, and see how far we can get.

Well, it turns out that not much was going on with the family in 1763.  Alexander's son James was serving as a constable, and that is about it.  On to 1764, then.

We only see Alexander once in 1764, in the court minutes again:

Craven County, NC
Court of Pleas & Quarter Sessions
October 1764

This shows that Alexander served as a petit juror.  The day he served, October 3rd, the court convened at 9 a.m. (Seeing as how he lived between 25 - 35 miles away and it takes a horse four hours to walk 15 miles, he probably had to spend the night before in New Bern.)

The court heard a whole bunch of items of business - fifteen to be exact, including proving deeds of sale, appointing executors, approving ordinary licenses, ordering indentures of orphans, appointing constables and overseers of the road, and even issuing certificates for the killing of wildcats, panthers, and wolves (presumably there was a bounty for the killing of wild animals that would prey on people's livestock) - and then it finally got around to the first court case.  I'll bet that was pretty annoying for the jurymen, especially those who got up before dawn to get there in time.

The minutes don't give any details about the case, just that the jury ruled in favor of the plaintiff and assessed damages of 14 pounds proclamation money plus court costs (6 pence).  Also, for some reason that is not made clear, judgement was given against two men other than the plaintiff and defendant for six pounds and five pounds as well.

You know me, I was curious as to how much of a hit those 14 pounds would have been.  It took me a good long while of searching online, but I think I finally found a document that gives us a pretty good idea.

Now, I don't know anything about the occupation or status of the defendant in the case, but according to the Department of Labor’s report, History of Wages in the United States from Colonial times to 1928, between 1750 and 1775, a skilled laborer in North Carolina earned 3 to 4 shillings per day, a common laborer only 2 shillings.  At 20 shillings per pound, that would be 2 to 4 pounds per month.  So 14 pounds would have been an enormous hit to somebody in the lower rungs of society.

For a wealthy planter, though, not so much.  

The court then adjourned until 3 p.m., at which time the court conducted five more items of business, and then the jury heard the second case, which had almost exactly the same outcome.  The defendant was found guilty and damages of 14 pounds 10 pence plus court costs were assessed.  

(It does seem a bit weird that the damages assessed were so similar.  I wonder if they had some sort of menu of damages, kind of like a Kelley Blue Book, that told the jury the appropriate amounts for different offenses!)

Alexander and his fellow jurymen then heard a third case. The jury once again found in favor of the plaintiff and assessed damages of 12 pounds, fifteen shillings, and four pence plus court costs.  The minutes give a little bit more information about this case, but not the really interesting stuff; just that the defendant's attorney requested an appeal, which was granted. 

 After two more items of business, court adjourned until the following morning:

Craven County, NC
Court of Pleas & Quarter Sessions
October 1764

This is the second page of the minutes from October 4th, and it shows the names of the jurors again. 

Alexander has a little x next to his name, which undoubtedly meant that, for some reason, he did not serve on the second day of court like he was supposed to.  When the next case was recorded, all of the other names were the same, but Alexander had been replaced by William Jones.  Maybe he fell ill, or maybe he just had things that he needed to do.  

This term of court actually continued the next day again, and that time there were three more men who had been replaced by alternate jurors.

So that makes it sound like the men just had other business they needed to attend to and were therefore excused.  The whole thing is kind of silly, because if the court didn't intersperse other business between each case, they could have easily finished all of the trials in one day!

And that was it for Alexander in the year 1764.

Now, when I first started this post, I had intended to begin talking about Alexander's son, Elisha Stout, as well, because he begins to show up in the land and court records in 1764.  However, as I started writing, it all kind of turned into a big mess, because there was a lot of detective work, and speculation, and a discussion of Elisha's wife, which felt like it needed to be in post of its own.  So we are just going to continue on with Alexander and pick up Elisha later.

The next time we see Alexander is in April of 1765, in the court minutes again.  And what would you guess he was doing?  Well, I'd say there is about a fifty-fifty chance of either jury duty or something involving roads.  And . . . roads it is.

Craven County, NC
Court of Pleas & Quarter Sessions
April 1765

The part about Alexander is at the top of this page.  I was expecting it to say that he was being appointed as an overseer of the roads again, because we haven't seen him receiving that appointment in a couple of years now.  However, the minutes say that he was already an overseer, which means either the appointment didn't get recorded, or I just missed it somehow.  

This says that Alexander and another overseer were being tasked with clearing a portion of the Trent River.  Whoa.  The Trent River was the major river running through the county that all of the other branches ran into.  

I don't know where John Frank Esquire's landing was located, nor do I know where Samuel Something-or-other's landing was (heck, I can't even figure out what his last name was!), so I don't know how long of a stretch they had to clear, and I also don't know how wide the river was along that section, but it was going to take all of their own men, plus the men of every other overseer on both sides of the river in the district to get the job done, so I'm guessing it was going to be quite the task.

(And if anyone else was a bit confused with the way the word "district" was being thrown around, the next section of the page tells us that a group of men was appointed to lay out a district in which the work was to take place, so I guess they were making a larger district containing the regular districts with their overseers and "hands.")

And here is something crazy - as we saw in one of my earlier posts, in either April or June of this same year the courts ordered all of the overseers in the county to straighten, regrade, and clear rocks from all of their roads.  That sounds like a major undertaking, just like this clearing of the river.  Alexander (and the men in his district) would have been very busy indeed, and probably had to work for longer than the allotted twelve days allowed by law.  I'll bet the men weren't very happy about that, but at least Alexander got paid for his role.  (I don't think I ever shared this with you, but I came across an entry in the court minutes that said a specific overseer was paid from the fines of delinquent road workers.)

Anyway, I guess we can rest assured, then, that Alexander did a good job during his previous stints as an overseer, since he kept getting appointed again and again.

Six months later, in October of 1765, Alexander appeared in the land records again:

This is the card from the North Carolina archives.  It shows that Alexander received a grant for 100 acres on the south side of the Trent River.  (I'll bet he was already living on and/or working this tract of land, because the court minutes up above referred to him as "Alexander Blackshire on Trent.")

Well, "south side of Trent" is a pretty big place, so let's see what else we can find to narrow the location down a bit.  Here is the warrant for the survey:

Alexander Blackshear

North Carolina Land Warrant

October 1765

(I don't know why these look so blurry!  If you click on the image it should be readable.)  When we look at the shuck from the survey, we see that the new grant was for a parcel between land he already owned and the river.  Pretty convenient that he was able to do that, huh?  The actual survey shows the shape of the parcel, and actually gives the scale of 1 inch = 100 poles.  The nifty calculator I found on the NClandgrants website tells me that 100 poles is 1650 feet (about one third of a mile).  Unfortunately, I don't know how big this original paper was before it was scanned, so I don't know how big an inch on it actually is.  After reading the description in the survey, though, I think that the top right-hand corner (at the dotted line) is where the river was.  

There are two other things we can discover from this document.  First, the survey was completed in January of 1765, and it took eight months before the grant was finalized!  The other bit of information is that Alexander's son, Abraham, was one of the chain-bearers, which would make sense because he was Alexander's youngest son, and it was usually young men from the family in their upper teens or early twenties who served in such a role.  (I find it interesting that the other chain-bearer was Francis Grigory, who was named as the owner of the neighboring property - or it was his son.  Either he was just a convenient choice, or he wanted to make sure the survey was done properly so that his own land wasn't encroached upon!)

So now, after three grants, two purchases, and one sale, Alexander had a total of 431 acres in Craven County.

But wait!  Shortly after I published my previous post, I stumbled upon something new.  Somehow I ended up on a USGenWeb site and I found this:

(And here is the disclaimer from the website because I am supposed to show it if I copy anything from them.)

I think this might be a good time to refresh our memory with a map:

Okay, I'll admit, this is not my best piece of work!  This is an 1861 map (hence the railroad tracks), but I tried to draw the 1760 county borders on it.  It was pretty hard, because the borders around Craven County changed like a million times over the years, and for some odd reason I had a very hard time looking back and forth between the two maps I was working off of and the map I was making.  Not only that, but I can't find a map from the time period between the formation of Dobbs and Lenoir Counties that actually shows county lines, so I don't know at what point the curved western border of Craven became that sharp triangle shape it would have when Jones County was formed  (maybe when Jones County was formed??).  So some of those color-coded border lines are approximate.  Which is really quite unfortunate, because it kind of really matters for what I am going to show you next.

Anyway, as we can see, Dobbs County was to the west of Craven, and the southern portion of Craven (later Jones) extended further into it than it does today.  That is significant because Alexander had land down there in the southwest corner of the county.  Speaking of which . . . .

I just have to throw this out there: Do you remember how a couple of posts back we saw that Alexander had been appointed as a road overseer from Crooked Run to the Royal Oak, and I was like, how the heck are we supposed to know where the royal oak was?!  Well, while putting the colored lines on this map, guess what I noticed?  Do you see the word "Trenton" near the middle of the map?  Look down and to the left, right on the southern border of the county near the town of Comfort (neither Trenton nor Comfort actually existed in 1765).  There is a little picture of a tree with the words "Royal Oak."  How about that?  It wasn't a royal oak, but the Royal Oak!  I guess that was one of those thousand year old trees or something that was such a landmark that it was still around and important enough to put on a map 100 years later!  (I wonder if it's still standing!)  

(Did you all know that the (alleged) largest oak tree in America is 90 feet tall and the canopy covers an entire acre?!!!)

Okaaaaaay.  Back to what we are supposed to be discussing.  As you can see on the map, in 1765 the western border of Craven County extended further west.  And right down there by the border was Tuckahoe Creek, where Alexander owned land.  Now here is a portion of the transcription of the index that was on the USGenWeb site:

This shows us that in Book 7 of the Johnston/Dobbs County deed records, on page 84 (out of more than 500 pages), there was a deed in which Alexander Blackshear sold land to Francis Winset (Winsell).  Since Book 7 covered the years 1765 through 1769, and this deed was in the first 20% of the pages, it is likely that the transaction was made closer to 1765.  

(And in case any of you chose not to read the USGenWeb Introduction I put up above, it said that all of the actual deed books were destroyed, and so the index is all we have to go on - hence the guesses based off the index!)

Was he selling land that he had previously purchased in Johnston/Dobbs County?  If that was the case, he should have shown up in one of the earlier grantor/grantee books, and he wasn't listed in the index for books 1-6.  If he was selling land that he purchased prior to 1746 when the entire area was still Craven County, there should have been a record of that in the Craven County deeds index, but there wasn't.  So what was going on?  I am pretty sure that the land he was selling was right there on the border with Craven County, maybe even one of his earlier land grant parcels, because when I looked on the NClandgrants website, there were three different Winsetts who received grants within the next thirty years, three of which were in Dobbs County and two in Jones (formerly Craven), and all on the south side of the Tuckahoe.  Those were probably family members of Francis (sons?) who were trying to build larger plantations by acquiring adjoining tracts of land.  

And this is where the problem with the moving borders comes in . . . 

The transcription doesn't tell us how many acres Alexander sold, but by looking ahead to the 1779 tax list and doing all of the math, it looks like it was 100 acres, the exact amount that was in each of his own adjoining grants on the Tuckahoe.  We saw that he sold what was probably his 1748 grant land back in 1760, and it is possible that this was the land from the 1754 grant, but only if the western border of Craven changed when Dobbs County was carved out of Johnston.  Of course, there is no other recorded sale of land by Alexander before the 1779 tax list, which means this has to be land from one of his grants, right?  

(And besides, one of the re-recorded deeds from the Johnston/Dobbs/Lenoir books lost in the courthouse fire was transcribed on the USGenWeb site with a note saying that it proved that a certain portion of the border between Lenoir and Craven had changed at some point, so I guess historians don't really know exactly what happened with those borders either.)

So, it appears that by 1765-ish Alexander had sold off both of his first two grants, being all of his land down in the southwest corner of the county.  After this sale, his 431 acres would have been down to 331 acres.  Maybe Alexander needed some cash for upcoming dowries (his daughter Sarah was married c. 1766-7) or maybe he just wanted to consolidate his holdings in the area further north and east, by the Trent River.  Both the documents from the Caroline Johnston lunacy trial and the court minutes we just looked at confirm that he was already living on that tract of land.

Well, since Alexander is now finished with land transactions until the next decade, and we are going to start seeing court minutes that reference him and his son Elisha together, I think this is a good place to stop for now.  Next time we will talk about Elisha Stout Blackshear, and the time after that we'll look at father and son together.  

 

                                                                                                                                                            - Therese