Revolution in the Foothills

Bob Jones

1998

Forward:

I don’t want to allow the following fiction to parade as fact in this information age. The absolute facts are only found in the bracketed and bold or in the footnotes. Peter did exist, he did serve in the Revolution in the units that were at the places mentioned, he married Jane Ewing of Bedford Va, he did live in these places and at these times as the notes will establish. As far as anything else goes, well let’s see if we can form a clearer picture by helping each other to trace this old Patriot’s life.

Notes are from

"A Roster of SC Patriots in the Revolutionary War" by Moss, 1983

Historical References:

"From Savannah to Yorktown" by Henry Lumpkin, 1986

"Ninety Six, The Struggle For The SC Back Country" by Bass, 1978

"The Great Wagon Road" by Parke Rouse Jr., 1995

Reference passages from the books are bracketed and bold.

PETER O'KELLY, born 1751 in Kilkenny, Ireland;

died December 19, 1839 in Wilcox Co., AL.

He married Jane Ewing Abt 1780 and lived in Laurens Co., SC.

JANE EWING, born 1758 in Bedford Co., VA;

died March 24, 1838 in Wilcox Co., AL.

She was the daughter of Robert Ewing and Mary Baker.

PETER had a brother JOHN KELLY of Laurens Co. SC then later Wilkes and Hancock Co., GA. His father may have lived with them and may have been named CHARLES O'KELLY.

Revolution in the Foothills

The story of Peter Kelly, Patriot

The Torch of the New World

[ PETER O'KELLY came to America as an apprentice cabinet maker, landing at Annapolis, Maryland in 1766. He dropped the "O" from his name upon arrival.]

The fifteen year old boy pushed his way to the crowded rail of the slowly rolling ship, as excitement and anticipation weighed the salty air. That familiar Irish Gaelic banter drowned out the circling gulls and a smart breeze filled the little "cruising" canvases of the old ship. For three days the boat had made its’ maddeningly slow way up Chesapeake Bay after a relatively "quick" and uneventful twenty-nine day crossing from the docks at Waterford Har on the southern coast of Ireland. By now though, all patients had run out in the young boy, and he urgently longed for the landfall planned at Annapolis. His father Charles and his mother, eight other brothers and a sister were on board somewhere. Traveling on the small ship also were his uncle William, to whom the boy was apprenticed as a cabinet maker, and his family. The boy had seen enough of his huge family in the lengthy and crowded days of the crossing however, and the steeples of Maryland’s capitol city now consumed all his interest as they appeared rising from the horizon forward. A new life in a new world awaited him now, and he couldn’t wait to get started living it.

Peter’s clan of O’Kellys were the smallest of the seven O’Kelly clans in Ireland. The Kilkenny O’Kelly’s were of an ancient stock of Celts. The name originates form the Celtic O’Ceallaigh, based on the popular personal name Ceallach, which may mean either ‘bright-haired’ or ‘troublesome’. Troublesome was the proper term to describe the times of his ancestors.

In early times the trouble had been the reoccurring raids of the Norsemen or Vikings along the coast. This had driven the clans inland, especially when the Vikings established a permanent presence in Dublin and in Waterford to the south around the turn of the first millenium. In 1054 a devastating war with the Viking Lords of Dublin had laid waste to the O’Kelly holdings in Lienster and the family crossed the River Nores to found a new homeplace at Kells in County Kilkenny. Here they found some success over the next century and the family grew and prospered, but soon another force would come to bear them down.

After conquering England in 1066 and then Wales by 1190 the Normans turned attention to Ireland. By 1200 the Anglo/Norman forces had landed and were pushing inland to the realm of the O’Kelly’s. The family rose with their neighbors to defend their homeland, but it was in vain. The military expertise of these conquerors was beyond the abilities of the rough country militia to defeat. Five hundred and fifty years later Peter Kelly would fight and win just such a war in similar green blanketed foothill country far removed in America.

After the English took Ireland in the thirteenth century the O’Kellys were in a bad position. In each generation the young would ferment revolt, and each generation suffered loss and defeat for their troubles. After a while the O’Kellys of Kilkenny were decimated and without holdings of significance. Then came the FitzGeralds. The King had declared the Irish an "insolent race" incapable of self government and he assigned this ancient Norman family to oversee his conquered domain. The FitzGeralds proceeded to evict from the land the O’Kellys of Kell, forcing the family, under the great burden of poverty, to settle in the village of Kilkenny. Still more misfortune dogged the O’Kellys. In 1545 Henry VIII disbanded the ancient Catholic Church of St. Patrick and demanded conversion to the "Official" Anglican faith. The O’Kellys refused and revolt flared again in the hill country. An Irish army under Hugh O’Neille and Red Hugh O’Donnell met Spanish allies and marched against the British but were defeated. For over eighty years the countryside was rent by hopeless and bitter revolt.

In the time of Peter’s great grandfather Oliver Cromwell landed in Ireland and began to finally subdue all resistance. After the siege of Drogheda the Irish were again defeated and

many of the old leadership and major families of old Ireland finally quit the country, moving on to Spain and France in a movement known as the "Flight of the Wild Geese". 120,000 of them fled from 1690 until about 1730.

By 1695 the English had passed laws preventing a Catholic to have any social position or government post. In fact no Irish Catholic was allowed to own a horse worth over 5 pounds. Many families, including the O’Kelly clan found it hard to comply, but eventually were forced converts to Anglisim. About this time a new influence was felt in the small villages of thatched roofs. William Penn, and Englishman but a friend to all poor people circulated about Europe promoting a Quaker settlement in the New World. After France invaded the Palantine in Germany many refugees from those lands moved down the Rhine to Holland, where England "bought" these Protestants from the Dutch and moved them to England. By 1710 the English camps on the Thames were full, and new refugee camps were founded at Waterford and Cork. These germanic peoples brought with them the "non-comformist" religions of Quakerism and Lutheranism. The local poor were attracted to Quakerism and the promise of hope in a new world and began leaving the Anglican fold and entered once again into the persecuted world of unapproved religious practices by 1740. In the mean time every day ships left Waterford on their way across the Atlantic carrying the Germans from the camps to new lives in Pennsylvania.

Peter’s great uncle Samuel O’Kelly was one of the first to propose emigration. His brother Charles, Peter’s father was slow to convince. Although their father John had taken the family into Quakerism in 1742, Charles was of a conservative mold and felt that he could not suffer his family to endure the hardships of an unknown frontier. Samuel however, with his cousin Andrew O’Kelly sailed in 1751, the year of Peter’s birth, for America with their families.

In the following years a trickle of letters from these kinfolk found the way back to Ireland and were read around the Kelly hearth. The stories enflamed the imagination of young Peter with tales of adventure and freedom in the New World.

Life had been hard in Kilkenny, even though his father and uncle were skilled craftsmen. They had run the business of their father in the small town, building furniture cabinets, and often coffins and crates when money was short. Life had grown harder and harder over the years. Deforestation in the countryside and then bad weather in 1755, 1756 and 1757 had ruined the crops. The English attempts to return all the non-conformist to Anglisism had been a drain on the social fabric of the little Irish towns. Charles and William had listened also to the tales of freedom in the New World, and began to imagine the great potential on the frontier of America. In the autumn of 1765 they sold all they owned, which wasn’t much, and had bought passage on the "cheapest" transport they could find for their families, a small cargo ship headed for Annapolis, the "slave" port of the south. As they exited the Estuary of the Noles River below the old Viking town at Waterford Har an old Celtic tear crept from the older men’s eyes.

As the gangway finally swung into position at the docks in Annapolis, the crowd pushed forward and Peter finally was tempted to wait for his mother, so clinging to a rope strung from above he resisted the tide until his family appeared in the rush. The O’Kellys were extremely fortunate people here on the docks, as they had the money to pay their way off the ship. For those unfortunate’s who could not afford the fee for passage this was the beginning of a grim business. Here on the docks they would be auctioned off much as the black slaves were, to become indentured servants to the locals who purchased them from the Ship’s Master. This period of servitude general would last for three to four years, and often separated families permanently.

This would not be the fate of the O’Kellys who had just spent the bulk of their worth to afford them passage to America. Now feeling free to join the chaos Peter set foot for the first time in this "new" world. It was a hot an humid afternoon on the third of June, 1766.

The Great Wagon Road

The road west beckoned to the family. Although they had wanted to find work and earn the money to properly outfit the adventure west, they found jobs scarce in Annapolis. Worse still, the "O" in O’Kelly publicly exclaimed them to be the downtrodden and patently "unreliable" and "troublesome" children of old Ireland, at least in the minds of the Tidewater. The influx of Irish and German peoples since 1710 had become a torrent, and the people of the area had no use for the penniless newcomers. Charles was advised to drop the "O", which he reluctantly instructed his family to do. From now on they were to be Americans, the Kelly family.

With the little chest of cash dwindling the family dipped into what was left to purchase four pack horses, pack gear and harnesses. In addition the family bought a young milk cow. William traded an old chest handed down through the O’Kelly clan from his Great Grandfather for two flintlock muskets of the Pennsylvania design and a supply of lead and powder. About the end of June the family paid the Innkeeper where they had all boarded in a small attic room their fare, and set out to seek Samuel and Andrew in Virginia.

They knew the closer route lay through the Tidewater to Fredericksburg and on to Williamsburg. This route however was crossed by numerous large rivers, the Potomac, the Rappahannock, the York and the James to name a few. Each of these barriers would have to be ferried, and each ferryman had his toll. This route was only for the moneyed traveler.

Since the end of the French and Indian war a new route had been taking settlers west and south, this was the Great Wagon Road. It bagan in Philadelphia and made its’ muddy way across the German countryside of Pennsylvania through Lancaster and York, eventually finding the Potomac at Watkin’s Ferry. Here at modern day Williamsport, West Virginia the road found that great river small enough for man and beast to ford. From there the road traveled south into the Valley of Virgina and points further south and west.

Many Quaker brethren had all offered to advise William and Charles of the best route to meet this road, and the Kellys decided to take the Annapolis Ridge route toward Frederick Town in Maryland beyond the Monocacy River. From the very start the route was a trial. The July sun beat down on the sweltering barrens and cut over forests of the upper Patuxent river as the family walked beside the packs. The road was no more than a dusty path, and at each creek or branch the Cow acted as if she would never move on, no matter what prodding or cursing she received. Six grueling days out of Annapolis, having camped on the trail side at night because the natives were distinctly unfriendly, the little group finally intersected with the more civilized Baltimore Road at Ridgeville. Another couple of days brought them to the fords of the Monocacy River at the little village of Creagerstown. Here John Creager took the family in and let them sleep on clean sheets, four to a bed, for several nights in return for their help in raising a new barn on his farm.

John told the Kellys the first of many first hand tales they would hear of the ferocious Indians of the frontier. It seems that in the recent war the Indians had penetrated into Maryland to this point and in 1755, eleven years earlier, and had burned the town of Monocacy to the ground. Days were spent torturing and brutally murdering the inhabitants, men women and children. John had been away at the time, and had decided after the Indians left to rebuild here at this new site a few miles north of the ruins of that ill-fated town.

After bidding the friendly farmer adieu the Kellys forded the Monocacy and traveled on to Frederick Town where they intersected the Great Wagon Road. Frederick Town was a backwoods metropolis in those days. Claiming at least a thousand souls, it’s taverns and inns served the multitudes that were passing west in those days. Here the Wagon Road and Braddock’s Road joined to cross the Blue Ridge together. Braddock’s Road, called by some the Baltimore Road and later to become the National Pike (even later US 40). Young George Washington of Virginia had laid out the road while he was in the service of British General Braddock.

In 1755 General Braddock had marched west with an army in pursuit of the Indians that had burned Monocacy. He eventually had penetrated far up into the mountains of Western Pennsylvania almost to present day Pittsburg following this new road. There he was attacked by French and Indian forces in ambush. Braddock forced his men to fight in typical European fashion, in large straight lined groups, and against an enemy fighting "Indian" style he had suffered an inglorious defeat. Braddock had been slain, and legend says it was only by the wits of young Washington that any of the British had escaped massacre to return to Frederick Town.

The Kellys knew that on other fields far distant the French and Indians had been defeated ten years earlier. The new lands that Virginia and Maryland had opened to settlers were an attempt to build a buffer of settlers to push the Indians back from the settled coastal areas and hold them at bay. On the tavern door at the Blue Boar in Frederick Charles read a proclamation from the Governor of Virginia stating that any family might claim 200 acres of prime land in Virginia’s Valley for settlement, and there would be no charge of tax or purchase for two years.

On across the Blue Ridge at Turner’s Gap the family pushed as late summer rains began to turn the trail into a bottomless pit of mud. As August began the family was lucky to make five miles progress a day. On August 14^th 1766 Peter and his family arrived at Watkin’s Ferry on the Potomac to find the river flooded, and the crossing impossible.

Six weeks on the road had left the family exhausted and unhappy. Bickering and discontent, rarely seen in the old Irish household now reigned. The prized milk cow had died somewhere in Turner’s Gap and had been left to the numerous wolves who Peter heard calling each night. One of the packhorses had come up lame, and William had traded it to a local for food and a bundle of bearskins. These furs were now stretched across cut saplings to form a crude abode for the family, a small respite from the rains. Several Quaker families in the area brought food to the family, and on one occasion Peter was allowed to sleep in the barn of a local farmer in return for a few days labor. William and Charles went hunting, but their lack of skill brought little reward and much loss of the precious powder. Each day the family watched the river and socialized, often bitterly, with the other families who found themselves delayed from crossing into Virginia by the rains.

After a week of such sufferings the rain had finally ceased, but it wasn’t until Sept 2^nd that the muddy river had fallen to a level at which man and beast could ford. Even then the current was dangerous so the Kelly women and children paid a silver Shilling from the old chest for Watkin’s to ferry them, the muskets and the powder across on the flat bottomed boat while the men braved the river with the horses and gear. Peter and William both insisted they were "men" and braved the swirling waters with their father and Uncle William.

As the early September sun shone spirits frayed spirits were revived. After all they were now at last in fabled Virginia. While at Falling Waters overlooking the Potomac Charles had killed a pair of big buck deer, and the family had lingered to cure and salt the venison. Moving on to Winchester, they arrived Sept 10^th at the last "town" they would see for many months.

Winchester was a rough frontier post that had recently changed its name from Frederick Town. The name change was needed to prevent confusion with the Maryland town with the same name. It had a main street which consisted of eight wooden taverns, an Inn, two churches and a log courthouse. In addition there were the usual mixed community of blacksmith’s and homes. George Washington worked in a law office here where land grants and claims could be filed, and the British maintained a garrison of twelve regulars here.

An old man, Charles Agin, a Quaker widower who kindly offered the family shelter for a week or two, told Charles and William about the bitter route that lay ahead. He introduced him to John Ewing, son of Robert Ewing of Bedford County. John was a young settler from southern Virginia returning home to his father’s family from a trip to Philadelphia. He explained to the Kellys that the Scotch Irish settlers populated the area of the Valley south of Winchester, and they were no friends to the old Irish. This was a stout and proud race, originally from Scotland and resettled by the British to the northern provinces of Ireland. The resettlement was an attempt by the empire builders of England to both break up the Scottish resistance and overpower the Irish. The Irish had seen the Scotsmen as invaders, the same as the hated English, and several ruinous wars had been fought between them. This was all remembered well in the haunts of the rough Scotch Irish Presbyterians, even though the events had happened forty years earlier and far across the Atlantic. Young John, who had no such prejudice took a liking to Charles and William and offered to mediate the passage and show them the way.

The road south of Winchester was more a meandering set of ever changing paths through the wilderness than it was a road. The Germans had made bypass trails down the valley to avoid the major Irish settlements, for they too had a hard time with the Presbyterians, and it was to these trails the Kellys were advised. With John Ewing as guide, the Kelly clan set out upon the road again around October 1, 1766 intent to reach Bedford by the first of November.

By October 8^th they had passed through the German enclaves (the local Scots called them Dutch because they couldn’t pronounce Deutsche) of Strasburg and Mauertown, and on the 14^th were camped on the banks of the North River (now the Maury River). Here they had the first freeze of their first American winter. Soon the fall colors were ablaze on the Blue Ridge to the east. As they fought for each mile on the muddy track they wondered at the sights of the craggy peaks toward the sunrise. John and Charles, led by the native born John Ewing moved silently through the very foot of these mountains stalking Elk, Buffalo and Deer. Often Peter was allowed to accompany them on these expeditions, and soon, to the relief of the families’ stomachs, game was a fresh daily thing. Crossing the South River at Spotswood’s Tavern (today’s Greeneville, VA) and then the James River at Buchanon’s they arrived at the Scotch Irish outpost of Fincastle on October 25^th, 1766.

This was not the typical Scot outpost, a log stockade surrounded by several ramshackle taverns and a few cabins. Here the Virginia Road met the terminus of the northern branch of the Wilderness Road. Wagons crossed through Fincastle regularly, a sight seldom seen in those years on the Wagon Road. The Great Wagon Road was an ironic name for the path which intersected in front of the fort at Fincastle. These unusual wagons on the Virginia Road carried lead from the mines at Chiswell’s far away toward the west (now near Wythesville VA), and on toward Richmond and Williamsburg along the James. The Wilderness Road traveled west to Chiswell’s then along the Clinch and Holston Rivers to new and totally wild lands. In those places in 1766 the Indians ruled the land, and the settlers were prohibited by the law of the British to settle. Settle they did though, and small villages were in existence in what is now East Tennessee by the time of Peter Kelly’s passing. Five years later Daniel Boone would pioneer a settlement in Kentucky, far across the Cumberland Gap along the Wilderness Road.

From here the Kellys traveled down the road to Big Lick (now Roanoke VA) where they left the "Great" road and turned toward Bedford, through the Roanoke Gap. Arriving on November 4^th 1766 they were seeking Samuel and Alexander Kelly. Charles found to his dismay that Alexander had died two years earlier. Samuel and William it seems had moved on down the wagon road almost a decade before, when the Indian troubles began, to find new land in South Carolina. Although there were a few Kellys related to Alexander in Bedford, and they were hospitable as could be expected, these newly arrived Kellys realized they had not found a home, yet.

On the Road Again

South Carolina had an offer of land similar to that of Virginia for settlers, an offer declared five years earlier. Samuel, according to letters shown to Charles by Andrew’s relatives, had laid claim to acreage and founded a Quaker church in the wilderness of upper South Carolina in lands given up by the Cherokee, an area called the "New Acquisitions".

The Kelly family found itself spending time with Edward Kelly and his family, sleeping in the barn and helping cut wood on the land originally claimed by the pioneer Andrew. Charles wandered in to the little village of Bedford one unusually warm afternoon. There tacked to the log wall of the meetinghouse was a notice posted by the High Justice of the County, John Ewing’s father. Robert Ewing asked publicly for an escort for his young daughter Jenny Ewing, who he declared destined to join his brother Thomas in South Carolina. In return for a safe passage the one who qualified for the task would own the wagon and team used for the move. Robert could afford such a deal, and he felt himself lacking the health to raise this young daughter.

Robert Ewing’s story was the same as many a settler of the Scotch-Irish tribe. Born in Londonderry Ireland in 1718 he had come with his family to America when he was Peter’s age in 1733. They had originally settled in Chester County in Pennsylvania but the lure of cheap land after the Governor of Virginia opened up new land in the foothills of the Blue Ridge drew them with the Bakers to Virginia in 1741. Young Robert had met and married Mary Baker, the daughter of Reverend Caleb Baker, over Baker’s objections of course, but love won out in the end and the couple bore a "galaxy" of son’s and daughters. Robert remained a justice for many years, he raised the Militia for the county during the French and Indian War and fought with the Indians at Point Pleasant.

Robert’s father John Ewing was born in Londonderry about 1690 and had died in the first days of the trip to Virginia in 1741. Robert and his brother Charles had grown up fast on the edge of the wilderness. They buried their father near Lancaster Pennsylvania and turned the families west again. Their grandfather Charles Ewing had come to Ireland from Scotland in 1692 leaving his father John buried in home soil of Kilmore, Scotland. Grandpa Charles had died before Robert was born, and was buried in Ireland. After arriving in the area of the Peaks of Otter in 1753 Robert had written the Governor of Virginia with attachments and references given by his father-in-law and soon was qualified as a Justice for Bedford by King George II. Robert’s father-in-law was a native of Massachusetts who had settled first in Pennsylvania and then moved on with Robert and Charles to Amelia County in Virginia. His father and Grandfather were original settlers of the Massachusetts Colony, natives of England. Robert had taken a "preaching" job and moved on to the foothills in 1753 to the foot of the Peaks of Otter.

The Kelly’s jumped at the chance to become owners of the wagon provided by Robert as a reward for safe delivery. Although Robert was concerned due to his prejudice against the old Irish, his son John assured him that the Kellys were upright people and Robert soon agreed. Robert Ewing’s brother, Thomas Ewing had settled in the Waxhaw area of the friendly Catawba Tribe’s holdings along the South Carolina border and seemed to be doing well. Winter was the time for travel in the South it seemed, and by November 20^th the family was on the road again, this time with a crude "covered" wagon and a new team of rugged Virginia draft horses. Peter and young Jenny (Jane) Ewing often bumped along in the back of the old wagon, Peter 15, always eager to tease and annoy the impressionable 8 year old Jenny.

They made good time on the frozen ground, crossing the Dan River at present day Danville on December 1^st, and arriving in the old Moravian settlements of Wachovia at Salem (Now part of Winston Salem NC) on December 8^th, 1766 as a huge snowfall enveloped the area. The Germanic Moravians were acceptable hosts, but they often suggested that the Quakers would find more acceptance down river in Salisbury. The New Market Monthly Meeting, the first big Quaker establishment in the backwoods, was meeting on the Yadkin, and many settlers of the faith were in Rowan’s county seat. On Christmas Day the family traveled south in the snow and a few days later crossed the "Trading Ford" of the Yadkin. By the night of January 1^st, 1767 they were in Salisbury, secured at the home of Jacob Rees, a Welshman and a "private" hostler who had come down the Wagon Road a few years before from Pennsylvania.

Jacob Rees was the hard drinking son of Reverend David Ap Rees of Carmathenshire, Wales. He had been born in Pennsylvania in 1712, and was raised "right" by his Quaker father who had come to New Castle, Delaware in 1700. In 1752 the brothers had moved to Augusta County in Viriginia, but then they had moved on to North Carolina after the Indian troubles of 1754. Jacob was the black sheep of the family, barely tolerated by his brothers David and William who lived nearby. Old Solomon Rees, his uncle who lived at Yadkinville wouldn’t even speak to him any longer. His son Valentine had married a German, Christina Harmon from Pennsylvania, the year before and then moved out to the frontier on the far side of the Blue Ridge. He had begun to spell his name Reece to avoid the connection with his infamous father.

William Kelly was cut from the same boisterous mold as Jacob, and around the fire in the small cabin he and Jacob drank homemade whiskey of Jacob’s recipe all night as Jacob filled the room with stories of the ancient Rhys clan of Wales. It seems the Rhys had once been Kings of Wales, until the English came. Now they were royalty without a country, a sad commentary on the state of mankind William and Jacob agreed in the late night’s flickering firelight.

Disaster at the Catawba’s Ford

By January 20^th the snow had melted and the family was anxious to be moving on. At Salisbury the Cherokee Path crossed the road and headed west and south into South Carolina. Charles and William decided to follow this trail to find Samuel down in South Carolina before returning to the Waxhaws to deliver Jenny to her Uncle Thomas Ewing. The path took them to Cowan’s Ford on the Catawba on the 22^nd. The river was high, and chunks of ice floated in it’s swirling muddy waters. On the road behind Charles and William lay many river crossings. The Monocacy, the Potomac, the Shennandoah, the Roanoke, the Dan and the Yadkin had all fallen to their will. The Catawba was indeed wild that afternoon, but nothing that these hardening frontiersmen couldn’t handle they determined. Entering the ford with the wagon the lead horse stepped into a hole and things began to go wrong. Charles whipped the lead to force them against the current but it only panicked the pole horses. Now things went from bad to worse. The wagon began to float in the current and then suddenly turned over, taking the team with it into the flood. Mary, William’s wife clung to young Jenny Ewing as the water swept the family in. Peter jumped clear and fought his way to his father’s horse. Sarah Kelly, Peter’s mother grabbed the loose reins of John’s horse as she was swept past. Somehow Jenny was deposited by plan or accident in a low hanging tree branch as Peter’s brother John and his Aunt Mary, caught up in the current and unable to recover, were swept from sight. The other children were safe on the near shore, so after dragging Peter and Sarah out of the water William and Charles splashed off downstream to rescue Jenny and find young John and Martha.

The night brought freezing temperatures as the decimated family huddled near the road. All night Charles and William searched downstream in the dark for their lost loved ones. Near dawn they found John washed upon a rock, almost dead. Mary was never found, and William would never be the same man. John was moved that afternoon, almost lifeless, to the home of William Rees, Jacob’s brother who lived a few miles away from the ford. It was a sad day for the family. William stayed at the river searching the banks until long after dark and returned again and again for the next week.

For that whole week seventeen-year-old John’s condition was suspected to be fatal. He developed pneumonia and if not for his youth he surely would have succumbed. The family had lost the wagon, the team and everything in the wagon. Only the old chest, the two muskets and a few possessions remaining on the two packhorses survived the river. William was totally distraught, as were his children. After a many late night discussions the families decided to leave the frontier and travel to Charles Town where they might find work and nurse John back to health. William Rees gave the family a two-wheeled cart in which John was placed in the back wrapped in the old bearskins from Maryland. Drawn by the lanky pack horses the family departed Sugar Creek on February 4^th 1767 headed down the near side of the Catawba for the Waxhaws and then on to the coast.

The weather had finally let up a bit, and the sad little group made good time through the hamlet of Charlotte. Here was a collection of log buildings fifteen years later to be characterized by British General Cornwallis as the home of "Those Rebel Hornets" because of their stubborn armed adherence to Independence. On across the area of the then undetermined and disputed South Carolina / North Carolina Line they traveled. February 10^th brought them to the farm of Thomas Ewing in the red clay hills of the Waxhaws on the edge of the Catawba Indian Nation.

Thomas was indeed happy to see Jenny in one piece, and he regretted the bad fortune of the Kellys. He asked the family to remain for a while but Charles was anxious to get John to Charles Town. Although he was recovering, he still seemed weak and lethargic. All Thomas could do was trade the worn pack horses for new mounts, donate a canvas cover for the cart and send them along the quickest route toward Charles Town guided for the first sixty miles to Camden by his black slave Archibald.

Slavery was not the same sort of thing to the early settlers as it was to later planters of the South. Thomas had accompanied his father years ago to Norfolk where Archibald’s mother and father were purchased by the family. In those days there was just too much work to be done, and nobody had the cash to pay wages. Slavery, as onerous as the thought of it seemed to the free settlers, was a fact of life. The Presbyterians like the Ewings settled this debt of the conscience by good treatment, a justification of deed that today seems less than adequate. Archibald, born in 1748 in Virginia had grown up in Bedford with his mother and father, and had happily gone South with Thomas when instructed to do so by his father’s master. Thomas always treated him as his own adopted child, although at a distance of emotion caused by a perceived inequality.

Archibald was a good guide, and he attended to every detail on the rough road. They made about seven miles a day as the good weather held, making the trip to Camden complete by February 21. As Archibald turned north on foot, the family camped outside a tavern in this frontier town, another little village of log cabins with a tavern located at a muddy crossroads in the wilderness.

Soon the family pushed on, hoping that the weather would hold and not wanting to waste it. They now saw a new world of tangled swamp and pine forests with slow moving brackish streams. Through the High Hills of the Santee and it’s straight pine forests and then back to the bottom lands they moved. The little hamlets at Hammond’s, then Sumter came and went as the miles rolled slowly by. Two weeks from Camden the family finally stopped at Bonneau’s Tavern and slept in the kind innkeeper’s barn for a few nights. On March 15, 1767 they left and the next day the ferryman agreed to take them across the Wateree River, known further north as the Catawba, at a reduced fee after the story was told of the river’s toll already paid upstream.

The road had become wider and a great deal busier when the family reached Monck’s Corners on March 20^th and by the time they reached Goose Creek on the 24th the welcome signs of civilization were in evidence across the countryside. On the last day of March 1767, eight months and eight days after they had left Maryland, the family, tattered and worn, turned the little cart onto the cobblestone avenues of Charles Town, South Carolina.

Part 2 below: 

Back Into The Wilderness

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In the early spring of 1771 a Trader sailing from North Carolina passed through Charles Town with a message from their cousin, John Kelly son of Hugh O’Kelly of Kilkenny. He and his family had come to America. Although his mother and father had died in the ruinous trip they had endured, blown off course and at sea for nineteen weeks, he and his siblings were at last landed in Portsmouth Island on Outer Banks. They hoped to soon sail to New Bern to travel across the Cherokee Path to the home of Samuel Kelly in Ninety Six District.

The boys, John, twenty and Peter now eighteen had continued to hear wild tales of the frontier, and like all young men across time, they wanted to go back out there. Uncle William had gone back up the road in 1769 into the "New Aquisistions" and settled near the long sought Samuel Kelly. The cousins soon had a falling out however, and William had moved on to the Enoree River in today’s Union County. There he was surprised to meet Thomas Ewing who had moved from the Waxhaws. It seems that a fellow named Jackson had arrived from Pennsylvania with a claim for the land he had settled. After a lengthy debate Thomas Ewing had leased the land to this rough hewn Presbyterian and moved on west. This Jackson fellow had his son Andrew Jackson in tow, a strapping young lad with a big future in the history of a country not yet born.

William had written Charles in 1771 to encourage him to take advantage of South Carolina’s renewed Land Grant Program which allowed a family head to claim 200 acres of unoccupied land for settlement, with payment and taxes deferred for several years. The prospect of a new "O’Kelly" settlement in the upstate attracted Charles and in time they bought the needed oxen and wagon and set out back up the Cooper River Road toward the Congarees, then on across the Broad toward the district of Ninety Six in the upstate.

In the fall of 1771 they came to own several plots of land near the Little River on South Carolina’s far frontier. William had already won a dubious place in the history of the area by having his name in the first court record of the new Ninety Six District in a complaint by the neighboring churchmen that he ran an "unruly tippling house".

Their first job was to clear the land and build their home. Only a few acres could be cleared per year, and their first home was the rudest of cabins. Their food in those days was very plain and without any variety. They were having a hard time those first few years. The Kelly family’s first backwoods home was a small one room log cabin with one door and one small window and the window had no glass, just a wooden shutter. The cabin was covered with thatch and clapboards The chimney was built of sticks and mud. The floors were dirt. Their food, to a large extent, was the flesh of wild animals and that without salt most of the time. Both men and women usually wore clothes and hats made from the skins of wild beasts. Their shoes were made from raw hides, their furniture was hand made from rough materials. The coverings for their beds were for the most part the pelts of deer, beavers, bears, and wolves.

Wild animals were numerous up at the cane breaks on the Reedy River, and they could secure their meat by killing bears, deer and squirrels. Buffalo had disappeared about ten years before. Wild fowls were plentiful, such as turkeys and quail, and also wild geese and wild pigeons in their season. The wild pigeons were so numerous in their migration season that in passing over they would at times hide the sun like a big cloud. The creeks were well stocked with fish. This would have been a veritable paradise for sportsmen, but the Kellys hunted and fished more for their food supply than for sport

The family planted patches of wheat which were cut with a small hand sickle, flailed from the straw, then separated from the chaff by pouring it from a platform on a windy day; and both wheat and corn were pounded into meal or ground with a small hand mill. With such crude methods of harvesting and handling wheat they could raise only small patches. Wheat bread was a rarity to he enjoyed only for breakfast on Sunday morning. Corn was the main crop and supplied bread for the family and feed for the stock.

These trying conditions lasted for only a few years. It was not long until their home was enlarged and improved. Small gristmills had been built on the branches around 1760 and later larger ones on the creeks. There was one of these gristmills on the Enoree not far from Little River. The law of supply and demand had done its work. Men with special aptitude turned their attention to the different trades. There was soon demand for carpenters, cabinet makers, saddlers, coopers, harness makers, blacksmiths, weavers, tailors, hatters, tanners, cobblers, millwrights, millers and men of other trades in every community. Shops and small stores were soon opened. Living conditions were constantly being changed for the better. Practically all the clothes for the Kellys, men women and children were made at the homes from cotton wool and flax. The seed had to be picked from the cotton by hand. This was a slow and tedious job. The task for each member of the family in the evening after supper was to pick his shoe full of seed cotton. Then the lint was carded spun and woven into cloth.

The Kellys were men of true character with some education and they had saved some money; but money could not buy the comforts and conveniences. They were not on the market in those years on the frontier and had to be made at home. They did not handle much money after their first supply made in Charles Town was exhausted, and in fact they did not need much for practically everything they ate and wore was raised and made at home. They did not have much of anything to sell and prices were low. The Kellys did have a constantly increasing number of horses, cattle, sheep and hogs. Everybody had geese from which the down was picked to make feather beds. It was a custom for the parents to give their daughters a feather bed when they married.

But do not think for a moment that the Kellys were unhappy in these hard pioneer days. They had never known anything but hardship and privation. They and they had come to America primarily that they might have civil and religious liberty. This was the dearest thing to them and they were happy in this freedom. The family library consisted of a Bible, the Confession of Faith, Matthew Henry's Commentary, Baxter's Works, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Buck's

Theological Dictionary. Peter from an early age had been taught to read, and he had read every word of all of these classics by the time he was grown.

Politics and Revolution

Although Quakers in name, they were not church goers, as most of the settlers were not, but they did from time to time have to venture to the "settlement" to purchase "salt, lead, powder and such". On these visits to Ninety Six the young men saw Cherokee warriors and British Regulars, and listened to the politics of the day. Those politics were filled with accounts of uprisings and incriminations related to the Regulator movement.

The village at the heart of Ninety Six was an old trading post, consisting of a dozen buildings including a court house, a three storied brick jail, a blacksmith and a tavern. It derived it’s name from the distance up the Old Cherokee Path to the first major official post in Indian country, Fort Prince George at Keowee. It was ninety six miles up the trail to that isolated outpost, located under the waters of Lake Keowee today, and another hundred and fifty over the mountains (a one month walk) to that far flung post deep in the Cherokee Nation at Fort Loudon on the Tennessee River. The Cherokee were a subdued lot however, after the Indian War of 1760, and now traders went about their business with little fear of the previously ferocious warriors. Charles and the boys heard the tales of Indian atrocities though, and the family musket was always nearby on the mantle in the family’s "dirt floored" cabin.

In North Carolina the Governor had actually marched on the people of the upstate, met in battle a citizens’ army at Alamance near today’s Greensboro, North Carolina, routed the undisciplined mob and ended up hanging a few ringleaders publicly in Hillsboro. The Regulator movement revolved around complaints that the Landed Gentry of the long established lower provinces held sway in the parliaments of both North and South Carolina at the expense of the frontiersmen. Court was all the way in Charleston for even the slightest affair, no protection was provided from lawlessness or renegade Indians, yet taxes were high. At first the revolt began by avoiding these taxes, but things soon heated into open conflict. After a while the Regulators got out of hand, highwaymen and renegades were indeed cowed, but their own actions became more and more motivated by other forces. Like all vigilantes their power corrupted their original good intentions and soon the "cure" became worse than the disease. People were robbed and women kidnapped by the Regulators. Soon the back country people begged Charles Town for assistance, and two companies of "Ranger" or mounted Militia were formed and stationed in Ninety Six to bring order to the upstate.

The Kelly families steadfastly refused to join this "revolt" as they saw no future in upsetting the crown, or their "Regular" neighbors. Indeed in their Quaker religion war was not allowed, for any reason. Uncle John especially wanted nothing to do with the intrigues. It has been said there were three groups in America in those days, a third who were Loyalists, a third who were Whigs (supporters of Independence) and a third who didn’t give a damn. In the early years of the war Uncle John was in the latter group. The boys of course felt differently, but a staunch and pragmatic Presbyterian Scotsman Andrew Pickens, an acquaintance and former neighbor of William Kelly, helped sway their minds to non-involvement. "The time will come…" he would say.

South Carolina decided to heed some of the legitimate complaints of the back country by creation of new District Courts complete with a Judge, a Sheriff and a Jail. Thus Charles was employed down in Ninety Six to help build these public edifices, and Peter and his brother were drafted of course, and gladly went along to help. In the hot and humid summer of 1772 Peter was twenty one and bored to death by the quite little backwoods village. Spending evenings in the Tavern at the small cross roads he heard the talk of the customers. The "Kings Men", mostly pardoned Regulator’s were dominant among the travelers. They ranted and raved about the lax enforcement of the newly appointed Sheriff of the Court. To them the growing unrest among the settlers of the backwoods was the same thing as banditry. Charles avoided the Tavern altogether and suggested Peter and John do the same. Peter, the son of such a backwoods farmer, went anyway but kept quite and listened.

By 1774 Peter had returned home to the Little River but he regularly traveled down the road across the Saluda River and on to Ninety Six. It was at the familiar tavern here that he first saw the notice posted on the door of the battles at Lexington and Concord in far away Massachusetts.

The War Years

[ While residing in Lauren's District in South Carolina, he enlisted and served two months under General RICHARDSON and was in the "Snowy Campaign".]

The time Pickens spoke of finally did come, in the spring of 1775. For a few months the rumors had flown that the King was to rally all the Loyalist to his cause, and would march and subdue all those who did not support him. Rumors enflamed the Loyalists that the Whigs were encouraging the Indians to move against the Loyalists. As word of the fighting at Lexington and Concord and Moore’s Creek in North Carolina reached the foothills people became inflamed with passions not seen before. Patrick Cunningham went door to door in the upcountry speaking to men about the power of the King. Charles, remembering the feelings of domination felt in Ireland began to imagine his hard won freedom drifting away once again. Fear had invaded the neighborhoods, not so much of the British Militia at Ninety Six but of the dealings of the English Indian agent, John Cameron and his intrigues with the Cherokee. Rumors spread that the Indians had signed a pact with their Tory neighbors and that all free thinking settlers were at risk.

Then in October Cunningham hijacked a wagon train of ammunition being sent to the Cherokee as a peace offering and armed his Loyalists. A bold man of action, the fiercely independent Andrew Williamson raised his neighbors to a force of 562 men and took off after Cunningham. They surged across the district only to find themselves outnumbered by Loyalist reinforcements and British Regulars. Williamson fell back on Ninety Six and hastily built a fort there centered around several log barns. Cunningham attacked for two days but as the countryside was aroused to arms all about him he was forced to withdraw up the Reedy River. During this fire fight the first South Carolinian to die in the Revolution was killed at Williamson’s little fort.

Although Charles O’Kelly hated it, when he heard the news from Ninety Six he finally gave his blessings to John and Peter and they marched off toward Camden to join the ranks of the South Carolina Militia mustering under old man Richardson.

Seventy year old Richard Richardson, ex-British Colonel and Indian War commander was not a man to sit back. Upon learning that Cunningham was regrouping and gathering more Tory forces in the upstate, the "Council of Safety" an unofficial governing body in Charleston, had ordered out the State Militia and assigned Richardson to command. He and "Danger" Thomson ordered Williamson to watch over Ninety Six while they proceeded to march from Camden across the Broad River and up the Reedy River with over two thousand militia. Soon other local units had joined him and his numbers had swollen to three thousand. No one in the back country had ever seen such numbers of men on the march, and the Loyalists were over awed. Cunningham heard of this hosts coming and began falling back into Indian Country fighting as he went. Peter saw his first combat late that fall, hit and run engagements between undisciplined and wary opponents with few casualties. As the chase heated up a thousand militia from North Carolina arrived in early December and Peter now found himself in the company of over five thousand armed patriots. Three days before Christmas in 1775 Richardson finally found his prey camping on the Reedy River at the "Great Canebreak" south of what is now Greenville, South Carolina. Peter rushed to the flank with the men of Thomson’s Rangers and in the early morning light they fell on the unsuspecting Loyalists. Their sentries had failed to give adequate warning of the attack, and soon the undisciplined loyalists were in disarray. The fight was brief but decisive, the Loyalists were out numbered and out gunned. Many escaped but a large number were captured and an end was put to Cunningham’s little army that day, although Cunningham escaped without his breeches, bareback on a horse while shouting for his followers to "shift for themselves".

Flush with victory the North Carolinians bid farewell to their southern brothers in arms, and Peter and his fellows marched back down the Reedy River toward Little River. A freak snow storm came that night blanketing the upstate with over a foot of snow, so Peter trudged into his home a returning hero on a white Christmas Day, veteran of what was known from then on as the Snowy Campaign. In Peter’s mind the war seemed over, and his two months service seemed to be enough.

[ Sometime in March of 1776, he volunteered for a fifteen-month term and served under Captain PERINHOFF and after his death in battle, Captain BROWN of the Third Regiment of the South Carolina Line commanded by THOMSON and was in the Battle at Sullivan's Island.]

In the prime of life exciting times had found Peter here on the frontier. He loved being the hero. He and his comrades sat about that winter telling tall tales of their supposed valor on the field of battle. In spite of all the bravado Peter’s mother and father were worried. The rumors abounded that Cameron really was afoot with the Cherokee and Creeks, a letter to British Indian Agent John Stuart had been captured. It was on the best authority that in the spring Governor General Clinton was to move from New York and crush the southern colonies, beginning with Charles Town. These fears were talked around the table and over every neighbors fence. When "Danger" Thomson came around to Long Cane with representatives of the Governor of South Carolina, recruiting for the Regular Continental Line, Peter was ready to go. On a cold March day in 1776 he set off riding the family horse down the Island Ford Road toward Ninety Six.

Peter was off to Charleston almost immediately, assigned to the command of a staunch Lutheran and German Immigrant named John Lewis Peyer Imhoff. Charleston was heady with the new era that had dawned. All over town people went about with patriotism on their sleeves. Every day some new parade brought in troops from points far and wide, all dressed in peculiar uniforms and carrying various flags of independence. Governor Rutledge seemed to be everywhere in those days, asking for money, encouraging the troops and overseeing the fortification efforts. Peter was swept up in it all and didn’t give a thought to the burning reality facing this seaport city, the reason he was here. The looming reality of the most powerful military machine in the world, about to descend in force with an all out effort to end their little revolt. He was having too much fun.

Not so with the Americans in the north. The same invincible enthusiasm felt by Peter had led the northern armies to embark on an ill fated invasion of Canada that winter, and they had been badly mauled. In fact the British had not been inclined to follow through with their threats against Charleston until those defeats. By the spring they felt that the revolt was virtually over, so plans went ahead to move forces south. Governor Clinton and Admiral Parker were the supreme commanders of the British effort launched against the southern colonies. Together they were two of the most powerful military men in the world at the time. Their troops included over six thousand British Regulars, many still burning with desire for revenge against their recent mishandling in Boston by George Washington. The British fleet consisted of two of the world's largest battleships, the Bristol and the Experiment, both with over fifty guns, as well as a large number of smaller gunships and transports. Even though Charleston had mustered almost six thousand militia and Continentals in it’s call to defend the city, the prospects looked pretty grim to Moultrie and Thomson as they inspected the unfinished defenses on the morning of June 28.

Ten years and three weeks earlier Peter had hung on the rail of that ship in Annapolis, and now he found himself several hundred miles and it seemed a lifetime away from there, cooking breakfast over a small fire overlooking that same ocean. As he ate he saw his colonel and the famous general looking down the beach from the rough rampart of palmetto logs he had helped build the week before. Peter had come over to Sullivan’s Island about nine days ago with the Third South Carolina, and they had been given the job of covering Breach Inlet at it’s narrow crossing from Long Island, today called the Isle of Palms. A few days later the British fleet had appeared up the coast and landed several thousand regulars. Peter could see them up the beach, their red uniforms and the glint of metal in the beachy June sunlight brought him feelings of misgivings.

The British already had been to Breach Inlet, they had landed some commandos a few weeks before, and their report had said the inlet was only knee deep when the tide was out. The British knew that the fort on the other end of Sullivan’s Island, the place now called Fort Moultrie was indefensible from it’s land-ward side. If they could land strong forces on Long Island, cross Breach Inlet and approach the fort while it was being bombarded from the sea, then it must fall, and with it’s fall Charleston would be theirs eventually. As Peter watched General Moutrie jumped to his horse from the log wall and galloped off hurriedly back toward the fort. Peter soon could see the distant fleet was cutting loose their topsails and beginning to move down the coast as the Redcoats were forming into battle formations. As the drums called the Third to battle on the ramparts Peter knew another day of reckoning had come.

The British troops came toward the inlet relentlessly as Peter and his comrades set their flintlock muskets ready. Behind them about five miles away they could hear the scream of missiles as the bombardment began at the fort. The British fleet that morning had arrayed eleven ships of the line with over two hundred and seventy guns against the still unfinished fort. Soon a real gun battle began, the ships having anchored front and rear to deliver broadsides, while the untested gunners at the fort delivered a steady fire seaward.

Peter’s concerns were focused on his own front however. Here with him were only "Danger" Thomson’s Third South Carolina of three hundred men, a company of Catawba Indians, Daniel Horry and his two hundred state troops from Georgetown and a regiment of two hundred North Carolina Troops of the Continental Line under Col Clark. Clark’s men had just arrived after taking an early morning dip when a pontoon bridge had sunk under them on their hurried move from Charleston. Across the inlet two thousand two hundred troops of the regular British army were bearing down on his place on the sand and log wall, stepping smartly with bagpipes and drums cutting a sharp crescendo in the sea air.

The first assault told the sad story of the brave British attack. Waters that were supposed to be knee deep were over a man’s chest, and under withering fire from behind the log ramparts the British line wavered and fell back. Attempts were made with long boats but "Danger" Thomson himself stood behind a 12 pounder cannon to Peter’s right and fired again and again point blank at the boats. Finally about one o’clock seven hundred re-enforcements from Virginia commanded by Peter Muhlenburg arrived, and seeing this through the smoke the British broke off the attack. Things had gone badly for the Brits at the other end of the island also. Three gunships had run aground on the shoals where Fort Sumter would someday be built, ammunition had exploded on a mortar ship and the damage to both the big battleships from the concentrated fire from the fort was extensive. The fort still was holding up under their heaviest bombardments, in spite of having run out of powder for a while. With dark Admiral Parker pulled his fleet out of Charleston Harbor leaving one ship on fire and that night he boarded Clinton’s beaten troops and sailed north to New York. Charleston had been saved, at least for now. Casualties were suprisingly light, less than forty patriots had died in the fight, but one of those killed was his German Captain Peyer Imhoff of Ninety Six.

On July 1^st 1776 Peter Kelly and the Third South Carolina marched back into Charleston to a hero’s welcome. Little did he imagine that in the early hours of that morning a hundred and fifty miles away tragedy had struck his life and that of many others across the country. The frontier had erupted from Virginia to Georgia with a general uprising of the Cherokee, Creek and Catawba Indians supported by Loyalists. This assault had been long planned by the British and was supposed to coincide with the capture of Charleston. Unknown to the elated Peter that morning, back on the Little River his mother, his sister and Charles, his father had lost their lives in a savage predawn raid. The old family musket had failed to protect them in the end, while he and John were off defending Charleston.

It was several days before the news of the massacres came into Charleston, and immediately all the upstate troops wanted to go home. General Lee, who Washington had sent to command troops in Charleston, had a hard time keeping the units together, but he finally mustered the Third’s Rangers and sent them riding towards the frontier. Things were bad in Ninety Six, on the first day of the uprising Williamson could only raise forty men of the militia, so many were in Charleston. Many families had sent their only guns to the coast and were defenseless in the face of the savage assaults on the isolated homesteads. By the fifth day Williamson had gathered two hundred men and marched to Due West, South Carolina to try and save a large number of families that had taken refuge there. The next day Andrew Pickens arrived with another two hundred of his previously neutral neighbors and the combined force moved on to Baker Creek near today’s Abbeville and relieved another group of families who had gathered in an old fort there. Soon more troops began to arrive, and by the second week when Peter got to Ninety Six to visit his family’s graves the American force totaled well over one thousand five hundred men, all hot for vengeance against the Indians.

In fact Peter saw himself as an avenging angel, and was determined to get into the fray. Having left a few days before, Alexander Williamson was already out there, going after Cameron. He had been told that the now hated Indian agent was camped at Esseneca Ford on the Keowee River and was determined to take him. Today Essenca ford is where US76 crosses Lake Hartwell in Clemson, South Carolina. With three hundred militia he brazenly marched up the Savannah River to it’s junction with the Seneca and on into Indian country. Andrew Picken’s, Peter’s neighbor in Long Cane was along and he constantly complained to Williamson that he should be careful, but Williamson was mad. At one AM on the morning of August 1^st 1776 Williamson’s three hundred were ambushed by over twelve hundred Cherokee led by Cameron just beyond Essenca Fords after crossing the Keowee. Cameron had convinced the Cherokee to lie in wait along the road and in the huts until the army had half marched by, then to unload a horrendous fire upon them. The tactic, uncharacteristic of the Cherokee worked and threw Williamson’s command into mad disorder. Wild charges through the smoke filled woods in the predawn darkness in a tangle of riverside wilderness, the battle took on an unreal aura, and then ended unexpectedly around dawn when Col. Hammond rounded up a small group of less than twenty five militiamen and charged the Cherokee position. This unexpected action, combined with the timely return of Pickens with a calvary unit that had been up river on patrol caused the undisciplined Cherokee to retreat. Williamson fell back and burnt the Cherokee towns at the fords, over one hundred huts and six thousand bushels of grain, then he marched back to Twenty Three Mile Creek where Anderson South Carolina now is, and set up camp here at the edge of Indian land. Cameron had eluded them this time.

Peter arrived at the camp the next day with "Danger" Thomson’s regiment. They had marched for two days continuously from back at Ninety-Six attempting to overtake Williamson. That night the leaders met in a tent overlooking Three and Twenty Mile Creek and determined to march their force, now several thousand strong directly into the heart of Indian Country. Against such a force the Cherokee could not stand, so as the Americans moved up the Keowee the Indians fell back into the mountains of the Blue Ridge. Town after town was burned until finally on August 4^th he burned the towns of Keowee across the river from Fort St. George, Sugar Town near Falls Creek Falls and Soconee on Estatoe Creek. Two days later another column operating further west burned Estatoe and Tugaloo over on the Chattooga River. Peter was with the group that burned Keowee, one of the oldest of the Cherokee towns, and Sugar Town just upriver. Three hundred huts were burned and thousands of bushels of corn went to the flames. Only a few elderly Indians were found, and they were promptly put to death. Peter seethed with anger at the Indians for what had been done so recently to his family, and to him and his fellows no crime was too grim to need any other justification.

Peter was in camp on the Little River above High Falls on August 12 when the famous "Ring Fight" occurred a few miles upriver. Andrew Pickens had hand picked twenty-five men for a patrol to locate the elusive warriors from the towns they had been burning. Just a half-hour from camp they had been ambushed by over two hundred Indians. Falling back to a small knoll above the river he had his men form a double circle and just like a parade ground exercise he commanded them to fire and reload in relays. This proved an impregnable defense against the individual attacks of the Indian host, and his day was saved when his brother Joseph Pickens arrived with re-enforcements from Peter’s camp.

Williamson and Pickens now marched forward up today’s Little River of Oconee County in pursuit of this band, and on August 14^th they burned the Cherokee’s remaining towns of Tomassy, Chehohee and Eustash all near today’s Walhalla, South Carolina. With winter coming on the Cherokee were now driven into the remote mountain valleys of Chattooga, Jocassee and Toxaway, their food stores destroyed and homes ruined. This, a fine reward for the faith they placed in the protection promised by Cameron only a month or two before. Williamson returned to Three and Twenty Mile Creek on the 16^th and Peter was given leave to go home with a promise to return August 28^th.

He saw his brother John while back in Long Cane, and John’s young wife who had by good fortune survived the massacre by virtue of being gone to Ninety Six at the time. John told him that he was going to move his family to Wilkes County, Georgia and try to avoid the war. John’s hopes would soon be dashed. Peter’s Uncle John was saddened by the loss of his own brother’s family and felt he should have done more to protect Charles. He kept to his books, and found solace in becoming an unofficial educator of the isolated children of Ninety Six. Thanks to John, Peter had learned to write, and now John had become "teacher" to a whole backwoods generation.

The power of the Cherokee in South Carolina had been broken by the campaign, but the major strength of the Cherokee still remained in the mountains of North Carolina and over in Tennessee. The Governors of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia determined to co-ordinate an effort to end the Indian threat once and for all. The entire countryside was aroused with thousands in the militias ready to fight so the determination was made to move against the entire nation while the forces were at hand. Virginian troops would move down to join the settlers in the Holston and Nolichucky Valleys and move against the Cherokee towns on the Tennessee River, while Georgian, South Carolinian and North Carolinian Troops would march into the mountains in a converging sweep.

Peter arrived as ordered back at the new fort at the Esseneca Fords, Fort Rutledge, on August 28^th 1776. With "Danger" Thomson’s Rangers he set out with Williamson’s force of eighteen hundred on the next day to meet North Carolina’s General Rutherford and his two thousand men in the heart of Cherokee country. Marching by way of Raburn Gap in Georgia they made good time and within a few weeks were near the Cherokee’s major center of Coweechee. Here Peter rested in camp for a few days from September 17^th through the 19^th while the army waited on Rutherford. General Rutherford had been waiting on his separate columns to gather in today’s Buncombe County at the time, and on the 19^th he had just crossed the French Broad at the War Ford, just below where the Biltmore House is today. When no news came Williamson decided to venture up the Coweecho River and blundered into an ambush at a place called "The Black Hole" about nine miles south of present day Franklin, North Carolina. Here was another defining moment in Peter’s young life. The gorge they marched into that morning was steep walled and overgrown with laurel and rhododendron. The only way out was straight ahead, and the Indians had the exit blockaded and heavily defended. All along both sides of the valley the Indians had hidden and from those points they laid down a murderous fire. The only way out was straight ahead, so it fell to Peter’s regiment, "Danger" Thomson’s boys to make the frontal assault. The Indians were unprepared for such a bold move and soon they had given up the field. Casualties were heavy in Peter’s unit, but he was unscathed.

Williamson moved on through Cherokee country after the battle at Black Hole, and near Murphy he met Rutherford on September 26^th. With over four thousand troops Williamson and Rutherford laid waste to the heartland of the Cherokee burning every major town and killing any Indians of whatever age or sex they found. The wrath of this army poured down the Valley River, along Brasstown Creek and followed the Hiawassee into today’s Tennessee. Nothing was left standing in this old native civilization’s homeland when they were done. For Peter revenge had been his, but his parents were still gone.

Peter was discharged in June of 1777, and he had had enough of war. The killing and the loss were incomprehensible and had left him sad and alone at the age of twenty six. He moved in with the family of his uncle, John Kelly and his wife Anna Hunter and helped with the farm. On occasion he traveled across the Savannah River to Wilkes County in Georgia to visit with his brother John’s family, and there he met the partisan Colonel Elijah Clarke and an old acquaintance from the Enoree, Capt. James Dillard. These men encouraged him to join them on a march to the Low country. He admired these heros, but he was determined to take no further interest in this war that had cost him so dearly. But that war he wished to avoid wouldn’t leave him alone.

In 1778 Savannah, Georgia fell to the British. His old neighbor Andrew Pickens had become caught up in the defense of Georgia, and led the American forces in victory at Kettle Creek near today’s Washington, Georgia. The victory was short lived however, as the British soon took Augusta anyway. The call went out that Charleston was again threatened in the summer of 1779, but Peter turned a deaf ear. His uncle decided that the future looked grim for his three daughters and his wife. He left the farm in Peter’s care, loaded the same old wagon they had bought in Charleston and moved across the mountains to the Nolichucky Settlement in what is now Tennessee in the fall of 1779. Uncle John Kelly was one of the first settlers in Greene County, Tennessee, settling in a place still called Kelly Gap.

In the mean time Peter’s old comrades were in Savannah late in the 1779 with Williamson when he failed to retake that important port city in a lengthy siege. Soon the entire American army was baited to Charleston and were lost in one fell swoop. Over six thousand American soldiers and militia were captured when Charleston finally fell to a brilliant classical British siege operation on May 12, 1780. Less than two weeks later British troops were once again in Ninety Six and Peter decided to run for his life rather than take an oath of allegiance to the King. In Georgia, living with his brother, it seemed all the loss they had suffered was in vain. He heard for a fact that Andrew Pickens had surrendered in Ninety Six and the Williamson had gone over to the enemy. Even Governor Rutledge had given up it was said, and had gone to North Carolina after sneaking out of Charles Town under cover of darkness.

A Time For Life Instead …

[ After being discharged on June 15, 1777, he enlisted to serve six months again in a Georgia Regiment under Captain JAMES DILLARD in 1780 and went on an expedition against the Indians ].

These were dark days for the revolt, and Peter’s brother John, living across the Savanah River in in Wilkes County was no less affected. John’s involvement with his neighbor Elijah Clarke had begun on the basis of protecting his wife and children from the Indians. Soon however the British and Loyalists were coming up river and invading Wilkes County. In mid February John Kelly had joined Clarke in attempting to hold on in Georgia. When Peter arrived in from Ninety Six in June Clarke had a proposal for him. In Clarke’s opinion Peter’s ability to read and write combined with his knowledge of the Indian lands, as well as his brother’s new residence in the area made him an excellent choice for the job at hand. After much persuasion Peter agreed to travel over the mountains to the Watuga Settlements and ask Issac Shelby for help. Issac and Clarke had met in 1776 in Cherokee Country and had become fast friends. Now Clarke felt that if Issac could muster some of the wild mountain riflemen he had met in Tennessee to his side he stood a chance of turning the tide against his enemies.

Peter and two soldiers from Clarke’s command with several Indian scouts made the trip over Raburn Gap and down the Little Tennessee River in late June. Moving from Settlement to settlement along the Holston and Nolichucky he found a great deal of resistance to becoming involved in the fighting over the mountains, especially from his Uncle John. Most of these fiercely independent pioneers had come over the Blue Ridge illegally before the Revolution, and had endured the hardships of the wilderness and the terror of the Indians just to avoid such an involvement. Yes they had co-operated in 1776 against the Cherokee but this was a question of safety of their own homes. There were a few who felt sympathy with Clarke and his embattled partisans, but even they told Peter they couldn’t leave until the early harvest was in. So Peter waited into the fall.

While waiting he found something else to occupy his mind, the now beautiful Jane Ewing, the same girl he had traveled with and harassed so many years before on the Wagon Road. She had been sent by her father to the Nolichucky Settlement near John Kelly’s Kelly Gap farm to live with a cousin for her own safety. She was instantly attracted to the tall thirty year old Irishman with sad eyes, and she remembered her childhood crush. After a whirlwind romance they married on the afternoon of July 21, 1780 in a small cabin near Jonesborough, Tennessee. When Shelby had gathered his little force and was ready to leave for Georgia, Peter, against all advice, was determined to take his new bride with him. Uncle John, unable to stay behind, left Anna and his girls and traveled with the group of family members and Shelby’s rugged mountain men. They arrived at the house of Peter’s brother John on Little River in Georgia in the second week of August.

The Sad Work of War

Peter Kelly was back in the war again, this time accompanied by his cousin John from Tennessee. Accompanied by Shelby and his men, Clarke now moved in an action co-ordinated with the new American army commanded by Gates. Gates would march on the main British stronghold at Camden, South Carolina while the partisans such as Clarke, Davies and fellow Georgian John Jones carried various other outposts across the foothills. Francis Marion would stir up trouble in the British rear. Confidence was high because General Gates, although a man of limited ability, had been sent to the south by the politicians of Philadelphia, along with several regiments of Virginia and Maryland troops. Joining with the southern army the numbers were once again threatening to the British. For Peter this "regular" army was little comfort, being far away near the Santee River. The frontier war, his war, had it’s own style of fighting, a style which Peter was now fully familiar with. He knew they could do their part if the "regulars" could achieve the other aspects of the plan. Unfortunately, due to Gates shortcomings, they did not.

Peter saw new men from Georgia come in every day to join Clarke, drawn by the prospect of a final victory as the rumors of Gates offensive spread. These Georgians were the rough honed type of men peculiar to the outskirts of civilization. Most were grizzend veterans of the Cherokee War. Peter and John watched large bodies of South Carolina Militia from other counties as they marched down the road by passing the post at Ninety Six, going to meet Gates at Camden and add to his little army. The back country was astir, for although the British and their Loyalist allies held the towns the rebels ruled the countryside.

With Shelby and Clarke four hundred men, Peter silently waded the cool waters of the Rocky River in today’s Anderson County, South Carolina. That night they made their move towards ground familiar to Peter, Long Cane. Back in Ninety Six District once again they found a strong force of Loyalists camped at Musgrove Mills on the Enoree River on the 17^th of August. The wise old frontier fighters developed a plan to lure the more numerous enemy into an ambush. Placing his men out of sight behind log and earthen barricades they would send a small calvary patrol out into the open to attract the Loyalist’s attention. Peter rode out with Captain Shadrack Inman toward the Loyalist position and when spotted they began to withdraw. Pursued by an infantry regiment they turned once to fire, then broke in apparent confusion toward the woods. The Loyalist Colonel Alexander Innes took the bait and sent the infantry forward with drums beating the charge right into a withering volley from the unseen marksmen at seventy yards. The battle heated up and at one point a gallant bayonet charge by the loyalists surprised and dislodged the Watuga men from their position in the line. Shelby was there to rally them however and they returned to the fight with a vengeful yell wildly swinging war hatchets and charging the bayonets Indian style. Uncle John won the admiration of his neighbors that day as he dove into the fray with a huge knife with such wildness as to awe the enemy. The Loyalists began to fall back, and within an hour had fled the field in disarray. Peter found his fellow warrior Shadrack Inmann dead on the field after the battle.

Shelby and Clarke now studied their next move, but that move was as obvious to them as it was becoming to Peter. Twenty five miles away lay the British supply base at Ninety Six, now practically undefended. As they began to get organized for this effort a rider came in with new orders from Gates. It was soon all over camp, the American army had been trounced at Camden and then had fallen prey to pursuers while resting at Fishing Creek and had been virtually wiped out. The British were loose now and Tarleton and his Green Coated Rangers were on the move to Ninety Six determined to catch Shelby and Clarke. General Gates, on the run to Charlotte, ordered all the partisans home to protect themselves from these assaults, and told them to lie low until he could rebuild his broken forces in North Carolina. Shelby decided he should return to Watuga and Clarke bid him farewell. Peter said his goodbyes to John as he determined to return with his new comrades in arms. It was a sad moment of lost opportunities as they parted company and Peter rode out toward Georgia. Only two hours later Tarleton pounded into their deserted camp, his men and horses too exhausted from riding night and day to continue the pursuit.

Over The Mountains, Out of Harm’s Way

Peter was happy to be back with his wife, but the news in Wilkes County was grim. Thomas Browne a loyalist commander had been making raids across the Georgia foothills with his men dressed and painted as Indians. It was one thing for the savages to rape and kill the families of Rebel soldiers, but for a supposedly Christian white man this was unacceptable. Clarke immediately went looking for Browne, and Peter was on the march once again. Clarke found Browne at a place called White House or McKays Trading Post about a mile and a half west of Augusta, Georgia on September 14^th 1780. Although heavily outnumbered by Clarke’s four hundred men, Browne refused to surrender knowing what would happen to him in the hands of the enraged partisans. The siege went on for a week and Browne ended up shot in both legs and unable to walk. Then, just as it appeared Browne’s men could hold out no longer word arrived that a British relief column from Ninety Six was about to arrive. Clarke was forced to make a hasty withdrawal, leaving his wounded to the care of his enemies. Browne was not up to this human responsibility however, and had the wounded men hanged or tortured to death on the spot. Peter was with Clarke on a hill about a mile away as they listened to the screams of agony of his dying men as they were roasted alive, and once again Peter wanted nothing to do with war. But war it was and it still wasn’t through with him.

The gloves were off with Clarke now, and he determined to find the families of Browne and his followers and treat them in kind. Peter was an outspoken opponent to such a course of action however and with the support of his Captain James Dillard convinced Clarke to undertake one of the most impressive feats any army could ever do. In late September the Georgia patriots took their families across the mountains to safety in the upper Tennessee River valley at the Nolichucky and Watuga Settlements.

The trip was difficult and scary for the 300 frontiersmen and their families. The Cherokee had removed to the deep coves and valleys and although they knew they were being followed discretely, all they saw of the Indians were their burnt and ruined towns. Across Raburn Gap and down the Little Tennessee River the group traveled, past that place known as "Black Hole". Horses were stolen at night, drums sounded in the deep forest of giant trees that surrounded them on the narrow trails and rumors of pursuit by Indian war parties kept them moving quickly. The group ran low on food, and game or forage was scarce in the burned over land so Peter was sent ahead to fetch help. He found Uncle John on his farm at Kelly Gap and John quickly rallied a group of militia who carried relief to the Georgians, meeting them at the ruins of old Fort Loudon near today’s Maryville, Tennessee.

Peter took his bride back to the home of Anna and John and after an anxious parting joined Dillard in a march down the Tennessee River. Clarke had ordered them to seek out strike at Dragging Canoe’s force of Cherokee operating out of the area around today’s Chattanooga, Tennessee, which was again threatening the settlements.

That October, while the Georgians were keeping the Indians occupied the Watugans finally decided to get involved. The always brash Furgeson had sent word to them that if they didn’t give up the fight and support the King that he would cross the mountains and lay waste to their lands. Thus aroused the "Over the Mountain men", including John Kelly, gathered and marched across to do battle. The victory they won over Furgeson at Kings Mountain on October 7^th 1780 was the turning point for the fortunes of American forces in the South.

Peter’s enlistment was up and he wintered with his wife in Kelly Gap in Tennessee. Uncle John returned from the battle and settled in for the winter. He told Peter of the way they had surrounded Furgeson on the open top of Kings Mountain near Charlotte, North Carolina. Of how they had attacked and withdrawn into the trees over and over as the well ordered and red coated Loyalists charged with the bayonet and then retired back to the top. At last the Loyalists had been overcome, and Furgeson himself was killed in a mad lone charge against the Watuga men at the close of the battle. Over sixteen bullets had brought him down.

Soon the settlements were abuzz with news that the extremely popular northern General Greene had replaced Gates. The reorganized American army was on the move south towards Cornwallis at Camden. Under Greene’s orders his old friend Andrew Pickens was operating with a detachment meant to threaten Ninety Six once again. In late January Peter heard that his now famous partisan neighbor had again, in connection with another northern General Morgan, defeated the British at the Cowpens in South Carolina in January. They had used a much larger version of the baiting ambush that he had helped Clarke and Shelby pull off at Musgrove Mills.

This little maneuver had become a specialty of American victories in the south, (it was later used at Guilford Courthouse in North Carolina) and it showed the adaptability of the Americans. At Cowpens Morgan and Pickens conceived a plan tailor made for their deficiencies. The leaders knew that the independent men from the Militias, although most were veterans, were ill disposed to stand in order against a massed bayonet attack by a determined foe. Unlike the other half of the little army at Cowpens, those from Maryland and Virginia, these troops placed under Pickens were temporary volunteers. Like Peter, these men had answered a call for one emergency or another, and then only for a short time, a period it seems of their own choosing. They all rode horses to battle and left them tied close behind the front in case a quick escape was needed. Knowing this propensity to escape and having seen it cause loss after loss in battles Pickens and Morgan decided they could fool the British commander Tarleton, for he had seen it also. Pickens arranged his militia in the front two lines facing the British assault in a field between today’s Spartanburg and Gaffnee, South Carolina. Morgan placed the regulars of Maryland and Delaware out of sight in a third and fourth line behind a slight rise. Pickens instructed his men to wait for the charge, then fire two aimed shots each, aiming at uniforms with epaulets and stripes, then run like "hell" to the woods on the left. In the closely aimed first volley a third of the Scotch Highland Brigade’s officers fell. They came on with bayonets gleaming and bag-pipes wailing, but they were staggered by the assault. Again they endured a withering volley and then they began to charge at full trot. The whole American line broke and ran away. Or so the British thought.

In fact the men were in a wild panic and it was all Pickens could do with the flat of his sword to turn them from their flight to the horses. But the Highlanders, feeling assured of victory, charged right on across the hill in pursuit and met the regulars of Morgan standing firm. Pickens returned to the field with the militia after a while and the British were broken completely. Only Tarleton and a few of his rangers ran fast enough to escape death or capture.

Peter, like all of Watuga, was delighted by the news, and the few occasions he and Jenny ventured to the settlements from Kelly Gap were festive occasions indeed. Peter also received news Clarke was out of action, wounded in an attack on Long Cane in December and Browne had been confined crippled to the fortifications around the besieged city of Augusta. By the spring of 1781 the British were on the run all across South Carolina and Georgia it seemed.

The War Winds Down

In April Peter felt the situation was returning to normal in Georgia, so he took Jane back to Wilkes County accompanied by many of the other Georgia families. Anxious to see and end to the war he bought a small tract of land from John in Wilkes and started a family with Jane. Their first son, John Kelly, named for his uncle, was born in the summer of 1781.

[ Often thereafter, he was called out on expeditions under PICKENS and MARION against the Tories and Indians. Shortly after his marriage to JANE EWING, PETER moved his family to Wilkes County, Georgia and lived there until 1782.]

Peter’s military days weren’t over however. He was called by Pickens to join him at the siege of Augusta, and his old commander Clarke persuaded him to go. In May, and after a great deal of fighting Thomas Browne was finally forced to capitulate to the combination of Pickens’ South Carolinians, Clarke’s Georgians and General Lee’s Continentals. On June 5^th 1781 Augusta was once again in American hands. Lee, fearing for the life of the hated Browne had him delivered to the British at Savannah under a strong guard meant to protect him from his Georgian neighbors.

Things didn’t go so well at Ninety Six where General Greene had invested the place since mid May. The British garrison had held out for twenty seven days against everything Greene could throw at them. Finally a British Column from Charleston lifted the siege, forcing Greene to retreat, but in the end the base was evacuated by the British and by July Ninety Six, although completely and utterly destroyed, once again lay under an American flag. Peter wasn’t at Ninety Six, but he did go once more when called, this time in September of 1781 to join Pickens and Marion in an attempt to deal a crushing blow to the British and possibly regain Charleston. At Eutaw Springs north of Charleston Peter saw his biggest battle. Although damaged badly the British forces held the field that day, but on the next they withdrew into the city never to march out into the countryside again.

In early 1782 Peter once again joined Pickens on a campaign into South Eastern Tennessee to put the newly active Cherokee out of action once and for all. They marched through North Georgia burning all the Chatahooche Towns in the last major action against the Cherokee. This attack all but ended Indian resistance although it would be eight more years before Dragging Canoe himself would surrender.

For Peter the long war was finally over. He had seen such things as a man shouldn’t have to see in those five awful years. His father, mother and sister were gone and even old Uncle John was far away over the mountains, his beloved wife Anna Hunter dead of the hard mountain life. Peter’s brothers Edmond and Joseph and his cousins had been spread apart by the war and for a time he didn’t know that two brothers had died, not of bullets but of sickness while serving. Out of all the loss though a new nation had been born and Peter had found a wife.

The American Dream, At Last

[ They then moved to Greene County and lived there until about 1787. In November of 1792, PETER KELLY and his wife sold 135 acres to KUNKIN CAMMRON in Greene County for L100. KELLY had previously purchased the land from WILLIAM PHILLIPS.]

Seeking more fertile land and peace from wartime memories Peter moved to Greene County, Georgia late in 1782. He and his brother John had met a fellow veteran during the Chatahoochee foray that year, and this man, William Phillips had taken them to see a one hundred and thirty five acre tract of land on Sandy Creek near the Oconee River, twenty miles south of Athens. Both Peter and John loved it and bought it on the spot. Returning home he excitedly broke the news to Jane, and within a month both families were moving west from John’s old home on Little River.

As the years went by Peter came to see that Jane wanted more than the isolated life on the edge of the frontier. She often felt that their son John would not have the advantages of her youth. She was a frontier girl herself, but she had been well off and grew up a bit back from the raw edge of the advancing line of settlement. Now in Greene County they occupied land not long before held by the Creek Nation. Even the old place in Wilkes seemed a more prosperous and civilized place due to it’s proximity to the river.

[ From there, they moved back to Laurens County, South Carolina for 14 years ]

Peter saw this too, so he decided in 1787 to take his family back to South Carolina. Here he still had the land of his father, and he had been given some adjacent land by his cousin John when he left for Tennessee six years before. Now however the old Ninety Six District was gone, and Long Cane was now in Lauren’s County. The land was overgrown, but it was good land, so before long Jane (now calling herself Jenny) and Peter had rebuilt the place. On those quite evenings Jenny convinced the thirty-six year old Peter to join the Duncan Creek Church and settle down, farm the land and watch the children grow. The town of Laurensville was formed a few years later and John and the youngest daughter Margaret grew up in the thriving little county, once a part of old Ninety Six.

Peter took Jenny back to Nolichucky again in 1788 after they found her father had died in Bedford County in Virginia. Peter had never met Robert Ewing, but his reputation had cut a wide swath through the frontier. A fellow Irishman he had been a great military leader of the French and Indian War and had been given huge grants of land across what is now Tennessee and Kentucky by both the crown and colonial Virginia before the revolution. His sons had received the bulk of this inheritance, but to Jenny he had left a far distant parcel of over a thousand acres on the Tennessee River near its’ junction with the Ohio.

This far distant land inflamed Peter’s imagination, but Jenny steadfastly refused to consider such a move back to the wilderness, not only the wilderness but what seemed to be the edge of the world.

[ The family next moved to Livingston Co., Kentucky on the lower Tennessee River, and lived there until 1811.

Peter had an ally in his son John, and by his twentieth birthday he and his father had finally worn Jenny down. They had some money from the sale of their land in Greene County in 1792, and now they sold the farm that Peter’s father and Uncle John had bought just thirty years ago. To Peter it seemed like forever since he had first arrived there on his first day in the "wilderness". At fifty one, with the twenty year old son John, several intermediate sons, their ten year old daughter Margaret and a baby, Peter and Jenny set out to find the their new Jerusalem in the west. They went back across the Savannah River and traveled west into the Cherokee country Peter had come to know on the Dragging Canoe expeditions. Arriving in the vicinity of today’s Chattanooga they paid fees to the Cherokee government for passage (a strange irony to Peter), hired a river guide and built a "flatboat" on the riverside, really just a crude raft of logs. With several other families they set out down the Tennessee River from the mouth of Chickamauga Creek in June of 1802.

Jenny decided pretty soon she had been right, but Peter took the challenge of the overgrown land. He worked the swampy land as best he could, but his knowledge of river had been nurtured in the up country of South Carolina. There the "bottoms" were the best of land, and even the great Savannah could be forded in dry weather. Out here in Livingston County the floods of the Great Rivers in the area, the Tennessee, Ohio and Mississippi in the spring of 1805 and 1806 made Peter wish he was on much higher land. Distance was another problem, back in Laurens it took about two weeks to make the round trip to Charleston. Here you might make two trips to a city, New Orleans or St Louis, in a year. John was unhappy after the floods, his youngest daughter was drowned, and Margaret was upset with the choice of eligible men in the sparsely settled area.

Alabama, Here We Come

[ When PETER KELLY was 60 he and his wife moved to Alabama and made their home with their son, JOHN, in Wilcox County, not far from McKinley, Alabama.]

John went back to Georgia in 1809 taking Margaret, now seventeen back with him. The route they took back to Georgia led them from the Tennessee River near today’s Decatur, Alabama, through friendly Chochtaw Country to the Tombigbee River settlements. From the little post at Saint Stephens, an old Spanish post on the edge of the wilderness they turned east towards the Alabama River and Georgia. Along the way John fell in love with a parcel of land just north of the Alabama River and there he staked a claim. At first they lived with his Uncle John back in Hancock County, Georgia, and there Peter’s daughter Margaret met the man of her dreams John M. Spinks.

John was the son of Presley Spinks, a veteran of the North Carolina Line. Old Presely had learned the "ropes". He 1808 he had received a grant from Georgia for the land he lived on in Hancock, based on his service in the Revolution. He told John Kelly that his father could get a grant for the land he longed to own over on the Alabama. Georgia was anxious to plant settlers there. They had claimed the area at first, then saw it as a buffer zone between them and the still bothersome Creek and Chickasaw Tribes. Later when the Federal Government took the area over as, at first, the Southwest Territory and then the Mississippi Territory, they too encouraged settlement.

John wrote letters to his father and mother and encouraged them to come to Georgia. The threat of new warfare was growing along the Mississippi River as the war of 1812 loomed, and Peter decided he was old and could not live through another such time. He and Jenny finally closed up the little cabin in Livingston County, Kentucky and traveled east in 1811 by way of old John Kelly’s in Tennessee.

Peter Kelly never got the "free" land but he and Jenny, with his son John and his family, as well as John Spinks and his new bride, Peter’s daughter Margaret moved. They traveled into the Mississippi Territory to Clarke County, named for Peter’s old commander. Peter’s brother John had moved there a few years before, so they joined his family at a beautiful hilly place near the Alabama River, before the year was out. The place was called Catherine and young John Kelly and John Spinks built neighboring homes there and joined some of the first settlers. In today’s Catherine, Alabama, the Kelly homeplace is in Wilcox County.

Peter became quite a story teller. His grandchildren and then great grandchildren sat around him on the porch of the Kelly place and listened to his tales of the frontier. In the 1820s he began to provide written testimony to the government concerning the pensions of fellow patriots and in doing this he left a detailed record of his exploits. In 1834 he applied for his own pension to help out his son John’s growing family, and he was awarded $50 a year. This was the only pay he ever received for his services to the new nation. To Peter this was more than enough!

PETER died December 19, 1839, preceded by his wife the March before. They were both buried in the KELLY private cemetery in front of the old KELLY home near Catherine, Alabama, on a beautiful knoll in a grove of large oaks. The land was sold in 1971 and the Kelly graves were moved to the Dickenson Cemetery at McKinley in Marengo County.

The Known Children of Peter O'Kelly and Jane Ewing are:

JOHN KELLY, born in 1781, ? Laurens SC, died 1866 in Wilcox Co., AL

m. (1) SARAH GEORGE b. 1793, died July 30, 1835, Wilcox Co., AL. They had seven children.

m. (2) SARAH LANGHAM b. 1795, Georgia 12/29/1841, Wilcox Co.,AL

m. (3) Mrs. AUBREY WILSON after 1860

MARGARET KELLY, born November 11, 1792 in ? Laurens SC; married JOHN SPINKS in Wilcox Co., AL abt. 1812, died November 27, 1854 in Kemper County MS. (My gggGrandmother.) She and John Spinks moved on the Kemper County MS after Peter’s death, and there their daughter Jane C Spinks married Calvin Davidson Jones around 1845. John, Margaret and Jane are buried in Liberty Baptist Cemetery in Porterville MS.

ENOCH L KELLY, born 1800 in Laurens County SC; married Sarah Green November 29, 1824 in Wilcox Co., AL. Enoch is listed living in Wilcox County, Alabama in 1830, but he is listed in the State Penitentiary in Coosa County, Alabama in 1850. He had been convicted of murder. He had been a blacksmith by trade in Wilcox County. SARAH (GREEN) KELLY is found farming in Leake Co., MS in the 1860 census. She had $400 worth of real estate and $270 worth of personal property.

EWING KELLY, born 1786 in Greene County GA

SARAH KELLY, married Zadock Adair and lived in Perry County AL 
END