Sergeant York And His PeopleCowan, Sam K. (Sam Kinkade)
History
Sergeant York And His People
Cowan, Sam K. (Sam Kinkade)
Appalachians (People); Tennessee, East -- Social life and customs; York, Alvin Cullum, 1887-1964
Fentress was made a county of Tennessee in 1823 and the first four pages
of the new county's records of deeds show that within eighteen months
Conrad Pile had added, through a number of trades, over six hundred
acres to his already large holdings.
So cautious in land titles was he that at the time of his death he owned
three rights to his home-place including the farming-land along Wolf
River. The first was his squatter's rights, which he had homesteaded.
But against this, North Carolina in ceding the territory of Tennessee to
the United States Government reserved title to the land grants the state
had offered to her soldiers of the Revolutionary War, and "one Henry
Rowan" of North Carolina entered warrants given him on March 10, 1780.
The Revolutionary soldiers had twenty years to locate their grants, and
in 1797 Rowan appeared with surveyors, claiming by his entry of 1780 the
"Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf." He operated under two land
warrants of 320 acres each, and in his registry of one of them he
specified "a tract on the north side of Spring Creek (now Wolf River),
together with the improvements of Coonrod Pile."
Old Coonrod traded with him, and Rowan took up his residence in what is
now Overton county. As late as 1817 there appeared "one Vincent Benham"
with title under a conflicting grant dated in 1793. Old Coonrod traded
with him and with "$10 in hand" Benham went his way.
But the deeds which Coonrod recorded were voluminous, with corners as
explicitly marked as any land title of to-day. Up on one of the
mountainsides upon a rock there is a crudely carved "X" which was made
by Coonrod to mark a corner which called for a "beech tree" that has
disappeared, and this mark and the forks of Wolf River, corners in
Coonrod's titles, stand to-day as survey points for the boundaries of
the farms now in the valley.
Coonrod built his home beside the spring, now known as "York Spring."
Its yard includes the spot where he made his first camp and where he
killed his first deer. Characteristic of him, he built well. The house
was hewn logs, large logs, some of them over fifty feet in length. And
the dwelling is now owned and occupied by one of his great
grandchildren, William Brooks, the only brother of the mother of
Sergeant York. The house is to-day one of the most substantial in the
valley. Just across the spring branch and up the mountainside is the
York home.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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