Most well known of these Quaker Frontiersmen was Daniel Boone.. The taming of the western frontier was a saga involving many men and most times, their heroic efforts were lost to the writers of the east..
Daniel Boone was born and raised in Pennsylvania. Boone was the wayfarer who achieved lasting fame guiding land-hungry settlers to the Kentucky frontier and fighting against the elements and the indians along side many a noble man whose stories were seldom told.
Boone was born November 2, 1734, in log farmhouse situated east of Reading in Berks County, Pa.
Daniel's father, Squire Boone, was an English Quaker born in Devonshire, England, in 1696. While still a youth, Squire, his brother George and sister Sarah embarked for Philadelphia in search of a settlement for their father's family, who immigrated finally in 1717.
Squire settled first in Abington, then moved to Gwynedd, where he met Sarah Morgan, born in 1700 to Welsh Quakers. A little of the Boone geneology here. Married in 1720, they lived first near Gwynedd, then in Chalfont, Bucks County, before purchasing 250 acres of the Homestead in 1730. Squire's father and brothers also lived in the area and became prominent in business, local government and the Friends Meeting.
Daniel was the sixth child, one of eleven, born to Squire and Sarah. Daniel's undoubtedly helped his father as farmer, weaver and blacksmith and had the usual experiences of a boy growing up in the back country.
In 1750 Squire and Sarah moved to the growing settlement in the Yadkin River Valley of Rowan County North Carolina. Squire had been "read out of Meeting" by the Exeter Friends in Pa. in 1748 for his unrepentance in allowing his son Israel to marry a non-Quaker.. He decided to move to Rowan County seeking peace and religious freedom for his family.
Daniel was 15 1/2 years old when the family moved to the Yadkin River Valley. Six years later, in 1756, he married Rebecca Bryan and with her, when he was home, raised ten children. In 1769-73, he failed in his first attempt to settle Kentucky. In 1773, Daniel and as many as fifteen other families, along with all their possessions and cattle, once again headed toward the land of Kentucke. Finally, after two more years of failure after failure, he succeeded in establishing Boonesborough. Between 1775 and 1783, Daniel Boone, along with other settlers, opened new parts of Kentucky never before seen by the white man..
One of these other settlers was Thomas Payne Johnson.. Thomas was born of Quaker parents in the Yatkin River Valley in Rowan County in 1742. Thomas and his brother Robert Johnson, along with their families, joined Daniel Boone in 1773 to establish settlements and trading posts in Kentucke. There was a number of other families who joined this ambitious effort plus a small army of seventy five men.. Upon reaching Cumberland Gap, they were attacked by indians and had to withdraw.. They moved back to the Clinch River.. Daniel Boone, Robert Johnson and others continued to try to breach the Cumberland Gap.. Thomas decided to try to find a southern route into Kentucke and went into Tenn. searching for an entrance into this land.. After three years in Tenn., he headed north of Cumberland Gap and finally found another accessible gap into southeast Kentucke. "Soundings Gap", as it was known, allowed Thomas and his family to enter the highlands of eastern Kentucke into what is now Letcher and Pike Counties.. Thomas, his wife and children, were the first white settlers crossing into eastern Kentucke. Their influence and direct lineage (kin) can be found in every hollow and glen of the eastern Kentucky highlands.. Thomas and his family settled in the Shelby Valley, now known as Virgie, Pike County, Kentucky. Thomas Johnson Jr.(b1771) established trading posts going toward the flatlands of Central Kentucky in what is now Johnson, Breathitt and Floyd Counties, Kentucky, while working for a surveying and trading company (Hibbard and Yark).. He also bought or traded for land everywhere he went. Another of Thomas' sons, William Payne Johnson (b1779), settled the Longfork of Shelby Creek. William Payne Johnson Jr (b1812) organized the Kentucky Volunteers during the War between the States and stood in the gap, literally, acting as gatekeepers to rebuff any effort of the Union Army entering Kentucky through the Soundings Gap.. His Volunteers numbered one to two hundred men but they were successful in maintaining the "Soundings".. A few hundred men could repell thousands of men trying to ascend to the "Soundings" for two reasons.. They held the high ground and the gap was very narrow.. No matter the number of men who would attempt to breach the "Soundings", they would have to climb up the very steep mountain and then narrow down to just a few men astride to walk the narrow gap.. After the conflict, the "Soundings" was renamed "Payne Gap" as an honorarium for William Payne Johnson Jr and his Ky Volunteers.. Thomas, William Payne, William Payne Jr, his son Pleasant and other children, Pleasants son Willliam Burnside and other children, William Burnside's children including his daughter, Carrie Buckley Johnson and her husband Laranzo Dow Spears, including their children are all buried in various FAMILY CEMETERIES in the highlands of olde Kentucke, in the Shelby Valley, on the Longfork of the Shelby River in Pike County, Kentucky.. On September the 6th, 1997, my mother was laid to rest with the many generations that proceeded her in our olde family cemetery on Longfork.. My father, William Burnside Spears, will soon join her.. I, too, in not too many years hence, will lay this olde body down along side all those who have gone before..
Remember the old spiritual that still rings out at funerals here in the highlands...
"We are marching down the valley, one by one..
We are marching toward the setting of the sun....."
"Behold all men as ye pass by...
As ye are now so once was I..
As I am now so shall ye be....
Prepare to die and follow me...."
ANON
bspears