As we continue to move toward our nation’s semiquincentennial, I continue to consider elements of the Revolutionary War effort of attaining independence and the related contributions and connections of families of the Fork, the Knox County lands between the French Broad and Holston Rivers.

I love it when someone gives me a lead on an American Revolution veteran with connections to the Fork, and Betty Ellis did just that. I had seen the ancestor’s name and knew where he was buried, but I wasn’t sure whether his descendants were connected to the Fork. Meanwhile, I had other low-hanging fruit to pick, so Jesse Green was bumped down on my list until Betty came along and asked me to take a look.

According to Green family genealogists, Jesse Green, a descendant of English immigrants who had arrived on the ship Delaware in 1686, was born June 14, 1753, in Delaware. Jesse’s mother, father, brother, and their wives were removed from the rolls of their Quaker Friends Meeting at Newark for various reasons between 1762 and 1761, but Jesse was removed when he enlisted to fight. Our Jesse should not be confused with another Delaware soldier named Jesse Green(e), who was a Major General in the War of 1812 and a legislator for Delaware. Perhaps he was a relative. Another man named Jesse Green served from North Carolina in the Revolutionary War, but pension records provide details that clearly distinguish him from our Jesse Green.

Our Jesse moved southwestward from Delaware, because Tennessee historian Dr. James Gettys McGready Ramsey stated in his Annals of Tennessee (1853) that as an Overmountain Man of North Carolina, Jesse acted as a Regulator, taking action against unfair treatment by the British government and the loyalist Tories who supported it. His long association with John Sevier’s son, Captain Robert Sevier’s company of horsemen, suggests that Jesse was at the Battle of King’s Mountain, where Robert died.

Jesse Green married Isabella Gibson (1764-1849) at the Watauga Settlement in 1781 and participated in the scouting parties that protected the frontier from Loyalists who had sought refuge in the wilderness and committed crimes against their Patriot neighbors. Her parents settled at what is known today as Manifold Station.

During the State of Franklin turmoil (1784-1789), Jesse Green and a Gibson man captured and hanged a man by the name of Dykes, who was plotting to kill John Sevier. Early Tennessee historian John Haywood related that Jesse Green and John Gibson were also part of the band that included Sevier’s sons, who crossed the mountains to pursue and rescue John Sevier from the captors’ intent on killing him in Morganton, North Carolina. Perhaps it was Isabella’s Gibson kin who also participated in these events. William Smith’s recounting of the rescue reads like a good action movie script.

What did it mean to wait at home while your husband, and possibly other loved ones, left on such a dangerous mission? What characterized these women of the frontier? Next week we will look at Jesse’s wife Isabella.

After the North Carolina “Land Grab Act” of 1783 opened up this region for claims, Jesse and his family settled in 1786 on 400 acres on the south bank of the French Broad, near Dr. James Cosby and Samuel Bowman. Jesse and Isabella’s descendants crossed the French Broad into the Fork and married into the Bowman family of Riverdale, the Underwoods of Kodak, and the Derieux family of Thorn Grove, as well as others.

Jesse Green’s marker at Forest Grove Church graveyard

Jesse died on August 26, 1831, and Isabella died on November 20, 1849. Both are buried at the Forest Grove Church graveyard, near their descendants’ ferry that ran across the French Broad to the Riverdale community, where their legacy lives on (thanks to good folks like Betty Ellis) without being forgotten in the Fork.

Jan Loveday Dickens is an educator, historian, and author of Forgotten in the Fork, a book about the Knox County lands between the French Broad and Holston Rivers, obtainable by emailing ForgottenInTheFork@gmail.com.

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