When Lord Cornwallis and his British army marched through what is now Davie County in 1781, they were traveling through a community that was far from united in its feelings about the Revolution.
The people who lived here were choosing sides. Some remained loyal to King George III and the British Crown. Others supported independence and the Patriot cause. Neighbors, friends and even families could find themselves divided by the Revolution. Here in what was then Rowan County, that division sometimes became very personal.
A Community Divided
According to local historian James Wall’s book, most of the men of wealth and property in what is now Davie County were Tories, loyal to the Crown, and did not support the Revolutionary War. Many of them refused to take the oath of loyalty to the new government after the war and left the area altogether. One of those men was Col. Samuel Bryan of the early Bryan family that has already been discussed.
Bryan was a prominent Loyalist in Rowan County. In 1775, he and nearly 200 others signed an address to Royal Governor Josiah Martin declaring their loyalty to the Crown. The following year, Bryan helped lead Rowan County Loyalists toward Cross Creek, where they hoped to join other Loyalist forces.
On the other side were the Patriots who did not support British rule.
Keep in mind also that Davie was still a part of Rowan County until 1836. According to Rumple’s history, Rowan supplied 1,500 out of the 9,000 soldiers from the district as well as four outstanding Revolutionary leaders: Francis Locke, Matthew Locke, William R. Davie, and Griffith Rutherford, none of whom were from what we now know as Davie County.
Richmond Pearson: A Local Patriot
Probably the most well-known Patriot here was Richmond Pearson, who came to Rowan County from Virginia at age 19.
Pearson and Samuel Bryan provide an interesting example of just how deeply the Revolution divided local residents. Pearson served as an officer in Bryan’s militia company, but when Bryan supported the Loyalist cause, Pearson sided with the Patriots. According to a story that has been passed down through local history, the two men even settled their disagreement with a fistfight. Pearson reportedly won, and the men who supported him joined the Patriot cause. While historians caution that the fistfight itself may be more tradition than documented fact, the division between Bryan and Pearson was very real.
Following the war, he lived at the “Shoals” Cooleemee, where he became a plantation owner and a very influential person in that area.
The Pearson family was very prominent, and Pearson’s son, Richmond Mumford Pearson, studied law and later established a law school in Mocksville in 1836. About ten years later, he moved the school to his Richmond Hill estate in what is now Yadkin County. The site is preserved today as Richmond Hill Law School.
The Pearson family cemetery is on Pine Ridge Road close to Cooleemee.
The Battle of Shallow Ford
A few Patriot-Tory engagements took place in this area, including the Battle of Shallow Ford in what is now Yadkin County. The battle took place on October 14, 1780, near present-day Huntsville. A nearby tributary later became known as Battle Branch because of the fighting that occurred there.
The Patriots won this battle, and interestingly enough, one of the Tory dead was a Captain Bryan—not Samuel, but history is not sure which one.
The Battle of Shallow Ford is another reminder that the Revolution in the Carolina backcountry was not simply a war between an American army and a British army. Patriots and Loyalists from the same communities could find themselves fighting one another.
A Mysterious Message for Cornwallis
There is more that has already been written about, such as the Cornwallis march across Davie, but the following is also a very interesting story.
On Labor Day of 1910, Mr. R. G. McSwain was riding his horse to Mocksville through a deep roadbed that was known then as “Setzer’s Cut” on the Mocksville side of Bear Creek when he noticed an oddly shaped bottle sticking out of an eroded road bank. According to a story published years later in The Davie Record, McSwain was then living with his father in the Hardison’s Chapel community about two miles west of Mocksville.
The bottle, found along the James McGuire farm, appeared to have been sealed with wax. Inside were old papers.
One communication was addressed to Lt. R. St. John of His Majesty’s 10th Dragoons. Inside was another dispatch, dated January 13, 1781, addressed to Lord Cornwallis and marked “Important.”
The message reported that the writer had learned from a spy that Greene and Morgan were about to move toward Cowpens. It was signed only “W. R. de V.”
If genuine, the message was written just four days before the Battle of Cowpens on January 17, 1781—one of the most important Patriot victories of the Southern Campaign.
Of course, the message never reached Cornwallis.
One wonders how it got hidden in the dirt along the side of a big rut in the roadbed, but we will never know. Who sent the note and how it ended up here remain a mystery, making history interesting!
Whether the mysterious papers were ever formally authenticated as genuine Revolutionary War documents is another question. More than a century after McSwain reportedly pulled that bottle from a Davie County road bank, the identity of “W. R. de V.”—and the story of how a message intended for Cornwallis ended up near Bear Creek—remain intriguing mysteries.