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29 Training in Christianity 29 CHAPTER 2 Training in Christianity Each age has its own characteristic depravity. —Søren Kierkegaard By the spring of John Smith’s eleventh year a relative peace had descended on the Holston Valley. More settlers were pouring in from both the northeast and southeast, the Baptist and Methodist religious communities were stable and even prospering in a small way, the older Smith boys were ready to marry off and raise families of their own—and once again George Smith found that arable land with good soil, which he considered his greatest necessity in order to do right by his sons, was getting scarce. As has been noted, he had a total of eight by this time, from twenty-eight-year-old Philip to two-year-old Henry, and though old George was of an age now to settle down, rest, and let at least Philip, young George, and Joseph take the harder labor off his hands, he began to look for new lands again. A preaching associate of William Murphy’s in southwesternVirginia, Robert Stockton, had a brother Thomas who only about that time had begun a settlement on a wild, uncleared portion of the upper Cumberland River in southern Kentucky. Whether or not old George got this information from Elder Murphy or from Robert or Thomas Stockton themselves cannot now be known. But it is certain that in 1795 George resolved to forsake his home in the Tennessee territory, take his family northward to Thomas Stockton’s valley, and once again break ground on a government land warrant. Accordingly, in the fall of 1795 George sold his farm on the Holston and took his family westward into the Powell River Valley, probably by following the Holston to its mouth at the frontier Sodom and Gomorrah of its day, the growing trading post known first as Fort White and then as Knoxville,1 and from thence heading up Powell River as fast as he could in order to keep his sons and daughters away from the boatmen, traders, gamblers, whores, and thieves that haunted the burgeoning frontier town. At the head of the Powell, hard by the border of both Virginia and Kentucky, lay Cumberland Gap and the Wilderness Road to the Bluegrass, and George let most of his family spend the winter here while he, with sons Joseph and John, went on to scout for the location of their new home. One might wonder why the aging George chose eleven-year-old John to 30 Raccoon John Smith be his and Joseph’s partner in this difficult task, rather than his firstborn Philip, young George, or even fourteen-year-old William. He probably had more apprehension about leaving his family back on the upper Powell than concern for his own safety in Kentucky, and he may have felt better in leaving at least four males with the womenfolk, figuring that he and Joseph could look out after young John. At any rate, in the fall or early winter of 1795–1796 Joseph, John, and their father set out from the upper Powell with weapons, pack horses, and farm implements, up through Cumberland Gap and following the Wilderness Road all the way to its fork at Crab Orchard, governmental seat of Lincoln County, near the edge of the central Bluegrass. They then turned southwestward on another rough trace that led to the upper Cumberland River, their destination close to the border of Lincoln and Green counties and very nearly back to the state line. The area is now in the county of Clinton, not too far from its present governmental seat at Albany. Circuitous though their route was, they finally made camp in Stockton’sValley that winter; George claimed a two hundred–acre tract on a small tributary of the Cumberland which is still known as Smith Creek,2 and that section of the present Clinton County, Kentucky/ Pickett County, Tennessee, border country became the home base of George Smith’s family for decades to come. Several of George and Rebecca’s children ultimately settled and raised their families in present Overton and Fentress counties, Tennessee, a short distance south of Pickett. Rough and rude though John’s upbringing back on the Holston may have been, his sojourn in Stockton’s Valley in the winter and early spring of 1796 with his father and brother—and especially the period during which he and Joseph had to fend for themselves while their father returned to Powell...

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