On January 1, 1777, the westerly portion of Pittsylvania County, comprising slightly more than half its total land area, was removed to form Henry County, named in honor of Mr. Patrick Henry, Esquire, the great orator for independence, Governor of Virginia, and, within a few years, a major landholder in the area being ceded.  A decade later, the northerly half of Henry County would be similarly removed to form Franklin County (1786), and in 1790 the western half of the remaining part would go to the formation of Patrick County, leaving Henry in land area less than one-third its original size.   From 1779 through 1784, after serving three terms as Governor of Virginia and before returning for two more terms afterward, Patrick Henry resided at his estate, "Leatherwood," in the easterly portion of the county along Leatherwood Creek.  ¹

1.   A timeline of Patrick Henry's life can be found at the website of the Patrick Henry National Memorial, a project of the Patrick Henry Society (link not authorized).  Also see Charles A. Grymes, George Mason University, "Virginia Places," (www.virginiaplaces.org/ places/henry.html)

        Additional information concerning the Minters during this period can be found in the Henry County Personal Property Tax List for 1782.  This list, a transcription of which is available online, provided by Jeffrey C. Weaver, identifies by name the independent male property owners in the county who held any of three taxable forms of personal property - slaves, horses, or cattle - and who in most cases were responsible for one or more tithes. ⁴   John was charged with one tithe, a kind of share of county finances, in effect an early form of property taxation, plus two horses and seven cows, as well as two slaves.  The deed transfer of 1779 cited in footnote 3 mentioned "one Negro fellow named Bob and one Negro Garl [sic] named Fanny."

        Early in the 1780s, John Minter apparently became embroiled in a dispute over land boundaries or claimant rights with a man named Blizard Magruder.  In 1785, a decision of the General Court of the Commonwealth resulted in a judgment in favor of Mr. Magruder pertaining to tracts of land consisting of 384 and 441 acres, located in Henry County. ⁵   A counterclaim by Minter in 1787 was dismissed.

Detail of Leatherwood Creek area in 1770. Source: Library of Congress, American Memory website, Op. cit.   Note that it is cited on the map as Leatherhead Creek, rather than Leatherwood (highlighted in red).  It flowed in a southerly direction into the Irvine River, which flowed into the Dan in North Carolina. No such river appears on maps of the area today.

John Minter's Ancestry:
        It has been said that a Richard and Ann Minter were at Jamestown by 1620.⁶   One researcher has them arriving at Elizabeth City (now the Kecoughtan section of Hampton) that year on the ship Margaret & John.⁷   If this is true, one or both probably died within a few years, by disease if not by Indian raid.  It is also said that a son of Richard and Ann, named Edward, along with his wife Grace, left England in 1635 to claim the land of his deceased father in Virginia, and that Edward and Grace had a son, about 1640, whom they named Jonathan.  Thus, either Jonathan or an unknown sibling was the first Minter born in America.  Jonathan is the only known child of Edward and Grace, but there may have been others.  Very little is known about him - where he lived, his wife's name, or the names of his children, with the exception of one: a son given the name Anthony, born about 1685.

        Anthony Minter married Elizabeth (surname unknown) and they moved to Caroline County before 1713, when their first child was born there.  One researcher has found evidence that the Minters were "... among the pioneers of early Caroline."⁸   Five of the eight known children of Anthony and Elizabeth Minter would move in time to a section of the piedmont region of North Carolina which later would become Chatham County (southwest of Durham), and one of the five would return to Virginia.  The one choosing to return was Anthony, Jr.

8.   Dellinger, Op. cit., Ancestry.com ID: I1500. 

        Anthony Minter, Jr., born in 1715 in Caroline County, married Elizabeth Jane (surname unknown), probably in the early 1740s.  In 1749, he purchased land in Cumberland County where they farmed and raised a large family.  In 1771, Anthony acquired 148 acres in Chatham, NC, on the Cape Fear River, where a number of relatives were living.  It is unknown whether they actually moved to North Carolina, but if so at some time thereafter they returned to Cumberland, which in 1777 was subdivided to form Powhatan County.  During the Revolutionary War, Anthony, then in his sixties, is said to have "furnished beef, wheat, and flour to troops," and later, in 1788, to have signed an oath in Powhatan County "showing his support for the Constitution of the United States."⁹  

9.   Dellinger, Op. cit., Ancestry.com ID: I1780.

        Anthony and Elizabeth Jane had some ten to twelve children, the exact number and the names of whom are not consistent among the various sources.¹⁰   John is believed to have been born in 1750, although some sources have the year as 1756.¹¹   He and most of his siblings were born and raised in Cumberland (later Powhatan) County, as is evident in available information regarding places of birth and place of marriage.  At least two of John's brothers, Richard and Joseph, died in Chatham, NC, which implies that they had moved to the area of some of their father's siblings and their descendants.

10.   Available sources on the family of Anthony, Jr. and Elizabeth Jane Minter are inconsistent regarding the numbers and the names of the children, and at least one source has John confused with another John found elsewhere in the Minter tree (Dellinger, Op. cit., Ancestry.com ID: I1795).  Storm, Op. cit. lists ten children of Anthony and Elizabeth Jane, born in the range of 1745 to 1764, although several birthdates are not known.

11.   John's date of birth as 1750 is from Edmund West, compiler, Family Data Collection - Births [database online] Provo, UT: Ancestry.com, 2001.  Some sources, including Wilson, Williams, and Storm, cited above, have it as 1756.

        Thus, as John and Susannah Minter settled along Leatherwood Creek in the 1770s, Minters were to be found in Powhatan, Fauquier, and Mathews Counties, their relations to each other unknown, and possibly still in Caroline County, Virginia, and sizeable cluster of the descendants of Anthony and Elizabeth Minter were residing in Chatham County, NC. 

        John Minter's wife, Susannah Williams, is believed to have been born in 1756, but whether she came with him from Cumberland or the two met and married in the Leatherwood area is unknown.  Modest support for the latter comes from a deed recorded in 1779 in Henry County detailing a property transfer (consisting of two slaves) from a James Williams and a William Brown to John Minter. ¹²   The surname Williams suggests the possibility that James was the father of Susannah and that he was a landowner in Henry County.  By the time of their arrival at Leatherwood Creek, John and Susannah already had two children, a daughter, Betsy, born about 1772, and a son, Hezekiah, born about 1773.  More would follow.

        Although his age was right for participation in the Revolutionary War, which was looming at the time of their move to Leatherwood, we have no record of John's having served in the militia, but it is still possible that he did.  Nor is it known whether John and Susannah built their own house, or purchased it as part of the farm from a previous owner.  In either case, the house most likely was expanded and improved over the years of their tenure as their family grew, and it is unknown how long the structure stood.

        Few facts concerning the lives of this late 18th and early 19th century farm family are available to us, and we can't really know very much about them, but it seems fair to say that John and Susannah Minter were substantially successful people in that they accomplished the not insignificant tasks of establishing and maintaining a productive farm and creating a large and seemingly successful family.  Both family and farm would endure for many generations.

        Silas was a preacher in the Leatherwood Baptist Church, as was his older brother Orthniel.  Like many small country churches in the rural south of the era, Leatherwood Baptist followed the "primitive" approach to religious practice and organization.¹⁴  It has been said that Silas had a leg amputated as a result of an accident when he was a young man, and that he was known locally as "the one-legged Baptist preacher." ¹⁵

        The last child born to Nancy, named Mattie, came in 1838, and the 1840 census showed, in addition to Silas and six children, a female in the age bracket of 40 to 49, suggesting that Nancy was still alive at that time.  But by 1845 she apparently had died, as Silas wed in April of that year Elizabeth "Betsy" Philpott (or Walker). ¹⁶   Since Betsy was 48 at the time, it is not surprising that no children are attributed to the couple.  Such a marriage, whatever the personal relationship between the two, was a practical, and likely all but essential, means to the continuation of the conduct of farm and family life, as well as, for Silas, the demands of ministerial duties in the religious life of the community.  When Betsy joined the family of The Reverend Silas Minter, there were children of ages 7, 9, 10, 14, and 17, as well as a 19-year-old male who would marry the following year, and five others between 20 and 28 who were already married.  Whether Betsy brought children of her own from a previous marriage is unknown but clearly it is not unlikely.

        Silas and Nancy (Stultz) Minter had eleven children who survived; if there were others who died young we have no evidence of them.  Of the eleven, six were boys and five were girls.  The six sons, born between 1821 and 1835, had families of their own and available accounts of the progeny of five of the six show an astounding 25 grandsons, most of them residents of Henry County.  Clearly, the Minter name, through the males, and the Minter bloodline, through all of the offspring, expanded rapidly during the 19th century.

        If the information has been transcribed accurately by others, it was in the family of Thomas and Jane Eggleton that the spelling of the name was changed from Eggleton to Eggleston in the children.  In any case, spellings of the name are used here as they have been found.  As to the relative prevalence of each, the 1880 census of Henry County (more accurately, the index of that census available at ancestry.com) shows six matches on the name Eggleston and 183 matches on Eggleton.

        Although he was 34 years of age at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Silas Junior served as a private in the 24th Regiment of the Virginia Infantry, C.S.A.  In records of the National Archives, his name is listed as "Silas J. Minter," the "J" presumably standing for "Junior."¹⁸   When the war broke out in April, 1861, Silas Junior and Jane had five children under the age of 12, and another would arrive later that year.

        It was the fourth child of Silas and Jane, their first son, named Michael Eggleston but called "Mike," who would eventually take over the farm as its fourth-generation proprietor and whose line we follow.

19.   Sophia Martin, Ancestry.com, numerous pages on the Winns, but also on the Minters, the most important for present purposes being IDs I4460, I4871, I3106, and I2974.
Another source on the Winns is John C. Hamler, Ancestry.com, ID I18895.

        It has been generally believed within the family that the Winns were of Irish descent, but we have been unable to determine who first came to this country from where or when.  Given the Primitive Baptist affiliation of the Winns, it is all but certain that they were of the so-called "Orange Irish," the Scottish and English people who moved to Ireland during the era of the attempted Protestant transformation of the Isle by the English monarchy during the 17th century.  Their situation in Ireland was often uncomfortable, and their circumstances worsened when they lost the support of the Anglican elite in England because of their "dissenter" theology.  By the 1700s many were opting to emigrate to America, and other British colonies as well, sometimes with indentures to be worked off when they arrived.  Many of these early immigrants to America from Ireland settled in the inland regions of the mid-Atlantic and southern colonies in and near the Allegheny and Blue Ridge mountains, with smaller numbers also in New England and elsewhere in the northern colonies.

        The 1880 census of Henry County, Leatherwood District, listed Michael E. and Martha J. Minter, each age 26, with four children, ages five, three, two, and infant; plus Mike's first cousin, Harden Minter, age 18; and a boarder (and undoubtedly a relative), Caroline Eggleton, age 21.  Harden Minter was a son of Mike's uncle Jim, who had been killed in the Civil War at the second battle of Bull Run, Antietam, Maryland, in 1862, shortly after Harden was born.  Families of other farms in proximity to the Minters bore the names Eggleton, Richardson, Gravely, and Thomasson, and apparently not too far removed was the home of Silas and Jane Minter and their three youngest children, ages eleven through seventeen.²⁰

20.   The numbers assigned to the houses, given in the "walkaround" order in which the census takers visited them, were No. 36 for Mike and Babe and No. 41 for Silas and Abigail.  The spatial relationship between houses and farms is unclear, but it seems very unlikely that it was as simple as one house to a farm.  More likely, some farms had two or more houses on them serving as residences of various members of the same families.

        On December 28, 1897, Silas Minter passed away at the age of 71.  Two months later, on February 27, 1898, Jane Abigail died at the age of 67. Unfortunately, we do not have obituaries for either, but if we did we might read that the couple was survived by eight children, by grandchildren numbering in the seventies, and by a few great grandchildren as well.  Their funerals at the family cemetery, on what is now Route 655, Green Hill Drive, must have been well attended events.

        Mike and Martha Jane "Babe" Minter had twelve children, nine of whom survived into adulthood and all of them had children. With this, the fifth generation of Minters in Henry County, we begin, in Part Two, to follow all of the branches to the extent that we can at this time.