The Lequire Family

Several years ago while visiting our "mountain house" in North Carolina my son John and I happened up on a small cemetery just off SR28 between Brush Creek and Bryson City that included several Davis graves. Knowing of the Davises in Ann's ancestry, we began searching for some known names and found the graves of Anderson Davis and Mira Lequire - Ann's great grand parents. The markers were crude with the names apparently scratched in the stones by hand. I did a little research and found a great deal about the Davis family, but was never able to trace the family of Mira Lequire.

Yesterday, I found an entry in the World Connect section of the RootsWeb website that mentioned a Joseph Lequire of Swain County of an age that could have been Mira's father. Checking further revealed the connection along with this family story.

Joseph Lequire was born in Rutherford County, North Carolina about 1788, the son of John Lequire who came to America as an eight year old boy with his father from France. Joseph married a girl from South Carolina, Jane Watkins. They proceeded to raise a family of nine children, most of whom were born in Rutherford County.

The children were John, Minor, Miranda, Narcissa, Joseph, William, Artie, Isaac, and Margaret. Miranda was our "Mira." She and her new husband, Anderson W. Davis, moved to the Bryson City area shortly after their marriage in 1843 while it was still Macon County. (Swain County was carved out of Macon in 1871.) Their first child - Sarah Jane Davis - was born there.

The rest of the family remained in Rutherford County until the Civil War came along. As with many family during those traumatic days, there were some who were loyal to the South and others whose sympathies were with the Union. During the winter of 1862/63, four of Joseph's children - Joseph, William, Artie, and Isaac - with their wives, husband, and children, left North Carolina, making a long, arduous move to Cades Cove, Tennessee where they had heard that most of the people there were sympathetic to the Union. Two of Artie's children died of "exposure" on the trip. After the war, Isaac - the youngest - returned to North Carolina for about five years, but returned to Cades Cove in 1875 to live out his life. Perhaps even then it was not a friendly atmosphere for a "Yankee."

Cades Cove was "overcome" by the new Smoky Mountain National Park in the 1920s. Most of the residents accepted what they were offered for their land. Most of the remaining Lequires moved out, some of them to north Georgia - right where we live now in Union and Towns County.

Jane died in 1871; Joseph shortly after in 1872. He is buried in the Lequire Cemeter near the Blankenship Cemetery which is near Bryson City. The next time we go Brush Creek, I plan to try to find his gravesite.<