The Carpenter line of Rockingham County, Virginia, and Carpenter’s Station, Kentucky, gave two fathers to the Revolutionary War — a Swiss-born elder who died in the winter camp at Valley Forge, and a frontier militiaman killed at Blue Licks ten months after Yorktown. Their families answered the two deaths by becoming one family. This is both stories.
The Valley Forge encampment kept a monthly account of every soldier. For George Carpenter, private in Captain Thomas Hamilton’s company of the 1st Virginia State Regiment, the ledger reads, in its entirety:
December 1777 — Present.
January 1778 — Present.
February 1778 — Present.
March 1778 — Died.
Four words for the whole winter. No record names the cause; nobody at Valley Forge needed it written down. The camp’s killers were typhus, dysentery, and pneumonia, and March 1778 was the deadliest month of the encampment.
He had not started as George Carpenter. He was born Georg Zimmermann, into a Swiss Reformed family of Hallau, in the canton of Schaffhausen, and he crossed to Pennsylvania in the emigration of 1744 — the same year a girl named Anna Schulteli came over from the same village in her stepfather’s household. They married in America, settled among the Germans of the Shenandoah Valley, and by 1762 the register of the Peaked Mountain Church in Rockingham County records “George Zimmermann, Reformed elder, and wife Anna, née Schulteli.” Somewhere in those years the county clerks began translating him: Zimmermann is German for carpenter, and Carpenter he became — the family that translated themselves.
Which makes what he did in 1777 remarkable. He was a church elder with grown sons, in his fifties at least — his exact birth year is one of this line’s open questions — and the pay rolls of the 1st Virginia State Regiment begin paying him as a private on the 14th of September, 1777, at six and two-thirds dollars a month. His regiment was Virginia’s own — raised by the General Assembly “on commonwealth establishment,” under a statute that promised its men would not be marched out of Virginia without the Assembly’s consent. The war overrode the promise within the year. After the 9th Virginia was captured almost whole at Germantown, Washington’s General Orders of 7 October 1777 read: “The state regiment from Virginia is to supply the place of the 9th regiment in Muhlenberg’s brigade, and do duty there ’till further orders.” So Colonel George Gibson’s state troops marched into the Continental army’s winter, and George Carpenter of Rockingham County — Georg Zimmermann of Hallau — froze at Valley Forge with Washington’s army until the ledger wrote its fourth word.
The Commonwealth, to its credit, paid its debts. In May 1784 Lieutenant Elliott Rucker of the regiment certified “that George Carpenter and Daniel Delph inlisted in the 1st Virg’a State Reg’t in the spring of the year 1777 for Three years each, and died in the service before the expiration of the Three Years,” and four days later George’s son John wrote out the family’s demand: “Please deliver our Land Warrants for Military Services done by George Carpenter & Daniel Delph.” Virginia issued bounty-land warrant No. 3156 — the register reads “Carpenter, John (Reps.) — Carpenter, George — State Line” — good for land in the Virginia Military District of Ohio, and a clerk drew his final pay that April: twenty pounds, nine shillings, twopence. A father converted into acreage and small change, six years after his death.
By then the family had already gone to Kentucky. George’s sons founded Carpenter’s Station in Lincoln County by 1783 — a Kentucky Historical Society marker stands there today crediting “sons of George Carpenter, Sr., who died while serving with the First Virginia Regiment.” (Even the marker stumbles on his regiment — there were two 1st Virginias at Valley Forge, the Continental one and George’s state one, side by side in the same brigade. The distinction took this project a week of statutes and muster rolls to pin down; I don’t blame the marker.)
The second story begins in the same county and ends on a worse field.
John Fry was a younger man of Rockingham County, married to Catherine Spears, a daughter of George and Christina Spears. The family’s DAR file remembers him as a frontier soldier before the Revolution ever started — at Point Pleasant, in Dunmore’s War of 1774. In the last winter of the Revolution he turns up in Captain George Baxter’s company of Rockingham militia, mustered for seven days in February and March 1782 to escort British prisoners to Winchester — and I owe you the detail that on the printed pay roll his name appears as “John Fye,” four lines from a private named George Speare, his wife’s father. Reading the original manuscript at the Library of Virginia would settle the spelling in one look; it is on my list.
That summer he went out to Kentucky, where the war refused to end. Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown in October 1781; on the Kentucky frontier the fighting burned on without him. On 19 August 1782, at the Blue Licks on the Licking River, a pursuing force of Kentucky militia was ambushed and routed in the worst defeat Kentucky suffered in the whole war — the battle where Daniel Boone’s son Israel was killed. Seven days later Colonel Levi Todd, who had commanded on the field and lost his own brother there, wrote out the list of the dead: “…John Folley, John Fry, Val Stern…” On the monument that stands at Blue Licks today, the roster of privates killed carries “Fry, John” four names below “Boone, Israel.”
He was a militiaman, so Virginia owed his family nothing — bounty land was for the State and Continental lines, and militia service did not count. The records say so flatly, and no claim exists. What his family got instead was land he had already earned: his daughter Leah later took up ground in Kentucky adjoining her father’s own survey, on a warrant of her grandfather’s. And the records indicate his son John was born after Blue Licks — a child who never saw his father’s face.
Now watch what the two broken families did.
Catherine Spears was a widow at about twenty-two, in a fort-station world that did not let widows stay widows long. She married Adam Carpenter of Carpenter’s Station — a son of the man who died at Valley Forge. And when her daughter Leah Fry grew up, Leah married Jacob Carpenter — a grandson of the same man. Mother and daughter, widow and orphan of Blue Licks, married a son and a grandson of Valley Forge. Two soldiers who almost certainly never met — one dead in Pennsylvania in 1778, one dead in Kentucky in 1782 — became ancestors of the same children, and every Carpenter in this line since descends from both of them. Catherine herself stands twice in my tree, once through each husband; the two streams of her life meet again generations later in Major Lindsey Carpenter, whose father’s line came from Leah’s marriage and whose mother’s came from Catherine’s.
One more thing belongs on the record, because these were Kentucky farm estates and the ledger does not stop at the family. When Jacob Carpenter — Leah’s husband — died in Casey County in 1828, the appraisement of his estate listed three enslaved people by name: Fanny, Overton, and Betty. They are the first enslaved people this branch’s records have given names to, and I record them here for the same reason I record my ancestors: so that someone searching for them can find them.
How the lines run down to me
- George Carpenter (b. Georg Zimmermann, Hallau, Switzerland; died Valley Forge, March 1778) — father of both Adam Carpenter (c. 1760–1806) and George Carpenter Jr. (1746–1819), founders’ generation of Carpenter’s Station, Kentucky
- John Fry (killed at Blue Licks, 19 August 1782) and Catherine Spears — parents of Leah Fry (1778–1820)
- Catherine, widowed, married Adam Carpenter; Leah married Jacob Young Carpenter (1779–1828), George Jr.’s son
- The two streams meet in Major Lindsey Carpenter (1870–1948), born at Knob Noster, Missouri; his daughter Dolores Grace Carpenter (1911–1960) of Humble, Texas, was my great-grandmother
- George the elder is my grandfather twice over — a sixth-great-grandfather through Adam and a seventh-great through George Jr. John Fry is my sixth-great-grandfather; Catherine is my fifth- and sixth-great-grandmother, once through each husband.
Two open questions, on the record: George’s birth year rests on inference — the often-printed 1725 is unevidenced and probably too late — and the manuscript of Captain Baxter’s 1782 pay roll would settle “Fry or Fye” in a single look. When either is answered, I’ll amend this page.
George Carpenter’s own page in the family wing holds the records behind this story: owentemple.com/family/people/i3146.html. The full working tree is on Ancestry — George Carpenter’s profile there (sign-in required; Ancestry’s rule, not mine).
Sources
- Valley Forge Muster Roll, entry VA29279 (George Carpenter, Pvt., Capt. Thomas Hamilton’s Co., 1st Virginia State Regiment, Muhlenberg’s Brigade) — monthly status Dec. 1777 – Mar. 1778
- NARA M881, Compiled Service Records, file “Carpenter, George — Virginia — First State Regiment” (NAID 141546290): company pay rolls Sept.–Nov. 1777; “Account of Money belonging to the Dead & Deserted of the Virginia 1st State Regiment,” dated March 1778
- Hening, Statutes at Large of Virginia, vol. 9 (the Oct. 1776 act raising the state battalions; the Oct. 1777 act continuing “colonel George Gibson’s” battalion in Continental service) and vol. 10 (bounty-land acts)
- Washington’s General Orders, 7 October 1777 (Founders Online; cross-checked in Weedon’s Valley Forge Orderly Book)
- Lt. Elliott Rucker’s certificate (16 May 1784) and John Carpenter’s demand — Library of Virginia, Revolutionary War Bounty Warrants (“Carpenter, George”); transcript VAS2895, revwarapps.org; warrant No. 3156 in Brumbaugh, Revolutionary War Records: Virginia (1936), p. 333
- Kentucky Historical Society marker #1203, Carpenter’s Station
- Peaked Mountain Church register (Rockingham Co.), 1762; Augusta County chancery, Carpenter vs. Fotch; the 1744 Hallau emigration lists
- Col. Levi Todd’s letter, 26 Aug. 1782, in Young, History of the Battle of Blue Licks (1897), App. K (from Calendar of Virginia State Papers vol. 3, p. 333), and the killed roster at App. O
- Burgess, Virginia Soldiers of 1776, vol. 1, p. 123 (Capt. Baxter’s pay roll, Feb.–Mar. 1782)
- Kentucky Secretary of State Land Office records (John Fry’s Treasury Warrant; Leah Fry’s entry adjoining her father’s survey)
- Jacob Carpenter estate appraisement, Casey County, Ky., December 1828 term
- DAR ancestors A019433 (George Carpenter) and A043063 (John Fry)