Ch 1, The Johnson Colonists

This is the story of William Freeland Johnson, his ancestry and decendents from his great, great, great grandfather Samuel Johnson, to his great granddaughter Kylee Alexis Chelbana and his great grandson Caden Robert Adams. It is a story that spans nine generations.

William Freeland Johnson today

As far back as Freeland knows, the Johnson clan began with his great, great, great grandfather, Samuel Johnson. Little is known about Samuel, but he and his wife settled Georgia as part of Lord Percival and General James Oglethorpe’s plan to clean up London by giving the unemployed and destitute an opportunity for a fresh start in the new colonies.

 General James Oglethorpe

Samuel and his wife (name unknown) arrived in the New World around 1750. By the time they arrived, the promise of the new colony’s hemp and silk production had faded, and the only hope for the new immigrants was subsistence farming. This might have been acceptable to Samuel, but the rules in the colony still required all male adults to join the militia, and to plant at least one “white mulberry” tree (a holdover from the silk experiment) per acre to validate grants of land. Furthermore, the land could not be sold or traded and could only be passed down to a male heir if that heir chose to farm it. Effectively, it was not possible to own land in Georgia. This fact, and the constant militia training and alert calls to thwart the threat of invasion by the Spanish to the south and the Indians to the west was enough motivation to cause many immigrants to relocate to other, more liberal colonies to the north.

In 1754, Samuel’s only son William Charles was born, it was the same year the French and Indians launched their campaign against the colonies. The family stayed on in the relative safety of the farm until the French and Indian War had been won. Thinking the end of the war would open up the land west of the Appalachians for immigrants, Samuel was prepared to pack up his family, give up his grant in Georgia, and move west, but much to his surprise, after the war, in 1763, the British ceded the land west of the Appalachians back to the Indians and, once again, Samuel found himself stuck on the land he could not own.

William Charles grew up on the farm in Georgia and the family was prospering when their world erupted in Revolution in 1776. Since the bulk of the revolutionary activities were taking place in the north, the Johnsons were effectively shielded from the war by distance. All was well until, in December of 1778, the British captured the nearby city of Savannah and brought the war very much closer to home for the Johnsons. With that event, Samuel packed up his family and belongings and joined a party led by Daniel Boone headed to Kentucky.

 The only known portrait of Daniel Boone, completed near the end of his life.  He was so feeble he had to be propped up for the sittings.

With the signing of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix wherein the Iroquois ceded their claim to Kentucky back to the British, settlers once again felt safe to venture west of the Appalachian Mountains. The party traversed the “Wilderness Trail” through the Cumberland Gap which had only been explored and opened up four years previously when Daniel Boone established Boonesborough.

This monument is at Boone's Station, Kentucky

Settling at Boone’s Station, the family finally felt “at home,” but Samuel could not escape the Revolution and the settlement was under constant threat from the Shawnee Indians who had not been a party to the Stanwix Treaty and had now sided with the British. Samuel joined the local militia, as did all male adults, and was killed in one of the Shawnee raids on the settlement in 1780.

William Charles buried his father at Boone’s Station, and for the sake of his mother, he moved back to the relative safety of Georgia. At about the same time, to escape the fighting to the north, Thomas Carter, his wife Elizabeth, and their daughter Anne arrived from North Carolina. Anne was 16 years old at the time, and William Charles was immediately enamored by this sprightly young lass. Anne’s parents, Thomas and Elizabeth were born in the town of Ottery, in Devonshire, England, just 45 miles northeast of Plymouth where the Pilgrims had sailed from in 1609. The young couple emigrated from Ottery to the colony of North Carolina in 1762.