Information Sheet

 

 

R         Carter, John Denton.

106                  “The Carters of Greene County, Tennessee: An Early American

                           Family,” Part One, 1981.

                                    One folder, typescript.

 

 

 

This is a history of the Carter family by a descendant in Biloxi, Mississippi.  Part One is sub­titled “From New Jersey to Tennessee.”  Later members of the family moved to Missouri.

 

The author of this family history, John Denton Carter, is a descendant of John Carter I, the patriarch of the Carters of Greene County.  John D. Carter is a native of Texas.  He at­tended Southern Methodist University and earned a doctorate in American history at the Uni­versity of California-Berkeley.  After serving as a historical officer in the U.S. Air Force, he taught at West Virginia University in Morgantown.  In the twenty years before his retirement in 1967, Dr. Car­ter was a research analyst for the Air Force and Defense departments in Washington, D.C.

 

“The Carters of Greene County, Tennessee,” is a history of an American pioneer fam­ily.  It is based primarily on census data, military service and pension records, and land claims.  The Car­ters of Greene County, not to be confused with the more prominent family of the same name in nearby Carter County, Tennessee, were prosperous landowners and farmers who arrived in New Jer­sey, probably from England, in the 1750s.  They migrated to the Mononga­hela Valley, in what is now West Virginia, in the 1760s.  They remained there only briefly be­fore removing to Surry County, in western North Carolina.  Fearful of the consequences of Lord Cornwallis’s march through the Carolinas, the Carters moved westward in 1780-1781, crossing the mountains into the area that be­came Greene County, Tennessee.

 

Although the Carter family did not attain more than local prominence, its members were in­dustrious, responsible yeomen who have been an integral part of the Greene County community for two centuries.  They were citizens and patriots, and members of the family served under gen­erals Gates and Greene in the Revolution, and under Jackson in the War of 1812.  Their story is typical of hundreds of families who migrated to the western frontier in the mid- and late-eight­eenth cen­tury.

 

 

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