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Lemuel Sawyer

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Lemuel Sawyer, United States Congressmen and author, was born in 1777 in Camden County, the youngest of Lemuel and Mary Taylor’s nine children.  Born into a well-connected and wealthy family, young Lemuel received an education at Flatbush Academy on Long Island in New York, before briefly attending the University of Pennsylvania in 1796.  In 1799, he enrolled at the University of North Carolina, but left the following year to enter politics.

In 1800-1801, Sawyer held a seat in the North Carolina House of Commons, and served as a presidential elector casting his vote in 1804 for Thomas Jefferson.  Sawyer was admitted to the bar that same year, and opened a law office in Elizabeth City.  However, Sawyer proved a more successful politician than lawyer, and was elected eight times to Congress serving 1807-1813, 1817-1823, and 1825-1829, often defeating powerful candidates such as William H. Murfree and James Iredell.

In addition to his political pursuits, Sawyer engaged in the literary arts.  His first work, Journal to Lake Drummond, published in 1797, was reviewed by David L. Swain as “puerile, and the language the most superlative bombast.”  He wrote a series of treatises on Greek literature and Roman history, all of which are now lost, as well as A Biography of John Randolph of Roanoke.  In the latter work, Sawyer portrayed his congressional colleague as a coward and imbecile to such a degree that reviewers labeled it libelous.  Sawyer followed with an autobiography, disclosing his gambling, wastefulness, and illicit affairs.  The book is still considered one of the most self-condemning works ever produced in American literature.

Sawyer also wrote several works intended for the common good.  In 1833, he produced The Observatory, advocating the development of a national observatory in Washington, D. C.  His last publication, “The Vine of North Carolina,” published in Report of the Commissioner of Patents in 1849, encouraged the growing of scuppernongs in North Carolina to promote the production of wine.

Sawyer is best known for his plays.  In 1824 he published Blackbeard:  a Comedy in Four Parts that is considered the first play written by a native North Carolinian.  The piece received such accolades when sold to members of Congress by subscription that Sawyer produced a second, The Wreck of Honor, which detailed the adventures of a lecherous American in Paris during the Napoleonic period.  Neither play has ever been staged.

Sawyer married three times.  His first wife, Sarah Snowden, died two years after their marriage in 1812.  In 1820 he married Camilla Wertz in Washington, D. C., who died six years later.  His final wife, Diana Rapayle Fisher, whom he married in 182, was a Brooklyn, New York socialite.  Over the next twenty years, Sawyer squandered her fortune leaving the two in utter poverty.  In 1850, Sawyer was forced to take a clerkship in a Washington, D. C. attorney’s office to make ends meet.  He died two years later and is believed to have been buried beside his brother in Camden County.

References:
William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, V, 289-290—sketch by Richard Walser
Dictionary of American Biography, XVI, 394-395—sketch by A. R. Newsome
Richard Walser, “First Playwright was a Gay Blade,” The State, July 5, 1952                                                     Location:                                                     US 158/NC 34 southwest of Camden

Isaac Gregory

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     Isaac Gregory, Revolutionary War militia general, was born in 1737 in Pasquotank County, the son of William and Judith Morgan Gregory.  Little is known of Gregory’s early life; however, he served as a county sheriff in the 1760s and early 1770s. In 1773 he was appointed a trustee to the building of St. Martin’s Anglican chapel on land owned by Thomas McKnight in Currituck County.
In 1775, Gregory represented Pasquotank County in the last colonial assembly to meet under a royal governor in North Carolina.  Although an early supporter of the Continental Congress and delegate to the provincial congresses of 1775-1776, Gregory withdrew, along with five other members, in defense of his friend Thomas McKnight, the Currituck County representative, when McKnight refused to sign the Continental Association.
From 1775-1779, Gregory held a series of appointments in the region including  member of the Safety Committee in Edenton and senior Pasquotank County militia colonel.  In July 1777 the General Assembly appointed him to a committee to establish a courthouse and public buildings in the new county of Camden, where Gregory held large land holdings.  That same year, Gregory’s brother, Dempsey, obtained a captaincy in the 10th N.C. Continentals, a post he held for only a few short months.  On May 12, 1779, the General Assembly appointed Gregory a brigadier-general of the Edenton district militia.
Although he had no combat experience, Gregory quickly gained the trust and respect of his superiors and fellow officers.  On August 16, 1780, under the overall command of Richard Caswell, Gregory led his brigade in the battle of Camden, South Carolina.  Facing a superior British army led by Charles Cornwallis, Gregory’s men held while other North Carolina militia regiments fled the field and joined Maryland and Delaware Continentals in a last-ditch bayonet charge that resulted in hand-to-hand combat with some of the very best British regiments.  Gregory’s horse was killed and fell upon him, after which he was bayoneted twice while stuck underneath the horse’s body.  Briefly captured, Gregory was paroled as British surgeons determined that he could not live.
Gregory recovered from his wounds and returned to Pasquotank County.  By November of that year he began forming a militia company of dragoons in the district to oppose a projected British invasion of the area from Suffolk, Virginia. In the spring of 1781 accusations arose that Gregory was secretly cooperating with the British after a letter was captured reputedly from him to the British commander in Suffolk offering to surrender his command.  Patriot officials, horrified at the thought that one of the senior militia commanders in the region was a traitor, moved to court-martial Gregory.  However, the letter had been written as a joke by a British officer under the command of Colonel John Graves Simcoe, and when word came of Gregory’s impending trial, the British sent word to Whig officials admitting that it was untrue.  Although he escaped trial, questions about Gregory’s loyalties continued to haunt him for the remainder of the war.
After the conflict, Gregory served in the General Assembly, and as a trustee of various academies and schools in northeastern North Carolina.  He was appointed a delegate to the constitutional conventions of 1788 and 1789 as a Federalist, and served as a commissioner of navigation for Albemarle Sound, as well as a customs collector for Camden County. Gregory died of an unrecorded illness at his plantation, Fairfax, in April 1800, leaving a wife, Sarah Lamb Gregory, and six children.
References: William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, II, 367—sketch  by William S. Powell Lawrence E. Babits and Joshua B. Howard, Fortitude and Forbearance: The North Carolina Continental Line in the Revolutionary War, 1775-1783 (2004) Walter Clark, ed., State Records of North Carolina, XIII-XV, XIII-XIX, XXII-XXV (1896-1906) J. G. Simcoe, A History of the Operations of a Partisan Corps Called the Queen’s Rangers (1844)

Location:                                                     US 158/NC 34 at Camden

Dempsey Burgess

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Marker Text: DEMPSEY BURGESS   Member of provincial congresses, 1775-1776; lieutenant colonel of militia in Revolution; Congressman, 1795-99. Grave is 7 miles S.E.

     Dempsey Burgess, Revolutionary War political leader, was born in 1751 in Pasquotank County, the son of John Burgess, a Baptist minister.  His mother’s name remains unknown.  Little is known of Burgess’s early life, although presumably it was spent in agricultural pursuits.
Burgess entered politics in 1773 as a member of the Colonial Assembly representing Pasquotank County.  In 1775-1776 he served in the provincial congresses held at Halifax and Hilllsborough alongside his friend Isaac Gregory.  When Camden County was formed in 1777, Burgess joined Gregory on the committee to design and lay out the new courthouse and county jail.
Burgess’s Revolutionary War military career consisted of appointments as major and lieutenant colonel of the Pasquotank County militia.  After the war, Burgess returned to farming.  Elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1795, Burgess held office for two consecutive terms.  In 1799 he retired to his plantation where he died on January 13, 1800, leaving a widow and four children.
References: William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, I, 271—sketch by Elmer D. Johnson Biographical Dictionary of the American Congress (1971) John H. Wheeler, Historical Sketches of North Carolina (1851)

Location: US 158/NC 34 at Camden

Dismal Swamp Canal

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DISMAL SWAMP CANAL marker reads: Connects Albemarle Sound with Chesapeake Bay. Begun 1790; in use by War of 1812.

       Authorized in 1790, the Dismal Swamp Canal connects Albemarle Sound in North Carolina with Chesapeake Bay in Virginia.  In 1728, Col. William Byrd II of Virginia was among the first to realize how important a canal could be to Virginia and North Carolina.  Byrd led a band of surveyors that same year to mark the border between North Carolina and Virginia.
In 1763, George Washington and Fielding Lewis surveyed the canal route.  The original plan was for it to connect the Albemarle Sound to the Chesapeake Bay via Lake Drummond.  The canal was built three miles east of Lake Drummond, but there is a smaller canal to connect the two.
In 1790, the North Carolina General Assembly authorized the building of the canal.  A private company which used slave labor was hired to do the job.  Construction commenced in 1793.  A system of locks, built so ships could be raised or lowered in the waterway, were set up, in North Carolina, at South Mills, Spence’s lock, the Culpeper lock, and, in Virginia, at the Northwest or Wallace lock, the Wilkins lock, and the Deep Creek or Gilmerton lock.  The only locks which remain today are in South Mills and Deep Creek; the others were removed between 1896 and 1899.
By about 1805, the canal was complete, but only small boats could traverse its course.  The canal was in use during the War of 1812.  Between 1839 and the beginning of the Civil War, it was widened and deepened.  The locks were improved with masonry, enabling larger boats such as passenger boats, freighters, and stern-wheel steamboats, to pass through.  Between 1896 and 1899, the masonry locks were replaced with timber ones.  During the Civil War, the canal fell into disrepair but it reopened in 1899.
Originally owned by the Dismal Swamp Canal Company, the canal was sold to the Lake Drummond Canal and Water Company.  On March 30, 1929, the federal government acquired the canal for $500,000.  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers now supervises it.  Today, the Dismal Swamp Canal is nineteen miles long, sixty feet wide, and at a controlling depth of nine feet.  The canal is part of the Intracoastal Waterway that stretches along the Atlantic and Gulf Coast states.
Boats on Dismal Swamp
References: Alexander Brown Crosby,The Dismal Swamp Canal (1946) Mary Evelyn Whitehurst, “The Dismal Swamp Canal,” in Historical Highlights of Camden County, 1777-1977 (1977) The Way We Lived in North Carolina, website map: http://www.waywelivednc.com/maps/historical/dismal-swamp-canal.htm Camden County, North Carolina website page on Dismal Swamp Canal: http://www.albemarle-nc.com/camden/history/canal.shtml US Army Corps of Engineers, “Norfolk District Dismal Swamp & Dismal Swamp Canal Environmental Restoration and Flood Control Study”: http://www.nao.usace.army.mil/projects/civil%20works%20projects/Dismal%20Swamp/homepage.asp

 

Battle of South Mills

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       Union General Ambrose Burnside’s (below) expedition into eastern North Carolina in 1862 scored a series of successes with the capture of Roanoke Island in February, New Bern, and Washington in March, and Fort Macon in April.  Among the few Confederate victories in that season was the defeat of a force sent to destroy the Dismal Swamp Canal locks at South Mills.  Burnside ordered 3,000 men under General Jesse Reno to blow up the locks in order to preclude the chance that Confederate ironclad gunboats might be floated down the canal from Norfolk.  The troops landed just south of Elizabeth City on the evening of April 18.Ambrose Wright

Carrying with them two wagons of explosives, the Federals made a strategic error by taking a wrong road and adding ten miles to their overland route north.  (They executed the mulatto guide who had misled them.)  Weary and robbed of any chance of surprise, the Union troops meet 900 Confederates, commanded by Colonel Ambrose Wright, a few miles below South Mills.

Fighting began around noon.  The Confederates held their opponents in check for three hours.  In late afternoon General Reno withdrew his men who returned the next day to New Bern.  Thirteen Union soldiers were killed and 101 wounded; the Confederates suffered six dead and twenty wounded.

 

References:
John G. Barrett, The Civil War in North Carolina (1963)
William R. Trotter, Ironclads and Columbiads:  The Civil War in North Carolina:  The Coast (1989)
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion
(Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot, March 30, 1997 (account of reenactment)

WHITEHURST, WILLIAM

William Whitehurst, enlisted in Capt. Hughes Troop of 32 Reg’t of NC Troops on May 30, 1861 in South Mills. As part of Company B, he was captured at Spotsylvania VA on May 10,1864 and sent to Point Lookout, MD and then transferred to Elmira NY on August 6, 1864. He died as a POW on April 2,1865.

Contributed by Bob Jones

 

WHITEHURST, SAMUEL

Samuel Whitehurst, enlisted at Shiloh, Camden County on Aug 20,1861 in Company H of 32 Reg’t North Carolina Troops. Captured at Hattress and exchanged on February 1862.

A book at the Wilmington NC Library had either  John or Samuel also dying as a POW in NY.  Some where in my cleaning out  of company files, I lost my copy of the page in the 32 Reg’t book.  The  website of the Union Camp had the last name listed as dying.  I have  microfilm copies for the rest of the above data.

Contributed by Bob Jones

 

WHITEHURST, JOHN

John Whitehurst, born in Camden Co. and enlisted at age of 35 at South Mills to Capt. Hughes Company of  32 NC  Inf. on May 30th, 1861.

A book at the Wilmington NC Library had either  John or Samuel also dying as a POW in NY.  Some where in my cleaning out  of company files, I lost my copy of the page in the 32 Reg’t book.  The  website of the Union Camp had the last name listed as dying. I have  microfilm copies for the rest of the above data.

Contributed by Bob Jones