| Notes |
- "On 7 January 1758 Sloan deeded three quarters of an acre to Robert Simonton, Thomas Allison, Samuel Thornton, Patrick Duffie, and William Simonton for the 'use and Benefit of the Presbyterian Society, commonly called the Fourth Creek Congregation Society.' Eleven days later, Luke Dean, a witness to the transaction between Sloan, his wife and the congregation’s trustees, appeared before Rowan County’s Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions to offer proof of the affair. "The households of Simonton’s own sons, Robert and William, stood, respectively, to the west and south of their father.
In June 1753 Robert, who was both a tavern keeper and surveyor, added the office of road commissioner to his growing list of titles. Like his brother, William Simonton also enjoyed a fair amount of local prestige. The owner of two slaves in 1759, William had doubled his slave holdings by 1768.87 The owner of four taxable blacks, the size of William Simonton’s slaveholdings was approached only by his neighbor to the west,William Watt, who also owned four Africans. In terms of slave ownership, both men stood above their neighbors, the majority of whom owned no more than two bondsmen.
Ten years later, in 1778, William Simonton stood at the pinnacle of wealth in the region bounded by Third and Fifth Creeks with an estate valued at £5678. A portion of this wealth undoubtedly derived from the land holdings William, the “dutiful son,” inherited from his father.
Sometime after 1760 William, then aged forty-three, married the daughter of his neighbor, the widow Margaret McKee, a newcomer from Lancaster County’s Derry Township.
For Fourth Creek parishioners such as William Watt, Thomas Allison, William Simonton, and Samuel Thornton, their elevation to the constabulary may have rested on their kinship to members of the court. Indeed, all could trace a kinship, either familial or affinal, to justices Robert Simonton and Andrew Allison. Constables from the area south of Fifth Creek were Thomas Allison (1753), William Watt (1755 and 1764), Henry Chambers (1759), James Mordah (1762), William Simonton (1765), William Stevenson (1767).
On 9 January 1765, Andrew Reed rose further in local prominence when Rowan’s justices appointed him overseer for the roads in the area between Fourth Creek and the South Yadkin. Nine years later, the Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions again entrusted Reed with a supervisory position, naming him, along with William Simonton, to “nominate Taxables” to work on the road leading from Fort Dobbs to near Salisbury.
On 4 November 1772 Rowan’s magistrates called upon John Mordah and William Simonton to assist several of the settlers residing near the South Yadkin and along the Fifth Creek watershed to layout a road leading from Cooper’s Ford to Fort Dobbs and then on to Kerr’s Bridge in the Irish Settlement.
(Source: genkssst -21 Sep 2008 - Excerpted from Journal of Backcountry Studies)
North Carolina Census, 1790-1890
Name: William Simonton
State: NC
County: Rowan County
Township: No Township Listed
Year: 1755
Database: NC Early Census Index
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Abt 1716 - 1818 (102 years)