Chapter Five
Three sons of Valentine Pressler arrived in south central North Carolina
about 1746-1748. In fact, they settled in the area of the Piedmont west of
the Great Pee Dee River which was still in Bladen County. Settlers coming
into this area from 1740 to 1750 found a wilderness of vast forests, wild
game, flowering shrubs, and rivers and streams filled with fish. A decade
earlier this was the hunting ground of the Siouan Indian tribes, the Waxhaw,
the Catawbas, the Cheraws. where food and clothing were the gifts of nature,
but alcohol and smallpox, the white man's diseases, had taken their toll.
By 1750 the steady stream of settlers, Germans, Scotch-Irish, Welsh, and
French were rapidly taking up land along the rivers and creeks. They came
from Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolina seaports of Wilmington
and Charleston. They sought new homes where land was cheap. Indian attacks
were not a threat, such as they had become in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia,
and government was far away. It took three days to ride the 100 miles from
the Great Pee Dee River to the county seat in Elizabethtown over swollen
streams and roads that were not much more than Indian paths.
The settlers who arrived in the wilderness that was Anson County in the 1740s
brought tools, stock, and personal belongings to aid them in their settlement.
The earliest residents simply settled without bothering to obtain a legal
grant to the land which they claimed. The English and Scotch-Irish cleared
the land by girdling the trees so that the sap could not flow and the trees
died, while the Germans used more sound farming practices and cut them down
and removed the stumps. They built log houses from the vast forests of
long-leafed pine; they built furniture and tools from the oak, cedar, and
cypress that was so abundant. However, they considered the log structures
only temporary until such time as they could construct more substantial frame
houses.
Most frontier settlers arrived with little more than a few horses or a yoke
of oxen, a few cows or hogs and some chickens. They hunted and fished the
forests and streams, but they looked forward to soon advancing beyond mere
subsistence farming to the day when their crops would produce a cash
profit.
The backwoods pioneers in the southern colonies shared certain cultural
characteristics, some of which we can only assume applied to the Presslers,
some of which the historical records most definitely indicate as applicable.
They highly prized personal freedom and individualism, and often times had
little respect for social institutions such as law, religion, and legal ownership
of land. They possessed an almost compulsive desire to move every few years,
settling on farmsteads in what were islands of population in the vast forest.
Hunting and fishing were pursuits ranking in importance with farming.
One almost senses a conflict within the Presslers on the one hand to put
down roots on land of their own and to build something for their children,
and on the other hand to yield to the urge to drift westward with the frontier,
living a life of natural freedom without constraints. Clearly, both desires
won out in different branches of the family at different historical periods.
By 1748 there were two or three hundred people along the Great Pee Dee River
and local residents decided that a new county was needed and petitioned the
Royal Governor at New Bern. Anson County was created in 1750 from Bladen
and included all of the western half of the present state of North Carolina
and stretched, in theory, all the way to the Mississippi River. Just three
years later in 1753 this vast area was divided along an east to west line
with the area to the north of this line extending up to Virginia designated
as Rowan County.
The three Pressler brothers who arrived in Anson County were very much
Anglicized, though they had grown up in communities which were comprised
of many German immigrants. Only the oldest, Andrew, had ever seen Germany,
and his memories were those of childhood prior to the age of eight. Since
his marriage, he had lived around English-speaking people with English customs
in Maryland and Virginia. He must have seldom thought of Germany anymore.
His two younger brothers had been born in America. Of course, they had heard
their parents and their parents' friends talk about the European homeland,
but they would have mostly thought of this as just evening fireside stories.
Andrew, John, and Peter each cleared the land on which he settled, likely
with the help of his sons, and possibly on occasion with the help of his
brothers. It has been said that a single man with an axe could clear an acre
of virgin forest in seven to ten days. The trees would be felled so that
they lay in parallel rows, and then they would be cut into logs of manageable
length for use in the construction of buildings and fences. The dead vegetation
would be allowed to dry for several months, at which time a "logrolling"
would be held. Perhaps eighteen to twenty neighbors would be invited to a
social gathering with plentiful liquor and sufficient labor to heap the extra
logs, stumps, and brush into piles for burning. After such an occasion the
men were said to look like chimneysweeps.
These hard won fields would only be productive initially for three to five
years. No matter how rich the soil, the productivity soon fell off, unless
it was restored through manuring, unless a system of land rotation was adopted,
and unless there was an intensive investment in hoeing a thriving crop of
weeds. The German farmer had a reputation for doing just these things, but
is it any wonder that with such an abundance of available land reported further
down the trail, that some of the Preslar sons and grandsons chose to move
on and create another clearing in the endless forests on the continent where
only a few weeks of clearing was needed and not endless years of intensive
work?
At least some of the Preslar family put down roots in Anson County and called
it home for several generations. North Carolina became the family cradle
from which so many of the Preslar/Presley families in the South would trace
their ancestry, and many of the family would remain in the area down to the
twentieth century as permanent, stable, prosperous and respected members
of the community.
They planted their fields with corn, from which they derived roasting ears,
cornbread, hominy grits, whiskey, and feed for poultry. Between the rows
of corn they raised squash, pumpkins and watermelons, all crops that their
Indian predecessors had raised. In a garden near the cabin, or house, they
raised cabbage, green beans, cucumbers, turnips, peas, potatoes, carrots,
and onions. Peach trees thrived in the area. As the years and decades passed,
other grains were grown to some extent, but cotton became the big cash crop
in Anson County. Unlike so many other regions of North Carolina, the county
never became a big tobacco-growing area.
The keeping and raising of hogs, which could easily find food in the wooded
countryside, provided an abundant source of meat, which could be preserved
by smoking. Pork was a dietary staple in the rural South. A cow or two provided
milk, buttermilk, and butter for the table. Chickens and turkeys were kept
around the house, as was a horse or two for transportation. In the early
days, wild hay was cut for the horses, and some of the corn was fed to them,
also. Near the pioneer cabin was a smokehouse, a chicken coop, a springhouse,
and a corncrib. If the settler remained on his land for five to ten years,
a horse stable, a free-standing kitchen, a root cellar, and perhaps a pig
pen might be added.
Andrew, John, and Peter each acquired land very soon after they arrived in
North Carolina. Andrew Preslar received a grant for 264 acres of land
on both sides of the Rocky River in 1751, and in 1754 Andrew Pressley
received an additional grant for 390 acres on both sides of Buffalo Creek.
Both of these tracts were in Anson County, and both, of course, were to the
same person, in spite of the difference in spelling of the surname.
The above two grants demonstrate that almost from the beginning of their arrival in North Carolina, the records of the Pressler family show a variation in spelling and an increased tendency to anglicize the name. The old German Pressler spelling was never used anymore; Preslar became the most common variant initially, and Presley became more and more frequent, particularly as branches of the family moved away from Anson County. We don't know how the family actually might have pronounced their name during these times, but it seems safe to say that over time they began to adopt the pronunciation that others who lived around them were using.
Blacksmith
Andrew, now identified as a blacksmith, sold the second tract mentioned above
to one Peter Arrant (Arndt) just two months after he had received the grant.
He disposed of the first tract in July 1758 and July 1759 by deeding a portion
of it to each of his three sons, John Jr. (ie. John the younger, to distinguish
him from his uncle), Thomas, and Andrew Jr.,. He reserved ¼ acre which
was used for the family burying ground. It was probably not long after the
latter date (when he would have been 58 years old) that he died. It was not
infrequent in the Preslar family that a father deeded his land to his sons
shortly before he died, rather than writing a last will and testament.
John Preslar Jr. (christened John Volintine Prisley) does not appear to have
left any descendants. Andrew Preslar Jr. (christened Andrew Presler) had
at least four sons, three of whom served in the Revolutionary War. The
descendants of these veterans moved into the mountains of western North Carolina
and eastern Tennessee, and one branch of this family in the early nineteenth
century found its way from Buncombe County, North Carolina to Lincoln County,
Missouri. There, one of its sons, named David Presley, took his wife and
children in 1848 and joined the great migration westward to the Willamette
Valley of Oregon. In 140 years after Valentine Pressler had arrived in New
York harbor, his descendants had managed to cross the entire continent. More
will be said shortly about Andrew Jr.'s sons and his descendants in the direct
line of descent to Elvis Presley.
Thomas Preslar (christened Thomas Prisley) lived most of the remainder of
his life in Anson County. He wrote his will there in 1808. His son, Thomas
Preslar Jr., moved to Chester County, South Carolina, soon after his father's
death, where he died in 1849. As an example of how surnames became changed,
the surname in Thomas Jr.'s will was Presly, but in the family Bible
and on the tombstone of his oldest son, also called Thomas, the name was
Preslar. So, it is obvious that there was not a sudden decision to
change the name; it was gradual and it was irregular, sometimes switching
back and forth until the original Preslar might have been forgotten.
We find this happening in several families. The descendants of Thomas Jr.
in South Carolina were numerous and several of them moved to Leake and Tate
Counties in Mississippi in the 1830s and afterwards. In both areas they
established themselves as land-owning farmers and stable citizens of the
community.
Two prominent twentieth century American political figures are descended
from Thomas Preslar, the son of Andrew. Through his daughter, Susannah Preslar,
who married John Helms, can be traced three descents of Senator Jesse Helms
of North Carolina, and through his daughter, Sarah Preslar, who married George
Helms Jr., can be traced the lineage of former President James Earl (Jimmy)
Carter. Thus, Senator Helms is related to Elvis Presley in three different
ways, a seventh cousin in two lines and a seventh cousin once removed in
another line, and he is a seventh great-grandson of Valentine Pressler. President
Carter is a sixth cousin once removed to Elvis Presley, and a sixth
great-grandson of Valentine Pressler.
Another son of Valentine Pressler, John (christened Hans Jurie Presler),
obtained a grant for 200 acres of land in Anson County in 1749. He presumably
married his wife, Mary, before he arrived in North Carolina, but nothing
additional is known about her. In 1777 at the age of 64 years he wrote his
will in Anson County and described himself as a haberdasher. From this and
from subsequent land transactions executed by his sons, we know that he died
in possession of several hundred acres of land in Anson County, which was
left to his heirs.
This branch of the family has been more likely than some of the other lines
to retain the Preslar spelling and pronunciation of the surname until
the present time. This was particularly true so long as they remained in
Anson County, where many of them have remained until the present day. However,
like the other branches of the family they frequently anglicized the name
to Presley once they moved away from Anson County.
Anthony Preslar, a son of John, served in a company of South Carolina Royalists
during the Revolutionary War from 1781 to 1783 (not all the Preslars were
American patriots at that troubling time of political divisions). After the
war he settled near Camden in Kershaw District, South Carolina. He married
and raised a family which included several sons. In 1820, he and his adult
sons with their families moved to Conecuh County in south central Alabama,
which had been admitted to the Union just the previous year. There on the
sparsely populated southwest frontier they obtained tracts of land granted
by the United States government in the early 1820s. In the 1820 census of
Alabama and in the early land records, their names were recorded as
Preslar, but in the 1830 census and subsequently, their names slowly
were changed to Presley. There, too, the family obtained land and
were farmers for generations to follow.
Another descendant of John Preslar was a great grandson, Hosea Preslar, who
was born in Anson County in 1814. Hosea grew up in Anson County where he
became a Primitive Baptist preacher. In 1853, Hosea and his family, along
with his brothers and their families, his parents, and his two cousins and
their families all migrated to Henderson County, Tennessee. Hosea wrote and
published a religious book in his later years, and the family tended to retain
the Preslar surname spelling, but even so, some of them were listed
in the 1860 census of Henderson County, Tennessee, just before the Civil
War with the surname Presley. Many of their descendants still reside
in the area, while others eventually moved on to Texas and elsewhere.
The youngest son of Valentine Pressler, Peter Preslar, purchased 200 acres
of land from Jeremiah Swan in Anson County on the Rocky River in 1750. Over
the next seventeen years he bought and sold several tracts of land, the last
tract being sold in 1767, after which date there is no further record of
Peter in Anson County. It is likely that his son moved to South Carolina
where in 1769 one Luke Patrick of Colleton County sold to Peter Presler Jr.
of said county all his stock of cattle ranging in the forks of the Edisto
River.
A map of the Province of South Carolina drawn in 1773 shows Colleton County
with the name Priestly clearly marked in the forks of the Edisto.
Could this have been a variant spelling of Preslar or Presley?
It would not be the only time that the historical records have shown a
Pressler descendant with the name Presley changed to
Priestley, which was the original English surname of which
Pressley was just a variant itself. In 1775 Peter Preslar was listed
as being in Captain Andrew Cummings Company of volunteer militia in the
Saltcatcher's and Edisto District of South Carolina (ie. Colleton County).
An interesting event occurred at St. Louis on the Mississippi River on 16
April 1789. Pedro Perales (who has been identified as Peter Presler),
with a wife and eight children, and Juan Cormer (ie. John O'Conner) were
listed as being on their way to Natchez. St. Louis, and all the territory
west of the Mississippi River, was at that time under the rule of Spain,
as was East and West Florida and Natchez. While the area of Natchez was ceded
by Spain to the United States in 1795, it was not before Pedro Presley
and Juan Oconor, who became his son-in-law, were enumerated in a 1792 Spanish
census of Natchez. These records have been found in the Archivo General de
Indias at Seville, Spain.
An 1805 American census of the Natchez District (Mississippi Territory was created in 1798) lists Peter Presler in Wilkenson County, and the 1850 census of Wilkenson County lists a then 70-year-old son of Peter named Joshua Presler and stated that he was born in North Carolina. This is suggestive evidence that the Peter who moved his family all the way to Natchez was a grandson of Valentine, and likely, the Peter Presler who was living in Colleton County, South Carolina a few years earlier. This family continued to live in Mississippi and Louisiana with plantations along the great river until after the Civil War, when the last of the family sold out and moved to Florida.
So, the Presslers prospered and multiplied in North Carolina, and many of their descendants moved with the developing nation into the newly settled mountains and river valleys and across the vast continent to the very shores of the Pacific Ocean. They became respectable citizens in the communities in which they eventually decided to sink their roots. In time they would be represented in all the walks of life of the nation, and even two descendants of John Preslar would attempt to write a book about their immigrant ancestor.
© 1997 Donald W. Presley. Reproduction of this material for commercial purposes is prohibited without written permission of Donald W. Presley. No claim is made to previously copyrighted material. Elvis, Elvis Presley, and Graceland are registered trademarks of Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc.
[Chapter Six][Table of Contents][Return to Welcome Page]