Chapter Six

Of the many Presley/Preslar family lines that began in Anson County, North Carolina, we now follow only one-that which led to Elvis Presley, father to son, father to son. As previously noted, Andrew Presler Jr. was christened in 1732 in St. Stephen's Parish in Cecil County, Maryland, the fifth and youngest child of Andrew (Andreas) Pressler. He was the only child of Andrew christened with the surname Presler, instead of Prisley. However, his name may appear as both Presler and Presley in the later records.

Moving with his family, first to Virginia, and then to North Carolina probably around 1746 or 1747, he seems to have struck out on his own soon after that time. If we accept the word of one of his sons as to the latter's date and place of birth, then Andrew Jr. was married and living in Rowan County, North Carolina, by 1748 or 1750. Andrew Presler served on jury duty in Rowan County (Salisbury District) in 1758 and 1759. His father, Andrew Sr., deeded him a portion of his land in Anson County in 1759, as he did his other sons, and when Andrew Jr. sold this land in 1767 he was said to be "of Mecklenburg County," North Carolina, which had been created from the western part of Anson County in 1762. A deed in Mecklenburg County indicates that he was still resident there in 1774.

In 1776 he bought land in Kershaw County, South Carolina, on the north side of the Wateree River. This was the first time at which the court records showed his name as Presley, and this was when we learn that Andrew Jr., like his father, was a blacksmith. Within three years he had moved back to Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, and had sold his South Carolina land. The date of his subsequent death is as yet undetermined.

The name of Andrew Jr.'s wife has also been lost to us, and the names of only four of his children (sons) are known. Three of his sons saw military service in the Revolutionary War. His son, Charles, was born probably about 1750 in Rowan County and enlisted for service in the Revolutionary War in 1779 in Kershaw County, South Carolina, while living with his parents. He served for over two years and then married in 1783 to Polly Keziah of Kershaw County, with whom he reared eight children. After the war he lived in North Carolina (Richmond County in 1790), in South Carolina (Kershaw County in 1800), and in Tennessee. In 1833 he was in Morgan County, Tennessee, and in 1835 he died in Bledsoe County, Tennessee.

Another son of Andrew Jr., also named Andrew Presley, was born in Rowan County, North Carolina, in 1754, and enlisted in Rowan County for service in the Revolutionary War for three month-terms in 1779 and 1781. He participated in the well-known Battle of Eutaw Springs in South Carolina on September 8, 1781. Andrew Presley (III) seems to have moved to Kershaw County after the war, at about the time his parents would have moved back to North Carolina. Nothing is known of his wife, but he was listed with family in the 1790 census of Kershaw County, and his name is in the land records of Kershaw County in 1791 and in 1797. He served on jury duty there in 1793.

By the time of the 1800 census, Andrew (III) had moved to Buncombe County, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge mountains. In 1833 he was in Claiborne County, Tennessee, and in 1855 he was living in Hawkins County, Tennessee, and was over 100 years old. Both Andrew and his brother, Charles, probably lived in their old age with their children whom they had followed to the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee.

Peter Presley, another son of Andrew Presler Jr., did not serve in the Revolutionary War, his brother, John, having substituted for him. He is believed to have settled in Anson County, North Carolina by 1780 where his descendants can be found living at a later date and even at the present time.

A fourth son of Andrew Jr., John Presley, who was the one from whom Elvis Presley was descended, was born in Rowan County, North Carolina, in 1748, according to a statement he himself made on his pension application. However the actual date may have been two or three years later. In 1779, when the family was living back in Mecklenburg County, he entered the military service for the Revolutionary War as a substitute for John Cole who had been drafted for six months. He marched with his company under Captain Drury Ledbetter to Camden, South Carolina, and from there to Charleston where the company remained for several weeks before marching to the Savannah River. There was no fighting and the company remained in winter quarters during much of this time.

Shortly after his discharge, he was drafted himself in May 1780 for three months under Captain Charles McKee. The company joined General Sumpter "near the Rocky Mount," then marched down into South Carolina and took part in the battle of Hanging Rock with the British. Once again he was discharged and returned home, but in the Fall of 1780 he went off again under Captain Jeremiah Wilson as a substitute for his brother, Peter, who had been drafted for three months. This time he marched from Mecklenburg County Courthouse down across the Pee Dee River to the Cheraw Hills where the company was stationed until his discharge.

After the war, John lived in Mecklenburg County for perhaps ten years, then moved to Kershaw County for about fourteen years (he was in the 1790 and 1800 censuses of Kershaw County), and moved back to Rowan County for several years. According to one affidavit, he was living in Kershaw County in 1816. At some time thereafter, he moved to Tennessee to be near his children, moving back and forth between North Carolina and Tennessee. He gave these places of residence on his own pension application which he made in 1833 when he was living in Monroe County, Tennessee.

Nothing is known about the wife of John Presley, whom he probably married before 1774, and before he went into the army. The census records of 1790 and 1800 reveal that he had four sons and three daughters. Most researchers agree that one of his younger sons was Dunnan Presley, born in 1780.

Dunnan Presley was born in Lancaster County, South Carolina. He was married twice, his first wife being named Catherine, whom he married about 1808 in Lancaster County. He moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Buncombe County, North Carolina, before 1820. By 1830 his wife had presumably died and he had remarried in Buncombe County to his second wife, Mary.

A Backwoods Farm

(Terry G. Jordan & Matti Kaups, The American Backwoods Frontier, An Ethnic and Ecological Interpretation (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1989))

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By 1840 Dunnan was living in Monroe County, Tennessee (he probably had lived there earlier), and in 1850 he was in Polk County, Tennessee, a 70 year old farmer, living with his 58 year old wife Mary. In 1860 he was in McMinn County, Tennessee, and he died between 1860 and 1870. The census records suggest that Dunnan probably had two sons and two daughters by his first wife, and perhaps three sons by his second wife. Three of his sons have been identified as Andrew, George and Dunnan Presley Jr.

The fate of the Presleys and most of their neighbors in the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee was determined to a large extent by early public land policies regarding the area. North Carolina, which then extended westward all the way to the Mississippi River, refused to ratify the Articles of Confederation after the Revolutionary War until it was assured that its western lands would not become part of the public domain. The federal laws which provided for public domain and small homesteaders were enacted too late to affect the development of Appalachia in the way that it did the Midwest. Southern Appalachia's lands were privatized, and when North Carolina in 1783 opened its western lands (including Tennessee) for purchase at cheap prices, absentee merchants, investors, land companies, and tidewater planters went on a rampage of land speculation. Many of these speculators were political figures in the state who had inside connections. Absentee landlords owned three-fourths of the total acreage on county tax rolls in some western counties by 1800.

These speculators grabbed up all the best agricultural lands, paying only 50 shillings to one pound per 100 acres. They would resurvey their land into smaller tracts, advertise the land in eastern cities, and sell it for considerable profit. Many of them were instrumental in the creation of towns, founded not just to serve the hinterland, but to add to profits by attracting new settlers and speeding up the sale of nearby agricultural lands. The State sometimes granted speculators land just for that purpose, as was the case for Asheville, Canton, and Waynesville.

While wealthy merchants, planters, and professionals living in the region were able to amass large land holdings, poor settlers and farmers who arrived in the area had little chance of acquiring a farm or even a town lot. In eastern Tennessee, one-sixth of the people in the area held ownership to over one-half of the land. The people who were moving into the region in the late 1700s and early 1800s, such as the Presleys, were mostly the poor, but there was no free land available. They became highly mobile, moving from year to year, always in search of affordable land.

The speculators preferred to use these landless people as tenants on their land. The latter would clear the land, plant orchards, build roads, and erect buildings, only to have the wealthy owner sell his land at a higher profit to new settlers who may have arrived with some money. There was little prospect that the poor settler could acquire a family farm. Unlike the Midwestern settler who could take advantage of the homestead laws, the Appalachian settler needed much more capital to get started. Nearly three-fifths of all frontier Appalachian households did not own land of their own, and those that did, owned only one percent of the land.

In the early 1800s less than half of the people in Southern Appalachia lived on farms and by 1860 one-fourth of the people were living in the area's towns. This was at a time when the nation's economy and means of family livelihood was based on agriculture and cultivation of the soil. Non-propertied people were reduced to wage labor, and employment opportunities were few. Agricultural employment was seasonal and paid low wages. Families were forced to move frequently in search of work. Poor families barely earned enough to meet subsistence requirements. There was no such thing as accumulation of wealth, either through savings or through inheritance, for these landless people.

The only means by which such a family could improve itself was to acquire a profession or skill, but in Southern Appalachia an education was only available to those who could afford to pay subscription fees or send their children to distant schools. In the Appalachian region of Tennessee only one-fourth of the school-age children at any time were enrolled in schools that lasted only four months a year. The result was that one-fourth of the adult white population was illiterate.

Thus, in the fifty year period from 1810 to 1860 there was little progress by poor families in the region as far as acquiring land. Ignorance and poverty had become the normal and persistent way of life for many people. This situation had a profound affect on the Presleys who were caught in this trap, as evidenced by the situation which remained with them even when they later were in Mississippi. It is to the credit of Dunnan Presley Jr., an illiterate man, that he made an attempt to improve his situation by joining the army, but it also was an expression of the migratory habits of the regional culture from which he came, one that he was to repeat several times.

Dunnan Presley Jr. was born on July 1, 1827 in Monroe County, Tennessee. On November 1, 1847 at the age of 20 he enlisted at Knoxville as a private in Captain Jno. C. Vaughn's Company C of the 5^th Regiment of Tennessee Volunteers. His regiment served in the War with Mexico, and between February and April of 1848 he was in San Juan, Mexico, and in May 1848 he was at National Bridge, Mexico. By July 2, 1848 he was on board ship returning to the United States where he was discharged at Memphis on July 20^th. On November 7^th he was issued a warrant for 160 acres of land based on his army service. It was sent to him in care of Rufus Smith in Madisonville, Tennessee.

Dunnan returned home to his wife and eldest daughter whom he had left in Tennessee. He had married Elizabeth probably about 1845 in North Carolina or Tennessee and to this union were finally born five children: Elvira E. in 1846, Elizabeth in 1848, Joshua in 1851, Dunnan in 1852, and Nancy Jane in 1854.

Elizabeth died about 1860, and soon thereafter, leaving his children probably with relatives, Dunnan found himself in northeastern Mississippi. On August 15, 1861 he married a second time in Itawamba County, Mississippi, to Martha Jane Wesson. As in his first marriage, he soon went off to war again. On May 11, 1863 he enlisted at Grenada, Mississippi, in Company E, Hamm's Regiment, Mississippi Cavalry. Perhaps, like many other Civil War soldiers, he was concerned about his family back home and temporarily deserted in order to investigate their circumstances, because from January 18 to June 30, 1864 he was listed as deserted and absent without leave. He presumably returned to his unit after the latter date.

Dunnan and Martha Jane had two children born in Mississippi: Rosella born in 1863 and Rosalinda born in 1865. He and Martha Jane were divorced, and on February 8, 1868 Dunnan was in Jackson, Madison County, Tennessee, where he married a third time to Mrs. Emily (Bryson) Pope. Emily died on April 30, 1876 in Powhattan, Arkansas. Meanwhile, Martha Jane resumed the use of her maiden name and raised her two daughters, Rosella and Rosalinda, in Mississippi.

In 1880 Dunnan was in Independence County, Arkansas, a farmer, and living in the household of one Thomas Pierce. Then, on March 18, 1882, he married in Benton County, Arkansas, to his fourth wife, Harriett Henrietta Toy. By her Dunnan had four children, all born in Missouri: James G.W. born in 1883, Narcissa C. born in 1887, Emily A. born in 1890, and Andrew J. born in 1894.

Dunnan and his fourth wife moved to Washburn, Barry County, Missouri, after their marriage, and when in 1888 he applied for a pension for his Mexican War service, he reported suffering from a variety of illnesses. In an affidavit in 1894 he also reported that his wife was invalid and had fits, as did two of his young children, and that his means of subsistence was limited to one milk cow valued at $12, household property valued at $25, and a pension of $8 per month.

By 1898 his eyesight was fading and he was continuing to suffer from a gastrointestinal disorder which he had first developed in Veracruz, Mexico. He mentioned that he had lived in Monroe County, Tennessee from 1848 to 1873, in Powhattan, Lawrence County, Arkansas from 1873 to 1881, and in Barry County, Missouri, from 1881. There was no mention of his family in Mississippi. He died in Barry County on March 10, 1900 at age 72 years.

Northeastern Mississippi was largely settled by people moving down and out of the valleys at the southern end of the Appalachian mountain chain. Like the area from which they migrated, it was a rural region with large numbers of tenant farmers and sharecroppers.

Tupelo came into existence on what had been the old Natchez Trace just before the beginning of the Civil War when a railroad along the old route brought about the building of saloons at the site which catered to railroad workers. In 1860 Martha Jane Wesson was 20 years old and living with her parents, Edward and Emily Wesson in Itawamba County. Just four months after Confederate guns fired on Ft. Sumter in Charleston harbor, she married Dunnan Presley Jr. Within a year a battle between Confederate and Union troops occurred at Corinth, just fifty miles to the north, and troops were marching through Tupelo.

Rosella was born into this world of war and marching armies, the fact of which her ancestor, Valentine, would no doubt have seen the irony. In July of 1864 Federal troops were sent into Mississippi in an attempt to intercept Confederate Cavalry and protect Federal supply lines. Cutting a swath of destruction behind them, they were attacked by Confederate troops at Harrisburg near Tupelo on July 14. Short of rations and ammunition, the Confederate troops were forced to withdraw.

The Yankees burned Tupelo to the ground. The town was rebuilt slowly after the war. A town built for railroad workers and a cotton trading center, it was a rough and rowdy town during the years of Reconstruction. In 1866 it became the seat of a new county named for Confederate General Robert E. Lee and created from parts of the counties of Itawamba and Pontotoc. Cotton became king in the rich farmland surrounding the area. The town was incorporated on General Lee's birthday, January 17, 1870, and became the trading center for a surrounding five-county area.

Rosella Presley, Elvis Presley's great grandmother, did not know her father. She told her daughter that when she and her little sister were little babies, they were taken to church by their maternal grandparents, and when they returned, their father, Dunnan, was gone.

Although Rosella had nine children of her own, there is no record, or family recollection, of her having ever married. Her daughter, Doshia, at the age of 91 reported that the identity of their father was always a mystery when they were children. Their mother just didn't talk about it. Her children were Walter G., Essie, Mannie E. (Doshia), Noah, Jesse D. McClowell, Calhoun (Cal), Mac (Mack), Robbie, and Joseph Warren.

Her son, Joseph, stated that his mother was a sharecropper who gave half the crop to the landlord in exchange for a cabin in which she raised her family. She took in washing and cleaned the homes of others for additional income. In the winter she gathered up her children and took them to find additional places to live and work in Mississippi and Alabama. Rosella died on July 30, 1924 in Pineville, Itawamba County, Mississippi.

Her son, Jesse Dee McClowell Presley, Elvis' grandfather, was born on April 9, 1896 in Itawamba County, Mississippi, and left school to find work at the age of eleven. At age 17 he married Minnie Mae Hood on July 20, 1913. He drifted from one job to another all over Mississippi, Kentucky, and Missouri, often working as a sharecropper in summer and a lumberjack in winter. His brother, Calhoun, said that Jesse was a dapper dresser and lover of fine clothes. He was said to have been a heavy drinker and a womanizer.

Jesse and Minnie Mae had five children: Vester born in 1914, Vernon Elvis born in 1916, Delta Mae born in 1919, Nash (Nashville) Lorene born in 1921, and Gladys Earline born in 1923. In 1940 J.D. and Minnie Mae moved to Sikeston, Missouri, but within a few months he left Minnie Mae. After being married over thirty years, Jesse divorced her. The divorce was finalized on August 3, 1954 in Lee County, Mississippi, but on December 4, 1948 he married Mrs. Vera (Kinnaird) Leftwich, a retired teacher with one son by her former husband, in Louisville, Jefferson County, Kentucky.

In Kentucky, Jesse stopped drinking and worked as a carpenter and woodworker for thirteen years and then as a representative and repairman for Pepsi Cola until his retirement in 1964. He, indeed, changed his life. He died on March 19, 1973 in Louisville, and Vera died on August 10, 1981 in Louisville, where both of them were buried. Minnie Mae never remarried, and from 1948 until her death on May 8, 1980 in Memphis she lived with her son Vernon and her famous grandson. Her first airplane flight was with Vernon to Germany to live with Elvis. Buried at Graceland, she was one of the three major heirs mentioned in Elvis' will.

Vernon Elvis Presley was born on April 10, 1916 in Fulton, Itawamba County, Mississippi, eighteen miles east of Tupelo. He dropped out of school after the eighth grade and worked as a farmer, a truck driver, a painter, and for a time in the shipyards at Pascagoula, Mississippi. He married Gladys Love Smith on June 17, 1933 in Pontotoc County, Mississippi, when he was just 17 years old, the same age as his father when he first married. She was born on a farm east of Tupelo where her parents were sharecropping.

During the years of the Great Depression, the economy of Tupelo was still rooted in the rich farmland surrounding the town and in the cotton and textile mills that operated there. Half of the farm families in the Tupelo area were tenant farmers or sharecroppers. Since farm families supplied most of the labor in the local industry, when orders were cut, farm-family income went down.

Vernon and Gladys lived in East Tupelo when Elvis was a small child. In 1948 Vernon moved his family to Memphis and obtained a job at the United Paint Company. Gladys died on August 14, 1958 in Memphis and was interred first at Forest Hill Cemetery in Memphis before her remains were moved to Graceland in 1977. Vernon then married on July 3, 1960 in Huntsville, Madison County, Alabama, to Mrs. Davada (Dee) Mae (Elliott) Stanley, mother of three sons, whom he had first met in Germany. They were divorced on November 15, 1977.

Vernon served as executor of Elvis' will and trustee of his estate. He died on June 26, 1979 and was buried next to Gladys and Elvis at Graceland.

It is obvious to any family history researcher after a time that family traits are passed down from generation to generation, whether they be of genetic or environmental origin. It is possible to see these traits expressed in the historical records of each generation. Interestingly, certain characteristics that were applicable to Elvis Presley's direct line are observable from what is known about the family and the regional history.

Beginning with Valentine Pressler, the circumstances of life in Germany at the time, when he was just entering middle age, were horrendous. There is little doubt that these circumstances of poverty, starvation, taxation and constant warfare in the country were the triggering factors that impelled him to take his family on a dangerous and perilous migration. He certainly was not alone, as evidenced by the flood of people who set sail down the Rhine in the summer of 1709. However, not everyone in his village, or in his family, left. Why Valentine? Why was he the one to pull up stakes and leave when so many others who chose to remain had suffered just as much?

We can really only guess. Perhaps he had lost his close kin, siblings, parents, etc. so that he had no one to keep him there. Perhaps his financial circumstances had taken a sudden downturn, his house burned, etc. The disastrous winter might have been the final straw for him, as with so many others. His neighbors may have had only marginally better circumstances, but they were sufficient to keep them from making the leap into the unknown.

There are possible clues to his personality that can be gleaned from the course that Valentine's life took in America. He didn't go with his companions up the Hudson River to the tar camps. He chose an independent route, staying in New York City and then moving to Staten Island. For whatever reason that he later left New York and moved to Pennsylvania(?) or Maryland, he seems not to have shrunk from change. Was it a continued search for economic opportunity, for cheap land, for the feeling of freedom which the backwoodsman found on the southern frontier? Was it prompted by the death of his wife? Was it simply a matter of wanderlust (to use a word of German etymology), a love of just being on the move? All of these factors probably came into play.

The death of Valentine was the beginning of the break with the German roots of the family. As previously explained, his sons were busy building a life in the New World, not reflecting on the Old. His great grandsons would have no memory of Valentine. Their father, Andrew Jr., had left the home of his father at a young age, and probably had few family stories to pass along, even if they had been curious. By the time their children were reaching the age that they would sit around the fire in the evening and listen to their parents tell stories, it was likely that the stories were about Revolutionary War experiences. It is easy to see how stories of Germany were soon forgotten.

For each new American generation there was the lure of cheap land on the frontier, the real need to succeed at providing for one's family, and perhaps the old urge of wanderlust at work. The move to South Carolina, to western North Carolina, and to Tennessee were big geographical breaks from the extended, and somewhat more settled, family back in Anson County, or from those branches of the family which had moved to more economically prosperous areas. Over time, even those families forgot the German roots of the family, but many of them continued to retain the original surname (though with the Preslar spelling), and they seem to have retained a greater stability of family than did Elvis' line.

The arrival of Presleys in the mountains of southern Appalachia did not bring economic success. As the early years of the nineteenth century progressed and the rest of America progressed economically, educationally, and socially, they sank progressively into deeper and deeper poverty. In a region where family unity and pride in family origins were considered characteristic, mobility in search of economic opportunity became not just a family tradition, but a necessity for survival for many people. Fathers were forced to become migrant workers, either moving their families frequently or leaving them to find a job.

The isolation of mountain geography and poor roads resulted in loss of communication between branches of families who moved to other valleys. Poor to non-existent educational opportunities meant that the outside world was passing them by in the development of ideas, technology, and economic development. Concepts of the greater world beyond their mountains, and the notion of a larger extended family beyond what they knew personally were unknown to them.

In rural northeastern Mississippi, which was partially settled by people moving out of southern Appalachia in the nineteenth century, with the incorporated family traditions just described, ignorance, unemployment, migratory habits, and lack of family cohesiveness had become a way of life. When Dunnan Presley Jr. married Martha Jane Wesson in Mississippi, and left her after she had given birth to two children, it was a reflection of this lifestyle. It set the precedent for generations to come.

Rosella grew up without a father in the house, and she did not provide a father figure for any of her numerous children. Jessie was a wanderer and from all accounts, was somewhat less than an ideal husband and father. Vernon was said to be an uninvolved husband and father, who spent years away from his family working elsewhere when Elvis was young.

Having said thus, it is not to place blame or fault, but to point out that individual lifestyles and family dynamics do not usually begin with one individual or generation, but have a long history going back through the past generations, influenced by environmental circumstances, as well as inherent personality traits.

Furthermore, the characteristics of a particular family's relationships is not derived from just one side of a family. There are two parents who come together to instill their children with certain values and personality characteristics. To say that absent fathers are immaterial, fails to consider all possibilities. Absent fathers influence family dynamics, positively or negatively, as much as those who are deeply involved in their children's lives. If certain corrective, or alternative, courses had been taken in the Presley family in preceding generations, who knows what might have been the family dynamics within the family of Elvis Presley when he arrived in the world? But then, who knows what affect that might have had on his talent and charisma, which so endeared him to his fans? His family history made him what he was.

They worked hard, but in fact, the family existed in poverty, lacked any idea of how to implement a plan to achieve success, and had no idea of how they had come to be in that situation. As one writer reported, "When an interviewer in 1956 told Vernon Presley that he bore an old English name, he replied with honest surprise: 'I never heard tell of any of my kinfolk coming over from anywhere.' Then, reflecting further, he allowed: 'I guess it must have been a long time back. We just seem always to have been here.'"

© 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.

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