Book Purge - Kentucky / North Carolina

Theiss, Nancy. Oldham County Live at the River's Edge, Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2010.

Richard Taylor

p. 10 Commodore Richard Taylor was certainly one of the most distinguished pioneers and early citizens of Oldham County. Born in Orange County, Virginia, the commodore married twice and had six sons and five daughters. Taylor was comissioned as a captain in the navy during the Revolutionary War in 1775. He was wounded twice, in the knee and thigh, and retired from active duty in 1781. His vessel, the Tartar, was engaged in battle with an English schooner when he received his first wound (the thing). In November 1781, he was commondore of the Patriot in another battle with an English cruiser just outside Chesapeake Bay. The following description of the battle scene was written by Mr. ANderson, who worked with Commodore Taylor and collected historical records, according to Lucien Rule's Pioneering in Masonry:

The sea was calm and the breeze insufficient to manipulate his vessel. Captain Taylor, therefore, determined to attack the Englishmen in open boas and board and capture her by a hand to hand fight. As his boats approached the enemy, they were the target for volley after volley from the guns of the British, but without damage to any of them. The American seamen were enthusiastic and felt that victory was within their grasp, when one of Captain Taylor's sailors, making mock of the British fire, exclaimed, "Why don't you elevate your mettle?"  This hint to elevate the

Book Purge - History of Shelby County, Kentucky

Willis, George. History of Shelby County, Kentucky, Baltimore, MD: Clearfield Company, 1993.

p. 35 Note - Up until the Civil War many old residents dated all happenings from "the night the stars fell." The meteoric shower which so startled all the people of this section and the State at large and so terrorized not alone the superstitious and uninformed, occurred in 1831. [November 12-13, 1833]. The old fashion blacks left over from the Civil War, when in care of the juvenile whites wound up their grave yard stories around the kitchen fireplace in the late evenings with tales of the "night the stars fell." Mr. L.C. Willis, the veteran lawyer, during the famous campaign of 1896 when all the "fixed" stars of deocracy seemed "slipping used to refer to the Carlisle's, Lindsays's, et al, as the "Pleiades," and then tell the story of the mountaineer, who on the  "night the stars fell,' rushed out in his night clothes, found his wife on her knees in front of their little cabin, and after viewing the awful phenomenon called to her, "Pray Ol' WOman, pray hard. I'll step around back, and if the seven stars has slipped, we're gone to hell, shore."  That the phenomenon was general throughout the State is further evidenced by a stroy that Judge Lawrence Anderson, of Graves County, quotes his grandfather, a county physician as elling. The latter

Book Purge - A History of Rowan County, North Carolina

Rumple, Jethro. A History of Rowan County, North Carolina . . . Salisbury,  NC, J.J. Bruner, 1881.

p. 43 - But the Scotch-Irish were probably the most numerous and the leading people of the settlement. The old records of the Court here show names of many of these old families, some of then now extinct . . . 

But along with these Scotch-Irish immigrants, and settling side by side with them there came settlers of another nationaliy to whom Rowan is no less indebted for her material wealth and prosperity. These were the Germans, or as they were familiarly called the "Pennsylvania Dutch." They were of course not of Dutch or Holland extraction, but Germans from the Palatinate, and from Hesse Cassel, Hesse Homburg, Darmstadt, and the general region of the upper and middle Rhine. Prominent among these for its history and the number of emigrants is the Palatinate or "Pfalz" as it is called in the maps of Germany.  This counry lies on the western banks of the Rhine, below Strasburg, and along the eastern boundaries of France. This beautiful land is watered by numerous small streams, the tributaries of the Rhine, and is divided by a range of mountains, the Haardts, running from north to south. Manheim and Speyer (Spires) are the two principal cities, situated on the Rhine, while Neustadt, Anweiler, Zweibrucken, Leiningen, are among its towns.  The Province was ther theater of many bloody [p.44]