• At least John Crockett had someone to share his grief. He was living in his own home some three miles away when tragedy struck. Perhaps as little as a year earlier he had married Rebecca Hawkins, a young woman born in Maryland who came south with her father, Nathan, to the settlements north of the Holston. But he barely had time to start a family before the war with Britain began to take him away from home for extended periods of time. He went to Lincoln County [NC] to join its militia, but by 1780 was back home in what was now Washington County, North Carolina. That October he was one of the “over-mountain men” who took their rifles and walked through the mountain passes to rendezvous with regulars to form an army that defeated the British and helped turn the tide of the war in the southern colonies at the Battle of King’s Mountain. While his son David lost all recollection of anything else his father did in the Revolution, he never forgot John Crockett’s role at King’s Mountain, or that image of the citizen volunteer, his deer rifle on his shoulder, riding off on his own accord to join other men who answered no authority but their own, in common defense of their notion of liberty.
After 1781 the war dwindled to occasional skirmishes in the South, and John Crockett could concentrate on making a place for himself. In 1783, the year of the peace, he became a constable in Greene County [TN], which was split from Washington. He also succombed to the lure of speculation, buying land at sixpence an acre and selling it for twenty times that four years later. But more often than not speculators bought land in exchange for their personal promissory note and sold it for much the same, and where little or no hard coin changed hands there was no real wealth to be gained. Indeed, even as he sought to make a killing in land, Crockett saw debts against him registered in the county court records. Whatever may have been his dreams of prosperity, the reality was that he occupied a page in the annals of the poor and always would.
At least his family grew. By 1786 he had four sons and had moved yet again, to the bank of the Big Limestone Creek where it flowed into the Nolichucky River on the eastern edge of Greene County. There on August 17, 1786, Rebecca produced another child. Interestingly John waited until this fifth baby boy before honoring his own father with a namesake. [2119, pp 11-12]