Hinkles and Hanrahans

Information from the online posting by Dr. Paul E. Sparks and Dr. Russell E. Bidlack at http://www.genealogy.com/ftm/b/e/c/Gordon-L-Beck-CO/WEBSITE-0001/UHP-0713.html :

William Sample Sparks was an innkeeper, and ran an ordinary in NC for many years. He moved his family twice, from Queen Anne's Co, MD, to the western frontier of Maryland in 1736, and then on to The Forks of the Yadkin in NC in 1754.

In or about 1736 that William Sample Sparks left Queen Annes County with his family and moved to the western part of the Province of Maryland. To do so, he would have crossed the Chesapeake Bay and probably travelled near, or possibly through, the small town of Baltimore, which had been laid out in 1730, to reach the western edge of what is now Carroll County, although at the time it was part of Prince Georges County. He settled in the area of Big Pipe and Little Pipe Creeks, perhaps close to where they join to become Double Pipe Creek, which, after about a mile, flows into the Monocacy River just above today's Millers Bridge, about 5 miles north of the town of Woodsboro. (Little Pipe Creek, which flows north and west, now forms the boundary between Carroll and Frederick Counties for several miles.)

The area in which Sparks settled, which is drained by the Monocacy River and its tributaries, was then commonly called "Monocacy," as the Indians had called it before the appearance of the white man. This area comprised most of what is now Frederick County along with part of today's Carroll County.

This area called Monocacy was a new frontier in the 1730s, and William Sample Sparks and his family were true pioneers. He doubtless built his own cabin after his arrival. Record keeping was very limited, except for recording the granting and selling of land. Because Sparks was not a land owner, nor did he become involved in any major lawsuit, his name was rarely recorded during the nearly two decades that he lived there. No church existed there in the 1730's except a small Quaker meeting-house. He did not join this group, nor did he join the Lutheran Church established later by German settlers.

By 1754, the year in which we believe that William Sample Sparks, with two of his sons and three of his cousins (sons of his deceased uncle, Joseph Sparks), set out for North Carolina, a great many other settlers had already made the journey. The destination of these Sparks emigrants was the land called "Lord Granville's Domain between the Yadkin and the Catawba Rivers" in North Carolina. North Carolina had been established originally as a proprietary colony belonging to eight English lords. In 1729, however, seven of these lords sold their rights to the colony to the King, but one, the Earl of Granville, refused to part with his share which, in 1744, was set apart with specified boundaries. Part of his "domain" consisted of a vast area which had been organized in 1749 as Anson County, but from which Rowan County had been cut off as a separate county in 1753. Shortly after Rowan County had been created, the county seat was established and named initially Rowan Court House, but this was changed later to Salisbury.

Agents for Lord Granville had advertised the virtues of this new land, particularly in Ireland and in Germany. Thus many of the early pioneers were Irish and German immigrants. How it was that William Sample Sparks and his sons and cousins learned of "Lord Granville's Domain" we shall probably never know, and we can only guess why they were attracted to it. A possible reason was a growing fear that there would be warfare between England and France and that this would result in Indian uprisings in western Maryland. Indeed, what would be called the French and Indian War in America was about to commence. There was also the fact that desirable vacant land was much less plentiful than had been the case a few years earlier, and owners of good land in Frederick County were demanding high prices. There was the pleasing prospect of being able not only to obtain new land in North Carolina at a much lower cost, but also there were reports that the soil there was unusually rich and that the climate was more mild than in western Maryland.

At the time Granville's survey was run (1746) people were beginning to fill the valley between the Yadkin and Catawba Rivers. The first settlers seem to have followed the river courses from South Carolina, principally the Pee Dee and Santee, and picked up lands in the southern part of what is now Rowan. Others poured in from Pennsylania and traveled down the "Great Wagon Road" that led them through the Shenandoah Valley into the North Carolina Piedmont. A record of one German, John Ramsour, showed that he traveled 502 miles from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to Salisbury. His route took him to Frederick, Maryland, [then to] Warrenton, Virginia, thence eastward to Amelia Court House, thence southward into North Carolina where he hit the trading path near Granville Court House, thence on to Trading Ford.

Another route followed the "Upper Pennsylvania Road" which is found on a map of 1775 and shows that the route instead of turning eastward in Virginia towards Amelia Court House, continued down through the Shenandoah Valley to Winchester, Salem, and into North Carolina where it stopped just about ten miles above Reedy Creek, a distance of 435 miles. Both of these routes were used a great deal by the immigrants coming into this section.

The great bulk of the settlers into the Yadkin Valley came via these two routes. It is unique that settlement in this part of North Carolina took place much faster than it did in counties to the east of Rowan. Immigration did not come from the eastern seaboard as was true in practically every other county, but from North and South.

The area in Rowan County where the Sparkses settled was called "The Forks of the "Yadkin River." This area was cut off from Rowan County in 1836 to form Davie County. It is at the southern tip of what is now Davie County that the South Yadkin River flows into the Yadkin River. The Yadkin above this point is sometimes called the "North Yadkin." The County seat of Rowan County, Salisbury, is about nine miles south of this lower tip of Davie County. Whether "The Forks of the Yadkin" was the area where the Sparkses planned to settle from the start, or whether they chose it after their arrival in Rowan County, will probably never be known.

Robert W. Ramsey in his book entitled Carolina Cradle,Settlement of the Northwest Carolina Frontier, 1747-1762 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1964) points out that prior to 1752, there were virtually no settlers in the Forks of the Yadkin, where the land was "rockier, more hilly, and less fertile than the land further south." He added:

It was not until the choice land to the east and south had been occupied that settlers sought out homes in the forks of the Yadkin. The immigrants to this region were largely of English stock, though there was a substantial number of Germans. Although the land grants of many are dated much later, a majority of these settlers were undoubtedly living in the area prior to 1756. (p.72)

While the number of settlers in the Forks of the Yadkin was small at the time of the Sparks family's arrival, there were a few families present. James Carter had gone there from Augusta County, Virginia, in 1747, but by 1753 he had obtained a 305-acre tract where Salisbury was being laid out as Rowan County's seat of justice, and it is thought that he had moved there by 1754. A man named Morgan Bryan had come to the Forks of the Yadkin with his family from Virginia in 1747, and two years later, in May 1750, Squire Boone had come from Pennsylvania with his family. Squire Boone's son, Daniel, who would become Kentucky's most famous pioneer, married Bryan's daughter, Rebecca, in 1755.