"Many of these men whose names are given in this list as purchasers of lots were men of prominence in the affairs of the county, or afterwards became such.

Thomas Forster did not live in the town, but on the southern side of the Swannanoa River, and on the old Rutherfordton road about 2 1/2 miles south of Asheville, on the farm on which in later years was made the junction of the Western North Carolina Railroad with the Asheville & Spartanburg Railroad and where is Biltmore.  He was born in Virginia on October 14, 1774.  In 1786 his father, William Forster, came with his family to North Carolina, and settled at the foot of the hill on the northern side of the Swannanoa River, about midway between the Hendersonville road and the road leading to the Swannanoa by way of Fernihurst at a place where a small branch come through a hollow and crosses the valley into the Swannanoa River.  Here Thomas lived until he grew to manhood.  Then he married Orra Sams, whose father, Edmund Sams, was one of the settlers from Watauga, and lived on the western side of the French Broad River, later the site of Smith's Bridge, until he moved higher up that river on the same side to a place about a mile above the mouth of the Swannanoa at the old Gaston place, near the place which has since been called the race track.  After his marriage Thomas Forster settled upon where he spent the remainder of his life on the banks of Sweeten's Creek, afterwards called Foster's Mill Creek, the first which enters Swannanoa from the southern side above the concrete bridge across the Swannanoa.  Its location was about one hundred yards above the present bridge.  He was a member of the House of Commons in the General Assembly of North Carolina from Buncombe County in 1809, 1812, 1813 and 1814, and represented that county in the Senate of the State in 1817 and 1819.  After a long and prosperous life he died on December (incorrectly on tombstone Dec. 14), 1858, and is buried at the Newton Academy graveyard.

He was a farmer, and accumulated a considerable property.  A large family of children survived him.  Two of these were living in 1898, but have died, Thomas Foster of Weakley County, Tennesse [sic], and Mrs. Rachel R. Garner, of  Winchester, KY.  Many of his descendants reside in Buncombe County.  His wife died before him on August 27, 1853, and he is buried by her side.  Frequent mention of him will be found in Wheeler's History of North Carolina, and Bishop Asbury's Journal.  He was known as Captain Thomas Forster.  But as his uncle of the same name was then living in Buncombe County it may be that the latter was the purchaser of that name to whom some of the lots mentioned above [in the Morristown article] were conveyed.  This Thomas Forster was usually designated as Thomas Forster, Sr., and, after a short while, removed to Abbeville, South Carolina, but later returned to Buncombe and died here in the early fall of 1839.

Zebulon and Bedent Baird were brothers who came from New Jersey to North Carolina in the later part of the eighteenth century.  They were Scotchmen by birth.  After their removal to North Carolina  they were the first merchants in Buncombe County.  Both settled on farms between Asheville and Reems Creek.  Here they died, and numerous descendants of both yet live in this county.  Zebulon Baird represented Buncombe County in the House of Commons in 1800, 1801, 1802 and 1803, and in the Senate of the state in 1806, 1809, 1818, 1821 and 1822. He was efficient in procuring the enactment of the law under which the Buncombe Turnpike was constructed, and is said to have found difficulty in reconciling his friends to his actions in this matter, but declared that he hoped to live long enough to see the day when a stage coach and four horses would gallop through the country driven by a man armed with a whip and tin bugle.  This vision  was destined to  a glorious realization but he never lived to see it. Nor was such an argument to be despised.  Such a sight would indicate a highway of commerce while it gratified the highest local pride then conceivable.  No more exhilarating scene was ever witnessed than a handsome newly-painted stage coach drawn by four fine horses as it bursts upon us around some bend in the mountains dashing at full gallop along a road winding its way through mountain defiles.  No more inspiring sound ever greeted human ears than that of the horn of the stage coach rushing up to some mountain station while its reverberations penetrate the deep recesses and are tossed from hill to hill in wild and weird musical cadences.  The late Zebulon  Baird Vance was Zebulon's namesake and one of his grandsons.  In 1793 Zebulon and Bedent Baird carried up the first four-wheeled wagon ever seen in Buncombe County, all transportation theretofore having been horseback or on sleds or trucks.  This wagon they bought across the South Carolina or Saluda Gap.  Zebulon Baird died in March, 1827.  Before his death the Town and Gillihan tracts above mentioned, together with the Baird 400 acres, a tract adjoining these on the wet and granted by the State to both in 1789, were sold under execution issued from Morgan- town on a judgment obtained against them by a third brother, Andrew Baird, and were bought at this sale by Zachariah Candler, who undoubtedly purchased in behalf of Zebulon Baird, to whom he conveyed the land by deed made eight days later than that to him from the sheriff.  After the death of Zebulon Baird, his brother, Bedent, or Beaden, or Beden, as it is sometimes spelled, conceived that in this transaction there had been something unfair to himself, and sued the widow and children and administrator of his deceased brother for an equal share in the land. This famous suit, at first decided in favor of Bedent, was carried by his opponents to the Supreme Court of North Carolina where at June term, 1837, nearly ten years after its beginning, it was decided in favor of the heirs of Zebulon Baird.  A possession at the northwest corner of the Town Tract in a field on the premises of the late M. J. Fagg was an important element in turning the decision to Zebulon's children. The late Governor D. L. Swain was the administrator of Zebulon Baird and took great interest in this case.  He is said to have openly announced to the judge who tried he case below that he would procure a reversal in the court above and to have added, "I will make Mr. Badger tear your opinion to pieces."

Zebulon Baird was attacked by his fatal sickness while riding along the road between Reems Creek and his home and fell from his horse.  His residence was the old house (now gone) on the eastern side of the old Buncombe Turnpike road, about two and one-half miles north of Ashe- ville and one-fourth of a mile south of the Burnsville Road and later owned by Captain J. E. Ray, and near the Casket Plant.  This house was partly a log structure and is said to have been constructed with loop holes in order to be used as a blockhouse in case of need against Indians.

John Street was afterwards the sheriff of Buncombe County, but mysteriously disappeared after the expiration of his terms of office.  He was believed to have gone to Tennessee. (Record book 11, page 521.)

Joseph Hughey was the first sheriff of Buncombe County having been elected to that office on April 16, 2792.  He was re-elected to it for several following terms successively, and was a large land owner in the vicinity of Asheville.

At a later date, James Hughey, whose name is above mentioned, was also  a sheriff of Bun- combe County.  He it was who as such sheriff made in 1798 the celebrated sale for taxes of the John Gray Blout lands, themselves embracing whole counties and amounting to one million seventy-four thousand acres. (record book 4, page 230, and Love v. Wilbourn, 5 Ired. NC Rep. 344.)

John Craig was Buncombe County's first treasurer, an office then known as County Trustee.  He was the grantee from the State in 1798 of a body of land in the northern part of the town of Asheville later traversed by Sunset Drive.  In the latter part of his life he resided in the eastern part of the county, where he was shot from ambush and killed.  Henry West was convicted of the murder but was pardoned, the pardon arriving while he stood on the scaffold with the sheriff ready to execute him.  He was a most eccentric character of much intelligence and considerable property and was said to have been a sailor and served under Paul Jones in the Revolutionary War, but prided himself upon being discourteous in manner and brutal in disposition.

William Forster, the father of Captain Thomas Forster, above mentioned, was the son of William Forster and Mary Forster, his wife.  He belonged to that large class of people called Scotch Irish, who have played so prominent and honorable a part in the history of the United States.  Born in Ireland on March 31, 1748, he emigrated to Virginia while yet a young man.  After the close of the Revolutionary War he removed with his family to Western North Carolina, and settled on the Swannanoa, at the place described as his residence in the above sketch of Captain Thomas Forster.  Here he lived for many years, and here he died on April 2, 1830.  In early life he married a Scotch woman by the name of Elizabeth Heath.  She died October 8, 1828.

Both William Forster and his wife were buried at the Newton Academy graveyard, the first persons buried there.

Ephraim Drake Harris was another of the early purchasers of lots in Morristown.  He soon removed, however, and probably returned to Cabarrus County, North Carolina.  To him was granted by the State, on February 19, 1794, a body of land which now constitutes the most eastern part of Asheville, extending eastward from Valley Street.

Samuel Lusk was for some while coroner of Buncombe County. In April 1799, he resigned that office and was elected sheriff. To this last place he was annually reelected until April 1803.

James Brittain was the representative of Buncombe County in the State Senate in 1796, 1797, 1802, 1804, 1805 and 1807.

Colonel William Davidson was the man at whose house the county was organized as above stated. He was a relative of Gen. William Davidson, who succeeded Griffith Rutherford in the generalship when the latter was captured at Camden and who was killed on February 1, 1781, at Cowan's Ford of the Catawba River in attempting to prevent Lord Cornwallis from crossing with his army.

Colonel William Davidson was also a relative of the Samuel Davidson who was killed by the Indians as above stated, and of Major William Davidson, a brother of Samuel and who with his brother-in-law, John Alexander, and his nephew, James Alexander, son of his sister Rachel, and with Daniel Smith, a son-in-law, became among the first settlers in Buncombe County. The portion of it where Major Davidson settled was then in Burke County at the mouth of Bee Tree.

Major William Davidson is sometimes confounded with Colonel William Davidson, who was the first representative of Buncombe County in the State Senate to which he was sent in 1792, and removed to Tennessee where he was prominent in public affairs, and where he died. It was at the house of Colonel William Davidson that Buncombe County was organized. Colonel William Davidson was born in Virginia and served in the American cause through the Revolutionary War.

Major William Davidson took a prominent part in the preparations made by the North Carolinians for the battle of Kings Mountain. These thwarted Ferguson in his raid which ended in that battle. During the Revolutionary War Major William Davidson lived in what became Burke County on Catawba River near the town now called Greenlee. His place was named the Glades. Colonel Fergsuson visited his home there on the raid into North Carolina by Ferguson, which resulted in the Battle of Kings Mountain and in the defeat and death of that distinguished British officer. After that war, Major William Davidson removed with some relatives and friends to the mouth of Bee Tree Creek of Swannanoa River, then in Burke County, but now in Buncombe County, where in 1784-1785 they formed the famous "Swannanoa Settlement" and where he resided for the remainder of his life and died and is buried.

In 1792 Gabriel Ragsdale and Wm. Brittain were Buncombe's first representatives in the North Carolina House of Commons and they continued to hold those places in 1793, 1794 and 1795, by reelections.

Colonel John Patton was born April 4, 1765, and was one of Buncombe's first settlers. He removed to that county while it was yet Burke and Rutherford and settled first where Fernihurst now stands. From here he removed to the Whitson Place on Swannanoa above the old water works. After residing there for some while he returned to the vicinity of his former home, and bought and fixed his residence upon the Colonel William Davidson place, where the first County Court was held. At this place he continued to reside until his death on March 17, 1831. He it was who formally opened on April 16, 1792, the first County Court, immediately after the justices were sworn and took their seats, appears in this entry;

"Silence being commanded and proclamations being made the court was opened in due and solemn form of law by John Patton specialy [sic] appointed for that purpose."

At that term, on the same day, he was duly elected to the then very important office of county surveyor. Near his residence he built, many years ago, a bridge across the Swannanoa River, which remained until the beginning of the war against the Southern States. His house for many years famous as a stopping place, being upon the Buncombe Turnpike road, and he raised here a large family of children, many of whose descendants are yet living in Asheville. One of his sons, the late Montraville Patton, represented Buncombe County in the House of Commons in 1836, 1838 and 1840, and subsequently in 1874-1875, and after being for many years a citizen and prominent merchant of Asheville, and in later life the clerk of the Inferior Court of Buncombe County, died in 1896, highly respected by everyone who knew him as a kindhearted but determined man of unswerving integrity and unpretentious usefulness. The late residence of Colonel John Patton stood on the southern side of the Swannanoa, at the ford about half a mile above its mouth, until within the last thirty years, when, after bearing for some time the name of the Haunted House, it was removed as being no longer tenantable. His wife, who was, before her marriage, Miss Ann Mallory, a Virginian, was born February 12, 1768, and died on August 31, 1855. She, with her husband, are buried at Newton Academy graveyard.

Probably others of these first settlers of Morristown attained prominence in the affairs of that town and of the County of Buncombe, and some of them, as we know, soon removed to distant places.

Here begins a new chapter in the history of Asheville. In 1795, Samuel Ashe of New Hanover County, a brother of the John Ashe who played so important a part in resisting the Stamp Act, was elected governor of North Carolina. In his honor the name of Morristown was to Asheville. This new name became common some time before any legal action upon the subject was had. In fact, it had become so common by October , 1795, that the clerk of the County Court, forgetting for the moment that in law the town was still Morristown, began in the opening statement of his minutes of that term, when giving the place where that session was held, to write the word Asheville, but before completing it he recollected himself and finished it out as Morristown. Subsequently, in beginning his minutes of the April term, 1796, he wrote as the place of the court's session, the full name of Asheville, but then again recollecting his error, and before he had written another word, he passed his pen through the word Asheville, and wrote the name Morristown. Finally in July, 1796, or October, 1796, or in January, April or July, 1797, the name of the town was duly changed from Morristown to Asheville. This latter name it has ever since borne.
 

Samuel Ashe, for whom Asheville was named, was born in North Carolina in 1725; educated at Harvard; became a lawyer; was one of thirteen members of the council which governed North Carolina after the commencement of the Revolution and prior to the adoption of her first Constitution, and part of that time president of that Council of Thirteen; was a member of the convention which adopted that Constitution; was speaker of the Senate in the first legislature which assembled under that Constitution; was by that legislature elected presiding judge of the Supreme Court of the State, which court was composed of three judges; and continued in that office until 1795 when he became and was, for three years, governor of the State. He was a member of that court when it decided, in the celebrated case of Bayard v. Singleton, that an act of the legislature was void because contrary to the Constitution; and he was governor when the land frauds of John Glasgow, Secretary of State, were discovered and created such a great excitement in North Carolina. At his plantation on Rocky Point he died in 1813.
 

Colonel David Vance was born at or near Winchester, Virginia about 1745. He was the oldest son of Samuel Vance and was descended on the paternal side from the DeVaux family of Normandy, the name DeVaux being corrupted into Vance. About 1774 David Vance came to North Carolina and settled in what was then Rowan County, on Catawba River, later Burke County, where he married Priscilla Brank. In the progress of the Revolutionary War, David Vance served in the American army in the north and rose to the rank of ensign and was at the battles of Brandywine and Germantown at Valley Forge. Later, in the south, he saw service in the same cause at the battles of Musgrove Hill and Kings Mountain and became a captain. After that war ended he removed to what is now Buncombe County, but then was Burke County, and settled at what was later Vanceville on upper Reems Creek. In 1786 and 1791 he was a member of the North Carolina House of Commons from Burke County and in 1791 introduced in that body a bill to create the County of Buncombe. He 1792 he became and for years continued to be the clerk of the County Court of that new county, on whose records his most beautiful penman- ship appears. He and General Joseph McDowell and Mussendine Matthews as commissioners for North Carolina, superintended in 1799 the running of the line between North Carolina and Tennessee from the southern border of Virginia southward across Pigeon River. It was in consequence of some conversations while engaged in that work that he wrote recollections of the Battle of Kings Mountain, published many years after his death. He became a colonel of militia. He died in 1813 and was buried on his farm in Reems Creek. Doctor Robert B. Vance, once a representative in Congress from Western North Carolina, who was killed in a duel with Hon. Samuel P. Carson, was a son of Colonel David Vance, and the late Zebulon B. Vance, governor of North Carolina and United States senator, the late General Robert B. Vance, Congressman from Western North Carolina, and the late Colonel Allen T. Davidson, member from Western North Carolina in the Congress of the Confederate States, were grandsons of Colonel David Vance.

A small party of Cherokees set out from the more western parts of North Carolina, in the summer of 1793m to attack the white settlements on Swannanoa River. It seems that the settlers had received some warning of this and were on the lookout. At any rate, the attack was not made. Simultaneously, but without concert with the North Carolinians, Colonel Doherty and Colonel McFarland had led an invasion from East Tennessee of a part of the Cherokee county which had escaped incursions from the whites. With one hundred and eighty mounted riflemen they entered the mountains at Unaka Pass and turned eastward, destroying six Cherokee towns, and killing fifteen Indians and taking captive sixteen Indian women and children. They were gone four weeks; and, by returning in another way from that by which they had entered the country, escaped an ambuscade of three hundred Cherokees which was waiting their return at Unaka Pass, expected to be by that same way of entrance into the mountains. The expedition had one man mortally wounded and three other less seriously hurt in the two or three night attacks made upon it by the Indians. It was contrary to the orders of the Tennessee territorial government, but probably prevented the contemplated attack on Swannanoa settlements and saved from destruction the village of Morristown, now the City of Asheville.