About 1774 he settled on the Catawba River in Rowan County, later Burke County, and married there, Priscilla Brank, daughter of Peter Brank.

     Serving in the Revolutionary War as an American soldier in the North, he was an ensign, and at the battles of Brandywine and Germantown and at Valley Forge.  In the South he was at the battles of Musgrove Mill and Kings Mountain and a captain.

     After that war he settled at Vanceville on Reems Creek, Burke County which is now Buncombe County.  In 1786 and 1791 he was a member from Burke County of the North Carolina House of Commons and in 1791 he and Colonel William Davidson from Rutherford County introduced in that house petitions to create the County of Buncombe.

     In 1792 he became and remained the Clerk of the County Court of that new county in whose minutes his beautiful penmanship appears.  He, and General Joseph McDowell and Mussendine Matthews as North Carolina commissioners superintended in 1799 the running of the line between North Carolina and Tennessee from the southern border of Virginia southwardly across Big Pigeon River.  In consequence of some conversation when engaged in that work he wrote recollections of the Battle of Kings Mountain published many years after his death.  He was a colonel of militia.

     In 1813 he died and was buried at his farm on Reems Creek.

     The Vances were Scotch Irish, and David Vance I, son of Irish-born Samuel Vance, was born in Frederick County, Virginia.

     Both Zebulon's grandfathers, David Vance I and Zebulon Baird, were prominent in the early history of Buncombe  County.  David Vance I married Priscilla Brank, of German descent, in 1775.  They settled in Burke County. Soon thereafter he joined Washington's forces fighting the British.  He fought at Kings Mountain and was lieutenant colonel by the war's end.  In 1792, while a representative from Burke County in the state legislature, he was appointed to a commission to survey the boundary between North Carolina and the new state of Tennessee.  He served as Buncombe County clerk of court from that year until his death in 1813.  His 898 acres on Reems Creek were willed to his sons Robert and David II.

     Zebulon's maternal grandfather, Zebulon Baird, was a prosperous merchant, and built the first log courthouse and jail in Asheville.  In1797 he laid off in lots about 63 acres of land for the town of Asheville.  He was one of the town's first five commissioners, and for a number of terms represented Buncombe County in the state legislature.

     David Vance II, Zebulon's father, was a captain in the War of 1812.  In 1825 he married Mira Margaret Baird, daughter of Zebulon Baird, at their Beaverdam home.  David and Mira Vance lived at the Vance homeplace on Reems Creek with his mother, Priscilla Brank Vance, until her death in 1837, when they bought a stockstand and inn on the Buncombe Turnpike near what is now Marshall.

     Zebulon Baird Vance, a precocious, mischievous, charismatic child, was educated first at an old field school, then studied a year at Washington College in Tennessee until his father's death in 1844.  The family moved to Asheville, where Robert and Zebulon attended Newton Academy irregularly and worked to support the family. John W. Woodfin let him read law in his office until David Swain, then president of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, secured him a loan to study law there.  He developed strong qualities of leadership and became a spellbinding orator, who spoke with sincerity and conviction enlivened by his ready wit and jocularity.  People flocked to hear him whenever they heard he was to speak. 

     On August 3, 1853 he married Harriet Espy.  They had four sons:  Charles Noel, David Mitchell, Zebulon Baird Jr., and Thomas M.

     That same year, as a young lawyer in Asheville, he won his first public office as solicitor of Buncombe County.  In 1854 he was elected of the Whig ticket to the House of Commons in Raleigh.

     In 1857 he was one of the search party that found the body of his former University of North Carolina professor, Dr. Elisha Mitchell, lost on the Black Dome.

   He was elected to the United States Senate in 1858 and served three terms as a staunch advocate of the Union until 1861.  How- ever, when the war began, he found he could not fight his own people.  He organized the Rough and Ready Guards and joined the Confederate Army.

     In 1862, without any campaigning, he was elected governor of North Carolina where he championed personal rights and upheld the writ of habeas corpus.  At war's end he was imprisioned seven weeks in Washington and returned to find his family in Statesville living in very straitened circumstances and his wife ill.  But his fortunes improved.  He was reelected governor in 1876.  Two years later both his mother and his wife died.  In 1880 he was again elected to the United States Senate, and he remarried - Florence Steele Martin of Kentucky.  He remained in the Senate until his death April 14, 1894.  He is buried in Asheville's Riverside Cemetery.