Descendants of Johm (1715-1781) & Patience Peacock

In the case of John Peacock, there is no mystery about the identities of his sons or sons in law, although there is no certainty about the birth dates of any of his sons or daughters. These must be approximated by working backwards, through the time they themselves begat their eldest children, In the case of Peter and Jesse, it can be inferred that they were born in 1753 or earlier from their appearance on a 1769 Dobbs County, NC tax list as men 16 or older.

(Editor’s notes from Brenda Templeton about John: John was probably eldest or first born son of Samuel One as evidenced by gift deed from Samuel of 100ac of his Bertie Precinct NC land grant to John in 1736. John sold that in 1742 to Robert Warren, who also bought the remaining lands of Samuel Peacock at that time.

John then moved to Dobbs County NC where he bought a land grant of 200 ac bordering the Nahunta Swamp. This was where he built his home but John bought and sold tracts of land and was something of land speculator as well as having his own plantation and at the time of his death owned 8 slaves.

John built a bridge across Nahunta Creek, which ran through the Nahunta Swamp. (His brother, Samuel II, built a bridge across the Contentnea Creek and both bridges were assigned to the same bill in the legislature, resulting in some confusion about Peacock’s Bridge.) These were two separate bridges at two separate locations within the same general area of the county. Samuel’s bridge has been marked with an historical marker due to the fact that a skirmish with the British occurred there in May 1781 ( long after Samuel had sold the property).

John’s bridge received no such distinction even though the main army, including Col Cornwallis, actually made camp near John’s home and must have used his bridge to move soldiers and equipment. (“Cornwallis reached Nahunta Creek and encamped near the bridge on May 5, 1781. The camp was about 2 ½ miles southeast of the present day town of Fremont”...source: Wayne County History Book.) John Peacock had been an ensign in the local militia some years prior to the Revolution, he and his sons were not Loyalists or Tories and likely tried to keep out of the unrest that that went on between neighbors with opposing views.

In fact John and some of his family occasionally attended services at the nearby Quaker Meeting House (Although John was never listed as a member, his son Abraham was.) The fact that Cornwallis and his main army camped near (perhaps ON John’s land) must have been a tense situation for John and his family because they were Patriots. Evidently there were few if any Tories as neighbors of John because had there been active Tories in the area they would surely have informed Cornwallis of the activities of some of John’s sons who we believe were members of the militia during the Revolutionary period.

There is no record of any actual contact between John and Cornwallis or his army but one has to surmise that due to the proximity of the army’s camping site to John’s home and the bridge that there had to have been some type of contact. The above mentioned Wayne County History Book cites that according to strong local tradition the dragoons did scour the countryside for provisions while in Wayne County.)

John Peacock himself, as we have seen, must have been born about 1715 or a few years earlier, The dates for his wife, Patience Raiford, have been given as 1724-1808, but the original source is unknown, as is the evidence by which James Phineas Mott concluded that Raiford was indeed her maiden name (Mott, who lived in Cornelia, GA, was a descendant of John through Simon & Raiford Peacock, and was among the first to seriously research the genealogy of the Peacock family.).

A widely circulated chart on the family of Simon Peacock gives his year of birth as 1738; once again, the basis for this claim is unknown. When William Peacock died in 1838 a newspaper obituary gave his age as “80 or 90” – not very helpful. If all the sons of John and Patience were born in the 1738-58 period, some of them must have married unusually late; on the other hand, there is that 1742 “colonial census” in which it would seem four of the six white polls must be children born before 1742 – unless they were younger brothers or other relations.

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