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Jonathan Basham - As per James Thomas Rigsby’s research on Jonathan Basham

Started by Frances Ashe Stanley on Friday, July 5, 2024
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The ruined pages of a 225-year-old book -- Deed Book A, the first records of land sales from the birth of Tennessee's Grainger county -- offer a clue to the life of Jonathan Basham, and what must be his brother, Johnson Basham.

Powell's Valley and The Transylvania Company

In 1774, Richard Henderson and some associates established the Louisa Company, which began negotiations with the Cherokee Indians to purchase land south of the Ohio and west of the Kanawha rivers. The company was reorganized at the start of 1775 as the Transylvania Company, and on March 17, 1775, the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals was signed by the Transylvania Company and the Cherokee, which gave a large area of land to the Transylvania Company.

The colony of Transylvania was short-lived: the Continental Congress in Virginia nullified the Transylvania Company’s treaty with the Cherokee shortly thereafter. But the land was granted to Richard Henderson and Others pursant to an Act of the North Carolina Assembly in 1783 and recorded as land grant number 714 in book 89, page 155. A survey of the land, number 995, was entered 5 December 1795 in Hawkins County, of which Claiborne was a part at the time. It broke the land along the Clinch and Powell Rivers up into lots.

At the time of the original grant, what would become Tennessee was still North Carolina. Tennessee became a state on June 1, 1796.

Four years later, Jonathan and Johnson bought land in Powell's Valley in East Tennessee, where Johnson already lived. Jonathan lived in Grainger County. Jonathan's daughter Susannah married James Miller III around 1811, which must have taken place in Powell's Valley, but no record exists.

Early life in Virginia

No record of the name Basham appear to exist in either grantor or grantee lists from Bedford county, Virginia at the time.

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