Chapter 1: Born of the Wilderness (1738–1768)

Joseph was the son of William David Spencer and Sarah Hill. His father’s name echoed the rootedness of English settlers seeking permanence on new soil, while his mother’s Hill surname suggested a lineage deeply interwoven with the land. Together, they formed a family like many others in the colonial backcountry: clinging to rocky soil, hewing their survival from forest and field, and raising children under the watch of muskets, prayer, and plow.

In those years, Virginia’s frontier was no quiet land. Orange County, where Joseph likely spent his earliest years, had only recently emerged from wilderness into sparsely settled farmland. European families moved westward, driven by land hunger, the promise of autonomy, and pressure from rising populations in the tidewater regions. But this westward push was no simple journey. They crossed terrain shaped by the Monacan and Cherokee, who had lived on these lands for generations. Though treaties attempted to delineate "Indian territory" and colonial lands, the truth on the ground was often violent, uncertain, and soaked in fear.

As a child, Joseph would have known the sounds of the frontier—the snapping of branches under deer hooves, the low drone of summer cicadas, the howl of a wolf echoing through valleys at dusk. His home may have been a log cabin chinked with clay, smoky from the hearth fire that never quite went out. Mornings began early. Joseph might have followed his father into the fields to learn the feel of soil between his fingers and the heft of a wooden hoe, all while his mother worked in the garden, stirring pots over an open fire or spinning flax into linen thread.

There were few formal schools, but there were lessons everywhere. Boys like Joseph learned survival and subsistence: how to plant by the moon, how to build a fence from split rails, how to track game and measure rainfall in puddles. By adolescence, he was likely apprenticed to farming life, though always with an eye on the wooded horizon—where men talked of more fertile lands to the south and west, across the Blue Ridge.

It was in this environment that Joseph formed his identity—one rooted in physical labor, spiritual endurance, and self-sufficiency. These qualities would shape every decision he made in the decades to come.

Family Migration

By the late 1750s or early 1760s, Joseph had likely married Mary DeRoachbloom Deaton. Their journey as a young family took them into Wilkes County, North Carolina, a region then being rapidly settled by Anglo-American migrants from Virginia and Pennsylvania. The soil there was rich, and the ridges of the Brushy Mountains offered some protection from native raids, but it was still a difficult life. Their first two children were born there, and Joseph—still a young man—would have worked tirelessly to build up a modest homestead.

That choice to leave Virginia for Wilkes County may have been driven by land scarcity or family alliances. But it reflects a pattern repeated across the colonies: the push westward into new terrain, where the price of land was often paid in sweat and blood.

Chapter 2: Through Fire and Founding (1768–1816)

By the late 1760s, Joseph Charles Spencer had grown into a man hardened by the frontier—muscular from years behind a plow, steady with a musket, and possessed of that quiet resolve born only of survival. With Mary Deaton Spencer by his side, he crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains in search of more fertile lands and better opportunity, joining a tide of settlers flowing into what would become Montgomery County, Virginia.

In 1782, Joseph appears in the tax records of Montgomery County with roughly 200 acres of land, suggesting he had succeeded in securing a modest but meaningful estate. This year, just one year before the Treaty of Paris would end the Revolutionary War, marked a turning point—not just for the American colonies, but for men like Joseph. The land he claimed was more than soil; it was proof of permanence in a republic just coming into being.

The Revolutionary War and the Frontier

Though we have no direct record of Joseph’s military service, his adult years were consumed by the long shadow of revolution. The American Revolution (1775–1783) turned Virginia and North Carolina into critical war zones and supply routes. Families in southwestern Virginia formed local militias, and many were called to defend against British-aligned Native American raids or Loyalist insurrections.

Joseph, likely in his late 30s and early 40s during the war, would have had children to protect and fields to tend. Whether he fought or not, the war was at his door. Soldiers from nearby counties passed through, requisitioning corn, cattle, and forage. Campfires flickered along ridgelines. Whispers of Tory spies and Cherokee raids would have sent him to bed with one eye open and his musket within reach.

During this period, Joseph’s land—remote and fertile—became a sanctuary for survival and self-reliance. Every acre was both a resource and a refuge.

The Republic Takes Shape

The war’s end brought new problems. The federal government, weak under the Articles of Confederation, offered little support to backcountry farmers. Taxation remained high, paper currency was unstable, and access to eastern markets was difficult. Yet men like Joseph endured, trading regionally, preserving food through hog slaughter and root cellars, and bartering with neighbors.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the creation of the Constitution in 1789, and the slow westward push of the federal frontier signaled to Joseph’s generation that America was expanding—and they had helped build it.

By the early 1790s, Joseph—now in his 50s—made another bold move. In 1796, just three years after Lee County was officially formed, he purchased 300 acres along the south side of the Powell River. The Powell River valley, lush and meandering through Appalachian hollows, promised fertile bottomlands and isolation from political turbulence. This land purchase was not only practical—it was symbolic. Joseph had weathered war and frontier hardship. Now, he was planting permanent roots.

A Farmer, A Slaveholder, A Pioneer

Farming remained his life’s foundation. Indian corn was the dominant crop—durable, versatile, and easily traded. Apple orchards likely dotted his land, and smokehouses would have stored salted pork through mountain winters.

Joseph, like many of his time and region, enslaved several individuals to work his land. While we cannot know their names or stories, this reality must be acknowledged. In 1814, Joseph freed at least one of his slaves, a detail that hints at complexity—whether moral, practical, or relational. This act placed him among a small number of Appalachian slaveholders who manumitted enslaved people before national abolition was even widely debated.

Loss and Remarriage

In September 1816, after more than 50 years of marriage, Mary Deaton Spencer passed away. The records are silent on her final days, but we can imagine the grief Joseph felt: a long marriage ended, his partner in both hardship and triumph gone.

That winter, the hearth may have seemed colder. The days—already short in the Appalachian hollows—dragged without her. Their children, now grown, might have brought food, helped with chores, and sat with him in silence. But there is a loneliness that only age and loss can breed.

Yet, Joseph did not fade into mourning. Sometime between late 1816 and 1817, he married Jemima Anglen, the widow of John Anglen. Perhaps it was a union of companionship and mutual need—two elders finding solace in shared history and familiar rhythms. Together, they would carry on the Spencer legacy a little longer.

The War of 1812 and the Changing Nation

Even as Joseph remarried, the world around him was shifting. The War of 1812 erupted just two years before Mary’s death. While Joseph was too old to serve, he likely watched younger neighbors leave for service and return with stories of British blockades and militia victories. Economic hardship hit the region as shipping routes faltered. Still, pensions from the war and new land grants began to circulate, creating fresh movement across Virginia and into Kentucky and Tennessee.

Joseph, now in his late 70s, bore witness to this changing South—still agrarian but inching toward market capitalism, still proud but scarred by conflict.

Chapter 3: The Valley and the Hearth (1816–1837)

When Joseph Charles Spencer married Jemima Anglen, widow of John Anglen, sometime after 1816, he was nearly 80 years old. The union was not a beginning but a kind of epilogue—a closing chapter between two elders whose lives had both been defined by hardship and endurance.

They lived on his 300-acre farm along the Powell River, a parcel he had secured in 1796, tucked into the ridges and hollows of Lee County, Virginia. The land sloped down toward the Powell’s slow-moving waters, where bottomland crops took root in spring and fat hogs were slaughtered in winter. Indian corn was the staple, and apple trees likely grew along the fence line, their fruit stored in earthen cellars to last through Appalachian winters.

This was not a grand plantation, but it was a working farm, and like many landowners in early 19th-century Virginia, Joseph held enslaved individuals—people whose names are lost to time but whose labor shaped the land and supported his household. His 1814 decision to free at least one enslaved person suggests a complexity in his views or circumstances, but the 1830 census still shows him as a slaveholder. These contradictions mirrored the divided soul of Virginia itself—between freedom and bondage, tradition and change.

The Spencer Household in 1830

The 1830 U.S. Census confirms Joseph still resided in Lee County in his early 90s. His listing shows:

• A white male aged 90–99 (Joseph himself)
  
• Other white household members, likely including Jemima
  
• Several enslaved individuals, performing farm labor and domestic work
  

By this point, Joseph was one of the oldest residents in the county—a living monument to the colonial past. He had lived through British rule, revolution, frontier war, nation-building, and two American presidencies named Adams. He had buried a wife, raised multiple children to adulthood, and likely welcomed grandchildren—and perhaps great-grandchildren—into his home.

Jemima, herself in her 70s, likely kept the domestic world running. The rhythms of life were measured not by clocks but by chores: dawn to dusk, seed to harvest, candle to embers. She may have cooked over an open hearth, supervised sewing and spinning, or helped tend to the kitchen garden while enslaved women did parallel labor under her direction.

One imagines Joseph seated on a wide porch in the late afternoon light, watching the Powell shimmer below. His walking cane rested beside him. His eyes, though dimmed with age, still surveyed the ridges he had once climbed, the fields he had plowed with his own hands.

Farm Life and Community Ties

Joseph’s farm would have operated within a tight-knit agricultural economy. Lee County was remote and relatively underpopulated, but that isolation forged deep community bonds. Neighbors helped each other thresh grain or raise barns. Church services—likely Baptist or Primitive Baptist—were social anchors, as were county court days and harvest gatherings.

Joseph’s sons, if nearby, would have helped with major labor: mending fences, tending livestock, clearing new fields. Daughters and daughters-in-law contributed to weaving, cooking, and maintaining the home. Children—those who were free—likely learned early how to sling a hay fork or shuck corn by lamplight. Those who were enslaved labored from sunup to sundown and were the silent, unseen foundation of the Spencer household economy.

The World Beyond Lee County

While Joseph’s world had narrowed to the valley and hearth, the country beyond was changing rapidly:

• Missouri Compromise (1820): A fragile truce between slavery and free-state advocates shaped political discourse, including in Virginia.
  
• Erie Canal (1825) and railroads (1830s): Revolutionized how goods and people moved across the continent, but likely felt distant to Joseph.
  
• Religious revivalism: The Second Great Awakening swept through frontier towns, likely bringing circuit-riding preachers to the Powell Valley and encouraging communal prayer and hymn singing.
  

Yet in Joseph’s twilight years, these events may have seemed abstract. His focus remained local: the rising cost of salt, the yield of corn, the illness of a neighbor, the warmth of the fire at day’s end.

Chapter 4: The Long Rest (1837 and Beyond)

By January of 1837, Joseph Charles Spencer was nearly 99 years old. Few men in American history could claim such a span—not only of years, but of eras. He had been born a British subject under King George II. He died a citizen of the United States during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, whose very image came to define American populism and frontier valor. Joseph had lived to see thirteen new states admitted to the Union. He had farmed under the Articles of Confederation and watched the Constitution debated from afar. He had lost a wife, gained another, freed at least one person from slavery, and watched generations spring from his line.

We do not have a record of his final words. But one imagines the scene in that Powell River valley cabin: a cold January wind rattling the windows, a fire crackling low, Jemima—or perhaps a daughter or granddaughter—holding his hand. His body, once strong enough to swing an axe through green hickory, was now frail, his breath shallow. But his mind, perhaps, was still clear. He had buried friends and outlived rivals. He had seen the wilderness tamed.

There may have been a Bible on the table beside him. Perhaps someone read Psalm 23, or sang softly, “Rock of Ages.” That winter morning, Joseph Charles Spencer died, and the world lost one of its last living bridges between the colonial frontier and the antebellum South.

Joseph was likely buried on his own land, as was customary in 1830s rural Virginia. The family would have built a simple wooden coffin, perhaps lined with wool or flaxcloth. The grave might have been dug on a knoll above the river, near where he had once looked out across the valley and dreamed of permanence. A wooden headboard may have been planted, marked with his name and the year—though time and weather would erase many such markers.

Funerals in those years were plain but heartfelt. Friends and neighbors would have gathered for a homegoing ceremony. Prayers were said, and scripture read. Stories were shared—of Joseph riding out to claim his land, of the orchard he planted, of the time he patched a neighbor’s fence during a thunderstorm. If the enslaved individuals he had once held still remained in the area, they too might have paused in silent witness. They would have known the man in ways few others did.

Joseph’s land and legacy passed to his children and grandchildren. Some stayed in Lee County, tilling the same fields. Others likely moved west into Kentucky or southward into Tennessee, following the same migratory instincts Joseph had once trusted when he left Wilkes County or Montgomery. His surname spread with them, appearing on census rolls, war rosters, and marriage certificates through the 19th century.

The land Joseph cleared and cultivated would eventually be parceled, sold, and transformed—into tobacco fields, cattle pastures, or wooded lots. The Spencer name, however, remained etched in the memory of the place. Oral histories likely kept him alive for several generations: “Old Joseph, your great-great-grandfather—he lived to be near 100, they say.”

Though no grand monument marks his resting place, his legacy lived through the muscle and memory of those who came after him.

In Appalachian communities, memory is sacred. Even without a tombstone or a written will, the land remembers. The Powell River still flows past the site of Joseph’s homestead. Generations later, his descendants may have walked that riverbank unaware they were touching the same earth, listening to the same whip-poor-wills, and watching the same mist rise off the ridges.

Joseph's story is not one of battlefield glory or political fame. It is the story of endurance, of faith in land and family. It is the American story, told through log cabins and cornfields, marriages and migrations. It is a life that, while shaped by frontier hardship and the presence of slavery, was also marked by self-sufficiency, renewal, and continuity.

Final Reflections

Joseph Charles Spencer’s life bridges two Americas—one born of monarchy and one forged in liberty. He was not a man of letters, but of land. He left no memoirs, only acreage and descendants. He enslaved others, but freed at least one. He watched a nation rise and saw its sins embedded in its soil.

Today, his name endures because his story—though buried in census columns and crumbling headstones—is one of the oldest kinds we know: the settler who stayed, the patriarch who endured, the man who planted trees whose shade he would never sit under.

His children bore his name forward. His land bore the prints of his hands. And his story now returns to the light, not only as a name on a page, but as a human life fully lived—deep in the hills of Virginia, at the edge of a fledgling nation.