Hello, After I read the two articles about Joshua Hadley in the Fayetteville Observer, I wrote to the author, Roy Parker, and shared some of the information we have collected. He has now written a third article about Joshua Hadley, using some of this information. I copy his email to me below for your enjoyment. John Hadley Hello, Here is a column that appeared in the Fayetteville Observer on April 28 best wishes roy parker jr Captain Joshua Hadley In Tennessee By Roy Parker Jr april25 2002 In 1787 when we last saw Capt. Joshua Hadley, one of Cumberland County's fightingest soldiers of the American War of Independence, he was again in uniform. The Revolution had been over for five years, but the 33-year-old Hadley heard the bugle call again. He was one of eight volunteer militia captains of companies that the North Carolina government proposed to raise "for the defense of western counties" in a time of lawlessness in that part of the state west of the Appalachians that would become the state of Tennessee. In January, when I first wrote about Joshua Hadley, I knew little about his life after he left Cumberland County. I wrote that it was "obscure," and I even surmised that a Revolutionary War veteran named Joshua Hadley who died at 76 in 1830 in Sumner County, Tennessee, was "another generation" from the dashing young Continental officer who grew up in on the family farm across the Cape Fear River from the colonial village of Cross Creek, now Fayetteville. But descendants of Joshua Hadley quickly out me straight. "Obscure?" Not at all. Here is the "rest of the story." In that summer of 1787, Hadley led his small company on a march that took them across the Appalachians to the Cumberland Settlements of what is now east Tennessee. For more than a year, according to Tennessee history, Hadley's militiamen battled marauding Indians even as a stream of new settlers,. including many veterans of the Revolution, came to the rugged but fertile valleys of the rivers west of the Blue Ridge. His small command was part of a battalion known as Evans' Battalion, named for Major Richard Evans. A history of the state says: "This battalion remained in the settlements about two years andrendered good service in guarding the various forts and in pursuing the enemy when the latter had committed murders or stolen horses." Joshua Hadley was impressed with the Cumberland settlements. When he got his first glimpse of Nashville, later the capital of the state, he described it as "a half dozen frame and log houses and twenty or thirty log cabins." At the time, Nashville was the county seat of Davidson County, in the part of North Carolina that in 1790 would be ceded to the federal government. In the autumn of 1787, Hadley returned to Fayetteville and married 18-year-old Hannah Holmes, whose father would become a governor of Virginia. At the same time, as a veteran of the Continental Line, Hadley was eligible and became a longtime member of the Society of he Cincinnati, an organization open only to Continental officers. His name is listed among the first members of the Society's North Carolina unit. But the Cape Fear would not hold Hadley for long. By 1789, he was a citizen of trans-mountain Davidson County, appearing in the 1790 census as "Captain Joshua Hadley." And so for the remainder of his long life,, the young captain of the Revolution from Cumberland County would be a wellknown citizen of the state of Tennessee. Hadley's military service led to his status as a major landholder in the new state of Tennessee. Even as he arrived west of the Appalachians, he was granted 7,500 acres of public land in recognition of his military services, which he chose to take in Williamson and Sumner counties After permanently moving to Tennessee to take up the grant that was his because of his war service, he began to acquire grants from other Continental soldiers who failed declined to come to the state. A 20th-century state official familiar with such grants said that Hadley at one time owned half of what is today Williamson, Sumner and Davidson counties. Descendants think that is a stretch, but not too far. Hadley's children and other members of his family scattered throughout the South and Southwest, with one notable member becoming an early notable of the Texas Republic. The Hadleys have a widespread family organization, with many busy family- tree experts. There is a Hadley Society, and a web site. A portrait of Hadley in his later yesars, handsome with a full mane of white hair, is on the web site. While Tennessee claims his mature years, Cumberland County, North Carolina ranks him among its Revolutionary War heroes. As an officer in the Continental Army, Hadley fought under George Washington at the Battle of Germantown, Pa., in 1777, and under Nathanael Greene at the Battle of Eutaw Springs, S.C., in 1781. Hadley paid a price in both of these fierce engagements, He was listed among the wounded at both Germantown and Eutaw Springs. Hadley was certainly no sunshine Patriot. He was in on the beginning of the War of Independence 1775. And he was still in uniform months after most others had gone home as the war wound down in 1782. Hadley is among the 58 signers of "the association," the defiant anti-British statement circulated in the village of Cross in the summer of 1775, soon after the war had erupted in New England. As such, his name appears on the stone listing those early Patriots which stands in a little park at the intersection of Old and Person Streets in downtown Fayetteville. Hadley's war record didn't end with his service at Eutaw Springs. For although General Cornwallis surrendered his British forces at Yorktown in October of 1781, the war of Independence had its own momentum in North Carolina, and especially in the Cape Fear area, where a British force held the port town of Wilmington, not evacuating until November of 1781. Spurred by the British presence, Loyalists, so-called Tories, rose up in arms in large numbers, their hard-riding bands overwhelming Patriot militia forces, taking virtual control of whole counties along the Cape Fear River. . Among victims of this bloody civil war was Joshua Hadley's own father, Thomas Hadley, at the time sheriff of Cumberland County. The Hadleys had been in Cumberland County since the 1750s. Thomas Hadley established one of the first merchant stores in the village of Cross Creek as early as 1761. He was slain, probably in July of 1781, at his home near Carvers Creek in northeastern Cumberland, by night-riding Tories. .Despite the departure of the British, the area seethed with civil war right on into 1782. And Capt. Joshua Hadley was still busy. He held a commission to round up Tories, as well as deserters and delinquents from the Patriot forces, throughout the river area. And because of that service, we have history's only contemporary assessment of Hadley's young personal and military character. A Major McRae, writing to General Sumner from Wilmington in February of 1782 reported: "Capt Hadley is invested with orders for this district. There is still a great prospect of success if he is active, which I believe is much his character." The zeal that so impressed McRae was apparently the distinguishing attribute of Joshua Hadley as soldier, settler, and citizen, in his home state, and in his adopted state.