Samuel Barton
early American explorer
Colonel Samuel Barton (May 1749 – January 1810) was a pioneer and Patriot of the American Revolution (1775–1783) but is remembered more for the exploration and settlement of what was to become Nashville, Tennessee. Little is known of his early youth. Family tradition holds that Samuel, born in Virginia, was left bound as an apprentice while his father returned to England for business only to be lost at sea. Recent y-DNA testing of a male descendant of Samuel Barton has shown that this branch of Barton's are part of a lineage whose earliest known member in America was Lewis Barton of Maryland.
Regardless of the chronology it is evident that he vacillated between his native Virginia and the wilds of Tennessee. In 1774 he fought as a ranger against Native Americans in Lord Dunmore's War. With the onset of the American Revolution he mustered in Virginia in June 1775. He served as sergeant in Morgan's Rifles of the 7th Virginia Regiment, the acclaimed snipers. As an explorer, hunter and frontiersman Barton proved an ideal soldier. Botetourt County, Virginia court records log his marriage to Martha Robertson on March 10, 1778.
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This entry incorporates text from “Samuel Barton” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.