Samuel Wear
Early American militia leader
Samuel Wear (1753–April 3, 1817) was an American Revolutionary War soldier who fought at the Battle of Kings Mountain. He was one of the early inhabitants of, and a founder of, the "Lost State of Franklin". He later helped draft the Constitution of the State of Tennessee.
Early life
Samuel Wear was born in Augusta County, Virginia in 1753. He and his first wife, Mary Thompson, had four children.
Frontier life
During the War for Independence, Wear and his family settled in the Overmountain town of Henderson Springs, then in Washington County (and later Greene County). Wear fought with the Overmountain Men in the Battle of Kings Mountain in October 1780. During the area's estrangement from North Carolina, Wear's house was the headquarters for the local Sevier County militia, loyal to Franklin president, John Sevier.
Wear served as a state constitutional delegate and was the first county clerk of Sevier County under the State of Franklin, 1786–1787. Wear kept the county clerk position through the several local, regional, territorial, and federal governmental changes that followed, and still held the position when the area received statehood in 1796.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as early American militia leader. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16859209. VIAF identifies the subject as 11386712. The Library of Congress control number is n88035450. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1753, 1817, 1780 and 1786.
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This entry incorporates text from “Samuel Wear” 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.