The Higgins of Cane River

The Higgins of Cane River are the family of Higgins, a community on the Cane River in north central Yancey County, North Carolina, of which the North Carolina Gazetteer says, “Named for John Higgins, early settler and father of a large family”; the county’s census lists five Higgins heads of household in 1840 (1840 Yancey) and Higgins families in dwellings 831 to 847 at Bald Creek in 1860 (1860 Yancey). The earliest record of the Holland line is a Holland Higgins taxed with no land in 1788 in Capt. Gudger’s Company of Washington County, then North Carolina and now Tennessee (1788 tax list), and listed in Burke County in 1790 with three boys (1790 Burke); that he was the father of Holland Higgins Jr. (c.1779–1824), and perhaps of John Higgins Sr., is an inference from the ages, since no document names his sons. A second line has earlier records: in 1836 Ananias Higgins declared that he was born in Guilford County in 1763, the son of William Higgins, that a militia tour from Wilkes County took him “by Caney River” in 1779, and that he had lived in his Yancey neighborhood for thirty years (pension R4979). A family letter of 1892, which says Holland Jr. was about forty-five when he was killed in 1824, says that he “probably came from Virginia to the Greasy Cove,” words that may refer to him or to his father and that are tradition (1892 letter); the 1782 personal property lists of Henry County (Henry 1782) and Washington County, Virginia (Washington 1782), name no Holland Higgins, and the surname could be Irish, from Ó hUiginn (Woulfe), or English, from Higgin, a pet form of Richard (Forebears). By the study’s reading (Exhibit 4), a Y-DNA test of a man descended father to son from Holland Jr. or John Higgins Sr., entered in the Higgins surname project (FamilyTreeDNA), would show whether the family shares a paternal line with the southwest Virginia Higgins, with the line of Ananias Higgins or with neither.

This study follows the family from the Holland line’s first dated record, the Washington County tax list of 1788, through the Cane River settlement, the Civil War, the branches that left for Tennessee and the Far West, and the community’s own twentieth century up to the flood of 2024, with what can and cannot be said about where the name and the family came from before 1788.

Yancey was formed in 1833 from Burke and Buncombe Counties, and Buncombe in 1791 from Burke and Rutherford (NCpedia), so the earliest records sit in the parent counties and across the state line in Washington County, Tennessee. Where a statement rests on a record, the record is linked. Where it rests on a reading of the records that no document states, the text says so.

How the records are read

Before 1850 the census names only the head of each household and counts everyone else by sex and age bracket. Identifications here are made by fitting known births into those brackets and testing the fit against neighbors on the page, later censuses, gravestones and pension files. Such a fit is an inference and is called one. Census figures come from volunteer transcriptions and indexes; only the 1850 page that holds families 885 to 887 has been read from the National Archives image.

Cemetery dates come from published surveys of the stones. Family-tree sites, including Find a Grave, are used only as leads, and several of their lineages are contradicted by the census. No living person is named.

Where the name comes from

Higgins has two separate sources, and the surname alone cannot say which one a family carries. In Ireland it is the anglicized form of Ó hUiginn, a learned family of the southern Uí Néill that began in what is now County Westmeath (Woulfe) and moved west into Connacht, chiefly to County Sligo, where it held land at Dooghorne, Achonry and Ballynary (Grenham). The meaning of the root is disputed. Patrick Woulfe read it as uige, “knowledge, skill, ingenuity” (Woulfe); others take it from a word for “Viking” (Irish Genealogy Toolkit).

The family’s trade was poetry. Woulfe counts eleven poets and professors of poetry of the name in the Annals of the Four Masters. The best known, Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn, held land at Achonry and Kilmactigue in Sligo and addressed poems to the O’Donnells, O’Neills and Maguires; an inquest of 1593 recorded that he died in March 1591, and a later tradition says the O’Haras killed him over a satire (Wikipedia). The Cromwellian settlement took the Sligo and Westmeath lands by 1654 (Grenham). One line went into the Spanish empire: Ambrosio O’Higgins, of the Ballynary family, became viceroy of Peru, and his son Bernardo O’Higgins was the first head of state of independent Chile (Grenham).

In England the name is a patronymic, “son of Higgin,” a pet form of Richard by way of Hick, with early examples in Yorkshire in 1379 and Lancashire in 1588 (Forebears). In 1881 there were 12,740 Higgins in England, 1,966 in Scotland and 439 in Wales (Forebears), many of them of Irish birth or descent: in 1841 more than a quarter of Scotland’s Higgins gave Ireland as their birthplace (Irish Genealogy Toolkit). Ireland’s own count, Griffith’s Valuation of 1847–64, found 1,972 Higgins households, only two still using the “O,” most of them in the west (Exhibit 1).

An eighteenth-century Higgins in the Virginia backcountry could have been Gaelic Irish, Ulster Protestant or English. Which one the Cane River family was is a question for a Y-DNA test, not for the name.

The first records, 1788–1824

The earliest record of the family anywhere is a tax list. In 1788 Capt. Gudger’s Company of Washington County, then still North Carolina, taxed thirty-three men (1788 tax list). The list names no place, but its Culbersons lived on Indian Creek in the Greasy Cove, the valley below Big Bald Mountain where Erwin, Tennessee, now stands. Among them were “Saml Culberson,” with 1,080 acres, “Joseph Culberson,” with 220, and “Holland Higgins,” with no land and one free poll (1788 tax list). A poll was a man of twenty-one or more, so this Holland was born by 1767. The Greasy Cove list of 1790 carries the same names, Culbersons, Blevinses, Dickins, Ecton, Love, Webb, Young, Gudger, but no Higgins (1790 Greasy Cove): by then he had crossed the mountain.

A letter written in 1892 by a grandson at Flag Pond tells the same story from memory. The letter’s “he,” Holland or his father, “probably came from Virginia to the Greasy Cove,” the great-grandmother, “Peggy Ellis before she married,” died, and the boy Holland “was then bound out to Joe Culberson, and was made to sit on the fence and watch for the Indians.” The great-grandfather “sometime after moved to Yancy Co., then Buncombe Co., NC where he lived and died” (1892 letter). The 1788 list puts a Holland Higgins and Joseph Culberson in the same company a century before the letter was written.

Two years later the elder Holland was across the mountain. The 1790 census of Burke County lists “Higins, Holland” in the 12th Company, one man of sixteen or more, three boys and no females, between John Street and Elijah Burris and two lines from Henry Hensley (1790 Burke). Henry Hensley entered 200 acres on Bald Mountain Creek of the Cane River in June 1791, which is probably where the company lay (NCGenWeb). In 1800 Holland Higgins was still in Buncombe, a man of forty-five or more with a woman of the same age and a girl of ten to sixteen, with a younger William Higgins, aged 16 to 26, on the same list (1800 Buncombe). He was born before 1755.

The younger Holland, born about 1779 (the letter gives his age at his death in 1824 as “about forty five years old”) (1892 letter), stayed on the Tennessee side for a time. In December 1798 a Holland Higgins witnessed Samuel Culberson’s will on Indian Creek (Culbertson genealogy); at about nineteen he was evidently still among the Culbersons he had been bound to. He married Barbara Hensley, Henry’s daughter, in Buncombe about 1810, and the letter describes him as his father’s equal at the trades: “a mechanic blacksmithing,” coppersmith, carpenter, stone mason, shoemaker, millwright, farmer and hunter.

Two lines

Holland’s three boys of 1790 were born between 1774 and 1790. The Holland born about 1779 was one. John Higgins Sr., who heads a Yancey household as “John Sen.” in 1840 at sixty to seventy, fits the window for another. That is the likeliest root of the local tradition that Higgins was settled by three Higgins brothers, a tradition Wikipedia dates to the “early 18th century,” which the records rule out (Wikipedia). No document names the sons.

The other line is documented by a federal pension file. Ananias Higgins declared in Yancey on June 29, 1836, that he was “born on the 14th day of November A.D. 1763” in Guilford County, the son of William Higgins, and had served militia tours from Wilkes County in 1779–81. His first tour went “to the mouth of Big Ivy and by Caney River,” so he saw this valley as a sixteen-year-old soldier. He had lived “for the last thirty years” in his Yancey neighborhood, so since about 1806 (pension R4979). Benjamin Hensley, by the family trees Barbara’s brother, vouched for him. The claim was rejected, and by February 1854 his sons-in-law signed as his heirs.

A William Higgins in Burke in 1790, and a William “Hagins” there in 1800 beside a Mills Hagins, may be Ananias’s father (1800 Burke). No deed, witness or shared tract has been found linking William’s family to Holland’s. The two lines shared neighbors, the Hensleys and Culbersons, and that is all the record shows.

Before North Carolina

Before 1788 no record names this family. Exhibit 3 sets out what is documented and what is not; four threads remain, none proven.

The first is a Holston River cluster of Higginses in southwest Virginia, the nearest Virginia Higgins in place and time. Philimon Higgins served in Robert Doack’s militia company in 1774 and paid personal property tax in Washington County, Virginia, in 1782, as did a Shepherd Higgins the same year (1782 list); a Richard Higgins held land on “Higgins Mill Run” from 1775; a John Higgins witnessed a William Ingles will in Montgomery County in 1782 (Summers). A John Higgins born in Virginia about 1760 who died in Tennessee in 1809, placed by family trees as Philimon’s son, has Y-DNA-tested descendants. Their haplogroup, R-BY60733, is a branch of R-M222, the lineage most associated with northwest Ireland; FamilyTreeDNA dates the branch’s common ancestor to about 1650 (FamilyTreeDNA). Nothing names a Holland or an Ellis in that cluster.

The second is William Higgins of Guilford and Wilkes, Ananias’s father. A William Higgins headed a household of eleven in Burke County’s 1st Company in 1790, when Holland was in its 12th (1790 Burke), and a younger William was on Holland’s Buncombe list in 1800. Two Higgins households settling one new county together is how kin often traveled, but no record says they were kin.

The third is a John Higgens sued with four others in Washington County, Tennessee, in 1783 (case files guide). One co-defendant, Benjamin Lindsay, appears on the 1787 tax list ten lines from William Ellis, one of the county’s two Ellis households (1787 list). If Peggy Ellis came from that family the pieces would fit the letter’s sequence, mother dead and boy bound out by 1788, but the one daughter of William Ellis the trees name, Margaret, married a Bean, and no Ellis record names a Higgins. A Hensley and two Ellises were also taxed in Henry County, Virginia, in 1782 (Henry list), with no Higgins among them.

The fourth is the name itself. Holland was a Maryland surname often handed down as a first name: Gen. Otho Holland Williams carried his maternal grandfather’s (Wikipedia). “Holland Higgins” may honor a mother or grandmother of that family. No Higgins–Holland marriage has been found.

The early-boat question

Family tradition often puts the first ancestor on an early ship. The record does not, yet. The best-documented early Higgins in America is Richard Higgins, at Plymouth by the 1630s and later at Eastham on Cape Cod and Piscataway, New Jersey; his descendants were traced in a genealogy of 1918 (Higgins, 1918), and no record carries that line to the southern backcountry. Seventeenth-century arrivals in Virginia and Maryland would be found in the published land and emigrant abstracts (Maryland State Archives), but none has been tied by any document to the Higgins on the Holston or the Cane River. Online trees that make such a connection cite no records.

One test can narrow the field. A Big Y-700 test of a man descended father to son from Holland Higgins Jr. or John Higgins Sr., entered in the Higgins surname project (FamilyTreeDNA), would show whether the family shares a paternal line with the southwest Virginia Higgins, with Ananias’s line, or with neither (Exhibit 4).

The death of Holland Higgins

Holland Higgins did not live to see Yancey County formed. A land grant of June 18, 1824, gave him a tract near Flag Pond, and on November 30 he was shot by David Greer, the recluse of Big Bald Mountain, in a quarrel over a cherry orchard. Charles Lanman, traveling through in June 1848, wrote that Greer’s “crowning event” was “shooting to the ground in cold blood, and in the broad daylight, a man named Higgins,” and that he “was brought to trial and acquitted on the ground of insanity” (Lanman, 1849).

The house attributed to Holland stands. The Tennessee Historical Commission’s draft nomination of the Holland Higgins Homestead, a one-and-a-half-story half-dovetail log cabin at Left Higgins Creek Road and Bill Shelton Road near Flag Pond, went before the State Review Board on September 18, 2026 (nomination; WATE). It records that his descendants housed loggers and sawmill crews there into the 1940s.

Barbara Higgins, a widow before she was thirty-two, with a baby of eight months and another on the way, raised ten children on Higgins Creek and lived until 1882. She is buried at Higgins Chapel, Flag Pond (cemetery survey).

The Cane River, 1840–1900

The 1840 census lists five Higgins heads in Yancey (1840 Yancey). “John Sen.,” sixty to seventy, lives with a woman of the same age, almost certainly the Nancy Higgins who is eighty in 1860 in G. W. Hensley’s household. His household also holds a male of fifteen to twenty, born 1820–25. That fits Hosea J. Higgins, who gave his age as thirty-seven when he enlisted in 1861, though the 1860 census made him thirty-two.

“Jno.,” twenty to thirty with three boys of five to ten, fits John H. Jr., married in 1831 by the family trees (WikiTree). “Jas.,” thirty to forty, fits the James whose son William M. was born about 1838. The “John” on page 5, next to W. A. Hensley, is probably Holland’s son John (1813–1891). “Hapey,” a woman with two small boys, may be Macy Higgins (1810–1890), who headed her own household again in 1860.

The 1850 census, read from the National Archives microfilm, is the one page that puts the generations side by side (1850 Yancey, p. 444). On October 9, 1850, Lorenzo Poteet found at family 885 “John Higgins,” 42, farmer, with “Winny,” 42, and James E. 20, William B. 17, Theo 16, Delilah 13, Emeline 11, John 7, Sanders 6, Charles G. 4 and Sarah 1; next door at 886 “John Higgins Sr,” 82, farmer, $100 in land, born North Carolina, neither he nor “Nancy,” 75, able to write; and at 887 “Massey Higgins,” 35, with David C. 13, John W. 10 and “Lacus H” 3. That settles John Sr.’s birthplace as North Carolina, not South Carolina, makes Gaston (Charles G.) a child of 1846, and shows the family as three households in a row.

John Sr. was gone by 1860, when Nancy, 80, lived with G. W. Hensley and his wife Malinda, 21, who by the family trees was John Jr.’s daughter, so Nancy was with a granddaughter. An 1854 death date given in some family accounts has no source: no stone, no estate file (the county’s begin in 1853 and hold no John Higgins until 1898), and no tree that cites one; the trees themselves guess 1820 (WikiTree). The “Henry” in his name probably comes from a profile that confused him with a John Henry Higgins Sr. of Grayson County, Virginia (WikiTree), and “Young” for Nancy rests on one profile whose only source is “Family search” (WikiTree). He died between October 1850 and 1860.

The fit corrects two errors that run through the online trees. Hosea cannot be a son of John Jr. and Winnie, who were in their early teens when he was born and did not marry until 1831; he was a younger son of John Sr. And James, listed as seventy-five in the 1860 transcription, is “James,” 47, in the 1850 census (1850 census, FamilySearch 1:1:M4BL-L12), 69 in 1870 (1870 census, FamilySearch 1:1:MWDC-X68) and 80 in 1880 (1880 census, FamilySearch 1:1:MCF3-W4V), so he was born about 1800 and was of John Jr.’s generation, not his father’s. That he was John Sr.’s son is an inference, and the 1880 record cuts against it: it gives the birthplace of both his parents as “TENNESSEE” (1880 census, FamilySearch 1:1:MCF3-W4V), where John Sr. had given North Carolina for his own. An estate file indexed as “James Higgins,” Yancey County, 1892, has not been read (estate file, FamilySearch 1:1:K78C-V6G).

Bald Creek, 1860

By 1860 six Higgins dwellings sat within sixteen numbers on the enumerator’s route at Bald Creek (1860 Yancey). James, with Susan and six children, was at 831. “Thrower,” the Theodore of the gravestones, was at 833 with Margaret and an infant. Massie was at 834 with David and Lucius. John, fifty, and “Winna,” fifty-two, were at 845 with six children and James V. Harper, eighty-eight. Erwin, twenty-eight, was next door. Hosea, with Marinda and seven sons, was listed at Day Book; Ananias D. at Day Book; Charles at Egypt.

These were small farms. John Jr. and Hosea each reported $2,000 in land; James $600; Massie $75 (1860 Yancey). The 1890 veterans schedule and the estate files of the State Archives, for Mills (1881), James (1892), John (1898), Theodore (1904) and Marion (1908), carry the same families forward (State Archives).

Where they are buried

The family’s graves lie along the river. Gwen Bodford’s 2005 survey places the John Higgins Cemetery “about 4 mi down Cane River,” on a ridge by a neighbor’s former house, with John (May 1811 – October 18, 1892) and Winnie (June 6, 1812 – September 8, 1887) and some fifty unmarked graves above them, the likeliest resting place of John Sr. and Nancy (Bodford). Beside them lies William M. Higgins (August 12, 1866 – June 28, 1949) with his wife Arrah E. Shepherd (1866–1930), the “Big Will Higgins” of the 1922 wagon ride and the 1944 Red Cross list (Yancey Record); he farmed on the Cane River through 1940, died at Marion in McDowell County, and was probably a grandson of John Jr., though no record names his father (Find a Grave).

The Higgins Cemetery behind Higgins Freewill Baptist Church, on the road Bodford calls Hog Branch and the county now signs Hawk Branch, holds Macy (1810–1890), Charles and Emaline, and William M. and James H. under their Union regiment; it is still in use, with 201 memorials (Find a Grave). Theodore (1835–1904) lies in the W. E. Higgins Cemetery on Gus Higgins Road. Find a Grave places Gaston (about 1846 – 1919) in the Hensley Cemetery on Bald Mountain (Find a Grave) and Hosea at Byrd Branch (Find a Grave).

The wives and their families

The Higgins married the families that settled around them. In the 1790 Burke list Holland Higgins sits among Henry, John, James and Herman Hensley, James Langford, and William and John Edwards; the 1800 Buncombe list, which is alphabetical, adds Lazarus Phillips, the Angels, the Youngs and George Byrd (1790 Burke; 1800 Buncombe; part 2). Four of those names supplied the wives of the next two generations; the Phillipses were at Red Hill and the Byrds on Jacks Creek, a few miles off.

The Hensleys. Barbara Hensley (December 27, 1792 – June 14, 1882), wife of Holland Higgins, was the daughter of Henry “Harry” Hensley, a Revolutionary militiaman who entered 200 acres on Bald Mountain Creek in 1791, and Barbara Angel, daughter of Charles Angel of the Angel plantation on Belews Creek in Surry, now Stokes, County (NCGenWeb; Grant; Old Hensley Cemetery). Sibella Angel’s will of 1809 names her daughter “Barbara” among the heirs (will). Barbara’s brothers included Benjamin, who bought 62 acres at Flag Pond in 1824 and vouched for Ananias Higgins in 1836, and William A., who by the Spivey Mountain survey married Holland’s daughter Lucinda and was Yancey’s sheriff in 1837 (Grant gives his wife as Lucinda Maney). Holland’s son George W. later married Benjamin’s daughter Mary Jane, his first cousin.

The Phillipses and Garlands. Winnifred Phillips (1812–1887), wife of John Jr., was by the family trees a daughter of Lazarus Phillips (1781–1866), buried at Red Hill in Mitchell County, and Jane Garland (1780–1855), daughter of William Guthridge Garland, a Virginia-born Revolutionary private who settled Red Hill in 1805 and was a county trustee in 1837 (Find a Grave; NCGenWeb). A Lazarus Phillips was in Burke’s 3rd Company in 1790 and in Buncombe in 1800 (1790 Burke; 1800 Buncombe). Winnie’s sister Betsy Jane married George W. Byrd, brother of Marinda Byrd Higgins, so the Phillips, Byrd and Higgins families were tied three ways. The 1831 marriage bond has not been found, and her own memorial reports a DNA result giving her different parents (Find a Grave), so her parentage is still open.

The Byrds. Two Byrd sisters married Higgins brothers. Susannah “Sooky” Byrd (December 4, 1811 – December 4, 1870) married James, and Margaret Marinda Byrd (March 20, 1819 – February 29, 1912) married Hosea (Find a Grave). They were daughters of William Kimsey Byrd (1778–1862), a War of 1812 private, and Elizabeth Benson, and granddaughters of Col. George William Byrd of Richmond County, Virginia, who is said to have watched the surrender at Yorktown and brought his family to Jacks Creek about 1796 (Find a Grave; Col. Byrd). Their brother Charles Avery Byrd lived next to Hosea in 1860. Sooky’s stone, illegible when surveyed, is the “?? Higgins, 12-4-1811 – 12-4-1870” in the Higgins Cemetery (Bodford). Emeline Bradford’s death certificate gave her mother as “Sooky Briggs,” most likely a slip for Byrd (Find a Grave).

The Edwards. Both of the next generation’s Edwards wives descend, by the family trees, from John Edwards Sr. (1750–1833), whose household stood on the same 1790 page as Holland Higgins, with William Edwards six lines below him. Margaret Lucinda Edwards (1838–1904), wife of Theodore, was a granddaughter of his son James through George W. Edwards and Margaret Allen; Susan Edwards (1842–1901), wife of Gaston, was a daughter of his son Edmond, a War of 1812 private, and Betsey Bradford (Find a Grave; Susan). Susan died in Unicoi County in 1901 and is buried at Erwin. John Edwards, two doors from Massie Higgins in 1860 with $2,500 in land (1860 Yancey), was of the same family.

Others. Rutha Elkins (1848–1936), wife of William M., was a daughter of James and Nancy Elkins; a Gabriel Elkins was in the 1790 company with two slaves (Find a Grave). Esther Sparks, who married Lucius, was the daughter of Ivens and Elizabeth Sparks, two doors from Massie in 1860 (1860 Yancey). Olivia Willis married Ananias D. at her father James Willis’s house in 1843. Across the line, Ellis and Samuel Higgins married sisters, Ruth and Lizzie Tilson, daughters of John Tilson and Mary Erwin of Flag Pond (Flag Pond School Cemetery; Higgins Chapel); a kinsman, William E. Tilson, raised a Confederate unit as captain, and his son John Q. Tilson led the U.S. House majority in the 1920s (Tilson cemetery).

Still unknown: the maiden names of Nancy (John Sr.’s wife), Massie, Mary Jane (Sanders’s widow) and Elizabeth (James H.’s widow); the parents of Thursa Jane Jones, wife of the younger Holland; and who James V. Harper, the 88-year-old carpenter in John Jr.’s house in 1860, was to the family.

The tree, as far as the records carry it

Generation 0. Holland Higgins Sr. (born before 1755; taxed in Capt. Gudger’s Company 1788; Burke 1790; Buncombe 1800) m. Peggy Ellis (died before 1788). Children: three sons born 1774–90, among them Holland (c.1779) and probably John Sr.

William Higgins (born before 1755), Guilford then Wilkes County. Sons Robert and William Jr. (killed at Eutaw Springs) and Ananias (1763 – by 1854), who settled on the Cane River about 1806.

Generation 1. Holland Higgins (c.1779 – Nov. 30, 1824) m. about 1810–11 Barbara Hensley (1792–1882), dau. of Henry Hensley and Barbara Angel. Children: Lucinda (1803–1898, m. William A. Hensley) and Elizabeth by an earlier companion; Ellis (1812–1909, m. Ruth Tilson), Nancy (1814–1881, m. a Tilson), John (1813–1891), James (1817–1875), Samuel (1819–1902, m. Lizzie Tilson), Barbara (1821–1911, m. a Hensley), George W. (1824–1863, m. Mary Jane Hensley), Margaret (1825–1889, m. John Edwards), Sarah, Malinda.

John Higgins Sr. (about 1768 – between 1850 and 1860) m. Nancy (about 1775 – after 1860). Probable children: James (about 1800 – about 1892, m. Susannah Byrd), John H. Jr. (1811–1892, m. Winnifred Phillips), Hosea J. (about 1824 – 1863, m. Marinda Byrd), and the unnamed husband of Massie (1810–1890).

Generation 2, Cane River. John H. Jr. and Winnie: James Ervin (1830–1877, m. Sarah Shelton), William B. (1833–1860), Delilah (1834–1922, m. a Silvers), Theodore (1835–1904, m. Margaret Lucinda Edwards), Ellender (1836–1928, m. a Hensley), Malinda (m. G. W. Hensley), Emeline (1841–1914, m. a Bradford), John (1843–1898), Sanders (about 1844–46, m. Mary Jane), Charles Gaston (1846–1919, m. Susan Edwards, then Julia McIntosh), Sarah (1849, m. a Peek), Wilson (about 1852).

James and Sooky Byrd: William Marion (1837–1908, m. Rutha Elkins), George W. (about 1842), Sarah A., Margaret M., James H. (about 1848 – 1924, m. Elizabeth), Mitchell J.

Hosea and Marinda Byrd: Curtis Alexander (1846–1932), William Thomas (1849–1884), Vincent Lafayette (1851–1941, m. Emma Peed), John Nelson (1853–1936), Marcus C., Cornelius.

Massie: David C. (about 1837–40), John W. (about 1840), Lucius H. (1847–1865, m. Esther Sparks).

John Jr. and Winnie’s grandson, by the 1880 census: William M. “Big Will” Higgins (1866–1949, m. Arrah E. Shepherd), whose parents a FamilySearch family tree (LLC8-4CR) gives as John (1843–1898) and Caroline Shelton (Exhibit 10).

Ananias D. (born about 1818–24, died 1864) m. Olivia Willis: John W., James P., Julia A., Jesse C., Hannah E., Nicholas, Laura E., Alla F.

Big Will

The William Higgins of the 1940s was William M. Higgins, “Big Will,” born in Yancey County on August 12, 1866, by his gravestone (Find a Grave); the censuses put his birth a year or two later. He grew up in his grandparents’ house. The 1870 census of Egypt Township lists “Wm Shelton,” 2, in the house of John and Winney Higgins (1870 census, FamilySearch 1:1:MWDC-X8F), and the 1880 census lists William, 12, in the house of John H. Higgins, 70, and Winnie, entered as “Grandson,” the word written over (1880 census, FamilySearch 1:1:MCF3-6SK). A FamilySearch family tree, citing a contributor’s life sketch, gives his parents as John Higgins (1843–1898), John Jr.’s son and a Union soldier, and Caroline Shelton (1848–1902), and says they were “not married” (FamilySearch family tree, LLC8-4CR); the same tree puts Caroline later with Joel Gilbert Hensley. No record read for this study names either parent, though the Shelton surname of 1870 fits the tree’s account.

He married Arrah E. Shepherd about 1888: the 1900 census lists William M. with his wife, “Ira,” 34, married twelve years (1900 census, FamilySearch 1:1:MSBR-VTB). They raised eleven named children on the Cane River (Exhibit 10); the 1910 census lists “Mat,” 5, among them (1910 census, FamilySearch 1:1:ML99-33V), and the 1920 census Max, 14, and “Noal,” 8 (1920 census, FamilySearch 1:1:MZJY-J4F). In January 1922 a missionary of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions rode down the valley with him in a wagon behind draft horses, the beginning of the mission that built the community center (Asheville Citizen-Times, 1931). The 1940 census lists “W M Higgins,” 72, widowed, at Bee Log, with his son Ralph, 39, and his daughter, “Loe Anderson,” 51 (1940 census, FamilySearch 1:1:KW7T-HFS), and in March 1944 he is on the Red Cross list in the county paper (Yancey Record). He died at Marion, in McDowell County, on June 28, 1949, and was buried in the John Higgins Cemetery, beside John Jr. and Winnie, the grandparents who raised him (Find a Grave).

His son Max Theodore Higgins was born in July 1904 and is “Mat,” 5, in the 1910 census (1910 census, FamilySearch 1:1:ML99-33V). The record of his marriage to Esther Higgins, 22, at Egypt Township on March 3, 1934, names his parents as Will and Arrah Higgins (1934 marriage record, FamilySearch 1:1:Q28R-GRMW). He died on January 16, 1996 (Find a Grave).

Big Will’s descendants, 1889–2023

Bob Higgins married Martha Jane “Janey” Adkins in 1912; their son, S/Sgt. Ned W. Higgins, was killed in action on September 9, 1944, at twenty-two (Find a Grave); (Yancey Journal, 1977). Jessie, of Nebo, died in 1983, and her obituary names her as a daughter of Will and Ara Shepherd Higgins, survived by a sister and her brothers Bob and Max of Burnsville (Yancey Journal, 1983). Lowe, who was living with her father in 1940, died in California, by the FamilySearch family tree (FamilySearch family tree, LLC8-LX6).

Max Theodore Higgins kept the store at Higgins, and the post office was in it: in June 1937 he and a partner “opened a store and gas station in the Post Office at Higgins” (Yancey Record, 1937); the 1950 census gives his occupation as “U.S. Post Master” (1950 census, FamilySearch 1:1:6FMS-TZKN), and the office ran until it closed in 1954 (Carolana). Through the 1950s and 1960s “Max Higgins’ Store” was the Upper Egypt polling place (Yancey Record, 1959); (Yancey Record, 1971). In May 1972 a fire at Higgins destroyed a two-story concrete block building holding $15,000 of farm machinery and feed and heavily damaged the house a few feet away, where Max Jr. lived; the paper reported Max Higgins Sr.’s estimate of the loss, $30,000 to $40,000, and does not name the store (Yancey Journal, 1972). The family’s account is that the store was damaged in that fire and that the Cane River carried it away in Hurricane Helene in September 2024. His wife, Esther, was a Higgins too, the “daughter of Isaac and Maggie Peterson Higgins” (Find a Grave), and a FamilySearch family tree makes her a great-granddaughter of James Higgins (FamilySearch family tree, LJJF-TJZ); if the tree is right, their marriage in 1934 joined the James and John lines of the Cane River family (Exhibit 13).

Their three sons are the generation that reaches the present. In September 1943 Carlton and Max Jr. each carried 1,875 pennies to Bee Log school to buy a $25 war bond (Yancey Record, 1943). Max “Sonny” Higgins Jr. (1935–2017) served four years in the Navy, in 1973 became maintenance foreman for the schools (Yancey Journal, 1973), and by his obituary was a Navy machinist on the USS New Jersey and a lifelong farmer; his funeral was at Holcombe Brothers in Burnsville and he was buried in the Max Higgins Family Cemetery (obituary). Carlton Allen Higgins (1938–2023) took his dental degree in 1964 (Yancey Record, 1964), went to Alaska as an Air Force captain, practiced dentistry in Fairbanks for thirty-six years, became a private pilot in 1967, and spent his retirement winters back at Higgins before he died at Anchorage in 2023 (Daily News-Miner).

Carlton’s obituary names his surviving brother, Noel (Daily News-Miner). The study follows the family no further.

The war

Yancey County split in 1861 and the Higgins households split with it. On the Confederate side, George W. and Marion joined Company G of the 29th North Carolina on July 26, 1861; Hosea enlisted in the same company at thirty-seven and was discharged in October 1862 or 1863, the records disagree; Theodore, James Ervin, David C. and Charles went into Company G of the 58th in July 1862, Theodore as its drummer (service abstracts). Marion, Sanders and a J. W. Higgins also appear on the Confederate side, the last two through widows’ pension claims (Sanders; J. W.). Hosea did not survive the war; by 1885 his widow Marinda was applying for a state pension under that year’s act (NC Digital Collections).

On the Union side, Gaston, James H., John and Lucius served in the 3rd North Carolina Mounted Infantry and William M. in its Company E (pension abstracts). Ananias D. Higgins and, by the census, his son James P. rode with Company D of the 8th Tennessee Cavalry; Ananias was killed in action at Marion, Virginia, on December 16, 1864 (8th Tennessee).

Across the line at Flag Pond, Holland’s grandson William Thomas Higgins served as a sergeant in Company M of the 8th Tennessee Cavalry and came home to give the land for Higgins Chapel and its school (cemetery survey).

The family’s earliest soldier was Ananias, in the Revolution, who substituted for his father William in June 1781 and marched to Eutaw Springs (pension R4979). Its later wars are below.

Where they went and what they did

Tennessee. After 1824 Holland’s family stayed on Higgins Creek and spread along the Nolichucky. Ellis (born 1812) married Ruth Tilson; Samuel (1819–1902) married Lizzie Tilson; John (1813–1891) died there; George W. (1824–1863), the baby of the murder year, moved to Cherokee County, North Carolina (Higgins Chapel; Old Hensley Cemetery). A second Holland Higgins (about 1842–1910) lies at Coffee Ridge (gravestone). The nomination says the family logged and milled on the homestead into the mid-twentieth century, and the Erwin cemetery records a Freemason and a railroad-era machinist’s helper among them (Martin’s Creek Cemetery). Gaston’s son Shelby (1872–1953) went to Erwin too.

The West. Hosea’s sons Tom and Vincent left Yancey in October 1870 with a teamster bound for Missouri, picked cotton on the way, and spent about five years near Bellefonte, Arkansas (family account). In April 1884 Tom was found shot through the temple and buried under eighteen inches of dirt in his own field; the man who did it had gone to Colfax to file on Tom’s claim (Record-Union). Louis Knott was convicted of first-degree murder in June (Astorian) and, after two postponements of his hanging, was taken from the Colfax jail by vigilantes and hanged on August 19, 1884 (Washington Standard).

Vincent Lafayette Higgins (1851–1941) settled at Union Flat near Pullman in 1884, grew wheat, married Emma Peed of Jasper, Missouri, in 1889, and belonged to the Masons and Odd Fellows. His diaries from 1892 to 1936, his papers, and the family Bible and family record are at Washington State University (Cage 649; Cage 783; Cage 1983). Their daughter attended Washington State College. Curtis A. Higgins (1846–1932), the eldest, is buried with their mother at Adin, Modoc County, California, where Marinda died in 1912 (Adin Cemetery).

The Cane River, 1900–1990. Those who stayed farmed and grew tobacco. In 1947 five Higgins men sat on the county’s farm committees (Yancey Record). The next generations worked at Glen Raven Mills, the Forest Service, the Newport News shipyard and the telephone company, and ran the Quinton Higgins 3-Way Service Station (Holcombe Brothers; Yancey Funeral Services).

Every generation served. Gus Higgins (1894–1984) went to the First World War; S/Sgt. Ned W. Higgins, son of R. W. Higgins of Higgins, went overseas in June 1944, was killed in action on September 9, and is named on the courthouse-lawn memorial at Burnsville (Yancey Record, June 1944; April 1945; memorial; Find a Grave); Wyman G. Higgins (1924–2010) came home with a Purple Heart; Hoover Higgins jumped with the 101st Airborne; Max Higgins Jr. (1935–2017) was a machinist on the USS New Jersey; Russel E. Higgins (1937–2026) retired from the Air Force as a Command Chief after thirty-one years.

Where they scattered: Erwin, Greeneville and Clinton, Tennessee; Abilene, Texas; Springdale, Arkansas; Harrisville, Michigan; Wallburg and Asheville; Newport News; Greenville, South Carolina; Athens, Georgia; Fairbanks. The obituaries that record these moves still name Higgins, Prices Creek or Byrd Branch as home.

The community, 1889–2026

A post office named Higgins opened on December 11, 1889, with Thomas J. Duncan as postmaster, and closed on February 28, 1954 (carolana.com). The community’s modern chapter began in January 1922, when a missionary of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions was sent “to Higgins. Stay there three months,” and found on arrival that her $100 had been spent elsewhere. On January 18 she rode down the valley with “Big Will Higgins” in a wagon behind draft horses and never left (Asheville Citizen-Times, 1931).

The same 1931 account settles the name of the church. The men of the valley gave $2,000 in labor and materials from August 1927; the building was finished with a legacy “given as a memorial to a Mr. and Mrs. Holland, of Chicago,” first used on September 1, 1929, and dedicated that December as the Holland Memorial Presbyterian Church. The name is the donor’s, not the ancestor’s. Her cousin John Markle, the coal operator, then paid for a second building of native field stone, begun in October 1930 and finished in spring 1931. Two days into that job, Sunshine Cottage burned with everything she had collected; she and a small Higgins boy who lived with her “barely escaped with their lives.” A postcard of the finished church survives at Princeton (postcard).

The Markle Building held a library, a clinic, a meeting room and craft shops. On January 28, 1941, the women of Higgins organized the Markle Weavers Guild there, and two women of the Higgins family went to Dorland-Bell School for a short course in weaving (Yancey Record); a Woodcraft Cooperative had sixteen charter members, and the Markle Foundation had just announced a grant “for the continuation of the program” (January 9, 1941). The county clinic met in the building from 1943 (clinic schedule), the Markle Handicraft School belonged to the Southern Highland Craft Guild, and Eleanor Roosevelt bought from its shop on July 3, 1934 (Kanigel, via Wikipedia). In 1952 a physician kept an office at Higgins (Yancey Record). The Yancey History Association described the site in 1998 as “a remarkable complex of stone buildings” that had served as community center, handicraft school, public school and medical center (Estatoee). One of them, a small stone school beside the Markle Building, is not the Bee Log school; the family’s account is that it still stands and is lived in today.

Jane Jacobs, the missionary’s niece, spent six months at Higgins in 1934 (Kanigel, via Wikipedia). She later made it the case study “Henry” in Cities and the Wealth of Nations: a settlement so cut off that its people, descended from builders of “stone parish churches” and “great cathedrals,” had forgotten that stone could be built with at all (review quoting Jacobs). The 1892 letter, which she never saw, lists stone masonry among Holland Higgins’s trades.

Bee Log School

Bee Log had its own post office from 1874 to 1962 (Wikipedia). Its school was one of five high schools the county built of native stone with Works Progress Administration money between 1935 and 1939; the Bee Log building was finished in 1938, and the new schools replaced earlier wooden buildings in the same communities (State Historic Preservation Office). The stones came from local farms, and one shaped like a bear gave the school its mascot (WLOS). A county school survey printed in January 1952 reported that a Bee Log building put up with WPA help had been “destroyed by fire,” and that a new building would house the elementary children of Bee Log, Little Creek and Piney Hill (Yancey Record, 1952); which building burned, the records read for this study do not say.

In 1958 the county’s high-school students moved to Cane River and East Yancey, the nomination not saying which school took Bee Log’s, and Bee Log became an elementary school (State Historic Preservation Office). It closed in 2018, after eighty-two years, with forty-two pupils, then the smallest school in North Carolina (WLOS, June 8, 2018). Two of Max Higgins’s sons went there, and Max Jr. graduated from Bee Log High School (Yancey Journal, 1973).

The clinic

On May 3, 1945, a medical clinic opened in the Markle Building under two physicians of Mars Hill, with equipment from the hospital that had operated at White Rock and money from county donors and the Presbyterian Board of National Missions; a maternity ward was planned (Yancey Record, 1945). A resident nurse was expected that month (May 24, 1945), and births at the “Higgins Medical Clinic” run through the county paper in 1946 (January 24, 1946).

After two months closed it reopened on October 5, 1946, with a physician from Celo on its staff and a board of management (October 3, 1946); on November 1 it moved into Sunshine Cottage, where it could take acute inpatients and maternity cases but not chronic cases or surgery (October 17, 1946). The board and the Markle Corporation, “Higgins residents responsible for the property of the Presbyterian church,” decided to close it on April 1, 1947, for lack of demand (March 20, 1947). In October 1950 the paper announced that a physician “from Higgins Clinic” would give a lecture to a parent-teacher meeting (October 12, 1950), and births at the Higgins Clinic appear in the paper in 1951 (March 22, 1951). In the valley’s memory it was a hospital: when the Yancey History Association posted an old photograph of the stone buildings on February 16, 2022, commenters wrote that they, their brothers and sisters, or their own children had been born there, and several named a later doctor; the county paper of August 11, 1966, names a doctor of a like name as the attending physician at a bloodmobile in the county (Yancey History Association); (Yancey Record, 1966).

Higgins today

The Presbyterian congregation at Higgins held services through the 1940s under one minister and, by 1946, with another minister resident at Higgins (1940; 1946); the Presbytery of Western North Carolina lists no Higgins church today (directory). Higgins Freewill Baptist Church on Hawk Branch Road is active, and its cemetery is the family’s main burying ground.

On September 27, 2024, Hurricane Helene put 30.78 inches of rain on Busick, at the head of the county (National Hurricane Center). The Cane River destroyed twelve miles of U.S. 19W, and the county counted eleven dead (Citizen-Times); Ramseytown, three miles above Higgins, could be reached only by helicopter (Wikipedia), and the county extension office counted some thousand landslides (Cooperative Extension). NCDOT’s permanent repair of 19W runs six miles from Piney Hill Road to Will Higgins Road with seven bridges, and ten miles below with ten more (NCDOT; WLOS). The road the Higgins settled along is being rebuilt as this is written.