Person:Lewis Foust (1)

Lewis Foust was about eight years old when the Revolutionary War moved across the southern states and into the area of North Carolina where he and his relatives then lived. (The name Lewis is also shown as Ludwig in some records.)

    British forces took Savannah in 1778 and Charleston and Camden, South Carolina in 1780; but a group of 900 frontiersmen forced the redcoats to retreat at the battle of Kings Mountain near the border of North and South Carolina. Thereupon, the British forces under Lord Charles Cornwallis marched to the north into the area of North Carolina where the Fousts had located. There, they engaged a colonial force at the battle of Fuilford Court House. No decisive outcome resulted but the British withdrew to Wilmington, North Carolina, thence to Virginia, where, ultimately, Cornwallis was defeated at Yorktown in 1781 to end the war.
    In an interesting sidelight of the North Carolina campaign of the British army, it is recorded that General Cornwallis seized a house owned by a family named Foust for his headquarters. Which Foust is unknown.
    Lewis Foust was still in his teens when his father Philip moved the family to the western frontier in Tennessee. While there, Lewis again experienced living under the threat of attack, this time from raiding Indian parties. Although the Indian problems had subsided after the French and Indian War and the British-instigated raids of the Revolutionary period, the relentless further push by settlers into Indian lands brought on other uprisings. A number of massacres occurred, carried out by the Creeks and Chicamauga Cherokees.
    Despite the unsettled conditions, three of Lewis' brothers, upon reaching adulthood, pushed on further west to stake their own claims. Lewis however, married a girl from the Shenandoah Valley of Viginia, Barbara Bowman, and they settled there. It was a more tranquil area where many Germans and Scot-Irish had homesteaded some 50 years before. The Shenandoah was a beautiful valley up to 30 miles wide, extending for a hundred miles between the Blue Ridge mountains on the east, and the Alleghenies on the west. It was well suited for growing all manner of crops. There, he and Barbara raised their three sons.
    Living conditions were better than on the Tennessee frontier, but in no way matched the growing splendor of seaboard cities such as Philadelphia and Boston. There, beautiful buildings of brick or gaily painted clapboard, had long since been constructed. Shipping companies were bringing a wide variety of merchandise from abroad; new textile mills and other factories were replacing home made products; and American craftsmen were producing fine furniture, silver items any many other things. Contrast the man and woman in the back country still wearing homespun with this description of a fashionably dressed Boston printer, "He wore a pea-green coat, breeches tied at the knee with ribbon of the same color in double bows, white vest, white silk stockings, and pumps with silver buckles which covered half the foot from instep to toe". Well-to-do city ladies might wear a low-necked dress with a tight fitting bodice, ruffles at the elbows, and a full skirt which was looped back to display a brightly colored, embroidered petticoat. Silk stockings and silk or leather shoes completed the ensemble.
    Conflict with the British erupted again with the war of 1812. But this time the battle did not involve the Foust family. Fortunately for those in the south, all of the campaigns were fought in the north except for a couple of minor actions, and the battle of New Orleans, where Tennessean, Andrew Jackson's troops won a striking victory.
    Within a few years, The Territory north of the Ohio river was opening up, and the lure of a new frontier with rich lands was drawing the attention of the sons of Lewis and Barbara Foust. They would soon follow the practice of most of their forebears, by responding to the lure of new opportunities.

From A Family History by Don Foust, 1997.

1. ↑ A. Donovan Faust (Foust). A Family History: The Ancestors of Thomas Wilson Faust. (1997).
2. ↑ From the Files of Sissy Hime Norris, 9/2001. (sissyhimenorris@@juno.com).