Person:William Anderson (229)

Information on Col. William Anderson

From “The Woman Within” by Ellen Glasgow, an autobiography published posthumously by Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1954. The following is a portion of an appendix titled, “A Dull Note for Genealogists”, pages 298-299, she wrote about the Glasgow side of her family.

“During the Scottish wars in the seventeenth century (the exact date is not known), a branch of the Glasgow family fled from Ayrshire to the Counties Down and Antrim in northern Ireland.

In the year 1766, Arthur Glasgow, a ward and a boy of sixteen, came, with his mother and elder brothers, to America, and settled on a tract of land in Rockbridge County, Virginia. The place was named Green Forest because Glas Gow means green forest in Gaelic, and the green tree was a feature of the family arms. The modern towns of Buena Vista, Balcony Falls, and Glasgow are now contained in the original Green Forest plantation. The old brick house, built immediately after the Revolution, on the site probably of an earlier log house, is still standing in Buena Vista. About 1830, the original dwelling was partly burned; but it was rebuilt on the old foundations, with one or two rooms and the large columns of the square front porch still undestroyed. In more recent years a long porch and a railing have been added.

Until my own generation, every member of my father’s family was born at Green Forest. The first American Arthur Glasgow (1750-1822) married Rebekah McNutt, the widow of Ensign John McCorkle, a youth who had fallen in the Revolution.

Their son Robert (1790-1839) married his cousin Catherine Anderson, the daughter of Col. William Anderson, of Walnut Hill, Botetourt County, Virginia, and his wife, Anne Thomas', daughter of Francis Thomas, of Montvue, near Frederick, Maryland.

The Andersons also were Scottish refugees in Ireland, in the seventeenth century. There, Robert Anderson married a Miss Graham (Margaret), the daughter of a Captain Graham, who was captured and executed in the Claverhouse wars. Family tradition relates that this young man was a near kinsman of the great Marquis of Montrose. But that is merely tradition, with an apocryphal flavour.

Colonel William Anderson, their descendent (1764-1839), of Walnut Hill, lived all his long life in the pioneer homestead of stone and round logs. Botecourt County was nearer the frontier than was Rockbridge, and in his youth Indians were still roaming the wilderness. As a boy of sixteen, he ran away from home in the night, and traveled two days and nights through the forest, with savages around him, in order to join the Revolution. He fought in the Battle of Cowpens and Guilford Courthouse, and in the War of 1812 he served as a colonel. In his later years, because he was called in to decide so many disputes among his neighbors, he was known as Squire Anderson. His three sons were all distinguished in Virginia of their period. They were Colonel John T. Anderson, of Lexington, Judge of the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, and rector of Washinton and Lee University; General Joseph Reid Anderson, president of the Tredegar Iron Works, Richmond.

Catherine, the daughter of Colonel William Anderson, was born in 1797. She was married to Robert Glasgow and was the mother of my father.”

1. ↑ ^1.0 1.1 FamilySearch - Research Helps.