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Facts and Events
Information on Thomas Bledsoe
Thomas Ball BLEDSOE (b. 1706 in Essex Co VA), reportedly son of Abraham and Anne BLEDSOE. Thomas has been found only once in Virginia records, on the Orange County tax list of 1734. He died in 1758, killed by Indians somewhere between Gray's Middle Fork and the North Mayo River in southern VA.
Source: http://www.fulkerson.org/volkertnc.html
From "Birth of American Frontier Culture" website:
- In 1728 Abraham Bledsoe of Northumberland County—the easternmost county in Virginia's Northern Neck—patented land on Rapidan River in the piedmont. By 1734 his son Thomas Bledsoe was on the tax list of Orange County, which at that time stretched as far west as the Mississippi, embracing German and Irish settlements on the Shenandoah.
- On court days Thomas and his brother Abraham, Jr. no doubt came into contact with settlers from beyond the mountains, and may have been enticed west by the money to be made in the deerskin trade. Abraham, Jr. became a noted hunter, and in 1756 scouted down Sandy Creek for an ill-fated campaign against the Shawnee in Ohio. In 1758 Virginia's government allowed him a scalp bounty of twelve pounds for killing two Indians before he himself was killed in the campaign to capture Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh).
- Abraham's brother, widower Thomas Bledsoe, was swept up in the southern migration and set down in 1748 at the foot of the Blue Ridge in what became Patrick County. There he married Susanna Fulkerson, whose unkind treatment of her step-sons, Anthony, Isaac, and Abraham III, caused them to leave home when Anthony was just fifteen. According to Anthony's daughter Sally, her father made the acquaintance of "a gentleman ... who took a liking to him and persuaded him to go to school to him [for two years], and if he ever got able he might pay for it ... then at 17 [Anthony] went into the mercantile establishment of Mr. McDaniel, and remained 7 years ... till he was 24—1757." [Source: http://people.virginia.edu/~mgf2j/english.html]
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