Previous: The Colonial Bealls
Their next son, Samuel, was born during the Revolution, in 1780, in the State of Maryland, as a US. citizen. Cornwallis surrendered Oct. 19, 1781. In '82, '84, and '86, Mannam and Frances had three more daughters: Elizabeth, Margaret, and Amelia.
On Sept 8, 1787, Mannam and Frances sold their lands ("Godfathers Gift" and "Plummers Land") in Prince George County and moved with their seven children and "his many slaves" to Washington, Richmond County (later Warren, now Wilkes County) Georgia, where they bought a nearby 200 acres of land from William Bryant and wife Martha. At the same time, perhaps drawn by lot as a war veteran's bonus, Mannam acquired a 434-acre tract seven miles southwest of Warrenton, Georgia, alongside Long Creek and the road from Warrenton to Jewell. That was also in Richmond County at the time, although that area later became and now is Warren County, and the road that crosses Long Creek is State Rt. 16. Part of that tract may have been planted in cotton, but it was left undeveloped for many years.
Mannam and Frances and their children probably settled down on those 200 acres near Washington. All of their children came along. Here are their Gen. codes, Names, and the ages at which they became Georgia Bealls:
The genealogically-minded will find the family trees spawned by these seven children in Carroll Beall's book or in Roberta Watts Cook's book from which Carroll got his data. Both books are available from Sam Beall.
Mannam was, like his father and grandfather, a planter. A planter is a farmer who has a plantation. Think of him as the actively engaged CEO of a labor-intensive organization.
Note that Francis, Mannam's oldest son, was 19 when he arrived in Georgia, already a master craftsman in the fields of carpentry and cabinetry. We have found no account of his activities for the next fourteen years, but It seems unlikely that he would spend them just helping around the house. He probably busied himself building barns and houses in and around Washington, Warrenton, Sparta, Jewell, Mitchell, etc. He did do something notable on the 8th of March, 1801. By then he was 33 years old and felt that it was high time he settled down and got married, whichever came first.
He married a girl from North Carolina: Sarah Gregory, age 18. My Aunt Anna told me that Sarah's maternal grandmother was a Cherokee.
Scots and Cherokees intermarried so freely during the 18th century along the Carolina and Georgia frontiers that several Cherokee chieftains bore Scottish names and many prominent Scots had openly-acknowledged Cherokee relatives. A famous Cherokee chief was named Mcintyre. The intermarriages apparently were recognized by both groups as bonds of political friendship between similar social entities: tribes and clans. Scots and Indians tended to see one another as fellow human beings.
The attitude of the Scots contrasted sharply with that of most immigrants. According to Frank Waters (The Book of the Hopi, 1963):
"The deeply rooted racial prejudice of the Anglo-white Americans against the Red Indians, virtually a national psychosis, is one of the strangest and most terrifying phenomena in all history. It has no parallel throughout the Western Hemisphere. The hot-blooded Spanish and Portuguese freebooters had achieved the conquests of Mexico, Central America, and South America in the name of the crown and the cross. Yet for all their cruelties they had no racial prejudice. From the start they intermarried lawfully with subjected Indians, creating a new race, the mestiso. In Canada and the United States the French also mixed blood with the Indians, and the Germans everywhere allied themselves as colonists with the native peoples.
"The Anglo-Protestants were the direct antithesis of other Euro-Americans. Cold-blooded, deeply inhibited, and bound by their Puritan traditions, they began a program of complete extermination of all Indians almost from the day they landed on Plymouth Rock."
At about the time of their marriage Francis began to build a log cabin on land on which he and Sarah would live. The acreage encompassed a spring about which the Indians had known for years. I will let my father take over at this point; I'm quoting from a letter he wrote to me from St. Petersburg, Florida in the late thirties:
"The original Beall 'mansion' stood about a quarter to a half mile from the burial plot, and was a two or three room log cabin. I saw it. Additionally, of course, there were the necessary outhouses, horse and cow lots, etc., but they were gone before my day. Now, that is where Francis Beall started."
...and according to my father, that is where Francis and Sarah lived and had their family. All ten of their children were born at the "standard" rate of one every two years in and about that cabin while Francis, helped by slaves (the principal artists and craftsmen of the South) were building a house, farther up the hill, that was destined (but not planned) to become the Beall Springs Hotel.
Born in the log cabin:
For a slight indication of what resulted from these and subsequent marriages, see Hey, Cous! in the appendix.
The log cabin, even the stone foundations for it and the other buildings Dad mentioned are long-gone from the scene, but the stone-walled Beall Family plot remains. 20th Century surveyors, when they widened and paved Georgia State Route 16 in the fifties or sixties, had to put a sweeping curve in the highway in order to miss the cemetery.
Although I haven't seen it since the middle thirties, what I remember is a stone-walled area with room for three, maybe four rows of four graves each. The plot sloped upward from the gravel road that was there at the time. The graves of Francis and Sarah are in the top row. There is one small grave that probably initiated the need for a family cemetery. It commemorates 5 year-old Edwin, 1816-1821. "Snake-bit", I was told. (There are plenty in the woods and streams--rattlers, water-moccasins, copperheads.)
Francis Beall died on the 19th of February, 1822, just as he had almost completed the family residence. Someone once told me that he was killed in a construction or lumbering accident connected with the building of the house. His father, Mannam, died a year later, followed soon after by his mother, Frances, so Francis did not inherit the Beall Springs land. There is an indication in Mannam's will that some of his land was devised to Francis perhaps other lands or properties to each of the children well before the will was written close to the time of his death. Dad assured me that before the log cabin no structure had ever been built on Beall Springs land except maybe some tepees.
Mannam and Frances aren't buried in the Beall Springs cemetery because they didn't live there. One or two cousins have told me that they lived and probably are buried in or near Washington Ga., and Dad told me that he had a copy of the inscription on his great-grandfather's grave, but it was not found among his papers. Since Mannam was a Revolutionary War veteran his grave might be so marked and therefore easy to find, but I've never been to Washington, Ga.