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Col. John A. Zachary
Written By: Jane Gibson Nardy - Cashiers Historical Society | Issue: 2018/11 - November
Not very long after the Cashiers Historical Society was formed in 1996, I received a phone call from Ben Zachary, one of my many Zachary family cousins, a descendant of Col. John A. Zachary’s eldest son, Alfred Zachary.
Ben, like most of Alfred’s descendants, lived in the Brevard area. He had learned about the new Cashiers Historical Society and wanted to turn over to the society a collection of the personal papers of Col. Zachary that on the death of the colonel in 1872 had gone to his eldest son, Alfred. Following an old English tradition, at Alfred’s death in 1892 the papers went to his eldest son and so on down through the generations.
In addition to the papers were the colonel’s prized grandfather clock and his Bible that listed the births, deaths, and marriages of family members. The grandfather clock is still today in the Transylvania County home of one of Alfred’s descendants but the Bible, stored in an attic of another cousin, was lost in a fire that destroyed that home.
Fortunately, prior to the invention of such a thing as Xerox copies, a Zachary lady, wanting to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, had carefully hand copied all the family vital statistics out of the Bible and had a Notary Public at a bank verify that it was an exact copy before sending it to the DAR Library in Washington, DC where it remains today.
So, when in 1996 Ben Zachary asked me if the Cashiers Historical Society would assume custody of Col. John A. Zachary’s personal papers, I couldn’t say “Yes” quickly enough. It was something an historian could barely dream of. Starting with Alfred Zachary, each owner of the papers added to the collection some of their own papers they considered important. There were obituaries, cut from newspapers and even some snapshots of family members. An Illinois cousin of mine, one of Mordecai Zachary’s descendants, came to my house a few years ago and photographed every item in Col. John’s collection.
The document that accompanies this article is dated 1816 and was sent to Col. John Zachary from Raleigh, when he was appointed a Captain in the First Regiment of the Surry County, North Carolina, Militia. He later was appointed colonel in that militia, a title he carried with him throughout the remainder of his life.
