Location
Tour: Hidden
County: Anson
Coordinates: 35.1255, -80.090.
One of John Colson’s mills was probably at or just to the west (left) of the coordinates, where today’s Pinkston River Road crosses Buffalo Creek.[1] A small but significant skirmish occurred nearby.[2] Some participants likely passed by the mill, either retreating or trying to capture prisoners. However, the exact locations of the mill and battle are unknown, so this site remains “Hidden History.”
John Colson, Entrepreneur
John Colson left England and landed in Wilmington around 1740, along with other family members.[3] Six years later King George III granted him 400 acres on both sides of the Rocky River at its junction with the Yadkin River, a mile-and-a-half north of the coordinates.[4] A two-room building that stood in the fork between the rivers was probably an “ordinary” owned by the family, a tavern that also provided food and perhaps lodging.[5] It served stagecoach and horseback travelers on roads passing north-south and east-west. Together the Colsons operated ferries across the rivers, and two mills. The peninsula between the rivers was such fertile farmland, some call it the state’s “Granary of the Revolution.”[6]
Colson was a magistrate—combination judge and county commissioner—in Anson County, which was much larger at the time.[7] But he was probably the same John “Coulson” who was arrested as a Tory and taken by volunteers to Hillsborough when the rebel Third Provincial Congress met there in 1775. He was “charged with dangerous practices against the Liberties of America,” likely turned in by delegate and neighbor Samuel Spencer. After a committee investigated, including later Declaration of Independence signers Joseph Hewes and William Hooper, congress forced him to respond.
He admitted: “I have been pursuing measures destructive of the Liberties of America in General, and highly injurious to the peace of this Colony; and truly Conscious of the heinousness of my Guilt, do now publickly [sic] confess… and sincerely promise, that I will for the future support a