Biography

Perhaps no one better represents the American Revolution in North Carolina than Joseph Winston. During a 1763 expedition against Native Americans as a Virginia teen, he was shot twice in an ambush. He carried one of those bullets in his body for life. In the early 1770s, he bought land in modern Stokes County, northeast of Winston-Salem, and became a farmer. He was elected in 1775 as a delegate to the rebel provincial congresses, was a member of the county committee of safety, and later became the registrar of deeds.

As a major and then lieutenant-colonel in the county militia, Winston served in every major Revolutionary campaign in N.C. He helped round up the defeated Loyalists (“Tories”) just after the 1776 Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge.[1] That summer he was in the campaign against the Cherokees with Virginia forces, and helped negotiate the Treaty of Long Island with them in modern Tennessee. His force operated against Tories in the region under Col. Benjamin Cleveland, and at the Battle