Biography

Virginia-born William Lenoir moved with his family to a plantation outside Tarboro at age 8. His father died six years later, and William was mostly self-educated, teaching himself business with a math textbook.[1] Lenoir taught for a few years before learning surveying. In 1775 he moved his wife and two enslaved women to Mulberry Fields (now Wilkesboro). Lenoir became clerk of the county “Committee of Safety,” essentially its new Patriot government. He first served in the Surry County militia the next year, as a lieutenant on a campaign towards Wilmington, and then in the Cherokee Campaign. Lenoir is valued by historians for the diary he kept of his war experiences.[2] When Wilkes County was created in 1777, he was named justice of the peace, a position he held the rest of his life along with a number of other county positions. He saw little combat for the next few years, until the 1780 Overmountain Campaign in which he received minor wounds at the