Location
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Coordinates: 36.0170, -81.4978.
Type: Stop
Tour: Wachovia
County: Caldwell
Partial
You will arrive at the entrance to the Fort Defiance home, which is now a private historic site. The site is open limited days of the week, and is not visible from the front gate if closed. Call ahead and time your visit accordingly, if you can. If not, there is room at the entrance to the driveway to park and read this page.
The house, family cemetery, and possible Overmountain campsite can be seen from your vehicle when the site is open. But seeing the interior requires walking over uneven ground and at least a few stairs.
William Lenoir
If you are inside the site, go to the tombstones visible across the driveway from the house and curl behind and around the trees to your left at that point. Walk between the two rows of graves on the other side of the trees (left side coming from the house). The fourth tombstone on the right, the first with a footstone, is Lenoir’s (see the picture below).
Fort Defiance was the post-war home of William Lenoir. Virginia-born Lenoir moved with his family to a plantation outside Tarboro, in Eastern North Carolina, at age 8. His father died six years later, so William was mostly self-educated, teaching himself three other languages and learning business with a math textbook.[1] Lenoir taught for a few years before learning surveying, by apprenticing along Fishing Creek[2] near Tarboro. In 1775 he moved his wife and two enslaved women to Mulberry Fields, now Wilkesboro.
Lenoir became clerk of the Surry County “Committee of Safety,” essentially its new Patriot government. He first served in the county part-time defense force (“