Recorded deeds in Buncombe County, North Carolina, tell interesting facts about John Dillard and his family who resided there some thirty-two years. That is longer than John Dillard lived in any other place, including Culpepper and Pittsylvania Counties, Virginia, Washington County, Tennessee or Rabun County, Georgia. Only Flat Creek deeds will be herein considered, and we will leave other artifacts of John Dillard in Buncombe County until another day.
The proof that we have established the same John Dillard who lived and died in Rabun County, Georgia is in the very last deed he executed in Buncombe County in 1826 to Adam Miller in Deed Book 24, Page 399, in which he was described as "John Dillard of the State of Georgia, County of Rabun". In fact, John Dillard in his Revolutionary pension application represented that he lived in Buncombe County, North Carolina.
An 1821 deed in which John Dillard sold adjoining property to William Pickens in Deed Book 19, Page 358, identifies a 100 acre tract of land in the Flat Creek section of Buncombe County as his original homeplace which he acquired as a land grant from the State of North Carolina in 1789 when it was Burke County, which became a part of Buncombe County in 1791. The Pickens sale makes John's departure into Rabun County about 1821 most probable, with the Miller sale coming five years later.
Flat Creek is a rural community still labeled by that name lying east of present U. S. Highway 23, about ten miles north of present Asheville, North Carolina. It consists of gently rolling hills in a large plain surrounded by higher mountains in the far distance. It is much like the landscape of the Little Tennessee Valley of Rabun County and the wide bottom lands of the Nulachucky River in then Washington County (now Unicoi), Tennessee to which John Dillard was apparently strongly attracted.
Starting with the original 1789 homeplace, John Dillard added a 100 acre tract for a consideration of "50 shillings for every 100" acres in 1799 "lying south of his old survey" (Buncombe County Deed Book 4, Page 347), a 60 acre tract "beginning on his hickory north corner by William Dillard's house on Strother's
What is more interesting is who owned land next to John Dillard's homeplace. Thomas Dillard, beginning in 1806 and continuing through 1808, purchased 220 acres of Flat Creek land in three deeds, one of which was witnessed by William Dillard, and which appeared to touch John Dillard's property (Deed Book 7, Page 650; Deed Book 3, Page 396 and Deed Book 3, Page 461). By 1810, all of the Thomas Dillard land had been sold to third parties, in that he is said to have migrated to Arkansas.
William Dillard, who married Sarah Gregory, a daughter of William Gregory, acquired through his wife's family a 105 acre tract at Flat Creek in 1806 in Deed Book A, Page 311. This tract was called for in John Dillard's 1808 deed as adjoining property. John Dillard was a witness to this 105 acre deed. This property was sold in 1812, the probable date when William Dillard migrated with his young family to Knox County, Kentucky and later to Greene County, Missouri.
An 1812 deed is found where John Dillard, Jr. and James Gregory, described as then of "Knox County, Kentucky", sold out to Zachariah Candler their 200 acres adjoining the original John Dillard homeplace (Deed Book E, Page 74). The 1812 deed, (which is the same land John Dillard, Jr.'s father purchased from Candler in 1820 as above noted) mentions that John Dillard, Jr. acquired this property by land grant from the state at an undisclosed date. This land grant is not indexed and may have never been recorded. It is reported that John Dillard, Jr., after living in Knox County, Kentucky, and Monroe County, Tennessee (he owned recorded real estate there, too) finally resided until his death in Cass County, Georgia near present Calhoun, Georgia, survived by his wife, Rhoda Lee Dillard, and many children.
Finally in 1814, James Dillard, then age twenty-one, purchased 100 acres from a neighbor, John Strother, at Flat Creek. This land appears to be contiguous to the tracts of land which John Dillard purchased in 1794 and 1810. No record is indexed in Buncombe County to whom or when James Dillard sold this property after he, with his wife, Sally Barnard, moved to Rabun County, Georgia, with his father, John.
We may not know the circumstances of why Thomas, William and John Dillard, Jr. left their Dillard kin at Flat Creek, but we can safely conclude that by 1821, John Dillard, then 66 years of age, probably decided it was better to leave his Buncombe County of thirty-two years and follow the younger children into Rabun County, Georgia, rather than be left behind without any of his children in Buncombe County, North Carolina.