[5] After a disastrous winter and attacks by Native Americans, all the Bryan family survivors abandoned the station and returned to the Yadkin River Valley in August 1780.

1733) along with his brothers and a settler party from Rowan County, North Carolina, entered this frontier land in the spring of 1776 and began pitching the station.

The parallelogram was distinctively elongated, with its width considerably shorter than its length, a design choice tailored to its inhabitants' desire to have a handsome amount of space in between the roughly forty or so cabins that would eventually be constructed.

William, who came from an influential Virginia land-owning family, declined an offer from the Royalist North Carolina government to build and lead a Tory militia as a commissioned Lieutenant Colonel.

As the Revolutionary War escalated, the British increasingly incentivized and supported native tribes, particularly those north of the Ohio river, in driving out the influx of settlers into this land westward of the Appalachians.

William's sons, Daniel and Samuel, who had been previously branded as Tories by the courts of Rowan, served during the revolutionary war on behalf of the Patriots, receiving pensions for their service against pro-British native tribes in Kentucky.

[10] The most important attack on the settlement occurred in August 1782 during the American Revolutionary War, when they were besieged by a force consisting of warriors from the Wyandot, Lenape and Shawnee tribes, along with a detachment of Butler's Rangers led by Captain William Caldwell and Simon Girty.

Historian Ranck asserts that all the important contemporary writers convey this impression: For the men to go to the spring would be to do exactly as the savages desired and devote the garrison to destruction.

If the women went in accordance with their regular early morning custom, the enemy would be confirmed in the delusion that their presence in force was undiscovered, and would withhold their fire to insure the complete success of their plans.

The Lexington chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution erected a monument in August 1896 to commemorate the importance of a nearby spring in helping preserve the fort from the attack by Indians and Canadians.

[citation needed] Johnson would later be credited in all the earliest accounts of the War of 1812's Battle of the Thames with the slaying of Tecumseh, using a pistol loaded by his orderly Capt.