[1] At age 20 Ezekiel, recently married, was named clerk of court in the new county of Tryon across the Catawba River, where he and his bride established themselves on a 100-acre (0.40 km2) farm just south of Kings Mountain.
[3] Military service record:[4] Polk adapted with increasing difficulty to the shifting boundary and consequent loss of his position as clerk of court.
But when the regiment was ordered to the coast, Polk balked, marching his men home rather than sacrifice their health, as he put it, for the protection of Lowcountry aristocrats and rice plantation nabobs.
[5] He led his company against Loyalist forces in the battle at Reedy River in December 1775 and the following summer commanded 300 militia in a successful expedition against pro-Loyalist Cherokees.
In late 1776 Polk surrendered his commission in the 3rd Regiment and returned to North Carolina, settling down on a 260-acre (1.1 km2) farm about 10 miles (16 km) below Charlotte, the Mecklenburg County seat.
With the fall of Charleston in 1780 and the subsequent defeat of Horatio Gates at Camden, Lord Charles Cornwallis's triumphant Redcoats marched into North Carolina, the main body encamping a few miles from Polk's farm.
[8] Such an action was not without precedent, and Polk's neighbors evidently did not judge him too harshly, for toward the end of the war the Mecklenburg magistrates, with only two dissenters, elected him sheriff.
The inscription composed for his first wife's tombstone spoke of "a glorious Resurrection to eternal life," but her painful illness and the death of all the children of his second marriage seem to have dampened if not extinguished the bereaved husband's faith.