Author: Geoff Baggett
Walter Billingsley – Soldier & Indian Spy – Virginia Continentals & North Carolina Militia

Walter Billingsley was born July 14, 1761, in Baltimore, Maryland to James and Elizabeth Crabtree Billingsley. The family relocated from Maryland to Guilford County, North Carolina around 1765.

According to family tradition, in the spring of 1776, Walter’s father was hanged by a band of Tories in his own yard in Guilford County. The exact cause of his murder remains unknown. Walter, his sister, Martha, and younger brother, Basil, all witnessed the event.

In 1780, Walter enlisted in an undesignated Virginia regiment at the American encampment at Salisbury, North Carolina. He was assigned to make cartridges and perform other training tasks. He was called upon to march and join the forces of Abraham Buford at the Waxhaw Meeting House, several miles from Salisbury. The following day, Walter was a participant in Buford’s Defeat, also known as the Waxhaws Massacre, in northern South Carolina. He made his escape into the woods after the battle. After linking up with North Carolina militia forces, he was traveling to link up with American forces under General Gates, but was captured by Tories in late May 1780.

He spent almost eight months in captivity in Camden, and was evacuated with the British Army in January, 1781, in the direction of the Battle of Cowpens. During the battle, he was encamped with the other prisoners in range of the sound of the guns. Following the historic British loss at Cowpens, Walter and several other prisoners were dragged by their captors through the forests and fields of North Carolina in the infamous “Race to the Dan River.” Shortly after Generals Daniel Morgan and Nathanael Greene made their escape across the Dan, Walter made his escape. It was March, 1781, just days before the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. He joined in with a group of North Carolina militiamen and actually took part as a combatant in that tremendous battle. Immediately after the fighting, he located his brother, James, a captain in the Rowan County Regiment, who secured a furlough for him from General Butler, and subsequently sent him home.

Later that same year, in November, 1781, Walter traveled over the Appalachian Mountains into Sullivan County (now Tennessee). He served as an Indian Spy and Scout under Captain Robert Kyle of Kyle’s Station, and under the overall command of Col. John Sevier. He served in various missions against the Cherokee, including the final Cherokee Campaign of 1782 under Colonel Sevier.

Walter Billingsley became something of a wanderer after the Revolutionary War. He married a woman named Mary Sumner in 1787. She was 17, and he was age 26. He appears on the 1790 and 1800 census in the Ninety Six District in South Carolina. Then, in 1802, his name appears on various land records and tax lists in Jackson County, Tennessee, near the Kentucky border. He is on records there through the year 1817.

Walter appears to have lived out his later days in the former Cherokee lands of east Tennessee. He appeared on the 1820 U.S. census in Franklin County, Tennessee, on the edge of ceded Cherokee territory. In 1830, he was in McMinn County, Tennessee. This was the last census in which his wife, Mary, appeared. He was on the 1840 census in Bradley County, Tennessee, in the home of his youngest son, Jesse. The final document that names him is a probate inventory in McMinn County in 1843. Walter likely died sometime in the mid-1840’s, right around the age of eighty-five.

He made application for a pension on September 8, 1932, in McMinn County, Tennessee. However, in an all-too-common travesty of justice during that time period, his pension was denied because he offered “… insufficient proof of six months of actual military service in an embodied corps or organization …” This, despite the fact that he languished in a British prison in Camden for more than six months.

In early 2017, local historians in Bradley County located two unmarked graves that they believe belong to Walter Billingsley and his wife, Mary. On October 28, 2017, the Tennessee Society sponsored a grave marking in his honor. Descendant Geoff Baggett, SAR Compatriot from Kentucky, financed a headstone marker for the site. Interestingly, Walter Billingsley is the “hero” of Compatriot Baggett’s fourth novel in his Patriots of the American Revolution Series. The book is entitled, “Soldiers and Martyrs.”