Richard Holyfield Henderson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Richard Holyfield Henderson (1751–1840), a 6× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial North Carolina, his Quaker parentage, his long lifespan spanning the Revolutionary and antebellum eras, his migration southward to Alabama, and his son James Alexander Henderson. Notable: Quaker heritage and the Henderson family's southward migration pattern.

Richard Holyfield Henderson, born the 4th of February, 1751, along the Reedy Fork of the Tar River in Alamance County, North Carolina, lived an extraordinary span of eighty-nine years, his life bridging the colonial frontier of his youth and the antebellum Deep South of his final days. He died on the 2nd of June, 1840, at Camp Hill in Tallapoosa County, Alabama — a settlement then but a single decade removed from its founding in the wake of the Creek cessions.

He was the son of Richard Holyfield Henderson, called "The Quaker" and styled Judge, whose own life (1710–1789) carried him from Virginia into South Carolina, and of Elizabeth Branson (1715–1788). The Henderson and Branson surnames together bespeak the Quaker dissenting tradition that flowed out of the Pennsylvania and Virginia meetings into the North Carolina Piedmont during the mid-eighteenth century, drawn by inexpensive land and the relative tolerance of the Albemarle and Cape Fear backcountry. The Reedy Fork settlements where Richard was born formed part of this broader Friends' migration, and the surrounding Alamance country would, in his twenty-first year, become the celebrated site of the Regulator uprising of 1771.

Richard's long life carried him through the whole of the American Revolution, the founding of the Republic, the War of 1812, and the great southwestern migration of planters and yeomen alike into the lands opened by treaty and removal in Alabama and Mississippi. His own removal to Tallapoosa County placed him among the earliest generation of settlers in that newly organized region, where he lived out his final years and was laid to rest.

Among his children was James Alexander Henderson (1796–1838), who preceded his father in death by two years and through whom the line descends.

Richard Holyfield Henderson was the compiler's 6× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.