The Royal Grant: Oil Camp Creek in The Foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains

By Kathleen Nelson

This short nonfiction story follows five generations of the Jones-Hart families, who owned property in the valley of Oil Camp Creek in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, from 1797 until 1957. This mountainous property was a Royal Grant Award to Thomas Jones for free bounty land for his service in the Revolutionary War from 1775 to 1783. The story depicts events about these families during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War II. This 160-year era of the Royal Grant property ended following the tragic death of Earle L. Hart, a Chicago businessman, an avid horseback rider, and the owner of a ranch he established in the valley during World War II, which gave life again to a deserted and desolate valley in Upstate South Carolina.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796042733

Kathleen Nelson

This is the first book for older children by UK writer Kathleen Nelson.

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Copyright © 2019 by Kathleen Nelson.

ISBN:                  Softcover                        978-1-7960-4274-0

                            eBook                             978-1-7960-4273-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 06/26/2019

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To my beloved and talented nephews and nieces.

The young father sat on the front steps of the old Hart house and told a story to his daughter while whittling on a piece of freshly cut wood. As the story goes, the Cherokees roamed the mountains of Upstate South Carolina for thousands of years, particularly the Pinnacle and Green Mountain areas. In these pristine mountains of multitude mountain laurel thickets, they hunted game, great herds of buffalo, bear, and beaver and camped on the banks of the one and only small creek. On the Pinnacle Mountain side of this creek, they had a favorite campsite where they roasted their game over the open fire pits built along the edge of the creek. When they roasted bear, the bear oil ran down and floated on the water of the appropriately named the Oil Camp Creek.

Above this campsite up the steep Pinnacle mountainside, massive gray rocks jutted out like a cliff hanging freely over the entry to a cave that reached far into the dark mountainside. As legend has it, this cave was known as the Cherokees’ old bear cave.

In 1755, the Cherokees regretfully signed a treaty with the state of South Carolina and never again roamed these pristine mountains. Soon they departed on their long and dangerous journey westward, famously known as the Trail of Tears.

In the 1700s, approximately the same time of the departure of the Cherokees, young Solomon Jones I sailed the stormy seas from Wales, England, to America and landed on the shores of Virginia. His