The Joseph Smart Sr. Families of Rutherford County, North Carolina

The Joseph Smart Sr. Families of Rutherford County, North Carolina, is an in-depth study of the Smart Family, traveling back in time to before the Revolutionary War and tracing the life of Joseph Smart Sr. as he travels south down The Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania, takes a wife in Virginia, settles land in western North Carolina and raises a large family; then suffers the tragic and sudden death of his beloved daughter, and lives long enough to see most of his children catch the “pioneer fever” and leave Rutherford County, migrating west to the states of Tennessee, Mississippi, Indiana, Missouri and Texas. Also included in this book is the modern-day, pictorial story, “Finding and Restoring the Smart~Hamrick Family Cemetery,, that chronicles the 2015 discovery of the century-lost Smart Family Cemetery and the work performed to reclaim the final resting place of Joseph Sr. and his family from a dense forest landscape. In the story, “Who is Buried in the Smart~Hamrick Family Cemetery,” those known to be laid to rest there are catalogued with headstone/field stone pictures and genealogy information. From the bucolic farmlands of western North Carolina in the mid-1700s, to the mountains of Tennessee and life with the Cherokee, to the wild and war-torn Texas frontier of the mid-1800s, The Joseph Smart Sr. Families of Rutherford County, North Carolina, is a comprehensive and historical telling of the pioneering “Smart Families,” their wanderlust, their fascinating lives, and their remarkable migration throughout our country.