Colonel Samuel Barton (May 1749 – January 1810) was a pioneer, frontiersman, and Patriot of the American Revolution who is remembered primarily for his role in the exploration, governance, and settlement of the Cumberland frontier that became Nashville, Tennessee. Little is known with certainty about his early life. Family tradition holds that he was born in Virginia and was bound out as an apprentice while still young, after his father returned to England on business and was lost at sea. Modern y-DNA testing of a male descendant of Barton has indicated that this branch of the Barton family belongs to a lineage whose earliest known member in America was Lewis Barton of Maryland, suggesting mid‑Atlantic colonial roots that preceded Samuel’s movement into Virginia and the western backcountry.
As a young man, Barton moved between his native Virginia and the trans-Appalachian frontier that would later form Tennessee. By 1774 he was already active as a ranger and Indian fighter, serving in Lord Dunmore’s War against Native American forces on the western borders of Virginia. With the outbreak of the American Revolution, he mustered into Continental service in Virginia in June 1775. He served as a sergeant in Morgan’s Rifles of the 7th Virginia Regiment, an elite corps of riflemen renowned for their marksmanship and backwoods skills. His experience as an explorer, hunter, and frontiersman made him an effective soldier in this specialized unit. Civil records from Botetourt County, Virginia, document his marriage to Martha Robertson on March 10, 1778, during the Revolutionary period, marking the formal establishment of his family while he was still engaged in military and frontier service.
Following his Revolutionary War service, Barton turned increasingly to the western country then claimed by North Carolina. Drawing on his military training and leadership experience, he joined the effort to settle and defend the Cumberland region. He became one of the early settlers of Fort Nashborough, the stockaded station on the Cumberland River that would evolve into Nashville. His original home, known as Barton Station, was established on Browns Creek at a site now occupied by Lipscomb University in Nashville. Barton engaged extensively in land trading, buying and selling military land grants awarded for Revolutionary War service, and he quickly emerged as a figure of local influence in the fragile frontier community.
Barton’s most enduring civic contribution came through his role in the creation of a framework of self-government for the Cumberland settlements. In May 1780 he joined General James Robertson and other leading settlers in drafting and signing the Cumberland Compact, a written agreement that functioned as an informal constitution for the isolated community. The Compact established rules for land distribution, defense, and local justice and remained the principal governing instrument for the area until Tennessee was admitted as the sixteenth state of the Union in 1796. The settlement was administered under a “Tribunal of Notables,” a body of twelve prominent men among whom Barton was included. In April 1781, just days before the famous “Battle of the Bluffs” at Fort Nashborough, he was wounded by a gunshot to the wrist while defending pioneers from Native American attack, underscoring his active role in the defense of the settlement. In 1846 the historian Albigence Waldo Putnam discovered the original Cumberland Compact in a trunk that had belonged to Barton, further confirming his central place in the early governance of the region.
On January 7, 1783, a second Cumberland Compact was drafted to refine and extend the original agreement, and Barton again was among its signers, one of ten founders who reaffirmed and updated the community’s governing arrangements. That same year, upon the creation of Davidson County in April 1783, he was appointed a justice of the peace and judge of the county court, placing him at the heart of the new county’s judicial and administrative life. In October 1783 he was elected court entry-taker, responsible for recording land claims, and was sworn in as second major of the county militia. By 1784 he had been designated one of the five directors of the fledgling town and served as its treasurer, overseeing its modest but growing finances. In subsequent years he was elevated to the rank of colonel in the militia, reflecting both his military experience and his standing in the community.
In 1798, not yet fifty years of age, Barton withdrew from active civic and political life in Davidson County and relocated with his large family to the area that would become Wilson County, Tennessee, the following year. There he devoted himself to agriculture, land management, and related pursuits. Over the course of his service and land dealings he had accumulated more than 1,000 acres (approximately 4.0 km²), and he established a substantial slave plantation on Jenning’s Fork of Round Lick Creek. In addition to farming his extensive holdings, he took up the work of surveying and appraising land, applying his long frontier experience to the orderly division and valuation of property in the expanding state.
Samuel Barton spent the last twelve years of his life in Wilson County, where he continued to manage his plantation and land interests until his death in January 1810. Although his exact burial site is unknown, his legacy endures in the early legal and political institutions of the Cumberland settlements, in the foundational documents of Nashville’s civic life, and in the memory of his service as a soldier, settler, and local leader on the Tennessee frontier.
Congressional Record
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