Gideon Blackburn was born in Augusta County, Virginia - on the cusp of the Revolution and three years before his community expressed their desire for liberty in their Augusta Resolves at Staunton. Augusta was the county that George Washington's famous (unconfirmed) "if defeated everywhere else" quote was based upon.
Gideon's grandfather William Blackburn was from Ballymena and was onboard one of the first big Ulster-Scots emigration waves, leaving in 1719 and settling at Yorktown. His son Robert Blackburn was among those to enter the Shenandoah Valley in the 1750s - he married Sarah Ritchie. Gideon was born in 1772.
The Tennessee Encyclopedia has this amazing biography of Gideon – pioneer settler of Tennessee, Presbyterian minister, educator, missionary, whiskey smuggler ...
"a staunch ally of the powerful acculturationist chief Doublehead, to whom he offered sanctuary shortly before Cherokee nationalists assassinated him in 1807"
... a friend of Andrew Jackson, purchaser and liberator of the Black slave John Gloucester, whom Gideon tutored and who later became the first African American Presbyterian minister in America. Gloucester was the first African American to enrol at Greeneville College / Tusculum University in Tennessee, which was co-founded by Ulsterman Samuel Doak.
• a detailed bio of Gideon Blackburn, written in 1934 by VM Queener for the East Tennessee Historical Society, is online here.
• An article in the Journal of Presbyterian History (Vol 5, Fall 1974) begins:
"Gideon Blackburn was a child of the southwestern frontier. Born in Augusta County, Va., on 27 August, 1772, to Scotch-Irish parents with little or no property, the boy was early orphaned and lived with his paternal grandfather until the latter's death when Gideon was about twelve years old. Thereafter he lived with an unmarried maternal uncle, Gideon Richie, a manual laborer who
like so many others of his class and age followed the current of migration toward the West. When the younger Gideon was about fifteen, he moved with this uncle to Washington County, Tennessee, then within the bounds of North Carolina. About three years later the two moved seventy miles further west, to Jefferson County, Tennessee".
(PS: in the trio of photos above I have used this image of Doublehead's brother, which has been used as the basis of recent depictions of Doublehead himself).
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