Page:The McClure Family.djvu/42

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28
McCLURES IN VIRGINIA.

few years before his death, he seems to have had no settled home, living with his sisters and children, frequently walking back and forth from Waynesborough to Old Providence, a distance of twenty-five miles, even when past seventy years of age. Unlike his father and his sons, he owned but little property. In personal appearance, he is said to have been a large, muscular man strickingly like his son John, whose photograph appears in this book.

The only extant reference to him is in a letter to his son John, from Samuel Coursey, dated, Xenia, Ohio, August 11, 1817. "How is your old father? I was going to write to him, but he talked of going away from our house and I did not no where and I thought he would not get it, but tell him I am wide awake and ask him, if he wins as much tobacco off Wm. Hutchison and the rest of the fellows about there as he used to do."

M. T. McClure, his grandson now living (1914) near Spootswood, Va., remembers him very distinctly, and states that while he sometimes imbided too freely he was a constant reader of the Scriptures. He also remembers hearing his grandfather and father talk of the battle of Point Pleasant, and is distinctly of the opinion that his grandfather told him, though only fourteen years old, he was present and participated in the battle of Guilford Courthouse. We know that Colonel George Moffett early in 1781, led a battalion of Augusta county men to North Carolina and participated in this battle. However I find no record of his ever having applied for a pension.

He was a soldier of the War of 1812, as shown by the following documents now in the hands of the writer, also the records of the Departments at Washington:

"Know all men by these presents that I, Andrew McClure, late a soldier in Capt. Thomas Sangster's Company in the Twelfth regiment of Infantry, who was enlisted the first day of March, 1814, to serve during the war and honorably discharged from the army of the United States March 30, 1815, as will more fully appear by my original discharge hereto annexed, have and by these presents, do