My grandfather was David Alexander Dugger, and he was born in 1814 here
in Carter County. He married Elizabeth Bunn[unknown] of
Johnson County, and in 1863 their older son, my uncle Michael Dugger,
was a prisoner in Richmond. And his brother-in-law came home and told
his mother that he wouldn't live a week, that he couldn't crawl across
the floor. They had offered him, if he would swear allegiance to the
Confederate cause, they would turn him loose, but he was so bitter
because his cousin had been home because he was trying to escape and get
to Kentucky to keep from being drafted in the Confederate Army-- they
were all strong Union men from up in the mountains--that he wasn't going
to do that. So she got on a horse with fifteen other people, and they
started to Richmond to try to save their children. And they got over in
North Carolina, and they ran into a band of Confederate guerrillas. That
was people who just raided the country; they didn't belong to any army.
And they shot and killed them all, and then they burned them. And my
grandfather then had five children, and he didn't know what to do with
them, so the Van Huss's[unknown] here took my father--he
was seven years old--and he was reared by them. And this William Dugger
was married three times. He married a Miss Urser([unknown]) the first time, and they had a few children; I don't know how many.
Then she died, and he married
Page 4 a girl from Washington
County, and they had some children. He met her in 1791 and then in 1809
she died, and by his two wives he had eight children. And he married a
woman named Nancy Ann Brown Pierce, and she had eight children of her
own. That made sixteen. And then she and her husband William had seven
more, and that made twenty-three, and the fifteenth child that was born
was my grandfather. He was born in 1814, and he lived to be eighty-seven
years old; he died in 1901, and I was four and a half years old, and I
remembered him because he was a great musician. He was a great fiddler,
and my father was. And my father could sing in church till you could
lift the roof, but none of the rest of us could sing. I had a son that I
named for my father, John F. Dugger, and he's defending one of these
cases in Nashville now. He's a very famous lawyer. He's been Assistant
United States Attorney and state senator for ten years, and he lives in
Morristown. We're very proud of all of those people. On William now,
when they had seven children of their own that made twenty-three, and
Julius Caesar Dugger was supposed to be the first settler of Tennessee
and was known as that for years. And one time somebody wrote an article
to the
Star about thirty-five years ago that he was a
myth; he didn't exist. And my young son, who's a lawyer here in
Elizabethton--he's fifty-two--was about seventeen, and my daughter was
about seventeen or eighteen. And these kids all hollered out, "It's too
bad you don't know who your grandfather was." And they come home, and
they were just as angry as they could be, and it made me angry, too.
Well, I was ignorant about the family, but I had an uncle, David
Alexander, Jr., and I went to see him. He was eighty-five years old.
"Why," he said, "George, this is all wrong. Julius Caesar Dugger never
come here from Virginia. In 1750 he was living in Wilkes County, North
Carolina. We know from the pension records that his oldest son William
was in the Revolutionary War, and he was born there on
Page 5 March 3, 1753. And then his youngest son was Julius C., Jr. The DAR
is named here for him. And he was born there in 1760. And," he said,
"that's all wrong." So I got in my car, and I was going to straighten it
out. It takes adversity sometimes for you to do things that maybe you
ought to bo anyway. So I went to North Wilkesboro, the county seat of
Wilkes County, and I inquired as to the oldest historian, and they gave
me the name of a lawyer who was seventy-five years old and said his
office was up near the courthouse. So I went up there and told him that
I had information that my great-great-grandfather lived over there in
1750, and I gave him his name. "Oh, yes," he said, "he lived down here
on the Dugger Creek. It's a creek that flows into the Yadkin River. And
when I was a boy I went fishing down there, and there was his cabin. The
logs hadn't all rotted yet. But they're long gone now, and there's a
mountain there, and the creek is still called Dugger Creek. It's a
famous fishing place. And the mountain is Dugger Mountain, and he lived
at the foot of that mountain." So I wanted to go down there, and he
said, "You won't see anything, but you can drive down to the Yadkin
River, and then you'll have to walk up there about two miles. And you
follow the creek, and you'll come to the mountain and where it is." So I
did that, and I got that all established that he lived there. And then
he hunted. Daniel Boone was born in Burkes County, Pennsylvania, in
1734, and when he was sixteen years old in 1750, his family moved to the
Yadkin River. And they were the only two white families in that whole
country, the Boone family and the Dugger family. And our tradition of
the family is that he went over there to visit Mr. Dugger, whose
children were small, and he came in with a load of furs that he'd
gathered over here. And he saw that, and he wanted to go hunting with
him, so he came hunting in here, even in 1750. And the whole story,
these old men, and some unusual situation. You see five generations of
people living today;
Page 6 you'll see a little baby and
all of them living. But five generations of my family goes back two
hundred and fifty-nine years. And I've talked to all these state
historians because I got interested in it, and I've spent about thirty
years on it, and I'm writing a book. I've got about five hundred pages,
and I've got a lot of things in it.