Williamston Women Among Those Involved in the Edenton Tea Party
Williamston residents, Frances Cathcart Johnston, and Margaret (Peggy) Cathcart McKenzie were among the 51 participants of the Edenton Tea Party of October 25, 1774.
The two sisters were the issue of Dr. William Cathcart and Prudence West.
Dr. Cathcart emigrated directly from Scotland and settled in Bertie County in 1737. His first marriage to Penelope Maule, perhaps the wealthiest woman in the province at the time gave him a large, landed estate. His subsequent marriage to Prudence West only added to this great wealth, the couple establishing their home on a plantation at the upper end of the Roanoke River in Northampton County, inherited from her grandfather, former N.C. Governor Thomas Pollock.
Contemporary sources reveal Frances and Peggy enjoyed the best education afforded women in the region at that time. In 1767, leaving Edenton enroute to his home in western North Carolina, North Carolina’s first Attorney General, Waightstill Avery refenced in his diary, now located in Wisconsin Historical Society’s Draper Manuscript Collection, Dr. Cathcart as “a gentn. of extraordinary fine sense and great reading,” while the girls were blessed with “the three greatest motives to be courted: Beauty, Wit and Prudence, and Money; . . . [they were] toasted in most parts of the Province.”
Dr. Cathcart assisted in bringing Daniel Earle, a noted religious figure, from England to North Carolina to serve Edenton’s St. Paul Church. Earle subsequently established a classical school for boys and in turn personally tutored the Cathcart sisters. Interestingly, Earle supported the revolutionary movement and presided over a meeting to that effect in Edenton on August 23, 1774. He was owner of the famed Bandon Plantation and established the area’s first shad and herring fisheries.
Frances married Samuel Johnston on May 29, 1770, and supported his many occupations as North Carolina legislator, U.S. Senator, North Carolina Governor, and Superior Court Judge. Samuel Johnston was also the first person elected by Congress as President of the United States under its first form of government but declined the office. In 1765, the Johnstons bought Hayes Plantation outside Edenton but relocated in the early 1790s to the Hermitage, a farmstead bordering the southern edge of nearby Williamston. Johnston himself established the towns first postal service. Out of nine children born to the couple, only four matriculated to adulthood, one son, Gabriel, having an intellectual disability. Based on the correspondence of her husband now located in UNC Chapel Hill’s Southern Historical Collection, Frances’s health likewise suffered much in her later years, accounting in part for the family’s move to higher ground in Williamston. While unfortunately no images of Frances survive, a needlepoint fire screen attributed to her is currently found in the North Carolina Museum of History. Frances died January 23, 1801. Her surviving son James Cathcart Johnston is responsible for construction of the present Hayes Farm plantation house in 1817, a National Landmark and recent addition to North Carolina Historic Sites.
Peggy married William McKenzie, one of the founding fathers of Williamston. The couple were unable to conceive children but later adopted the young sons of William’s deceased sister Janet McKenzie Clark and Scottish-American merchant Colin Clark, reputedly lost at sea. Raised on William McKenzie’s Skewarkey Plantation on the western edge of Williamston, the Clark brothers in turn became merchant planters, establishing the agriculturally rich communities of Hamilton in Martin County and Scotland Neck in Halifax County. Peggy died October 11, 1823.
Biographical information gathered in part from the author’s personal research, Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, University of North Carolina Press and Samuel Johnston Papers, Southern Historical Collection, UNC Chapel Hill and Historical North Carolina Newspapers Database.
Resources:
https://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/rev-daniel-earle/