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After the death of the saint the family became Huguenots, and on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 the direct ancestor of the Seviers of whom I am writing fled from France and settled in London, where he is said to have engaged in trade and prospered.
We could not recognize in Custer and Herkomer, Kuster and Herckheimer, were not the ancestral history of the two generals already known; and in the backwoods, a man often loses sight of his ancestors in a couple of generations. Giving to the backwoods society such families as the Seviers and Lenoirs. The Huguenots, like the Germans, frequently had their names Anglicized.
The Boones and the Bryans, the Robertsons, the Seviers, the Shelbys, the men who opened up the West and shaped the destiny of its inhabitants, were genuine freemen, with a sense of law and order as inseparable from liberty. They would follow a Washington but not a Hermon Husband.
The Seviers were of French descent. The family name in France was Xavier, and they originally came from Xavier, a town at the foot of the Pyrenees, in Navarre, which was the birthplace of the famous ecclesiastic and missionary St. Francis Xavier.
Such was the case with the Clarks, Boons, Seviers, Shelbys, Robertsons, Logans, Cockes, Crocketts, etc.; many of whose descendants it has been my good-fortune personally to know.
Some of the younger Seviers, coming upon this valley on a hunting-expedition, had induced their father to remove to it; and here, "higher up the river, on its north side, and near the closing in of a ridge," he had built a roomy log mansion, a portion of which was still standing in 1844. The sons had erected dwellings lower down the river, and nearer the "Watauga Old Fields."
Among them, however, were some who had received the best education then afforded by the colonies. Prominent among these were the Seviers, a father and four sons, who some time before had emigrated from Shenandoah County, Virginia, and settled about thirty miles farther north, near what is now Bristol, in Tennessee.
Then then" the major's thin, powerful old hands grasped the arm of his chair "we found him in the twilight under the clump of cedars that crowned the hill which overlooked Deep-mead Farm broad acres of land that the Seviers had had granted them from Virginia dead, his pistol under his shoulder and a smile on his face.
The Erse, Welsh, and Gaelic immigrants to America are just as distinct from the English, just as "foreign" to them, as are the Scandinavians, Germans, Hollanders, and Huguenots often more so. Such early families as the Welsh Shelbys, and Gaelic McAfees are no more English than are the Huguenot Seviers or the German Stoners.
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