Joseph Martin (general) - Early Life

Early Life

The son of planter Capt. Joseph Martin Sr. and his wife Susannah Chiles, great-granddaughter of Colonel John Page, Joseph Martin Jr. was raised in a Virginia gentry family in Albemarle County. His father, Joseph Martin Sr., was the son of a wealthy British merchant in Bristol, England, who sent his son to Virginia as supercargo aboard his ship the Brice. When Martin Sr. son wrote his English father that he planned to marry the daughter of a common Virginia colonist – an inferior in the eyes of his English father, whose other son would become Mayor of Bristol – the enraged father wrote back disinheriting young Joseph Martin Sr., who never returned to England.

Joseph Martin Sr. was "a perfect Englishman", recalled his grandson later, "large and athletic; bold, daring, self-willed and supercilious. And in him was depicted, as my father has told me, the most complete form of the aristocracy of the British government." Capt. Martin arrived in Albemarle County in 1745, one of the original patentees. He settled on a 2,200-acre (8.9 km2) land grant nearby neighbors Dr. Thomas Walker, Peter Jefferson, James Madison, and the Lewis and Clark clans—all connections that would be useful to his rambunctious son.

But Joseph Martin Jr., the son of the English immigrant, was not cut out for a Virginia gentry planter's life. As a youth, Joseph Martin ran off from an apprenticeship during the French and Indian War of 1756, and joined the army at Fort Pitt, where he served alongside another Virginia youth, Thomas Sumter. Following his early army service, Martin lit out for the rigors of the frontier, where he dressed in buckskin and was an early real estate speculator, trapper and fur trader and Indian fighter.

Martin's youthful adventures on the frontier were grist for later stories. One biographer described the runaway carpenter's apprentice as "wild, undisciplined, intellectually lazy, and shiftless." Treating school as "a joke, often running away," Martin "sometimes combined with other reprobates to form a neighborhood menace." But recalling his father years later, Martin's own son William noted the General's mental acuity made him stand out in a family noted for its "mental mediocrity." Eventually the soldiering, trapping and Indian fighting transformed the young Martin into a fearsome explorer.

Among Martin's earliest excursions on the frontier was one made on behalf of family friend Dr. Thomas Walker. In 1769, Martin journeyed to Powell's Valley to attempt a settlement, a full 100 miles (160 km) ahead of any previous settlement. Martin and his party – which included his son Brice and Mordecai Hord – had hoped to secure the 21,000 acres (85 km2) granted to Dr. Walker and themselves. Martin's Creek in the region where Joseph Martin attempted his settlement is today named for him. (Martin's Station, as the settlement was known, became a well-known stopover for westward-bound settlers for many years.) The settlement ultimately failed, which some historians have blamed on the inability of the Loyal Company to defend its title to the tract.

But in the foray to Powell's Valley, Martin had established his credentials as a hard-bitten explorer. Daniel Boone and his party of explorers were stunned in 1769 when, upon their arrival in Powell's Valley, they discovered that Martin and his 20-man party had beaten them there. It was beyond the farthest reaches that Boone and his long hunters had explored. Following Martin's feat, the Albemarle County native became a force to be reckoned with in exploration circles, even though Martin's settlement was soon broken up by the Cherokees, who pushed back against the westernmost settlement yet attempted.

By 1775, when North Carolina merchant Richard Henderson purchased an immense tract of land from the Cherokees to found the short-lived Transylvania colony, in what is today Kentucky, Henderson turned to Martin as his agent in Powell's Valley. It was one of several such roles that the explorer, accustomed to trapping, longhunting and traveling in the Appalachian wilderness inhabited by the Cherokee, would hold over the years.