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Sandy Creek Association: Joseph Maddock - Part IV

-Joseph Maddock and his wife Rachel followed the migration south to the Eno River Valley in Orange County and was operating a water gristmill on the west bank of the Eno by August 1755.

- Both Maddock and his wife Rachel were of prominent Quaker ancestry, and Maddock quickly assumed a position of leadership among both the Eno Valley Quakers and those of Cane Creek. He was an organizer and overseer of the Eno Preparative Meeting of Friends.

- Maddock was a miller, horticulturalist, and carpenter who became the leader in the community

-Maddock’s Mill had been selected as a gathering place for the Sandy Creek Association to discuss their grievances in 1766 with county officials. According to Maddock family tradition, Joseph was not actually consulted about the choice of his mill as a meeting place and afterwards constantly feared confiscation of his mill and property.

- Maddock quickly made contact with a Georgia land agent, Leroy Hammond, and on 1 Sept. 1767 a vanguard of Orange County Quakers, led by Joseph Stubbs, Maddock's son-in-law, petitioned the royal governor of Georgia, Sir Joseph Wright, to reserve 12,000 acres for them on Sweetwater Creek, St. Paul's Parish, in Columbia County. Later, the reserve was enlarged to 40,000 acres. Maddock himself sold his mill and 20 acres of surrounding "Mill Lands" to Colonel Thomas Hart in November 1767.

- At least 132 families, and possibly more, followed Maddock to take up residence on the reserved lands in eastern Georgia. There, new homes, and mills were built, and a new town, Wrightsborough, was laid out on Town Creek.

- The migrant Quakers, however, had failed to take the Creek Indians into account, and continued Indian attacks on their settlement and crushing losses of their cattle and horses as well as violent guerrilla raids finally forced them to abandon Wrightsborough and their great reserve and to search for peaceable homes in Indiana.

- Maddock himself remained in Georgia and died ca 1796, the site of his grave is unknown.

Research courtesy of Mary Claire Engstrom

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