{"id":6782,"date":"2025-05-30T19:33:08","date_gmt":"2025-05-30T23:33:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/?p=6782"},"modified":"2025-05-30T19:33:11","modified_gmt":"2025-05-30T23:33:11","slug":"a-history-mystery-revisited-was-sgt-lawrence-everhart-ever-from-lovettsville","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/a-history-mystery-revisited-was-sgt-lawrence-everhart-ever-from-lovettsville\/","title":{"rendered":"A \u201cHistory Mystery\u201d\u00a0revisited: Was\u00a0Sgt. Lawrence Everhart ever\u00a0\u201cfrom\u201d\u00a0Lovettsville?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Seven years ago, in June  2018, we published one of our periodic \u201cHistory Mysteries,\u201d<\/a> trying to unravel with legend of Revolutionary War hero Sgt. Lawrence Everhart. The \u201cmystery\u201d in this case, was that Sgt. Everhart was claimed by both Lovettsville, in Loudoun County, Virginia, and by Middletown, in Frederick County, Maryland, where he lived most of his life, and is buried.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u00a0pointed to\u00a0Yetive Weatherly\u2019s book\u00a0Lovettsville: The German Settlement\u00a0\u2013 the most thorough history of Lovettsville \u2013whereinthe section on \u201cLovettsville\u2019s Revolutionary War Heroes\u201d (page 18) features two such heroes: Lawrence Everhart, and Johannes Axline. A letter quoted by Mrs. Weatherly refers to\u00a0\u201cLaurence Everhart who was indeed from Lovettsville.\u201d\u00a0The quoted\u00a0letter continued: \u201cHe was the first born son of Christian Everhart who was born February 13, 1720 in Pfaltz, Germany, and who came to Loudoun County around 1764. Christian Everhart\u2019s son Johannes Lorenz Everhart, called Lawrence, was among the first Virginians to enlist\u2026.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We concluded that Frederick County had the far stronger claim on Everhart. Although Lawrence had leased land here after the War, in the 1790s, from Adam Axline, and had paid taxes on the land and on \u201cpersonal property\u201d of six horses and one or two enslaved blacks, the bulk of the available evidence showed him living in Frederick County for all of his life, since his family emigrated from the Rheinland Palatinate in Germany in 1764.(Court records in Frederick also showed him freeing his slaves in 1795 and 1799.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The \u201dnew\u201d evidence<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In the time since I wrote the \u201cHistory Mystery\u201d piece in 2018, some more documentation has come to light.  Last year, the Frederick Chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution (named the \u201cSergeant Lawrence Everhart Chapter,\u201d which I joined in 2017), asked our Chapter Genealogist Kenneth Coppage to undertake a new study of Everhart\u2019s life.  This was triggered by the upcoming 270th<\/sup> anniversary of his birth in May 1755, and also the need to attempt to resolve some of the inevitable discrepancies in his life story, to separate legend and fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coppage\u2019s research can be summarized as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Johannes Lorenz Eberhard (Lawence Everhart) was born on May 5, 1755, in Hessheim in the Rheinland-Pfalz in what is now Germany. In 1764, his parents brought him to America, and they settled near a relative in Frederick County,\u00a0Maryland. On August 1, 1776, Lawrence enlisted in the Maryland Flying Camp and was engaged in battles in New York and New Jersey. He returned home in the Spring of 1777, where he remained until Fall 1778, when he enlisted in Col. William Washington\u2019s regiment of cavalry. He served in the Southern Theatre from 1779 through the Siege of Yorktown in October 1781, including being wounded in January 1781 in South Carolina, and then saving the life of Col. William Washington at the Battle of Cowpens. Lawrence Everhart died at Middletown on August 2, 1840.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Coppage\u2019s research convinced him that Everhart likely did live in Loudoun County in the early 1790s. In addition to the property and tax records cited above \u2013 which show that Everhart leased 237 acres of land here, and paid taxes here in the 1790\u2019s \u2013Everhart himself stated in an 1834 court proceeding that, \u201cwith the exception of three or four years since the revolution,\u201d he had always resided in Frederick County. This almost certainly refers to the first half of the 1790s when he was leasing and working land in Loudoun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not surprising, as he had family ties here.  His parents had moved to Loudoun around 1787, and lived here the rest of their lives; they are buried at the old German Reformed (St. James) Cemetery.  Many if not all of his brothers and sisters came here as well, and are buried at the Reformed and the Lutheran Cemeteries, and other burial places in the area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps even more important, is that the Everhart family had been here since 1765, when a Jacob Everhart purchased the mill on Dutchman\u2019s Creek which was known for many years as \u201cEverhart\u2019s Mill.\u201d Because \u201cJacob\u201d was a frequently-used name among the Everharts in Germany, we have been unable to determine for certain if Jacob was a brother of Lawrence\u2019s father Christian, or a cousin.  (Various genealogical sources say one or the other.)  The mill stayed in the Everhart family for many decades; it was destroyed in the flood of 1889.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So in conclusion, we can confidently say that although Sgt. Everhart was not \u201cfrom\u201d here, he did have many ties here, before and after the War. We can justly be proud of this Revolutionary War hero\u2019s connections ties to Lovettsville and the German Settlement. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seven years ago, in June  2018, we published one of our periodic \u201cHistory Mysteries,\u201d trying to unravel with legend of Revolutionary War hero Sgt. Lawrence Everhart. The \u201cmystery\u201d in this case, was that Sgt. Everhart…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6785,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,35,89],"tags":[260,261],"class_list":["post-6782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history-mystery","category-lovettsville-history","category-revolutionary-war","tag-history-mistory","tag-lawrence-everhart"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6782"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6789,"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6782\/revisions\/6789"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}