U.S., Headstone Application for Military Veteran - Bartlett Sisk, Private North Carolina and Virginia Continental line

This inscription is on the back of Bartlett Sisk's headstone.

Bartlett and brother Daniel enlisted in the "mountainmen militia" and fought in the Revolutionary War. They helped defeat the British at Kings Mountain on the NC/SC border. Daniel was killed there.

Soon after Bartlett returned home to Virginia after the war, his father, Timothy Sisk, deeded his home and 275-acre farm along the Rappahannock River to Bartlett.

Timothy Sisk and/or wife Elizabeth Bartlett had relatives in western North Carolina, some with the name Cisk in Haywood Co., NC (bordering present-day Cocke Co., TN). One researcher thinks their grandchildren, Daniel's widow and children, were living in NC. The Cisks and the European immigrants lived along the Pigeon River in harmony with Cherokee Indians, and even intermarried. Timmy, who probably never entered Cocke County, was living in North Carolina when he died.

Sometime after 1800, after Bartlett sold the farm in Virginia, he and his family—along with his father and mother and brother Martin and sister Rebecca (along with her husband Phillip Jenkins)—moved to Haywood Co., NC (Timothy Jr., about whom little is known, apparently remained in Va.). Bartlett, a moderately wealthy man from the sale of prime real estate in Virginia, began searching for new farmland along the Pigeon River. He acquired 270 acres not far from the mouth of English Creek in present-day Cocke County. In 1805, he and his family, along with his mother (his father and brother Martin remained in NC), moved to the new property. Later, Bartlett purchased two more tracts of land (175 acres and 60 acres) farther up the English Creek valley.

Martin Sisk, Bartlett’s brother, moved back and forth between Cocke County and Haywood Co., NC, although he and his wife Mary were recorded as members of the Big Pigeon Primitive Baptist Church in Cocke County and often attended its monthly meetings.

Rebecca (Sisk) and Phillip Jenkins made their home in the Cosby Community. They are buried, along with their son Joel, in a family cemetery. Another son, William, moved to Missouri, where he died. Many, if not most, of the Jenkins families in Cocke County are descendants of Phillip and Rebecca.

Bartlett was buried in 1840 (beside his wife, who died about five years earlier) on the grounds of the original Big Pigeon Primitive Baptist Church. Years later, his descendants had his remains moved to the Bryant-Sisk Cemetery and his grave marked with a new monument.

Bartlett’s wife, Mary Campbell, was a sister of Nancy Ann (Campbell) Gray, wife of James Gray Sr. Most of the Grays in Cocke County are descendants of this family.