The Life of Colonel Richard Callaway
Family Origins & Early Years
Transylvania Trail Memorial Plaque, Boonesborough, Kentucky.According to the Callaway family Bible, Colonel Richard Callaway was born in June 1722 in Virginia. Richard Callaway was the grandson of English immigrant Joseph Callaway. Richard became a captain in the Virginia Service during the French and Indian Wars and commanded the fort at Blackwater (around 1757). He was appointed one of the trustees of New London, Virginia, and he patented lands in Bedford, Brunswick, and Lunenburg counties.
Kentucky Frontiersman
Memorial plaque for Kentucky's first ferry.Colonel Callaway was part of expeditions to Kentucky with Daniel Boone, and he assisted in the founding of Boonesborough, Kentucky, where he helped to defend the fort in battle in September 1776. Callaway was there when Richard Henderson and his Transylvania Company negotiated a treaty with the Cherokee at Sycamore Falls in 1775, granting 20,000 acres of land in Kentucky and Tennessee to the Transylvania colony.(Callaway Family of Virginia and Some Kentucky Descendants) The Treaty of Sycamore Falls, also called the Treaty of Watauga, marked the beginning of expansion into Kentucky. As part of this venture, in Spring 1775, Callaway joined with Richard Henderson and Daniel Boone to help open the Transylvania Trail through the Cumberland Gap —“the first great pathway to the west.”1 From DAR records on Callaway and historical marker.
As focus of the old West, Kentucky has always loomed large in the national imagination as the habitat of the American border hero. Boone and Kenton, Harrod and Clark, Callaway and Logan, lurk vast in the wings of the national theatre, dramatic protagonists magnified to almost superhuman proportions in the mist of a legendary past...Wrought with rude but masterly strength out of the hardships and vicissitudes of pioneer life, the heroic conquest of the wilderness, the mortal struggles of border warfare, this composite figure of Indian fighter, crafty backwoodsman, and crude surveyor has emerged as the type-figure in the romance of the evolution of American character.2 Archibald Henderson, “The Creative Forces in Westward Expansion: Henderson and Boone,” in The American Historical Review, Vol. 20, No. 1 (October 1914).
Kidnapped by Indians
Memorial to settlers of Boonesborough, Kentucky.Richard Callaway had married twice and had fifteen children. In one of many stories of settlers who were kidnapped by Indians, in July 1776, a group of Shawnee Indians kidnapped two of Callaway's daughters, Elizabeth and Frances, along with Daniel Boone's daughter, Jemima. One of the girls left a trail of her torn clothing, but it was two days before Daniel Boone and others from the fort at Boonesborough, including Callaway's nephew, Flanders, were able to rescue them. Flanders Callaway and Jemima Boone were married in 1777.
Patriot til Death
Memorial plaque to Richard Callaway.Colonel Callaway defended the Boonesborough fort from many attacks by the Shawnee Indians. He also served as a member of the House of Delegates of the General Assembly of Virginia from 1777-1779 and reportedly became one of the first justices in Kentucky.(DAR) In 1779, Callaway was granted a contract to build the first ferry to operate across the Kentucky River. While building the ferry, he was ambushed and killed by Indians in 1780 in Boonesborough, Kentucky. According to one account, a friend of Callaway's was held captive by the Shawnee and saw his captors wave a scalp in the air that he knew to be Callaway's.3Family records. Others at Boonesborough reportedly found the body and buried it, but its exact location is not known as it was never properly marked. At Boonesborough today, there is a plaque memorializing Colonel Richard Callaway.