Rob Neufeld, Columnist Published 10:58 a.m. ET Feb. 12, 2017 | Updated 6 hours ago

The attic chapel built by Jacob Shook around 1800 was photographed by Henry Neufeld in 2009, soon after the Shook-Smathers house (now a museum) was put on the National Register of Historic Places.(Photo: Courtesy of Henry Neufeld)

When 20-year-old Jacob Shook arrived with his family, after a 600-mile trek, at what is now the Conover area, he was stepping into a political maelstrom.

His starting point had been Williams Township, Pennsylvania, the Lutheran enclave his grandfather, Johannes Schuck, had found after having fled Alsace-Lorraine with his family in 1732.

In 1767, Johannes died, and Jacobs dad, George, age 45, and uncle, Wilhelm Volprecht, 49, pulled up stakes and made the next big exodus, down the Great Wagon Road to greener pastures in Carolina.

Jacob married Isabella Weitzel in 1770, some sources say perhaps having shared expectations on the journey and the American Dream looked as promising as the Cape May shore had looked to Johannes in 1732 when hed led his family off the pink, John and William, after 17 weeks at sea, a mutiny, a quarantine and a customs check.

Jacobs dad, George, had been six years old on the journey.Did Jacob, growing up, witness his dad and grandfather differ on how and even if to tell the saga?

For Johannes, it had been a survival story.One of the strange things that had happened on board, according to Rick Bushongs web-posted history, Murder Lurks on the Pink John and William, was that Joseph Hubley, a writer condemned by the Catholic Church as a heretic, had probably been murdered by a French assassin whom Hubley had hired as a valet.

For George, the John and William experience may have been too grim to tell, for as the ship had taken five extra weeks to come ashore, clean water had run out and many children had died and been thrown overboard.

A pink is a small, flat boat, about the size of a restaurant, with a cargo area below deck.They were generally not used for trans-Atlantic trips, but aging ones came to serve the immigrant and slave markets.

Hearing these stories and seeing his fathers trauma may have given Jacob his first experience of being spared from horror by distance.

Jacobs new big horror was the royal governments war against Regulators militias resisting governmental oppression in western North Carolina. Most of it was taking place many miles east of the Shooks, whod settled on Lyles Creek, a western branch of the Catawba River.

Today, Shook Road, shouldering Lyles Creek, crosses the bucolic Rock Barn Country Club and Spa. Recently, the club went from being semi-private to private. We did sell memberships before, Det Williams, the clubs interim general manager told Cory Spiers of the Hickory Record, in May, but the value of exclusivity wasnt there.

In 1771, all of what is now Catawba County, had contained only 200 families, according to Charles Preslars 1954 History of Catawba County.

While the Shooks were doing such things as communally raising barns, with posts and beams and local stone, in the German fashion, the royal governor was cracking down on suspected rebels; and the rebels were fighting back.

After the May 1771 Battle at Alamance Creek, a Regulator defeat, the royal government offered rebels pardons under oaths of loyalty, a situation, Bob Jones wrote in Jacob Shook and the War of Independence, that could lead to their hanging if ever again caught in arms against the Government.

On August 8, 1774, the Rowan County Committee of Safety responded with a declaration of independence nine months before the famous Mecklenburg Declaration.

The Rowan resolutions opposed taxes levied by Great Britain, affirmed solidarity with New England, instituted a boycott of British goods, encouraged local manufacturing, and opposed slavery.

The women of Rowan formed their own association ad resolved that they will not receive the addresses of any young gentlemenexcept the brave volunteers who served in the expedition to South Carolina, and assisted in subduing the Scovalite Insurgents.

The Scovalites were Scots whom the Crown granted land in the Cross Creek area of South Carolina, and who maintained loyalty to the royal government.

General Griffith Rutherford called for troops to fight the Cross Creek Tories. And Jacob and his younger brother, Andrew, answered the call.

When a large part of Rutherfords army went to stop the Scovalite soldiers from reinforcing the Kings army in Wilmington, the Shooks stayed in Cross Creek to keep guard over that hotbed.Jacob was once again at a distance when the Patriots devastated the Loyalists at Moores Creek, 20 miles inland from Wilmington.

Rutherfords men had gotten there first and had removed the planks from the bridge and greased the runners, so that when the Scovalites crossed, which they felt they must do, they were easy targets in an ambush.

With their faces painted blue, the kilted warriors, dressed in the colors of their clans, raised broadswords as they fell into the six-foot deep water and bagpipes wailed.

Jacobs next call came a few months later.

On April 9, 1776, the N.C. Provincial Congress funded two battalions and three companies of Light Horse, to be led by General Rutherford, to put down the Cherokee, who had begun a series of attacks on North Carolina homes as far east as Rowan County.

Each enlistee would immediately receive a bounty of 3, 40 shillingsabout what contracted workers got for one month of hard labor.John Kaighn, a Pennsylvania merchant, was, by comparison, offering 3 to anyone whod produce 15,000 cocoons on a mulberry tree.

The Congress also resolved that a penalty of 5 be inflicted on any person who shall knowingly secrete, harbour, succour or entertain, for the space of 24 hours, any deserter from the service, with half the fee going to the informer.

Rutherford wrote Colonel William Christian, a fellow commander in Virginia, that he was ready to march and by the assistance of Divine Providence, crush that treacherous, barbarious [qv] Nation of Savages, with their white abbetors, who lost to all sense of Humanity, honor and principle, mean to extinguish every spark of freedom in these United States.

The Shooks marched slowly with a huge army, 1,400 pack horses, and a requisite number of pack horse drivers, across the French Broad at present-day Biltmore Estate; through present-day Pack Square, where they saw the graves of Shawnees killed by Cherokees in 1735; and single-file along mountain trails until they reached a two-week camping spot in present-day Clyde.

That was a somewhat idyllic respite.The corn was high; and fish and game were plentiful.

It preceded the one experience in which Jacob was not lucky enough to be at a distance.We do not know in what ways he was involved in burning crops and homes, killing Cherokees, and capturing prisoners.We do not know what experiences he shared with his brother, and what qualms they expressed.

We do know that they returned home in October, and that, according to John Chappo in his article Shock and Awe for Saber and Scroll, many of Rutherfords men would eventually succumb to disease and exhaustion following the expedition.

In May, 1781, Jacob served again in the militia, and was stationed at Davidsons Fort (now Old Fort).After the war, In 1783, he and two others went to court and presented a charge against a man from Lyles Creek.They accused the man of supporting the king during the war, Wilma Hicks Simpson writes in Greater Than the Mountains Was He.

Old divisions were still fresh.One family genealogist has noted that Jacob had had an anger problem.

Then, Jacob moved his family to Clyde, the beautiful haven salvaged from his nightmare. Several years later, swept up by the Great Awakening, he converted to Methodism, and provided a chapel in the attic of his house, where Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury is said to have preached.

When did Jacobs moment of grace come about?

Reverend T.F. Glenn in his History of Methodism wrote that, one day, under conviction of sin, Jacob went to work in his cornfield, praying and weeping when his burden of guilt was lifted and his soul was flooded with joy.He shouted and praised the LordHe dropped the lines, left his plow, lost his hat, and shouted all over the field.

What was he putting behind him and what did he see ahead?

Rob Neufeld writes the weekly Visiting Our Past column for the Citizen-Times. He is the author of books on history and literature, and manages the WNC book and heritage website,The Read on WNC.Follow him on Twitter@WNC_chronicler; email him at RNeufeld@charter.

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Visiting Our Past: Odyssey of Clyde pioneer Jacob Shook - Asheville Citizen-Times