A Family Divided

The Zachary family of Cashiers symbolizes the divided loyalties of western North Carolinians. The builder of this house, Mordecai Zachery, had strong ties to the Confederacy, as did others in the area. Confederate Gen. Wade Hampton sent his family to his hunting lodge, located across the road for safety during the war. It burned to the ground in 1932. Zachary brother and near neighbor Alexander remained a Unionist. Too old to serve, Alexander Zachary gave aid and sympathy to Federal soldiers who escaped from Confederate prisons in South Carolina and made their way through the mountains to Union lines.



William H. Thomas, the noted politician, promoter of western North Carolina, and white Cherokee chief, was among the travelers on the Tuckasegee-Keowee Turnpike who stopped at Mordecai Zachary house. When the war began, Thomas enlisted white and Cherokee men for his Confederate unit, Thomas Legion. Zachary served in the Legion, according to his tombstone inscription.



Alexander Zachary sons served both sides during the war. Christopher Columbus Zachary enlisted in Co. F, 29th North Carolina Infantry, in the Confederate army. He rose to the rank of sergeant but later deserted and returned to western North Carolina. He then "rode with the Bushwhackers"—Union Col. George W. Kirk 3rd North Carolina Mounted Infantry—that attacked Confederate units in the mountains. Another son, fourteen-year-old Thompson R. Zachary, guided a group of escaped Union officers through Cashiers Valley to the Federal lines in Knoxville, Tennessee, where they were photographed. Alexander Zachary remained in Cashiers after the war.



In 1873, Mordecai Zachary sold this house to former South Carolina congressman Armistead Burt, a leader in the secession movement before the war. Zachary moved to a farm near Cherokee in Swain County, next to Thomas property.



(sidebar)

Mordecai Zachary constructed the Zachary-Tolbert House in the popular Greek Revival style about 1850. Zachary also built the original furniture, much of which remains in the house. Besides raising a family here with his wife, Elvira Keener, Zachary also boarded travelers on the Tuckasegee-Keowee Turnpike. The Tolbert family purchased the dwelling in 1909. Since 1998, the Cashiers Historical Society has owned and interpreted the house, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.



(captions)

(lower left) "Union Refugees in East Tennessee," with T.R. Zachary in back row on right, from Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial History of the Civil War.

(upper center) William H. Thomas Courtesy North Carolina Office of Archives and History

(lower right) Union bushwhackers attacking Confederate cavalrymen, engraving by Junius Henry Browne, 1865.

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Show me all markers in:  Cashiers, NC  |  Jackson County  |  28717  |  North Carolina  |  United States of America

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