The Tale of Crooked Neck John | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: This article appeared on John Hood's daily column in the Carolina Journal, which, because of Author / Publisher Hood, is linked to the John Locke Foundation.

    As I have spent much of the week in Oklahoma watching a hawk making lazy circles in the sky, I offer in this space today a somewhat-expanded tale of a North Carolinian from yesteryear whose stubbornness almost got him killed - twice.

    RALEIGH  -  In my continuing efforts to perfect my punditry persona of "crotchety not-so-old man," I have recently discovered a wonderful new source of material: the life and times of John Kincaid.

    The early history of North Carolina is full of fascinating characters. John Kincaid was one of them. A Scotch-Irish immigrant to western North Carolina in the late 1700s, Kincaid produced not only a mindboggling number of descendants in Lincoln, Gaston, Caldwell, Burke, and neighboring counties - beginning with his 18 children by two different wives - but also a colorful and often-repeated tale of Patriot resistance during the Revolutionary War.

    Born around 1710 to Scottish Presbyterians living in Northern Ireland, Kincaid spent the first three decades of his life in Ireland before immigrating to Pennsylvania with his wife and six children around 1745. After giving birth to three more children in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, John Kincaid's wife Julie passed away. Soon afterward, John took another wife, Nancy Nixon, and proceeded to have nine more children.

    John Kincaid appears to have been a shoemaker by trade who also farmed. By the late 1750s, he had grown dissatisfied with life in Pennsylvania. Among other things, John is recorded to have "complained of the amount of his tax." Who doesn't?

    So John, Nancy, and their growing family moved southward. First they settled in Southside Virginia. By the mid-1760s, however, John Kincaid had purchased 850 acres of land on Catawba Creek, in what would soon become Lincoln County, North Carolina. Some of his children were adults by then, and either set up homes on their father's property or acquired neighboring parcels.

    It didn't take long for the neighbors to learn two things about John Kincaid. First, he was a fierce critic of British policy towards the American colonies - a "strong old-line Whig," one said. And second, John Kincaid was a stubborn man.

    When the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, several of John's sons went off to fight. John Kincaid Jr. served under General Thomas Sumter in South Carolina and fought at Kings Mountain. James Kincaid participated in a 1778 campaign against the British-allied Cherokees and later served during the British siege of Charleston. Robert Kincaid joined a militia unit combating British-allied Tories in western North Carolina.

    As for John Kincaid Sr., he was 65 in 1775, and thus too old to go off to war. Instead, the war came to him.

    Likely because of his well-known antipathy to the British, Kincaid was the target of repeated harassment by local Tories. As a large landowner, he was also suspected of possessing significant wealth. So one day late in the war a band of Tories showed up at his door with a demand: give us your money or else.

    John Kincaid chose the "or else." So the Tories tied a noose around Kincaid's neck and strung him up in his own barn.

    As Kincaid was kicking and clawing at the rope, the Tories heard the sound of approaching horses and took off. John's wife Nancy Kincaid and two of their daughters then rushed into the barn and cut John down. He survived the attack.

    But it was just the first one. Upon hearing the news that John Kincaid still lived, the Tories returned to his house and again demanded his money. Kincaid again refused. So they hanged him a second time. And again, the sound of horses chased them off, allowing Nancy to cut her husband down.

    Incredibly, John had survived his second hanging. But the rope had cut grooves into his skin and injured his neck. That's how he got his nickname: "Crooked Neck John" Kincaid.

    Even more incredibly, John Kincaid lived for another three decades. In 1792, he moved again, this time to a 1,400-acre farm with a grain mill in a Burke County community named for one of his new neighbors: Hoodsville.

    Yep, old Crooked Neck John was my ancestor - three different ways, in fact. His daughter Ibby Kincaid married my great-great-great-grandfather John Hood. And two of John Kincaid's descendents married each other to produce my great-great-grandmother Betty Kincaid.

    John Kincaid passed away in 1811 at the age of 101. He had lived long enough to see his beloved American Revolution give birth to a new republic of liberty.

    And those Tories never got their damned hands on his money.

    Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation, which has just published First In Freedom: Transforming Ideas into Consequences for North Carolina. It is available at JohnLockeStore.com.