Pioneer and Patriarch
History knows Colonel Ezekiel Polk (December 7, 1747 – August 31, 1824), only dimly, as a grandfather of a President, James K. Polk. Yet the different careers of a difficult to understand man may tell us more about not only him but others of his generation. These people were unsettled in many ways, always looking for adventure and the unknown.
Ezekiel’s Scotch-Irish father first settled in Maryland then followed the ever advancing frontier. Ezekiel was the next youngest of five boys and three girls born to William Polk and Margaret Taylor Polk of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, near present-day Carlisle. About 1753 the family moved southwestward to the southern boundary of North Carolina in what would become Mecklenburg County. His parents appear to have died shortly afterward, and Ezekiel probably was brought up by his older brother Thomas, the senior member of the family, a leader of the local militia and a member of the first and subsequent North Carolina provincial assemblies. At age 20 Ezekiel, recently married, was named clerk of court in the new county of Tryon across the Catawba River, where he and his bride established themselves on a 100-acre farm just south of Kings Mountain. Ezekiel became a surveyor and a prosperous landowner. He would eventually marry three times, and raise 12 children to adulthood. In 1772, however, the provincial boundary was surveyed, and Polk's property was discovered to lie in South Carolina. Polk adapted with increasing difficulty to the shifting boundary and consequent loss of his position as clerk of court.
During the Revolutionary War, Polk served in the state militia. At first he was chosen lieutenant colonel of the district militia. Later, he was a captain in the North Carolina militia, but after his property there was occupied by the British, he joined the South Carolina militia. After the British capture of Charleston, South Carolina, Polk became Colonel of one of the three regiments that General Sumter raised in the back country to support Nathaniel Greene's resistance. Some sources say that Ezekiel Polk was a signer of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence (allegedly the first Declaration of Independence made in the Thirteen Colonies during the American Revolution. It was supposedly signed on May 20, 1775, at Charlotte, North Carolina.) At least one version of that document includes his name. It may have been deleted (along with others) because of his religious beliefs that conflicted with the devout Presbyterians among his neighbors and family.
After the war this period of his life is very little known. After the active phase of the war, Polk's atheist beliefs brought him increasing conflicts with his neighbors. Having had one property burned by the British in the war, he used purchased land bounties (land grants paid to solders made by a government for their services during the war) to build another successful property. In 1790, Governor Blount appointed him Justice of the Peace for Tennessee County and by 1806 he is known to have been living in Williamson County. In 1811, he was a member of the grand jury formed to "inquire into the body" of Maury County, TN.
The treaty with the Chickasaw Indians that opened West Tennessee for settlement was signed on October 19, 1818, by Isaac Shelby and Andrew Jackson. Settlers began to arrive in 1819, he moved with his sons Samuel and William and his sons-in-law, a War of 1812 veteran, Col. Thomas Jones Hardeman, who became the first county clerk and for whom the county was named. Along with them Thomas McNeal and their families founded the first white settlement "Old Hatchie Town" in Hardeman County, TN. The town of Bolivar was later formed through the donation of fifty acres of land from Colonel Polk and William Ramsey. Each donor was to receive one choice lot. Rapid settlement occurred thereafter, with new arrivals coming from North and South Carolina, Virginia, northern Alabama, and Middle Tennessee.
In 1821, Ezekiel Polk, age 74, composed his own epitaph and requested that it be "carved on durable wood and placed upright at my head, and a weeping willow planted at my feet." He died three years later on 31 August 1824 and fulfilling his wish the marker was erected above his grave in the Riverside Cemetery at Bolivar,Tennessee. Later when the town moved north because of flooding, he was moved to Bolivar Cemetery in about 1826. Then on Oct. 23, 1845, he was buried for the third and final time at Polk Cemetery, which was designated to be "Forever a family burial ground."
Epitaph of Ezekiel Polk
Here lies the dust of old E.P.
One instance of mortality;
Pennsylvania born, Carolina bred,
In Tennessee died on his bed.
His youthful days he spent in pleasure,
His latter days in gathering treasure;
From superstition liv'd quite free,
And practiced strict morality.
To holy cheats was never willing
To give one solitary shilling,
He can foresee, (and in foreseeing
He equals most of men in being,)
That church and state will join their power,
And misery on this country shower;
The Methodists with their camp bawling,
Will be the cause of this down falling;
An error not destin'd to see,
He wails for poor posterity,
First fruits and tenths are odious things,
And so are Bishops, Tithes and Kings.
During the campaign of 1844 when James K. Polk, E.P’s grandson was running for President, Edward Polk, his half uncle hurriedly removed the marker from his father’s grave and replaced it with a stone monument removed the part about the church. Polk was not a church member and the family did not wish to provide inspiration for the charge of heathenism for not believing in God. The marker today has been restored to its original wording. His grandson James Knox Polk would become eleventh President of the United States.
Ken Savage
Jan 11, 2011
For a more in depth look at Colonel Ezekiel Polk's life as the Grandfather of a President, please click on the file below ... The William and Mary Quarterly - A Magazine of Early American History, Jan 1953 Issue, pages 80 to 98.