Publisher's Synopsis
When one thinks of the name Carson and the frontier, one's mind turns naturally to "Kit" Carson, one of the greatest of the frontiersmen. This history, however, is not that of Kit Carson, but of some of his cousins. It is the history of much of the family of Samuel Carson, who in the early part of the Eighteenth Century settled in Mount Pleasant Township in what became York County, Pennsylvania. Samuel was one of the brothers of Kit Carson's grandfather, William Carson, who himself came first to Pennsylvania but soon went south to North Carolina. Samuel Carson was one of the pioneer settlers in the part of Pennsylvania west of the Susquehanna River. Samuel's descendants were also frontiersmen. As the frontier moved, they moved with it, clearing new land and establishing new farms. They were among the early settlers of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. They were also among the first to move into that part of western North Carolina that became Jefferson, Greene and Washington Counties in Tennessee. In that area one of their cousins is reputed to have hunted with Davy Crockett. Then as the Indiana Territory was opened, they moved into it. One of them supervised the first road built in Franklin County, Indiana. Others died in the malaria-ridden swamps of Johnson County, Indiana before enough trees were cleared to allow the sun to dry the land. Some of them later moved west to farm lands in North Dakota, Idaho and Washington. As some of the later generations moved off the farm, they too became pioneers in their own way. One became a saddler and harness maker, another a pharmacist. Another helped to found what later became Carson-Newman College in Tennessee. Still another became a civil engineer and plowed through the jungles of Malaysia to select sites for mini-power plants on the rivers. During the author's career as a naval officer and civilian employee of the Department of Defense, he became known as an innovator - organizing new units, developing new techniques and heading new projects. He attributed his constant desire to be on the frontiers of knowledge, which led him into the areas of atomic energy, earth satellites and finally computers, to the heritage of these pioneer ancestors. While this book attempts to adhere to sound principles of genealogical research and documentation, it was the author's hope that the frontier spirit of the Carsons whose lives are chronicled would shine through and inspire his descendants to keep that spirit alive.
