As can be clearly seen from stories up to now, our Ayers ancestors possessed a pioneering spirit that kept urging them ever onward to new lands of promise and hope.  Nathaniel Ayers in North Carolina was like those before him.

Up until the mid 1700s, the French had control of land west of the Appalachian Mountains, and essentially kept the English settlers hemmed in the East by playing the Indians against them, and by relying on the seemingly insurmountable mountains.  However, after the British defeated the French and Indians in 1763, the French conceded all contested lands to the Mississippi River. This initially was a cause for celebration for the settlers wanting to move to the new frontier lands. However, the royal proclamation of 1763 did much to dampen that celebration as it in effect closed off the frontier to colonial expansion, ostensibly to calm the Indians and regulate trade and settlement.

Daniel Boone, the legendary wilderness scout, was born in Pennsylvania and raised as a Quaker. Like the Ayers family from Maryland, Daniel’s family was one of the many that migrated southward, settling in western North Carolina in 1750.  As a young man, he was known to be fearless and for taking long hunting expeditions into Indian territory.  The region beyond the settled borders of Virginia and the mountains was called Kentucky and it was a total wilderness. Despite the proclamation and some resistance from American Indian tribes such as the Shawnee, in 1775 Daniel Boone blazed his Wilderness Trail through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains over into Kentucky.  He pushed even further into the state beyond the mountains and founded the Fort Boonesboro settlement in the fertile central region.  See map at the end.

After the colonists finally defeated the British in the Revolutionary War, all the land to the Mississippi was then ceded to the Americans, and some adventurers began traveling there. However, in the early years, many travelers fell victim to hostile Indians. Soon though, with this new opportunity to homestead and a new route through the mountains marked by Boone, more than 200,000 settlers migrated to the Kentucky frontier by 1800.  Nathaniel Ayers and his family from North Carolina were among these early pioneers.

It is believed Nathaniel’s wife was Mary Leake and they had at least one child in NC about 1794, named Bailey Ayers. Kentucky was admitted as a state in 1792, and the Wilderness Trail was widened to accommodate wagons pulled by oxen.  It is difficult to pinpoint, but it is believed the family relocated to the new state around 1800.  We know for certain though, that by 1810 they were living in Wayne County, KY, a mountainous area near the border with Tennessee. The family had 3 males and 6 females.  It took hardy souls to homestead in this area, which was nothing but wilderness, and still occupied by scattered Indians.  At this time there were less than 800 families in the county. Settlers lived within riding or walking distance of each other and they had large families, with their children and grandchildren inter-married into each others families. This area today is part of the Daniel Boone National Forest.

Nathaniel Ayers is mentioned as helping with a land survey in 1808 in Campbell County, Tennessee, and in county court records in 1815 and 1818.  At that time Campbell County was larger than today and the western part of it was just across the state border from Wayne County, KY.  Did he actually move to TN for a time?  I think the answer is probably not because he apparently lived in an area close to the border between KY and TN which was in dispute and not officially settled until 1820.  So, the border moved around him.

Nathaniel then disappears from all other records until he applied for his Revolutionary War pension from Laurel County, KY in 1836.  It must be assumed he was living with the family of one of his daughters and was not a head of household.  It is also assumed that he died sometime after 1836 in Laurel County which is a short distance northeast of Wayne County.

When Nathaniel Ayers first came into Kentucky, why did his family settle in the mountains instead of pushing further into the central area of KY where the land was certainly more amenable to farming?  One strong possibility was that he already knew other family or friends who had previously relocated there.  Another reason is that all the best lands had already been settled on before he arrived.  The actual reason is unknown today.  Whatever the reason, the mountain way of life he entered set the course of history for the next five generations of Ayers families.