The Pate family who put down their deepest roots in the hill country of central Arkansas had traveled a long way to reach it. Their story begins far to the east, in the tobacco parishes of colonial Virginia, and moves westward across three states in the span of a few generations — until, at last, it settled on a small stretch of Arkansas countryside that one man would scarcely leave for nearly eighty years.
Edward Pate of Sussex County, Virginia
The earliest of the line to emerge clearly from the records is Edward Pate, born 17 July 1742 in Surry, Virginia. In 1766 he married Lucretia Adams, and the couple made their life in Sussex County, in the tobacco country of the colony's southeastern reaches. Edward died there on 30 March 1805.
His will, written 29 October 1804 and proved the following April, opens a window onto a substantial and carefully ordered household. To his son Cordy he left twenty acres purchased of Nicholas Prince on the north side of the new road, land where Cordy already lived. He remembered his daughters Rebeccah and Lucy, provided schooling for his younger sons — two years each for Edward and Hartwell, one year for Edmund — and made provision for his grandson Burrel, the son of his daughter Rebeccah. Three of his sons, Harbert, Hardy, and Henry, had already received their shares of the estate, and Edward named Harbert, Hartwell, and Henry as his executors. The will was witnessed by William Pate, Peterson Pate, and L. Mason.
Even in Edward's own lifetime the family had begun to disperse. Harbert would settle in Warren County, Georgia; Hardy would carry the name into Tennessee.
Hardy Pate and the Scattering of His Heirs
Hardy Pate, born about 1771 in Sussex County, married twice — first to Elizabeth Glover on 6 January 1791, and afterward to Polly Fisher on 22 April 1801. By the early nineteenth century he had left Virginia for Williamson County, Tennessee, where he died in February 1807.
Hardy died intestate, and the settlement of his estate left an unusually clear record of his family. The inventory, recorded 5 April 1807 in Sussex County, divided the balance among five heirs: Parsons Pate, Polly Pate, Elizabeth — wife of Henry Sledge — Nancy Pate, and Lucy Pate. Lucy had no guardian appointed when her father died, a sign that she had already reached her majority.
The heirs were already scattered across three states, and the paperwork of the estate maps that dispersal. On 22 February 1817, Polly Pate of Bedford County, Tennessee, granted her brother Parsons power of attorney to collect from John Jarrard — administrator of a Henry Pate, deceased, and then acting as her guardian — all sums due her as an heir of Hardy Pate, including her fifth share of land in Sussex County. It was land Polly would almost certainly never see. In January 1820, Elizabeth and her husband Henry Sledge, then of Williamson County, likewise empowered Parsons to sell the forty-nine acres in Sussex County that Hardy had left her. Nancy Pate, born about 1795 in Sussex County, married Braxton Sammons on 21 January 1812 and moved on to Rowan County, North Carolina. Of Lucy, born about 1791 and named among the five heirs, little more is known.
Parsons Grady Pate
At the center of these transactions stood Parsons Grady Pate, born about 1793 in Virginia to Hardy Pate and Elizabeth Glover — his name variously rendered "Persons" and "Person" in the records. Living in Lincoln and Bedford counties, Tennessee, he acted as attorney-in-fact for his sisters, gathering in the remnants of their father's Virginia estate even as the family moved farther from it.
Parsons carried the migration one long step further. He married Lourena Raney Hinkle, a daughter of Henry Hinkle, born about 1800 in Virginia, and by the late 1820s the couple had crossed into Arkansas — then still a territory, admitted to statehood only in 1836. They appear in Conway County records as early as 1828 and repeatedly thereafter, with an additional trace in Union County in 1830. Parsons was very likely the first of this immediate family to reach Arkansas, and the reason others followed.
The country the Pates found there was thinly settled and demanding. Homes were built of hewn logs, roads were poor, and families cleared ground, raised corn and cotton, and produced most of what they consumed by their own labor. That Parsons appears so consistently in Conway County across those years suggests he had put down roots rather than continuing to drift. He and Lourena raised at least five children — Elizabeth, Hardy (named for Parsons's own father), Henry Clay, Andrew J., and Charles W. The naming of a son Henry Clay marked a household attentive to the political currents of the age.
Parsons died about 1840 in Arkansas, roughly forty-seven years old; his place of burial is unknown. Lourena outlived him by about a decade, dying around 1850, likely in the Arkansas country where she had raised her children. What endured were the children who carried the Pate name forward into the growing state.
Their scattered fortunes tell of a hard frontier. Hardy Pate, born 1830, made his home in Conway and married Sarah W. Jones on Christmas Day, 1851; he died in 1862 at Little Rock. Charles W. Pate, born 1839, died young in 1846. Andrew J. Pate was born in 1835. But it was the son named for the Kentucky statesman who would anchor the family to a single stretch of ground.
The Englebrights of Conway County
The family into which that son married had followed its own improbable path to the same Arkansas country. Lewis Englebright, born 11 September 1809, was the son of John Englebright and Zilpah Sylpha Vann, and he lived his entire life within the bounds of Conway County. His presence there is recorded across a long span — from 1828 through the census counts of 1830, 1832, and 1840 — marking him as a settled householder rather than a restless migrant. Family tradition held that his father had come from London, England, and that the family had made its home on or near the Choctaw reservation to the west.
Lewis married a woman named Elizabeth, and together they raised at least four children: Sarah Adeline, Mary Minnerva, Virgil Morrow, and Almeda. The family name shifted in the records between "Englebright" and "Engelbright," as such names often did. Conway County in Lewis's day was rural and agricultural, its economy built on subsistence farming, and he lived the plain, demanding life of clearing, cultivating, and providing. That life was cut short: Lewis died in February 1845 in Conway, at only thirty-five, leaving Elizabeth and their young children behind. The cause of his death and the place of his burial went unrecorded.
His eldest daughter, Sarah Adeline Englebright, was born in Conway on 27 February 1836 — the very year Arkansas achieved statehood. She grew up in a country of clearings and cabins, of self-sufficiency wrested from the land, on ground near the Choctaw country. That proximity gave rise to a persistent family tradition that the Englebrights carried Choctaw blood — a belief most likely rooted in nothing more, and nothing less, than the place where they made their home.
Henry Clay Pate
Henry Clay Pate was born on 16 September 1832 in Conway, Arkansas, the son of Parsons Grady Pate and Lourena Raney Hinkle. His very name carried the political currents of his generation. Henry Clay, the great Kentucky statesman and champion of compromise, was among the most celebrated Americans of the 1830s, and thousands of frontier families honored him by naming their sons after him. That the Pates chose it suggests a household attentive to the wider affairs of a republic Arkansas had only just joined.
When Henry was still a small child, his family appears in the 1840 census in Hardin, in what would later become Faulkner County — a landscape of timber, river bottoms, and hard-won farmsteads. A boy there would have learned the rhythms of clearing land, tending stock, and raising crops long before he reached manhood.
On 8 October 1854, at the age of twenty-two, Henry married Sarah Adeline Englebright in Conway. She was eighteen. The couple settled in the community of Union City, and there they remained for the rest of their long lives, building a household that would grow to include at least seven children: Lourena E., Francis "Fannie," Josephine, Mollie Mary, George Redmon, Louis Hinkle, and Henry Grant. The names carry echoes of family and era alike — Lourena after Henry's own mother, Hinkle preserving her maiden line.
War in the River Hills
The Civil War reached deep into central Arkansas, and no family living there through the early 1860s escaped its shadow. Faulkner and Conway counties lay in contested ground, subject to the movements of both armies, to guerrilla raids, and to the constant pressure of shifting military control. It was against this backdrop that, in the autumn of 1864, Henry Clay Pate raised his hand and swore an oath of allegiance to the United States — a formal declaration of loyalty at a moment when Federal authority was reasserting itself across the state.
For a farming man in his early thirties with a growing family, such an oath was as much a matter of survival as of conviction. It could protect property from confiscation and secure the freedom to work and travel. Whatever combination of loyalty, pragmatism, and self-preservation moved him, the act placed him on the record at one of the defining moments of his life and his nation's history. That his son Henry Grant bore the name of the Union's victorious general — later president — may hint at where the family's sympathies came to rest.
The Ground That Did Not Move
The most striking feature of Henry Clay Pate's life is its constancy of place. He and Sarah Adeline lived out their years within a remarkably small compass of geography, in and around Union City in the hill country north of the Arkansas River. This was transitional country between the flat, fertile bottomlands along the river and the rougher, timbered uplands rising toward the Ozarks — land of modest creeks and hollows, of clay and rocky soil that rewarded steady labor more than ambition, dotted with oak, hickory, and pine. Nearby Springfield and Wooster, where members of the family were born and married, were not towns in any urban sense but loose gatherings of farms organized around a store, a church, a school, and a cemetery.
Henry appears in the same district again and again: enumerated at Union City in 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900, and 1910. The county boundaries shifted around him, so that the same land is recorded first as Conway County and, after Faulkner County was carved out in 1873, as Faulkner County. The county moved; he did not. Sarah Adeline's own census trail — 1860, 1870, 1880, and 1900 — traces the identical ground. She did not move; the county lines moved around her.
Life here ran on agriculture and on little else. The Pates were a farm family in the plainest meaning of the phrase — a household that lived by cotton, corn, hogs, and garden crops, by whatever the land and their own hands could produce. Cash was scarce and self-sufficiency the rule. The rhythm of such a life turned on planting and harvest, on the fortunes of weather and market, and on the slow improvement of a homestead. As a farm wife and mother of seven, Sarah Adeline's days were consumed by the ceaseless labor that fell to women in such settings — gardening, preserving, cooking, spinning, sewing, and child-rearing — work that left little written record but formed the true substance of a life.
They did not live alone on that ground. Around them clustered a dense web of related households — Englebrights, Heaths, Campbells, Harmons, and Hawkinses — settled near one another in the same census districts across four decades. Proximity meant survival: shared tools, shared hands, shared care in sickness and childbirth. Among these families it was one of Henry and Sarah Adeline's sons, George Redmon Pate, born at Springfield in 1870 and raised at Union City, who would in time carry the family's story beyond Arkansas.
The Close of a Chapter
Sarah Adeline lived to see the turn of the new century. The census of 1900 records her still at Union City, in the community where she had spent her entire life. She died at Wooster, in Faulkner County, on 11 November 1900, at the age of sixty-four, and was laid to rest in Faulkner County that same year — close to the ground where she had been born, married, and raised her children.
Henry Clay Pate lived another eleven years. He appears in the census of 1910 as an old man of seventy-seven, still rooted in the country he had known his whole life. He died at Union City on 10 December 1911, at the age of seventy-nine, having spent nearly eight decades within the same small stretch of Arkansas countryside.
His passing marks a natural close to the family's deepest chapter in Union City. By the census years of 1900 and 1910, the settlement had matured from raw frontier into a settled but modest farming district, with two and three generations of roots — but the same forces reshaping the whole rural South were at work. Worn soil, low cotton prices, and the steady lure of new land pressed on the families of the Arkansas hills, and the railroads and land promoters of the new century pointed toward Texas and the newly irrigated valleys of New Mexico Territory. Within a decade of Henry's death, members of the next generation had gone west, carrying with them the farming life they had learned in the Faulkner County hills.