Pariss (Parish) Sims (1), born near Belfast, Ulster, North Ireland, about 1750, came to America with his widowed mother and two brothers, Abraham and Robert, about 1765.

We have no record of his father's name but tradition says his mother was a Parrish and that there were a number of children in the family, including some daughters and four older sons, Thomas William, James and John, who came to this country prior to 1765. See Chapter Eighteen.

Pariss, his mother and brothers, Abraham and Robert, first settled in Pennsylvania. After the American Revolution, Abraham settled in Culpepper County, Va. Robert went to Indiana and Pariss settled in Salisbury District, near Salem, now WinstonSalem, N. C.

According to a grandson, Robert W. Sims, as stated in his letter, quoted in Chapter Two, Pariss "served eight years in the Revolutionary War and was one of Gen. Washington's life guards" (member of his body guard company). There is also a tradition in the family that Pariss was with Washington at Valley Forge and the Crossing of the Delaware. It is said he enlisted in the army in Pennsylvania in 1775 and served through 1783.

The North Carolina Department of History and Archives supplied me with copies of the following pay vouchers for Revolutionary War service:

Voucher No. 2316, Salisbury District, 11 pounds to Parrish Syms, Aug. 31, 1782.

Voucher No. 665, Salisbury District, 4 pounds, 18 shillings to Parris Sims, September 19, 1783.

The National Archives, Washington, D. C., supplied copies of the following payroll records for Revolutionary war service:

Parris Sims, 2nd Company of the Georgia Battalion commanded by Capt. John Lucus, 4 months and 12 days service, during the period, Jan. 1, 1782 to Dec. 31, 1782, $29.30.

Paris Sims, 2nd Company of the Georgia Battalion commanded by Capt. William Mcintosh, 4 months and 12 days service during the period, June 9, 1783 to Nov. 4, 1783, $29.30.

The North Carolina pay vouchers were no doubt back pay, as there is no indication of the period of service. Attention is called to the variations in the spelling of his name in the above records. In the 1790 Census of Salisbury District, North Carolina, his name was listed as Pariss Sims.

Under "Remarks" on the 1783 pay roll, he was listed as absent without leave in June. He had married in 1782 and his first child, Robert, was born at Salem, now Winston-Salem, N. C., May 14, 1783. Failing to get official leave, he evidently took off and went home to see his wife and new born child, after which he returned to his company.

The National Archives, Washington, was unable to supply additional information on his service due to the fact that most of the records of the War Department were destroyed in a fire in 1800.

Two descendants that I know of hold membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, on his service record. A letter from the National Office of DAR, Washington, says:

"We have accepted Revolutionary service for one Pariss (Paris) Simms (Sims). He was born in Ireland and died in Tennessee. The last number with this record is Ruth Shackleft Rudy (Mrs. Raymond M.) National No. 481893. She holds active membership and resides at 23 North Columbus Ave., Mount Vernon, N. Y."

Mrs. Rudy is a great granddaughter of Dorothy Sims Turman, a sister of my grandfather, Shields Sims, who was a great grandson of Pariss Sims. See Chapter Five.

Mrs. Jeff Eleanor Sutherland Bronson (Mrs. John 0. Bronson, Sr., Corinth, Miss.) a descendant of Abby Caroline Sims Sutherland, a granddaughter of Pariss Sims, was accepted as a member of DAR on his Service record, National No. 459994, June 5, 1958--see Chapter Four, Sims-Sutherland Family.

There is a tradition in our family that the mother of Pariss Sims and his brothers was a Parrish (Parish), and, that she came to America, as a widow, with her sons Pariss, Robert and Abraham about 1765. There is also some indication that they came over from Ireland with one or more Parrish family who settled in Virginia, where the four older Sims brothers, William, Thomas, John and James, had settled at an earlier date.

Variations of the Parrish name, Pariss, Parish and Paris, appear as given names in each generation of practically all of the descendants of Pariss Sims and his brothers, down to the present day.

Pariss SIms married Keziah Royster of Granville County, N. C., in 1782.

Records of the Royster family of Granville County, N. C., in the book, "Lost Tribes of North Carolina," simply stated that "Parish (Pariss) Sims married Keziah ...."

Martin W. Sims, a grandson (See Chapter Fourteen), says in a letter written in 1905 to Mrs. Hallie Lee Royster, Raleigh, N.C. -"I cannot go beyond my grandfather and grandmother... my father was the third son and fifth child of Parish (Pariss) Sims and his wife Keziah ... I send you a letter from Thetus W. Sims, Member of Congress from Tennessee, who is of our family."

Thetus W. Sims, a great grandson of Pariss Sims, was a Member of Congress from West Tennessee, 1897-1921. Evidently, Mrs. Royster was at that time (1905) seeking information of the family of Pariss and Keziah Royster Sims.

When the first census of the United States was taken in 1790, Pariss (the way the name is spelled in the record) was head of the only Sims family in the Salisbury District of Stokes County, N.C. He was listed as the head of a family of two sons, under 16, and three females.

In the 1800 Census of Stokes County (now Forsyth County) his name was spelled as Parish Sims and his family was listed as follows: Males, four under l0 years of age; one, 10 to 16, one 16 to 26 (Robert was 17) and one 26 to 45 (Pariss) -Females, -two, 10 to 16; one, 16 to 26 (Keziah, his wife-age given is an evident error as she was listed in the census of 1830 in Giles County, Tenn., as being between 60 and 70 years of age). Pariss was listed as being between 70 and 80 in the 1830 census of Giles County; also as having one male under 5 (a grandchild); one male between 30 and 40 (William, his youngest son who was living with him); one female, 20 and under 30 (his youngest child, Judith, born in 1803).

Pariss and Keziah Royster Sims had nine children, six boys and three daughters, all born in Stokes County (now Forsyth), North Carolina. Their sons were: Robert, Abraham, Martin, Matthew, John and William; daughters, Sally, Patsy and Judith.

Urged by a pioneer spirit and the hope of bettering his situation, as well as opportunities for his children, he decided to move to Tennessee where new land was opening up for settlement by soldiers of the Revolution. Tennessee had been created as a State out of North Carolina Territory, west of the mountains, in 1796.

So it was, in the summer of 1807, he joined a wagon-train of neighbors for the western journey over the Great Smoky Mountains into a land of promise. With all their possessions loaded into a covered wagon, drawn by oxen, Pariss Sims and his family set out on a rugged trek to find a new home. Robert, the oldest son, then 24, remained in North Carolina until 1819.

Tradition says that Pariss' possessions consisted of basic household goods, a few farm tools, seeds for garden and field crops, guns for protection and hunting game, a sow and a few shoats, a cow and calf, some chickens and a mare which he rode. The boys walked, herding the livestock, hunted and fished along the way--the older boys took turns driving the oxen. Keziah and the smaller children rode in the wagon.

The wagon-train followed the immigrant trail over the mountains, through Deep Gap near Boone, N. C., entering Johnson County in Eastern Tennessee, thence down the East Tennessee Valley, across the Cumberland Plateau into Middle Tennessee. There, they took the Southwest trail through White, Warren, Coffee and Bedford counties, into what was then a part of Williamson County, now Giles County, where they established their new homes on the Middle Prong of Lynn Creek.

Less than 10 years before the area had been claimed by the Indians as a part of their hunting lands. For many years several Indian Nations, including the Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws and Choctaws, had claimed an interest in all of Middle Tennessee between the Tennessee and Ohio rivers, each Nation holding a claim but no one of them being permitted by the others to permanently occupy it. The Indians resented the coming of the white settlers and their vindictiveness resulted in unceasing warfare as they were pushed out of the area by treaties, made by their chiefs with State and Federal governments.

In 1780 General James Robertson, called the "Father of Middle Tennessee", with others from the Watauga Settlement in East Tennessee, had established Fort Nashborough, now Nashville, the State Capitol, on the Cumberland River. In 1783, the General Assembly of North Carolina, to which the Territory then belonged, established the County of Davidson which, generally speaking extended East to the Cumberland Mountains and South and West to the Tennessee River. The area, which included present day Giles County in which Pariss Sims and his neighbors settled, had been set apart by North Carolina for settlement by soldiers of the Revolutionary War.

In 1796, the State of Tennessee was created, thus complicating land grants that had been made by the State of North Carolina. Various piece-meal treaties were made with the Indians, from time to time, until 1805, when a NorthSouth Indian Territory boundary line was established. This line passed through the western portion of what is now Giles County, eight miles west of Pulaski, crossing Elk River near the present town of Prospect, thence to the Tennessee River. This opened up a strip of new land for white settlers, who poured into the area from Western North Carolina, as well as from older settlements. See the Parish Sims Family, Chapter Eighteen.

After some 40 days and nights, plodding along behind the slow moving oxen-drawn wagons, Pariss Sims and the others of the wagon-train from North Carolina, had arrived in what is now Giles County in the early fall of 1807. They pitched their camp on the Middle Prong of Lynn Creek, scouting the area, staked out their claims; started building cabins and making clearings in the virgin forest for gardens, corn and other crops. Others making the settlement along with the Pariss Sims family were John, William and Joel Rutledge and Jacob and Andrew Blythe.

The place they had selected for their new homes was a country of rolling to steep, heavily forested hills, cut by three main streams, prongs of Lynn Creek that spread North from the present village of Waco, known as Lynnville before the name was given to a new town on the railroad, a few miles to the East.

The settlement was then in Williamson County, formed out of a part of the County of Davidson. In November, following the arrival of the settlers, Maury County was formed out of a portion of Williamson and two years later, in November 1809, Giles County was formed out of the southern part of Maury County. Thus, in little more than two years, the new settlers lived in three different counties.

The establishment of this settlement and others in the Lynn Creek area is documented in an "Early History of Giles County," written by James McCullum in 1876, as follows:

"The first settlers in the Northern part of the County were William Dearing, George Malone, Gabriel and John Faulkes and Daniel Harrison who settled on the East Prong of Lynn Creek in the Fall of 1807. John, Joel and William Rutledge, Jacob and Andrew Blythe and Parrish (Pariss) Simms (Sims) settled on the Middle Prong of Lynn Creek in the Fall of 1807. Nicholas Absolom, Hugh Barren, Thos. Mooney and Andrew Pickens settled on the West Prong in 1807; most of these raised corn in 1808."

Thus, was the first community of White settlers established in the area that had, only recently, been the hunting and battle grounds of the Indians. Soon the village of Lynnville, now Waco, was established with a store, a mill, a doctor, a school and a church, and life on the frontier grew brighter.

Here Pariss Sims, born in Ulster, North Ireland, founded his last home, a modest log house on the frontier of a new land. He had made his contribution to the birth of our Nation as a soldier in the American Revolution. He had helped to carve from the virgin forest a new, growing community for generations of the future, few of whom would ever know the adventures as well as hardships that had been his.

From here his descendants, among whom are numbered many prominent leaders in the development of our countryteachers, ministers, doctors, lawyers, progressive farmers and statesmencan draw strength in pride of the pioneer spirit which led him to this land of freedom and opportunity which he helped to establish. As far as is known, he left no estate; no will. A grandson, Abraham Martin Sims, said of his father's family:

"Father and mother were poor. Their wealth was their children. Mother lived to see all of her children grown and what was wealth to her, all her children had clean records....we grew what we ate, wore clothes made at home."

On a visit to the Lynn Creek community in 1963, I discovered evidence that indicates that the land on which Pariss Sims settled was later found to be a part of a large Land Grant made by the State of North Carolina to a high army officer in the Revolutionary War. Thus, it appears that Pariss lost the land he had cleared for his homestead, which explains, no doubt, why all of his children, except his youngest daughter, soon left the community.

Robert Sims Pariss' oldest son who had remained in North Carolina, where he had married, moved his family to Giles County in 1819. In or about 1832-3 Pariss Sims and his beloved wife, Keziah died and were buried in some small graveyard that the writer, their great, great great, grandson, has been unable to locate, unless perhaps, it be that they were buried in two unmarked graves by the side of their youngest daughter, Judith Sims Brownlow, at Campbellsville, a few miles west of the Lynn Creek community.

In 1963, I spent some time in the Lynn Creek area with Judge Joe Sims of Lawrenceburg, Tenn., a great grandson of Pariss Sims. We found the graves of Judith Sims and her husband, Joseph Brownlow, in the old cemetery at Campbellsville. They have simple sandstone markers, bearing the following inscriptions:

The graves, as were several others, were then covered by a jungle of briers and honeysuckle, taking some time to locate them. On a return trip, in 1964, I was happy to find that the old cemetery had been cleaned up. A visit to the burying places of our ancestors can often be a saddening experience. In one I found a great cedar uprooted, heaving up the graves and crushing the headstones. The tree had no doubt been planted there, more than 100 years before, as an evergreen marker to shade the family graves which it had damaged in its own death in a storm.
Judge Sims and I found evidence of two other adult graves by those of Joseph and Judith Brownlow, but no standing markers; only some broken, weathered sandstone slabs with undecipherable inscriptions. My grandfather and some of the other "old ones" of the family said they thought Pariss Sims and his wife were buried there.

Since Judith, their youngest daughter, was the only one of their children to marry and make her home in the area, I am inclined to believe her parents were buried in the plot where markers now stand at her grave and that of her husband and one son, who died in his youth. Another son. Robert Sims Brownlow, moved to Missouri in the early days.

If we can ever find absolute evidence that the unmarked graves in the plot with Joseph and Judith Sims Brownlow are those of Pariss and Keziah Royster Sims, we plan to erect a suitable marker with the following inscription:

"In Memory of Pariss Sims of Ireland and North Carolina, Revolutionary War Soldier and Pioneer Settler in Giles County-1750-1833; and his Beloved Wife, Keziah Royster Sims, 1762-1833."

After the death of his parents, Robert Sims, their oldest son, moved with his family from the Lynn Creek area to Wayne County, Tenn., in the fall of 1833.

II-1. Robert Sims, born near Winston-Salem, North Carolina, May 14, 1783. See Chapter Four for a record of his family.
II-2. Sally Sims, born in North Carolina in 1784, married William Rutledge, Dec. 10, 1809. He was a settler with her father on Lynn Creek in 1807. They moved to Indiana and settled near her uncle, Robert Sims, a brother of her father who came over from Ireland with him about 1765. See Chapter Eighteen.
II-3. Patsy Sims, born in North Carolina in 1786, died unmarried.
II-4. Abraham Sims, born in North Carolina in 1788; settled in Macon County. See Chapter Thirteen.
II-5. Martin Sims, born in North Carolina about 1790; settled in Bedford County. See Chapter Fourteen.
II-6. Matthew Sims, born in North Carolina in 1792; settled in North Alabama, near Florence, thence to Fayette County, Tenn., about 1826-8. See Chapter Fifteen.
II-7. John Sims, born in North Carolina about 1794; settled in the Tombigbee River area of North Mississippi, near Fulton. See Chapter Sixteen.
II-8. William Sims, born in North Carolina about 1800; settled in Williamson County about 1830, thence to Mantachie area of Mississippi, on the Tombigbee River about 1854. See Chapter Seventeen.
II-9. Judith Sims, born in North Carolina in 1803; married Joseph Brownlow, son of James Brownlow, a pioneer settler on the West Prong of Lynn Creek, Giles County, 1809. They had a son, Robert Sims Brownlow, who was the father of Louis Brownlow, the noted government administration expert of Washington, D. C. Louis married Elizabeth Sims, a daughter of Cong. Thetus W. Sims. It is said that James Brownlow was a relative of William G. (Parson) Brownlow, Governor of Tennessee, 1865-1869. See Chapter Eleven.

Footnote: Roman Numerals indicate generations; Figures are Sims identification numbers.

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