Kentucky Ancestors, Volume 46, Number 2 - Kentucky Historical ...

Privates George Thompson Baker and Andrew Jackson Baker
Company F, Seventh Kentucky Volunteer Infantry Regiment, USA
by Joshua Lee Baker
George Thompson Baker, of rural Whitley
County, Kentucky, was a staunch Unionist. He and
his son, Andrew Jackson Baker, enlisted in the same
unit of the Seventh Kentucky Infantry Regiment
shortly after the Civil War began. Both were
privates. George Thompson was older than most
enlisted men. He was in his fifties. He died aboard
a U.S. hospital boat near Memphis. Andrew Jackson
Baker was twenty-five when he enlisted. He survived
the war, returned to Kentucky, and died in Berea at
age eighty-one.
Private George Thompson Baker
George Thompson Baker was born in 1809, 1 on
Stinking Creek, in Knox County, Kentucky. 2 He was
the son of Bryce and Mary “Polly” (Arthur) Baker. 3
He went by both Thompson and George T. Baker. 4
Thompson Baker was the grandson of Joseph
Baker, 5 a Revolutionary War veteran and early Knox
County settler, 6 who came to Kentucky from Burke
County, North Carolina. 7 Joseph Baker initially
settled on Cherokee lands along Yellow Creek, in
present-day Bell County, Kentucky, but was evicted
from the Indian lands. 8 U.S. troops destroyed Baker’s
crops and burned his cabin in 1799 when he and
others refused to leave by the declared deadline. 9 He
then purchased a thirty-three-hundred acre tract near
Todd’s Fork, on Stinking Creek, in Knox County. 10
Thompson Baker married Nancy Henderson,
daughter of Jonathan Henderson, on 2 November
1829; 11 they were married at her parents’ Knox
60 | Kentucky Ancestors
County home. 12 Thompson and Nancy farmed in
the Stinking Creek community of Knox County,
Kentucky. 13 They did not have children when the
1830 U.S. census was taken. 14 Bryce and Polly Baker
sold Thompson a fifty-acre farm “on Bryces branch
[near] the waters of the left hand fork of Stinking
Creek,” in November 1834. 15 Thompson was listed
on the Knox County tax rolls, annually, between
1830 and 1839. 16
Thompson and Nancy sold their farm on Bryce’s
Branch of Stinking Creek, in Knox County, to
Rochester Hales on 6 March 1839. 17 They moved
from Knox County to neighboring Whitley County
in 1839 or 1840. 18 Thompson appeared on the
Whitley County tax rolls, for the first time, in
1840. 19 He received a two-hundred-acre land grant
along Craig’s Creek, in Whitley County, in 1850. 20
Whitley County records indicate that he paid taxes
on two parcels of land on Craig’s Creek between 1845
and 1863. 21 He and Nancy were in Whitley County
when the Federal censuses were taken in 1840, 1850,
and 1860; he was listed as Thompson Baker on the
1840 and 1850 schedules, and, as G. T. Baker on
the 1860 schedule. 22 Thompson and Nancy Baker
had ten children: John Baker, James Madison Baker,
Mary Baker, Andrew Jackson Baker, William Baker,
Mahala Baker, Emily Baker, Elizabeth Baker, Pleasant
Martin Baker, and Nancy Ellen Baker. 23
George T. Baker and Andrew J. Baker enlisted
in the Union Army at the Whitley County seat in
Williamsburg, Kentucky, on 20 August 1861. 24
They signed on as privates in Captain William Sears’