the Boyles of Stokes County

Riley puts off joining the war between the States as long as he can. At fifteen, he has older brothers that can fight. That spring, he helps his family get the crops in the ground as he watches his first four brothers sign up to fight. It is March of 1862. His brother Calvin leaves home too before the corn is even half-high. For a while that summer all the Boyles boys were still alive. That fall the harvest is harder than normal with so little help on the farm. He spends his first Christmas without his older brothers John William and Augustin. Brother Alexander would be dead right after New Year’s Eve 1863. His brother Irvin enlists to take his place. A second spring comes, a second corn crop goes in, and before they could harvest it, Irvin would be dead as well. A second Christmas: this time with four brothers missing. A third spring, a third corn crop. James Haywood dies in May.

Riley helps get that third crop of corn in at harvest time, and then marches down that same path as his six brothers before him. He joins up with Calvin’s company and the two brothers fight side-by-side for four months. During that time: another Christmas, another New Year. Calvin is shot in the hand and dies not from the wound, but from the infection. Another spring, a fourth corn crop planted without Riley home to help: the only folks home at this point are his parents, his sister Maryann, and his youngest brother Wade. Riley marches, drills, fights, gets thrown in prison, writes long letters home to his sister Mary Ann and his little brother Wade. He does all this for an entire spring. And then the war ends.

You can read many of the letters written by the Boyles brothers during the Civil War here

Riley came home in May of 1865 to a log cabin home that surely felt emptier than it had just three years before. His parents, John Boyles and Charity Ferguson, along with Mary Ann and Wade, had been trying to hold the farm together as best they could with half the help. Riley spends two years with his family helping get the farm back on track, trying return to some kind of normal after the war. In the early summer of 1867, he married Mollie Newsom, a square-jawed woman with a kind face, who came from a family of seven daughters. Together the two would have seventeen children, eleven of whom would make it to adulthood. They would name three of their children after Riley’s brothers— Calvin, Wade, William.

Riley farmed the rest of his life, occasionally winning prizes at the Stokes County fair for his wheat. The family threw Mollie a huge birthday bash when she turned sixty in 1912. The family went to church that morning just like it was a normal Sunday, and not a single person let on that, after the service, the entire congregation was going to follow Riley and Mollie home to join in on the festivities. Mollie comes home to over 140 guests and long tables set up under shade trees spread with “the richest of viands and the good things of the land.” One reporter for the Danbury Reporter who attended the event added a note about Riley: “Mr. Boyles is a plain practical man, and thinks people would be much more healthy and strong if they would return to plainer and simpler methods of living.”

Riley was Julian’s grandfather. We are not that far removed from the Civil War when we think of it in terms of generations. Before Riley, the farthest back we can currently go is four generations: Riley’s father John, his grandfather William, his great-grandfather John, and his great-great-grandfather Wilks. Wilks Boyles was born in Pennsylvania about 1730 and brought his family down the Great Wagon Road (now highway 81) to finally settle down on the middle fork of the Little Yadkin River in Stokes County, North Carolina. He appears in area records in 1770 as William Biles. And that’s one of things that makes it so hard to track down Boyles records is the variety of spellings of the name: Biles, Boils, Bools, Bowls, Boyls, Byles, among others. There are some likely candidates for predecessors beyond Wilks. Boyles-family researchers talk about the “Five Boyles Brothers” that came from Ireland via Maryland in 1701. Then there are two other Irish Boyles brothers— William and Charles — who arrived to Virginia about 1740. Maybe one day some more records will come to light.