SUBMITTED BY: JC Knowles (edited and vetted by Cheri Todd Molter)
Samuel A’Court Ashe was born on September 13, 1840 at Wrightsville Sound, near Wilmington, North Carolina. His parents were William Shepperd Ashe and Sarah Ann Green. During his youth, Ashe lived on his father’s plantation at Rocky Point, north of Wilmington.
At the age of nine, he was enrolled in a boarding school in Macon, Georgia. Part of his education also took place at Rugby Academy at Washington D.C. and Oxford Military Academy at Oxford, Maryland. In 1855, Ashe entered the U. S. Naval Academy, but he resigned from there in 1858.
When the Civil War began, Ashe entered service for the Confederacy in his native state. He served in Company I of the 18th Infantry, North Carolina Troops until he was discharged for promotion on Aug. 25, 1863. Then, according to his compiled military record, Ashe was commissioned into Company A of the North Carolina 2nd Battalion Local Defense. By the war’s end, Ashe was the assistant commanding officer at the arsenal in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
In his later years, Ashe served as an editor of the News & Observer, a Raleigh newspaper. He also was the author of an eight-volume history of North Carolina.
Ashe died August 31, 1938, and he is buried in Raleigh’s beautiful Oakwood Cemetery. A monument for Ashe was dedicated on Capitol Square in Raleigh on September 13, 1940. During his life he was known as a soldier, a journalist, a legislator, an editor, and a Christian man.
