Prestwood, William Thomas, 1788-1859

Schoolteacher, farmer, and surveyor in Western North Carolina.

From the description of Papers, 1783-1859. (Duke University Library). WorldCat record id: 32520338

Nathaniel Clenroy Browder, was born February 4, 1904, in Hickory, North Carolina. He received a bachelor's degree in education from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1930 and married Blanche Penland, of Hayesville, North Carolina, in December of the same year. He worked as a high school teacher before moving back to Chapel Hill in 1938. Browder completed a year of graduate level study in English at the University of North Carolina and then began working for the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) in Chapel Hill, North Carolina from 1939 to 1940. His projects for the FWP included various history-related interviews throughout the southern United States. In April 1940, Browder moved to Raleigh, where he completed a course in drafting at North Carolina State College (later North Carolina State University) and began work for the North Carolina State Highway Department.

In 1943, Browder began working for the Army Signal Corps and served as a cryptographer in Arlington, Virginia during the war. During his term of service, he was also loaned to the Air Force and stationed in Okinawa, Japan. After the war, he continued his career in cryptography in Washington, D.C., working for the National Security Agency until his retirement in 1965. After his retirement Browder moved to Clay County, North Carolina and pursued his interest in local history and genealogy. He wrote, edited, and published a number of books, including: Notes on the Browder Family of Tidewater, Virginia, 1704-1850 (with Blanche Penland Browder, 1970); The Cherokee Indians and Those Who Came After: notes for a history of the people who settled western North Carolina (1973); De Soto & Other Spanish Explorers & Their Historians (1975); The Tri-State Tobacco Growers Association, 1922-1925 (1983); Just Plain Folks (abstracted stories from the Federal Writers Project, ed., 1983); The Enciphered Diary of William Thomas Prestwood, 1808-1859 (ed., 1983); Ground Level History (1984); A Story of the Civil War: a story of the late war by Hannah Lide Coker (ed., 1984); and Isham Browder, Revolutionary soldier, man of mystery (with Blanche Penland Browder, 1984).

In 1984, Browder made arrangements to donate his papers and books to North Carolina State University. Included in these papers were the original enciphered Prestwood diaries, which Browder spent six years deciphering, transcribing, editing, and researching. Also in 1984, Browder and his wife created the Nathaniel C. and Blanche P. Browder Scholarship Endowment, an undergraduate endowment in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at North Carolina State University. Browder died on November 7, 1984.

William Thomas Prestwood was born in 1788 in Chesterfield County, South Carolina. His grandfather was the founder of the influential Coker family, which was established on the upper Pee Dee River prior to the Revolutionary War. He often taught school, but he also did a variety of other types of work, including jobs as a surveyor, mapmaker, clerk, constable, militia officer, farmer, gold miner, and stone carver. He was also a musician and naturalist, and, at the time of his move to Burke (later Caldwell) County, North Carolina between 1813 and 1814, he was a Master Mason. Prestwood married Celia Clarke and they raised six sons and one daughter. Prestwood began keeping an enciphered diary in 1808, and continued to do so until his death in November 1859.

From the guide to the Nathaniel C. Browder Collection of Cryptography Manuals and William Thomas Prestwood Diaries, 1808 - 1983, (Special Collections Research Center)