Career
Charles Lilburn Lewis was the oldest of eight children born to Colonel Charles Lewis of Buck Island and Mary Randolph. The couple eventually had eight children: Randolph, Isham, Jane Jefferson, Lilburn, Mary Randolph, Lucy B., Martha, and Ann M. (Nancy). The family initially lived in a two-story log cabin on a 500-acre tract south of the Rivanna River around eight miles from Charlottesville, Virginia.
In 1782 Lewis inherited 1500 acres and other property from his father"s estate, on which he built a large new home on a bluff overlooking the river.
He named the estate Monteagle or Mountain. Eagle. During the American Revolutionary War, Lewis joined his father in signing a declaration of independence of the citizens of Albemarle County.
Lewis also served on the Albemarle jury in 1785. The grown sons Randolph and Lilburn moved with their families to Livingston County, Kentucky from Albemarle County, Virginia in 1806.
According to Boynton Merrill, Junior. in Jefferson"s Nephews: A Frontier Tragedy, Lewis had fallen on hard times at the end of the 18th century and was forced to sell his land and slaves.
Randolph and Lilburn purchased large tracts of land along the Ohio River near Smithland, Kentucky, and Lilburn built his home, "Rocky Hill", on a high point in the center of a 1,000-acre farm. On December 15, 1811, Lilburn and Isham had been drinking. Their older brother Randolph had also died, as had Lilburne"s first wife Elizabeth.
The brothers brutally murdered a 17-year-old slave named "George", who had dropped and broken a pitcher of their mother"s, with an axe in front of their other slaves.
That night, the first New Madrid earthquake struck the region. The brothers tried to hide the remains of George, but his body was revealed two months later, when a chimney collapsed in one of the major aftershocks.
The brothers were arrested and charged with the murder. Lilburne tried to persuade Isham to join him in a suicide pact.
While they were planning it, Lilburned died by accident.
Isham was held under investigation, but escaped and disappeared. He died in Livingston County. In 1953, Robert Penn Warren published a lengthy poem entitled Brother to Dragon: A Tale in Verse and Voices that retells the story of the Lewis family and the murder of George.
