John Evans (7 December 1738–18 May 1834), member of the Convention of 1788, was born in the part of Prince William County that in 1742 became Fairfax County. While he was still young, his father, John Evans, died. His mother, Margaret Evans (whose maiden name is not recorded), remarried and sent her son to school in Alexandria. When he was thirteen, the family moved to the area that became Loudoun County in 1757. Evans married Ann Martin about 1761. Of their eight sons and two daughters, one son and one daughter died in infancy or childhood.

Early in the 1760s Evans traveled west to the Monongahela River and marked trees on the land he planned to claim with tomahawk slashes. He returned to build a cabin, and in the mid-1760s he, his family, and their enslaved persons prepared to move there. Fear of Indian hostilities interrupted their plans, however, and they lived for a time at Fort Cumberland, in Maryland. In October 1770 they were among the first settlers in the area that later became Morgantown. Evans named his new home Walnut Hill. He served as a lieutenant in the West Augusta militia during Dunmore's War in the autumn of 1774 but did not fight at the Battle of Point Pleasant, the only major engagement.

Evans received a commission as a major in the Monongalia County militia on 17 February 1777, a few months after the county was established, and won promotion to colonel not long afterward. He commanded militiamen from his county and several others in 1778 when General Lachlan McIntosh led an expedition into the area north of the Ohio River. Evans's troops helped build Fort McIntosh on the Beaver River in Pennsylvania and also Fort Laurens on the Tuscarawas River in present-day Ohio. While on that expedition he was appointed county lieutenant, the commander of the militia, and in that role coordinated Monongalia County's defense for more than a decade. Indian attacks on the thinly defended frontier in the later years of the Revolutionary War threatened to drive settlers completely from the county. Evans frequently wrote to the governor and other state leaders requesting supplies and reinforcements. Late in the 1780s and early in the 1790s he periodically mobilized and supplied militiamen and rangers to protect against raids. Accused of wasting and selling the county's ammunition and of certifying a fraudulent militia payroll, Evans was court-martialed in 1792. The outcome of the trial is not known, but by the spring of 1793 he had resigned as county lieutenant.

Evans won election to the House of Delegates from Monongalia County in 1779. As a consequence of arriving late for both the May and the October sessions, he was not appointed to a major standing committee. Evans became clerk of the Monongalia County Court about 1782 and held that position until he resigned in 1807. Many early records of the county were destroyed in 1796 when fire consumed the outbuilding on his farm that he had been using as his office. He also served as a commissioner for land claims in Monongalia, Ohio, and Yohogania Counties in 1781, as a trustee of Morgantown beginning in 1785, and as a trustee of Randolph Academy appointed in 1787.

In March 1788 Evans was one of two Monongalia County delegates elected to the convention called to consider the proposed constitution of the United States. He attended all twenty-six sessions of the convention in Richmond but is not recorded as having spoken during the debates. On 25 June, Evans voted to require amendments before ratification and after that motion failed voted against ratification. The other delegate representing Monongalia favored ratification. Evans did not participate in a vote on 27 June that defeated a proposal to limit Congress's power of taxation.

Reelected to the House of Delegates in 1791, Evans served in that body again in the session of 1794 and from 1797 to January 1800. (His namesake son represented the county during some of the intervening years.) Evans sat on the Committee of Propositions and Grievances in 1791, 1794, 1797, 1798, and 1799; on the Committee for Courts of Justice in 1791, 1798, and 1799; on the Committee of Claims in 1797; and on the Committee of Privileges and Elections in 1797 and 1798.

Evans's wife died on 11 October 1827. Six years later he received a federal pension for his Revolutionary War service. By then Evans was nearly blind and had disposed of most of his property. He wrote a new will in 1831 that freed one enslaved adult female at the time of his death and provided for freeing two enslaved girls and two enslaved boys when each reached the age of twenty-one. John Evans died, probably at his residence in Morgantown, on 18 May 1834 and was buried in Oak Grove Cemetery.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Samuel T. Wiley, History of Monongalia County, West Virginia (1883), 521–523, and Bernard L. Butcher, ed., Genealogical and Personal History of the Upper Monongahela Valley, West Virginia (1912), 3:1316–1321; John Evans Jr. Bible records (typescript), West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV (variant birth date of 9 Dec. 1737, variant birthplace of Loudoun Co., and death date of 18 May 1834); self-reported birth date of 7 Dec. 1738 and notation "Died May 1834" in Evans's deposition, 15 Feb. 1833, Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty-Land Warrant Application Files, Record Group 15, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; several letters in files of various governors, Executive Department, Letters Received, Record Group 3, Library of Virginia, printed and calendared in part in William P. Palmer et al., eds., Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts, 1652–1869 (1875–1893), 2:625, 3:89–90, 232, 343, 418, 484, 4:232, 597–598, 5:603–604, 6:118–119; John P. Kaminski et al., eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution: Ratification of the Constitution by the States, vols. 8–10: Virginia (1988–1993), 10:1539, 1541, 1566; typescript of will proved 26 May 1834 (Monongalia Co. Order Book, 11:486) in Monongalia Co. Will Book, 1:81; gravestone inscription includes variant birth date of 9 Dec. 1737 and erroneous death date of 18 July 1834 for John Evans and variant death date of 11 Nov. 1837 for Ann Evans; death notice in American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge, for the Year 1835 (1835), 329 (variant death date of 21 May 1834 at age ninety-seven).

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by William B. Bynum.

How to cite this page:
William B. Bynum, "John Evans (1738–1834)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2023 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Evans_John, accessed [today's date]).

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