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Sometime in the early 1820's, William Trentham and his family migrated to Sevier County, Tennessee, from Haywood County, North Carolina.  They settled in the Two-Mile Branch and Forks of the River area, now part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

William Trentham was one of the early school teachers for the White Oak Flats community.  A story handed down for generations about him as the school teacher in White Oaks said -- "William Trentham seems to have known how to enforce order among what must have been a body of turbulent pupils, for it is told of him that he once whipped a daughter of Daniel Wesley Reagan for spitting into the school books of her fellow students.  This so incensed the father of the girl that he vowed there should be no more schools of that kind where he lived, so he locked the schoolhouse and took away the key."

William Trentham and his wife Easter Ogle were listed in the 1830 and 1840 Federal Census of Sevier County, Tennessee.

William Trentham was appointed as the only postmaster for the White Oak Flats community.  The post office was organized on 11 November 1840 and was disbanded on 13 June 1844.  He also served as the Justice of Peace for the 11th Civil District (White Oak Flats).

William Trentham was buried with his wife in the Trentham Family Cemetery, now part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  William's grave stone gives 1843 as his date of death.

Source:  Smoky Mountain Clans, Donald B. Reagan, 1974, p 49.  Smoky Mountain Clans, Volume 3, Donald B. Reagan, 1983, p 164.  Smoky Mountain Clans, Volume 2, Donald B. Reagan, 1983, p 101-102.  In the Shadow of the Smokies, Smoky Mountain Historical Society, 1993, p 719.  Sevier County, Tennessee, and Its Heritage, 1994, p 359.

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