LENOIR, William, soldier, born in Brunswick county, Virginia, 20 April, 1751; died in Fort Defiance, Wilkes County, North Carolina, 6 May, 1839. When he was eight years old his father removed to Tarborough, North Carolina he received a limited education, married at the age of twenty, and settled near Wilkesborough. In the beginning of the Revolution he was an active Whig and clerk of the Surry county committee of safety. He suffered severe hardships as a lieutenant in General Griffith Rutherford's campaign against the Indians in 1776, and was afterward engaged, as a captain in Benjamin Cleveland's regiment, in subduing the Tories. At the battle of King's Mountain he was wounded in the arm and side, and at the defeat of Colonel Pyle, near Haw river, a horse was shot under him. After the war he was appointed a justice by congress and afterward by the state assembly. He was a member of the assembly, and from 1781 till 1795 of the state senate, over which he presided for five years. He also took an active part in the Hillsborough convention for the adoption of the constitution of the United States. At the organization of the State university of North Carolina in 1790 he was chosen president of the board, and for the last eighteen years of his life he was major-general of the militia. A town and also a county in North Carolina were named in his honor.