04/19/2026
🇺🇸 Honoring Our Local Revolutionary Hero
The Soldier and the Surveyor
ZEPHON FLOWER — REVOLUTIONARY PATRIOT
Born November 30, 1765, Hartford, Connecticut · Son of Nathaniel & Hulah Bradford Steele Flower
The Flower family had been part of Connecticut life for nearly a century before Zephon was born. His father, Nathaniel Flower, was believed to be descended from Lamrock Flower of Rutlandshire, England, who had crossed the Atlantic around 1685 and planted his family at Hartford. By the time Zephon arrived on November 30, 1765 — the son of Nathaniel and Hulah Bradford Steele Flower — Hartford was an established colonial town, and the Flowers were an established part of it. But the world Zephon was born into would not stay settled for long.
In the spring of 1779, thirteen-year-old Zephon Flower enlisted in the Revolutionary army under Captain Maxwell of the Light Dragoons. He was, by any measure, too young to be a soldier. The army was not particular about such things. He served from that spring until January 1, 1780, then — just twenty-five days later — re-enlisted, joining Colonel Elisha Shelding’s regiment of Light Dragoons. He would not receive his discharge until June 12, 1783, when the fighting was finally over. It is probable that he received his first instruction in surveying during the war itself, with Colonel Kingsbury serving as his tutor — passing along the technical foundations of a craft that would define the rest of Zephon’s working life. John Jenkins, another early surveyor who practiced in the Valley, may have further inspired the young soldier. One of Flower’s first maps of Athens was rendered from the survey notes of Jenkins, dated 1786.
He was not present at the principal battles of the Revolution, but the war found him all the same. He was, by every account, wonderfully brave — a young man who seemed to attract danger and walk out of it. He told thrilling tales of capture and recapture that stayed with listeners long after he had finished. There was the story of crawling through a port hole of a fort with a loaded cannon swinging into place behind him, the gunner just moments from firing. There were hairbreadth escapes that no one could quite explain, except to say that Zephon Flower possessed an uncommon instinct for survival.
But of all the stories, one rose above the rest. One night, while standing sentinel duty, young Zephon halted a man who was passing the guard without giving the countersign. In the darkness of a military encampment, rank did not excuse the challenge, and Zephon held his ground. The man stopped. He gave the countersign. He returned the salute. And then he tossed the young soldier a silver half dollar, saying “Good boy, good soldier.” The man was General George Washington himself. It was a small moment measured against the scale of a revolution, but for a thirteen-year-old boy far from home, standing his post in the dark, it was the kind of moment a man carries for the rest of his life — proof, in silver, that doing your duty matters even when no one important seems to be watching.
When the war ended and the discharge came on June 12, 1783, Zephon Flower was not yet twenty years old. He returned to Connecticut and, in 1785, married Mary Patrick of Hartford. Together they removed to Stillwater, New York, beginning the long, westward-drifting life that would eventually carry them deep into Pennsylvania. In 1786 he assisted with the State Line survey, running the boundaries of a new nation still figuring out where it began and ended. In 1787, according to the records of the Susquehanna Company, he purchased a share in that enterprise, likely at Kingston, where he is recorded as living the following year.
By 1791 he had settled in Sheshequin, the long narrow township that follows the Susquehanna south from the New York line into Bradford County. There he was made a Major in the militia — a title that would follow him for the rest of his days. “Major Flower” was how Athens would come to know him, and it suited him: there was a precision to the man, a quiet authority that came from years of reading terrain and making consequential decisions in difficult country. From Sheshequin he moved east of Athens, living on several different locations within the town over roughly twenty years. He had found his place. In the end, he lived out his final days in the home of his son, who had purchased the Colonel Franklin property — a fitting address for a man who had spent his life in the company of history.
As a surveyor, Major Flower became one of the most consequential figures in early Bradford County and the wider Susquehanna Valley. He was appointed Deputy Surveyor of Bradford County by Surveyor General Cochran, serving formally from 1821 to 1824, though his surveying work had been ongoing for decades before that appointment made it official. He must have been kept very busy in those early days with all the land controversies and new land divisions. Highways and village streets also required his services as surveyor-engineer. In New York State alone, his survey of the General Thomas patent — a tract of about 7,000 acres — kept him occupied at various times between 1803 and 1830. This large tract contained what is now most of the Village of Waverly, extending northerly to a point above the former Fraley Park and west of Waverly Hill. Another lengthy survey was the Douglas patent, which extended easterly from the Thomas land along the state line to the Susquehanna River and northerly to beyond the Cannon Hole area. He laid out many of the early roads that knit the region together and helped locate numerous obscure land claims — the kind of tangled, overlapping disputes that plagued every frontier settlement and required both technical skill and hard-won local knowledge to resolve. He was, in the plainest sense, the man who drew the map of the world his neighbors lived in.
On December 31, 1811, Zephon Flower put his signature to a document that survives to this day: a land indenture recording the sale of 242 acres and 32 perches in Lycoming County from Abraham Witmer and his wife Mary to Avery Gore of Ulster Township, for the sum of four hundred and eighty-four dollars and forty cents. Flower signed as a witness — one of two men present to attest the transaction. It is a small but tangible piece of evidence, placing him precisely in Lancaster County on the last day of that year, lending his name and credibility to the orderly transfer of land.
There was one other distinction he carried with quiet pride. On June 12, 1798 — exactly fifteen years to the day after he received his military discharge — Zephon Flower became the first person made a Mason by old Rural Amity Lodge. The symmetry of that date, whether coincidence or chosen, speaks to a man who understood that the life he built after the war was as worthy of honoring as the war itself.
He and Mary Patrick raised twelve children together — a large family, nearly all of whom eventually removed to the West, following the same frontier spirit that had carried their father from Connecticut to Pennsylvania a generation before. Among those who remained, none was more fondly remembered than Helosia. The older residents of Athens knew her as “Aunt Louiza Flower,” and recalled her as a woman of constant, quiet generosity — always moving through the community with a capacious basket on her arm, invariably filled with nuts and apples she pressed upon every child she met. That basket eventually found its way to the local museum, where it outlasted its owner as a small monument to a life spent in acts of kindness. Their children were:
Helosia — born January 16, 1786, noted for her many deeds of kindness and charity, died unmarried, July 13, 1861.
Mary — born July 12, 1788, married Zebulon Mix, Towanda.
Nathaniel — born July 16, 1791, married Clarissa, daughter of Moses Park, died September 8, 1851, without children.
Huldah — born October 26, 1793, married Timothy Bartlett, Sheshequin.
Ithuriel — born December 10, 1797, removed West.
Zuliema — born April 6, 1800, married George Walker of Nichols, N.Y., mother of nine children, the fourth being Zephon F. Walker, a noted surveyor and civil engineer of the county.
Other children — Philomela, Zephon, George, Alfred, Albert, and Almore.
Mary Patrick Flower, born December 20, 1765, outlived her husband by many years, dying March 5, 1848. Both are remembered in the records of Athens’s Revolutionary War veterans. Major Flower is buried at the Franklin-Flower burying ground in East Athens..
Major Flower’s legacy did not end with his own death. Through his daughter Zuliema and her son Zephon Flower Walker, he founded a surveying dynasty that would serve the Susquehanna Valley for more than 150 years. Zephon Flower Walker, his grandson, was born July 21, 1824, the son of George Walker Jr. of Factoryville and Zuliema Flower. Upon the death of his father in 1837, he went to reside at the Flower residence — the former Colonel John Franklin farm in East Athens — where he worked as a farm hand and studied the rudiments of surveying at the Athens Academy, augmenting that education with practical experience from his grandfather. It was not long before Walker had an extensive practice as both surveyor and civil engineer. He became surveyor-engineer for the Geneva, Ithaca and Sayre Railroad, and also served the boroughs of Sayre and South Waverly when they were first established. In Waverly he surveyed the land for the first extension of the corporate limits, new streets, and some of its first sanitary sewers. Z. F. Walker married Rebecca M. Franklin, great-granddaughter of Colonel John Franklin, on August 9, 1855, and once again the old homestead in East Athens became occupied by a descendant of the old soldier.
To them was born Nathaniel Flower Walker on May 28, 1858 — the third and final member of the illustrious trio, who would carry the family’s surveying tradition into the twentieth century. Nat, as he was familiarly called, served as Village Engineer for the Waverly Water Board when the upper dam of the water supply was raised some thirty feet, making certain the contractor carried out the work to the satisfaction of the board. He was also deeply interested in the preservation of early maps of the Valley, redrawing many that are now held in the Athens Museum. Tragically, on February 12, 1940, Nat met his death in a fire that destroyed the Franklin home, which had stood for over 140 years. Despite his age he made a futile attempt to extinguish the blaze but was overcome by smoke. A man named Edward Daniels also lost his life in the fire. Neighbors and firemen were able to save much of the home’s contents, however, including the valuable maps and records that are his grandfather’s most lasting legacy. Nat Walker never married, and with his death the dynasty came to an end — but the original maps the three surveyors left behind continue to serve future generations.
The boy who halted Washington in the dark became the man who mapped Bradford County and the Susquehanna Valley. The thirteen-year-old soldier who crawled through a fort’s porthole became the surveyor who laid out the roads, boundaries, and village streets his neighbors traveled every day of their lives. And through his daughter Zuliema, he founded a line of surveyors that would serve the region for more than a century and a half after his death. Zephon Flower’s story is the story of an entire generation — men and women who fought a revolution in their youth, then spent the rest of their lives building the country they had won, in the places where it still needed to be built. He arrived in Athens as a frontier surveyor with a soldier’s past. He left it as one of its founders, and the grandfather of a dynasty.
Sources: A History of Old Tioga Point and Early Athens, Pennsylvania, pp. 189–190, 350–351, by Louise Welles Murray · Pioneer and Patriot Families of Bradford County, by Clement Heverly · “Valley Family Founded Survey, Engineering Dynasty That Lasted for Over 150 Years,” The Evening Times, by Les Marshall · Lancaster County Land Indenture, Abraham Witmer to Avery Gore, December 31, 1811 (Zephon Flower, witness)
