HISTORY OF FAYETTE COUNTY KENTUCKY, by Robert Peter, ed. by William H. 
Perrin, O. L. Baskin Co., Chicago, 1882.  Reprinted by Southern 
Historical Press, Easley, SC, 1979.
page 772
N. R. SIMMONS, physician and farmer, Athens, is directly descended, 
paternally, from Virginia stock.
His great-grandfather, by the maternal line, Peter Pattric, was a native 
of Ireland, from which country he came to America and settled first in 
Maryland, but subsequently removed to Kentucky, when the rare beauty and 
promising fertility of this region was yet attracting the hardy pioneers 
who reclaimed the land from forest wildness, and began to make it a 
paradise, fruitful and lovely beyond anything their most ardent hoped or 
liveliest imaginings could picture.
He was one of the settlers on the Indian frontier, who became a martyr to 
energy and enterprise, and a victim to aboriginal rage and rapacity.
Being taken a prisoner by a war party of Indians, he was made the sport of 
their ferocious revels, tortured and taunted, and, when welcome death 
lingeringly liberated the brave spirit from the cruelly lacerated body, 
his heart was cut out and set upon a pointed stick, in token of the 
respect which his courage and endurance had inspired in the minds of his 
dusky captors and fiendish murderers.
His wife, Millie (Rentch) Pattric, long lived to mourn her hero departed, 
and died in this State at the age of ninety-one years.
Dr. Simmons' father, Greenberry, and is mother, Susan (Rentch) Simmons, 
were both Kentuckians, born, he in 1801, she in 1806.
The father died in 1851, being killed by the accidental discharge of a gun; 
the mother is still living, a resident of Nelson County, where our subject 
was born.
He graduated at Long Island Medical College in 1864, and began the regular 
practice of his profession in the following year, at Bardstown, Ky., where 
he was married, December, 1865, to Jennie, daughter of James and Mary F. 
(Blackwell) Pettit, the latter a daughter of Gen. Armstead Blackwell, still 
a distinguished resident of Winchester.
The Pettit family is well known in connection with the hardships and heroism 
of the early settlement of Fayette County, in which the name is deservedly 
honored.
Dr. Simmons remained in Bardstown till 1877, when he came to Fayette County, 
where he has since continued in practice.
He also devotes a part of his energies to the care of the homestead farm 
of his father-in-law, whereon he resides, and which, under his judicious 
management, is cultivated with pardonable pride and deserved profit.
He is a Master of Masonic Lodge, No. 445, at Athens, and a Ruling Elder of 
the Presbyterian Church at Salem, Clark County.
He has two sons: James P., aged fifteen, and Greenberry, aged thirteen years.
Simmons Pattric Rentch Blackwell Pettit
=
VA MD Nelson-KY Clark-KY

http://www.rootsweb.com/~kygenweb/kybiog/fayette/simmons.nr.txt