How long have people lived in Lawrence County? Quite a long time.
Most anthropologists believe that Native Americans first came to Tennessee a little more than 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age.
For context, if Native presence in Tennessee were an hour on a clock, with the arrival of Native people at 11:00 P.M. and present day at midnight, then David Crockett settled here and Lawrence County’s government was formed a little after 11:58 P.M. and the bulk of our recorded local history has happened in the two minutes since.
That’s a lot of years unaccounted for, and untold thousands of stories which we will never know. The closest we can usually get to knowing anything about the people who lived here in those years is the material culture they left behind. Our county is rich in artifacts left behind by Native people. Generations of Lawrence Countians have turned them up by plow, found them near creeks, and seen them sticking out of hillsides after heavy rains.
In March, I will share the story of a local archaeological dig and what it discovered about local Native people from the things they left behind.
The images above all show arrowheads that I have found in Lawrence County, myself. Have you ever found a Native American artifact in Lawrence County? Share some photos in the comments!
In the spring of 1818, David Crockett and a group of other important men met at a place about four miles north of Pine Bluff, and listened to a man named Henry tell the story of one of the most frightening nights of his life.
Like a faded map to buried treasure, Henry knew something that was very valuable.
The story begins at the Revolutionary War battle of Ramsour’s Mill, North Carolina. There, on June 20, 1780, Captain Gilbreath Falls was killed in action at the head of his patriot cavalry company.
The state of North Carolina rewarded his sacrifice by granting his widow and children joint ownership of a 4,000-acre tract of land in the state’s western frontier.
In 1784, when the grant was made, the border of that tract of land began “on Indian Creek beginning at the first fork of said creek above General Rutherford’s encampment, near an Indian encampment.”
However, that vast tract of land–an estate of 6.25 square miles–was in a wild section of the country in 1784, squarely in the center of Chickasaw territory. Indeed, white settlers largely stayed away from it until the autumn of 1816, when the Federal government purchased it from the Chickasaw and the settlers decided to call the place Lawrence County.
But who was General Rutherford? And where was Indian Creek?
When the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, North Carolina—like the other newly-independent states—was short on cash. To pay its veterans, it devised a system of land grants in the wild territory west of the Appalachians.
At that time, North Carolina laid claim to all of the land that would become Tennessee in 1796. To explore and survey land for these land grants, North Carolina sent General Griffith Rutherford on a surveying expedition in 1784. His men spent weeks hacking through the wilderness, noting the location of important landmarks.
Rutherford’s son, Henry, was present with this expedition. Three decades later, it was Henry who met Crockett and the other commissioners north of Pine Bluff and shared his story.
Henry said the creek was called “Indian Creek” because “a plain Indian reed passed up and down the creek.” This was probably a variety of native cane. By Crockett’s time, however, Indian Creek was known as Shoal Creek, the name we still call it today.
In March 1784, Rutherford’s men began following Indian Creek “in sight of a small quantity of pine timber on the opposite bluff,” the place in modern Lawrenceburg that has been known for more than two-hundred years as Pine Bluff. Today it sits opposite the Lawrenceburg Water Filtration Plant on one side and David Crockett State Park on the other. Somewhere about 3-5 miles north of the bluff, they came to the site of a “large Indian camp” on the bank of the creek, and decided to make camp for the night.
Henry was terrified.
The signs, he said, were all around that the Indians were still in the vicinity. Thomas Gillespie, another member of the expedition, remembered that they found “saplings chopped & bent down & as we judged for the purpose of conveying the wounded” near the camp. Henry “was very apprehensive that they would be disturbed that night by Indians.”
Although the night passed peacefully, all of these circumstances ensured that the Indian campground where General Rutherford’s men spent the night just north of Pine Bluff would be a memorable place for the men who camped there. Perhaps that’s why the surveyor used it as the beginning point of Captain Falls’s massive land grant.
By 1818, when Falls’s heirs were ready to cash in on their claim, Indian Creek had a new name and few people were left who remembered where Rutherford’s men had spent that night in 1784.
Crockett–by 1818 a magistrate and a man on the rise–and a group of other commissioners were appointed by the county court to collect testimony from Henry Rutherford and other survivors of the expedition to ascertain as closely as they could where the campground was, and whether or not Indian Creek was now known as Shoal Creek.
Those depositions were all copied at some point and sent to the Tennessee Historical Commission. Today, they are in the collection of the Tennessee State Library and Archives. I first came across their existence in the footnotes of James Shackford’s biography of David Crockett. I recently transcribed the depositions and began an in-depth research project regarding the land grant. Captain Falls’s widow, as it turns out, was very likely my 4x-great-aunt.
Henry Rutherford and his father General Rutherford moved to Middle Tennessee in the early nineteenth century. Rutherford County, Tennessee, is named for the general. Henry’s memories–and the memories of the other men summoned by the commission to corroborate his testimony–were worth a literal fortune to the heirs of Captain Falls. And they are worth their weight in gold to local historians today, for preserving the memory of Lawrence County when it was a truly wild place.
On this day in 1786, the people of Nashville were afraid. And they were taking up arms.
But what connection does that long-ago militia mobilization have to downtown Lawrenceburg? It’s a long story, but an interesting one.
A confederacy of Native American tribes in the Northwest Territory (modern Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan) renewed hostilities with the United States in 1785. At issue, among other things, was who controlled the land north of the Ohio River.
The British had ceded that land to the United States after the Revolutionary War, but they still maintained forts and trading posts there, and supplied the Indians with weapons. Many of the tribes in the region had sided with the British during the Revolution, and still held unbending hostility toward the United States for the brutality of Washington’s army against their villages during that war.
Adding to the tension was the westward flood of settlers seeking new land. As these settlers continued to encounter hostile Indians, the number of skirmishes and raids between the two groups increased. In 1785, members of several of the northwestern tribes met at Fort Detroit and formed the Western Confederacy, proclaiming the boundary between their land and American land to be the Ohio River. This subsequently led to an increase in the frequency and violence of the raids conducted by both sides.
Eventually, after a series of defeats in which thousands of poorly-trained American militiamen were killed, George Washington sent a well-trained regular force of American soldiers into the area under General “Mad” Anthony Wayne. This army dealt the Indian Confederacy a crushing blow at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, bringing an end to Native dominance in the region.
Although Davidson County was far from most of the heavy fighting during this war, it was still a frontier outpost surrounded–and vastly outnumbered by–potentially hostile Indians. Many of the Cherokee Indians in what would become East Tennessee supported the tribes of the Western Confederacy during this conflict, and some Cherokee leaders actually sent warriors to support their efforts.
In response to the fears of the people of Davidson County, on November 18, 1786, the North Carolina legislature authorized the county to raise “two hundred and one men” to be “enlisted and formed into a military body, for the protection of the inhabitants of Davidson County.” These 201 men were to rendezvous at the “lower end of Clinch mountain” and remain enlisted for two years.
The purpose of this small force was to defend settlers in Davidson County from the same types of Indian raids that were occurring north of the Ohio River, and to attempt to stop the Cherokee from rising up in support of their allies in the north.
One of the men who enlisted in that force was Private John Thompson.
We know extremely little about John Thompson, other than he served his time in the defensive force and was rewarded with a land grant of 400 acres for his service. It was a land grant that he would never claim.
The warrant pictured here was made to Thompson on April 14, 1792. It was an order to survey 400 acres which, for whatever reason, was never surveyed. Because Thompson never claimed his land, the claim reverted to the state.
On December 14, 1820, the state granted the warrant for Thompson’s 400 unclaimed acres to the commissioners of the new town of Lawrenceburg, who surveyed part of that land into the lots that we now know as the Public Square of Lawrenceburg. Although the survey was completed less than a year later, the General Assembly of Tennessee did not officially deed the land to the commissioners until January 16, 1823. The commissioners were responsible for striking the lots off to any who would purchase them, and to use the funds raised by the sale to build a courthouse, jail, and public stocks.
In addition to the land grant, the deed pictured is the deed showing that the state granted Private Thompson’s land grant to the first commissioners of Lawrenceburg. It is recorded in Deed Book A in the office of the Lawrence County Register of Deeds.
How many people can say that they have owned over 3 square miles of land in Lawrence County AND had an American hero as a squatter on that land?
John Christmas McLemore (1790-1864) was one of the most powerful men in early Lawrence County–and it’s possible that he never set foot here. In the months following Lawrence County’s organization, McLemore purchased thousands of acres in the new county. One massive tract contained 2,100 acres of land (that’s over 3 square miles of territory!), which he then struck off into dozens of smaller tracts for a tidy profit.
Most of the people who settled Lawrence County were not like the wealthy and powerful McLemore (who was good friends with Andrew Jackson, and went on to marry Jackson’s niece and become even wealthier by purchasing Jackson’s stake in the land that would become Memphis). Indeed, many of Lawrence County’s early pioneers were squatters–penniless folk who settled, cleared, and cultivated land they didn’t own in hopes of saving enough money to one day purchase their home-place from the owner.
One of these early squatters was none other than David Crockett. Although Crockett used some of his wife’s small fortune to purchase several hundred acres of Lawrence County land outright, he laid claim to hundreds of other acres that he hoped to one day pay for with the profits of his mill. And some of the acreage Crockett claimed belonged to McLemore.
On October 26, 1820, Crockett wrote a letter to McLemore from Lawrence County, explaining that his “powder factory have not been pushed as it ought and I will not be able to meet my contract with you.” Crockett had promised McLemore payment by November 1 for one 320-acre tract of McLemore’s massive holdings, on which Crockett was claiming occupancy.
Apparently Crockett had already paid for a separate 60-acre tract from McLemore, but had received no title, and was unable to pay for the 320-acre tract because of delays in constructing his Shoal Creek milling and distillery operation. Crockett’s letter goes on to say, “I dont expect I can pay you the hole amount until next Spring if you confide in me you can Sent the warrant by male as soon as posable and my letter can Stand as my note.”
Crockett’s struggle to obtain ownership of his occupancy claim on McLemore’s land was a familiar story to most of the poor folks who settled the Tennessee frontier with no money but a solid work ethic and a fighting spirit. This personal experience with occupancy rights in Lawrence County no doubt inspired his later actions in Congress.
Years later, Crockett built his congressional career on a complicated bill which sought to, among other things, reform the corrupt bounty-land system and give squatters in Tennessee a fair chance to lay claim to the land they had worked. His devotion to this cause cost him his political career, as it estranged him not only from the rest of the Tennessee congressional delegation–which was made up of wealthy men who did not see the plight of the common man as urgently as Crockett did–but also drove Crockett away from President Andrew Jackson, who was a legend among land speculators.
[The above excerpts from Crockett’s letter to McLemore were taken from the stellar book ‘David Crockett in Congress: The Rise and Fall of the Poor Man’s Friend’ by James R. Boylston and Allen J. Wiener]
Can you imagine paying only two cents per acre for land in Lawrence County? What about almost the ENTIRE county, plus most of the counties around it?
Most of Lawrence County was legally opened for white settlement by a treaty signed on this day in 1816, when the Chickasaw Tribe of Indians ceded around 9,300 square miles–6 million acres–of land to the United States.
The United States agreed to pay the tribe $120,000 over a period of ten years for this incredibly valuable tract of territory, making it almost a literal steal for the United States. That sum comes to about two cents per acre for land that encompassed not only all of modern Lawrence County, but also most of modern Maury and Wayne Counties, and the bulk of northwestern Alabama.
According to an article published by the Chickasaw TV Video Network, “General Jackson, riding a crest of popularity, led the U.S. negotiations at Chickasaw Leader George Colbert’s home. The Chickasaws might have expected better since they had fought with General Jackson against the Creeks and because the Chickasaws showed him a charter given to them by President Washington guaranteeing them their land in 1794. But Jackson coldly told them, ‘The hunt is over, the game is gone.’ “
This signature page of the original treaty shows the signatures and marks of not only Andrew Jackson and the other white negotiators, but also of many of the chiefs and elders of the Chickasaw Nation who agreed to the deal, including several members of the powerful Colbert family, who arranged for the treaty to include bonus sums and land reservations for themselves.
The white men who organized the land-grab were also motivated by the prospect of a quick fortune. The shallow place in the Tennessee River that would become Florence, Alabama was part of the territory ceded by the 1816 treaty. That land eventually made tidy profits for Jackson and his closest friends, who invested heavily in lots which they sold to settlers for high speculative prices. And at least one Jackson family friend speculated in huge tracts of land here in Lawrence County when it first became available for purchase.
The trickle of illegal pre-treaty white settlement became a flood of legal white settlement in the winter months after the land was ceded by the Chickasaw. Among the wanderers who came to the unorganized territory that would become Lawrence County that winter was David Crockett, who “became so well pleased with the country about there, that [he] resolved to settle in it.” Crockett’s role in helping to bring law and order to the fledgling county would catapult him into a political career that would culminate in his service as Congressman from West Tennessee.
Did you know Lawrence County’s last Revolutionary War veteran died less than ten years before the Civil War began?
By the early 1850s, there were few Revolutionary War veterans left in the United States. Indeed, on the 1850 census, only 67 Lawrence Countians were left who said that they had been born before 1776, and only six of those people had been 15 or older when the Revolutionary War began.
But Lawrenceburg resident Samuel Thomas was one of them. In fact, he was the last surviving veteran of the Revolutionary War in Lawrence County.
Born on March 10, 1759 in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, Samuel was 19 years old in August 1778, when he marched off with his militia company from Anson County, North Carolina, to fight for American independence. As his obituary states, “he served his country faithful, and at the close of the war was honorably discharged, and retired to private life, to enjoy, in common with his co-patriots of the revolution, the fruits of his toils and privations.”
His obituary, however, only tells part of the story.
In his pension application testimony, Samuel tells tales of fighting Tories, marching through the backwoods of South Carolina, doing battle with redcoats, marching with George Washington’s army, and being present at Yorktown on the day that the British surrendered.
Samuel was 90 years old when he applied for his pension in Lawrenceburg. At that time, he said that he had lived in Tennessee since 1816.
Samuel died in Lawrenceburg on December 14, 1853, at the home of prominent citizen George H. Nixon. According to his obituary, he was the last surviving veteran of the Revolutionary War to live in Lawrence County. Samuel was buried with full military honors. The local volunteer militia company of Captain Burkett escorted Samuel’s body to the grave.
The Methodist minister Reverend Noah Parker preached ‘an appropriate Divine service,’ followed by a stirring patriotic eulogy from H.H. Rose. Some excerpts of that eulogy are as follows:
“It is needless for us to ask, why this array of arms around the peaceful grave? Why that banner, with its time honored stars and stripes, is now waving over this ‘city of the dead?’ We are around a soldier’s grave, and these are the fit emblems of a soldier’s burial….
“To day we have conveyed and laid in the silent grave the last soldier of of the Revolution in our county. He has been blessed with long life. He lived to see his country great and happy; extending the blessings of freedom, from the Atlantic to the golden shores of the Pacific ocean…
“We should be thankful that he has lived to enjoy the fruits of his own toil, and to see its blessings extended to a mighty nation–we should be thankful that he has lived to see that tree of liberty, which in youth he assisted in planting in freedom soil, extend its branches from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean, and from the frozen north to the burning sands of the Rio Grande of the south…we should be thankful that he has lived to see that flag in the hands of his descendants, waving victorious upon the battlements of Monterey, Vera Cruz and Mexico; we should rejoice that he has lived to see his country one of the most powerful nations upon earth–the land of the free and the home of the oppressed of every country.”
An ancient Native American rendezvous spot, a beautiful waterfall, and a thriving village now vanished?
Marcella Falls is a picturesque community about 13 miles northeast of Lawrenceburg, near the Giles County line. Factory Creek drops about 20 feet from a bluff at the confluence of three hills, forming a beautiful waterfall in the woods on private property.
In 1957, ‘The Annals of the Lawrence County Historical Society’ recorded a local story that Native Americans once held council meetings beneath “one of the huge oak trees still standing near one of the large springs” at Marcella Falls, and that they made pottery from the clay in a nearby field.
The place got its name from a teacher. According to an article written by Mary Ann Truitt Clayton, Marcella Paine was the educated daughter of a Maury County attorney who came to the mineral springs near the falls in an attempt to recover her poor health in the 1850s. While there, she worked as the tutor and governess of the children of A.O. Williams.
Williams saw the industrial potential of the falls when he came to Lawrence County in 1852. He and his brother harnessed the power of the falling water to operate a woolen mill, a tan yard, saw mills, and a gristmill at the falls in their prime.
The textile operation produced finished products that were shipped by wagon to Nashville and on to points far and wide. The mill also continued operation during the Civil War. According to his Southern Claims Commission application, Williams was an “uncompromising Union man” who had to smuggle his goods through the Federal lines to Columbia in order to avoid capture by Confederate soldiers.
After the war, the village around Marcella Falls continued to grow. By the time the railroad came to Lawrence County in the 1880s, Marcella Falls had a post office, churches, and a variety of small businesses clustered near the falls. However, the railroad eventually shuttered the little village by shifting commerce toward Ethridge. The post office closed in the 1890s, and by the 1920s almost all of the old businesses had dried up.
In 1925, E. Dan Smith attempted to convert the Falls into a private resort for friends and family, complete with a swimming pool and picnic area. However, Smith soon tired of nonrelatives coming to use the resort area and sold the land. The A.O. Williams cabin was renovated and preserved by Coach Ralph and Ethel Young Benson, and survives today near the Falls.
Do you recognize any names on this list of “intruders?”
Before the Chickasaw Nation ceded the land that would become Lawrence County to the United States government in 1816, the area was infested with squatters; whites who had moved to the area and built homes, farms, and businesses on the land without the tribe’s permission.
This list of ‘Intruders on Shoal Creek’ from May 23-24, 1809, contains a list of 31 families who were squatting on the land near Shoal Creek while it was still under native control.
Included in the list is Daniel Beeler, a man who would later become a prominent citizen in Lawrence County, and for whom the Beeler Fork of Shoal Creek is named.
Many of these families were forced to leave their illegally-claimed land by United States soldiers, but the tide of migration into Indian country became so impossible to control that, by 1816, the Chickasaw decided that it was best to cut their losses and take the meager sum offered for the land by the U.S. government.
Tennessee was first admitted to the Union on June 1, 1796 and had been a state for 21 years when Lawrence County was founded on October 21, 1817.
Tennessee’s road to statehood was long and arduous. In 1784, settlers in several western counties of North Carolina (an area that encompasses twelve modern counties in East Tennessee) formed an unauthorized state government which they called Franklin, wrote a constitution, elected a governor, and proceeded to exist in a state of political limbo for the next four years.
Neither the hapless Confederation Congress nor the State of North Carolina recognized the existence of Franklin, and after years of in-fighting and quarreling, Franklin dissolved and rejoined North Carolina in 1789. A year later, the Federal government organized the territory claimed by North Carolina west of the mountains into the Southwest Territory.
A 1795 census of the Southwest Territory showed it exceeded the population requirement for statehood. In a referendum that followed the census, voters in the territory approved the motion for statehood by a margin of 6,504 to 2,562.
After the referendum, Territorial Governor William Blount called for a constitutional convention in Knoxville to draft a state constitution. The 1796 Constitution allowed all free males who owned property the right to vote, regardless of race. This was a very progressive stance for the time. According to the historian J.G.M. Ramsey, Thomas Jefferson is said to have remarked that Tennessee’s 1796 Constitution was the “least imperfect and most republican of the state constitutions.”
The name “Tennessee” comes from the Cherokee word “Tanasi.” Although the exact meaning of the word is unclear, Tanasi was an important 18th-century Cherokee village in modern Monroe County. The village’s status as a trading center resulted in Europeans naming the river after the village. Thus, the name ‘Tanasi’ became the Tennessee River, and subsequently the State of Tennessee.
Tennessee was admitted as the sixteenth state of the Union on June 1, 1796, by a bill signed into law by President George Washington.
Have you ever found a cool fossil in Lawrence County?
I found this Acrocyathus fossil in western Lawrence County. The place where I found it was once covered by an immense colony of rugose coral. It thrived beneath the waters of a shallow sea.
We know this because the petrified ghosts of that reef litter the fields and woods today in thousands of honeycombed Acrocyathus fragments. They are exposed by the winter frosts and washed up by the summer rain.
When the sea dried up and the coral died, the reef was covered by mud and sediments. As the mud dried and the sediments hardened, the coral inside decayed and the cavities left behind slowly filled with minerals which, over time, formed fossils like this one.
According to the University of Kentucky Geological Survey, these fossils are approximately 330 million years old and are typically found in the geologic formation known as St. Louis Limestone. For more information about Acrocyathus, follow this link: https://tinyurl.com/ydwd7t6h
Leave photos of your favorite local fossil finds in the comments!
Lawrence County History Trivia 