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.
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]
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.
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!
Did you know that there was a band of snail-eating Native Americans living between modern West Point and Iron City a few centuries before the birth of Christ? On March 25, 1962, three archaeologists conducted the first-ever archaeological dig in Lawrence County history to learn more about them.
The dig occurred at the site of a 2-acre mound of snail shells on the western bank of Shoal Creek, on land owned by Dr. J.W. Danley. For years, according to Danley, people had found arrowheads near the site and sold them to collectors. The mound of snail shells on Danley’s property constituted a midden, or ancient trash-heap of garbage discarded by the nearby Native American settlement.
The archaeologists dug 4 five-foot sections at the mound. Their excavations uncovered three main pits of discarded materials, each rounded and roughly 18″ in diameter. The first pit yielded a Narrow Stemmed Adena Point, a Cotaco Creek variant, six flake knives, and one Wheeler Punctate potsherd, among other artifacts.
The only human remains found in the midden were in the second pit, which contained a human humerus bone. The third pit contained 200 snail shells and 5 flint flakes. Among the other artifacts dug from the midden were 1 Flint Creek point (which the archaeologists recognized as a common find on other Shoal Creek sites where a large number of digging and chipping tools are found), 2 Benton Stemmed points, 3 pebble hammers, 2 bifaced knives, and 31 flake knives.
Due to the large quantity of deer bones and snail shells found in the midden, the archaeologists determined that the settlement of Native Americans at the Danley Site ate mostly venison and freshwater snails as a protein source. The archaeologists also determined that the settlement existed in the late Archaic or Early Woodland periods, which would date the site at its most recent to several hundred years before the birth of Christ.
While the remains of agricultural implements such as primitive hoes were found in the midden, the archaeologists believed that these implements were indicative that the people of the Danley Site probably did “extensive digging for roots” as opposed to large-scale crop cultivation.
For more information about the dig, and to see a complete listing of the artifacts recovered from the site, check out the article written by the archaeologists in ‘Tennessee Archaeologist,’ vol. XVIII, no. 2, pages 66-69.
Christmas is a time for cherished traditions; chestnuts roasting on an open fire, sleigh bells ringing in the frosty air, trimming the tree and going to grandmother’s house over the river and through the woods, and–watching fireworks in the yard with your family?
On Christmas Day 1883, Lawrenceburg residents were treated to a downtown fireworks display. As local court official W.T. Nixon wrote in his diary, “‘Old Santa’ came to our house last night and made us all happy. As usual the children’s stockings were well filled with goodies and small presents…and all of us happy and glad Christmas is here. We were up betimes to see some fire works in our front yard.”
Nixon and his family watched the Yuletide fireworks show from their front yard on Pulaski Street in Lawrenceburg, where The Hidden Garden is today. Although fireworks are now most associated with Independence Day and New Year’s Eve, they once served as an all-purpose outlet of celebration.
In 1879, Nixon wrote, “the holidays draw on apace and soon the festive Juvenile will glory in the noise and sulphrous smoke of that heathenish invention…the fire cracker.”
Happy National Christmas Lights Day! Be sure to check out the dazzling Christmas light display in Lawrence County’s Amish community!
All kidding aside, many visitors often ask why the Amish don’t believe in using electricity.
The Amish of Lawrence County, who first settled here eighty years ago, are part of the Old Order. In fact, Lawrence County is home to the largest population of Old Order Amish people in the South.
Old Order religious beliefs, including their prohibition on electricity and motor vehicle usage, are grounded in centuries of tradition intended to maintain a life of simplicity and austerity. As Jonas Miller writes in his excellent book ‘The Ex-Amish Kid,’ “the Old Order Amish shun all modern conveniences such as electricity and automobiles because that is the way they were set up from the beginning, and that is the way they are going to keep it.”
These traditional Old Order convictions extend to every part of Amish life, from the clothing they wear to the type of facial hair the men can have. And while they may not have Christmas lights, their shops produce some excellent Christmas gifts, and they are open for business every day except Sunday.
Lawrence County History Trivia 