Did you know that a bandit lies buried under the Old Military Road in Leoma? And that he was killed by the brother of General Nathan Bedford Forrest?

Unlike Florence’s tale of outlaw Tom Clark being buried under Tennessee Street, Leoma’s own outlaw under the street is verified by an eyewitness account. The story begins with the Civil War.

W.P. Oliver, who wrote for the Lawrence ‘Union’ under the pen-name of ‘Fleetwood,’ was a boy of 16 when he witnessed the outlaw buried beneath the street.

As he recalled, it was about the year 1863 when Captain William Forrest, the brother of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, was “riding six miles south of Lawrenceburg on the Old Military Road” with a squadron of cavalry. Right where the city of Leoma currently stands, Forrest encountered a rogue named Davis in a Confederate uniform attempting to waylay a wagon driven by a young man named Bud Thomason, who was bound for the Clay factory with a load of thread.

When Captain Forrest arrived, he saw that the highwayman was attempting to cut the harness from one of Bud’s horses. Forrest ordered Davis to leave the horse alone. Instead of obeying the captain’s order, Davis pulled his gun and fired at him. Forrest narrowly dodged the first bullet, jumped from his horse, and took up a defensive position behind a clay embankment.

Davis fired a second time, and the ball struck the captain’s horse, piercing the beast behind its shoulders. Forrest then took aim with his own weapon and shot Davis squarely through the heart. Davis fell to the road, dead.

Forrest and his squadron continued on their way, as did the wagon driven by Thomason. Unfortunately, Forrest’s horse made it only as far as the nearby Hall’s Stand, home of Jake Springer, where the animal succumbed to its wounds and fell dead in the yard.

After the incident, the few citizens who lived nearby quickly buried Davis’s body in a shallow grave, without a coffin, about two feet in the ground. They built a rough fence of dead limbs around the grave to keep livestock from disinterring the body.

This fence stood around the grave for many years, until Oliver says that a forest fire burned it up. The same fire that burned the fence also felled a nearby tree, which fell lengthwise across the grave, covering it completely and serving as a grave marker to those who remembered what had happened at the place.

Oliver goes on to say that the log was still covering the grave when they began building the town of Leoma, but was moved some years afterward by someone who did not know that a man was buried beneath it, and Oliver wrote that “there is nothing there now to indicate the spot.”

While Oliver did not witness the killing of the outlaw Davis, he could clearly remember seeing Captain Forrest’s horse lying dead in Jake Springer’s yard, and he remembered the fence of dead limbs and the burned-out log on the grave. On a more grisly note, Oliver said that he also once saw a road crew accidentally exhume some of the bandit’s bones in the course of their work.

Captain William “Bill” Forrest From the Matt Hagans Collection Source: Forrest Family Faces