Lawrence County History Trivia

Readers, for your enjoyment, here is a bit of Lawrence County’s religious history. This booklet belonged to Alta Alley of Deerfield, and contains the Lawrence County Baptist Association’s 1934 minutes from its annual meeting at Park Grove Baptist Church. Do you recognize any of the names in the booklet?

Today (April 16) is the 17th anniversary of the ‘Forgotten F-5,’ so-called because the Nashville tornadoes of the same day overshadowed reports of the storm on major news networks.

The storm that tore through Lawrence County on April 16, 1998 produced the only recorded F-5 tornado in Tennessee history. The path taken by the 1998 tornado was very similar to the F-4 tornado of May 18, 1995. Both storms ravaged Deerfield and Ethridge.

The 1998 tornado was over a mile wide at some points and caused damage to over 100 homes in Lawrence County, including over two dozen homes destroyed. Between Lawrence, Wayne, and Maury counties, more than 150 homes were destroyed by the storm. Three people were killed by the tornado in Wayne County.

This video was shot by Doug Alley of Deerfield, whose family was watching the storm from their back yard, which was about a mile and a half from where the funnel appears here. The broken trees in the foreground are remnants of damage done by the 1995 tornado, which destroyed the Alley family’s house.

The year 1998 was a meteorologically active year for Lawrence County. Tornadic winds swept through the northern end of the county earlier that spring, and a later storm produced a severe hail storm that did a great deal of damage to area homes and vehicles. That July, a massive flood of Shoal Creek killed 2, injured 20, and damaged or destroyed 122 homes across Lawrence County.

We wish to extend our condolences to the family of one of Lawrence County’s finest gentlemen, Coach Aaron McCroskey. Coach McCroskey passed away this morning.

Coach McCroskey’s ministry as a teacher, coach, and pastor touched the lives of many local people, and, as can be seen in this collage from the September 2001 edition of the Lawrence County High School ‘Wildcat,’ his rich singing voice expressed the shared patriotism of our community in the days following the September 11 attacks. In this photo, he is singing Lee Greenwood’s ‘God Bless the USA’ at the patriotic assembly held at LCHS on September 12, 2001.

His congregation, Solid Rock Worship Center, announced the following funeral arrangements via Facebook this afternoon:

Visitation will be Friday, April 10 at Neal Funeral Home from 3-8 p.m., and Funeral Services will be Saturday, April 11 at 2:00 p.m. at Mars Hill.

Our great Lawrence County teachers will appreciate this.

Did you know that Lawrence County teachers have been attending teacher in-service programs for well over a century?

And that they used to occur on Saturday mornings?

And that they often required teachers to read hundreds of pages in textbooks in preparation for group discussion?

And all of that was on top of the regular work required by their course-loads, which for most of them involved teaching multiple grades in one room.

This article from the February 28, 1912 edition of the Lawrence ‘Democrat’ describes what was planned for a March 1912 meeting of the Lawrence County Teachers Association. The Teachers Association at that time was reading through the books of the Teachers Reading Circle Course.

The Teachers Reading Circle was a professional development organization which provided teachers with the opportunity to continue learning about the latest developments in their field.

For that March 1912 meeting, high school teachers were scheduled to arrive at the courthouse at 8:30 on a Saturday morning to discuss readings from books about high school education. Primary school teachers were scheduled to meet at 10:00 that morning to discuss the first five chapters of a book called ‘Standards of Education With Some Consideration of their Relation to Industrial Training’ by Arthur Henry Chamberlain.

In the 1908 edition of Chamberlain’s book, the first five chapters were 129 pages long, and they were entitled:

“The Aim of Education”
“The Elementary Curriculum: Its Motive and Content”
“Industrial Training: Its Aim and Scope”
“The Meaning of Correlation”
“The Basis of Ethical Training”

For the full 1908 edition of this book, please follow this link:

https://tinyurl.com/y5yralnq

While the meeting was not mandatory for all teachers, as modern in-service days are, the superintendent at the time “urged” all teachers to attend, and I find it hard to believe that he wasn’t keeping track of those who chose not to attend.

From the Lawrence ‘Democrat.’

Have you ever found an arrowhead?

Almost ninety years ago, one Lawrence Countian found an arrowhead with quite a tale to tell.

According to the ‘Lawrence News,’ during the week of April 19, 1926, local man Webster Pearl went into the mouth of a collapsed cave on the south side of Crowson Creek near Lawrenceburg, just a “short distance” from the Crowson Mill.

In the mouth of the cave, Pearl discovered a deer skeleton with a flint arrowhead lodged in the spine, indicating that the animal had probably been killed by Indians.

Although Pearl was not sure how the deer had come to die in the cave, he estimated from the location of its injuries that it had not gotten there under its own power, and he reckoned that the Indians must have left it there.

The ‘News’ goes on to say that a hill just above the cave had yielded a lot of flints and arrowheads, indicating that the cave and the surrounding area had probably once served as an Indian encampment.

For your enjoyment, here is a detailed 111-year-old map of Lawrence County.

This soil survey map was created in 1904 by the United States Department of Agriculture. For the details of that survey, have a look at the official government publication here:

https://tinyurl.com/yyawsw28

Please note that some of what this document says about the early history of Lawrence County in those first pages contains some inaccuracies.

The Soil Report details what kinds of soil were found in which parts of the county, and what kinds of crops grew well in those types of soil. It also points out interesting statistics, such as the average size of farms in Lawrence County in 1900 was 127.2 acres, and at that time, more than 3/4 of the county was forested.

For a version of the map that allows you to zoom in and out on specific points, please follow this link:

https://tinyurl.com/yxuztnb2

Source: United States Department of Agriculture

Did you remember to set your clocks forward last night?

You might be surprised to know that almost 4% of Lawrence County’s population chose not to. In fact, in some neighborhoods in northern Lawrence County right now, it’s still an hour earlier than it is in the rest of the county.

Lawrence County’s Old Order Amish people do not observe daylight saving time. The Amish view the practice of setting clocks forward as a modern contrivance that skews the natural order of things.

Some Amish people refer to daylight saving time as ‘English time’ or ‘fast time,’ and to standard time as ‘slow time.’

Photo Credit: Clint Alley

Have you ever pictured the first company of Confederate soldiers leaving Lawrenceburg at the beginning of the Civil War in the spring of 1861? If you have, you probably imagined that they marched off to war beneath the first national Confederate flag, representing the new southern nation that they were off to defend.

If so, you would be wrong.

According to Lieutenant John Hildreth–as quoted in an article in the Lawrence ‘Democrat,’ written sometime in the mid-1910s–when the first Confederate troops left Lawrenceburg to serve in the Civil War in 1861, the community indeed made and donated a flag to them, but it was not a Confederate flag.

Despite the company’s clear allegiance to the new Confederacy, Hildreth said that the company flag under which they marched off to war was the Stars and Stripes of the United States.

There are several possible reasons for this confusing footnote in local history. One is that, when the first Confederate troops left Lawrenceburg for training, Tennessee still had not formally seceded from the Union. The state’s voters had rejected secession in a special referendum on February 9.

It wasn’t until May 6, after the Union bombardment of Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s subsequent call for troops, that Tennessee’s legislature passed a resolution to secede from the Union, pending another referendum. That referendum was held on June 8, when the people of Tennessee voted 2-to-1 in favor of secession, making Tennessee the last state to secede.

Meanwhile, in the month-long interlude between the legislature’s resolution and the referendum, Lawrence County men began going to war. Lawrenceburg’s first company of Confederate soldiers left in May, before the state had officially joined the Confederacy. The men who joined the company actually voted on the issue on June 8 while in camp (interestingly enough, Hildreth said that he voted against secession both times, even when in training to join the Confederate army; regardless, he served the South faithfully throughout the entire war).

It is possible, in the confusion surrounding Tennessee’s official status, that the people of Lawrenceburg had no clue what kind of flag to send off to war with their sons, so they may have arrived at the decision by virtue of it being the only flag they knew.

Another explanation may be that the pattern for the new Confederate flag had not yet been seen in Lawrenceburg at the time that the company left for war, and the people of the community again fell back on the only flag design they knew.

The Stars and Stripes flag was presented to the Confederate company in Lawrenceburg with “a beautiful address” by 18-year-old Lily Bentley, who no doubt helped stitch it together. The cloth for the flag was purchased b Flovel Wilson, the owner of the Laurel Hill Cotton Mill.

Whatever the cause for the mismatched flag, the company did not march beneath the flag for long. As it was clear that flying the flag of the Union would cause great confusion on the battlefield, the company commander, Captain Benjamin F. Matthews, sent the flag home to his family after the company was officially mustered into the service of the Confederacy on August 7, 1861.

Although Hildreth did not say whether the company ever got another flag from home, he did describe the company’s first uniforms. To the best of his memory, the company was comprised of about 80 men when it left Lawrenceburg. They were outfitted with uniforms made of “beautiful” gray jean cloth, which he believed had been produced at one of the textile mills between Lawrenceburg and Florence, but which other sources say was produced at the Laurel Hill Cotton Mill.

Hildreth, who was a tailor, cut the uniforms for the men, himself. With “two sewing machines and 20 Southern Lawrence County ladies,” he was able to present the uniforms to the company in just two weeks.

For many years, the ‘Democrat-Union’ had a program known as the ‘Over-80 Club,’ where people who were over 80 years of age could get a free subscription to the paper for life if they submitted a brief autobiography.

Most of these autobiographies are collected in the books ‘In Their Own Words’ and ‘In Their Own Words 2,’ compiled by Hazel Myhan and for sale at the Lawrence County Archives.

One of the most humorous autobiographies came from George M. Mattox, who joined the club in the early 1970s. An exceprt of his Over-80 Club autobiography is as follows:

“My name is George M. Mattox. I was born in Cullman, Ala. on October 5, 1891…

“I reckon me and my old gal have done a pretty good job. We got 30 cents in money we haven’t spent. We bought land in Lawrence County in May, 1920, and the fall of December 5, 1920, we landed in Lawrence County with the little we had.

“We cleared this land and made a farm of it. We have been married for 56 years. We have never argued in our lives, but sometimes you could hear us reasoning things for a quarter of a mile.

“I am in excellent health and could work all day. I have the majority of my farm sowed down and black angus walking all over it.

“I learned ten or twelve years ago that I could take it easy and live off the interest I owed.”

Happy birthday to two Lawrence County churches!

On this day in 1872, Sacred Heart Catholic Church of Loretto was founded.

And on this day in 1896, First Baptist Church of Lawrenceburg was organized in the Opera House on the Lawrenceburg Public Square.

These two churches have played important roles in the development of their respective communities, and they are two of the reasons that Lawrence County is a great place to live.

Happy 143rd birthday, Sacred Heart Loretto! And happy 119th birthday, First Baptist Lawrenceburg! May you both continue to serve Christ and the people of Lawrence County for centuries to come!