Lawrence County History Trivia

A roadside inn, buried Indian gold, and a connection to Hellen Keller? Welcome to Alexander Springs!

On Highway 43, between Ethridge and Summertown, an old road winds through the hills and crosses the beginning of what becomes the Buffalo River. The road–Alexander Springs Road–roughly follows a path that has been traveled for more than two centuries, and it is the heart of a community that began many years before the first Alexander came to the area.

What we now call Highway 43 is the descendant of the Military Road, which was the main route from Nashville to New Orleans for many years. It was so-named because it was built by Army engineers from 1816-1820. Alexander Springs Road is part of the original route of that road.

At the place where the road met the Buffalo River, James McMillan operated a stand by at least 1835 and probably much earlier than that. A stand was a roadside inn where travelers could obtain room and board for themselves and their horses. In 1853, McMillan sold the stand and 550 acres to Absalom Alexander, who operated it with his wife Ellen Fields Alexander and their children.

According to family lore (Absalom and Ellen were my ancestors), a regular lodger at the Alexander Stand was Mary Keller of Tuscumbia, Alabama. You may not have heard of Mary, but you probably know about her granddaughter, Helen. As the story goes, Ellen became such close friends with Mary that she named one of her children in Mary’s honor. We can’t be sure if the story is true, but we do know that Ellen named her newborn son Mack Keller Alexander in 1855.

The stand and stable were dismantled during the Civil War to prevent soldiers from using the buildings. But the size of Absalom’s estate and the presence of so many excellent springs in the area leant the Alexander name to the area, and it has been Alexander Springs ever since.

A persistent legend about the community is that a group of Indians long ago buried gold on Ivy Bluff, near the old Stand. A group of Indians came to the area in 1939 claiming to have a map showing the location of the gold. Fresh holes dotted the bluff the next morning, and new holes were discovered in the area for many years.

A former Confederate spy killed in the street…with a shovel…by a founding member of the Ku Klux Klan? It happened in Lawrenceburg on this day in 1876.

The Pulaski ‘Citizen’ tells us that on July 11, 1876, W.B. Chaffin was “drinking and creating a great disturbance” in Lawrenceburg. A constable attempted to arrest Chaffin, but was unable to complete the job alone, so Sheriff James K. Garner set out to bring Chaffin to justice. To aid in the task, Sheriff Garner summoned Circuit Court Clerk John B. Kennedy, pictured here.

Chaffin was the clerk and master of the chancery court during the Civil War. Despite taking the oath of allegiance to the Federal government and outwardly professing to be a Union man, Chaffin often harbored Confederate guerrillas in his home, and appeared around town to be quite familiar with their activities. During the Civil War, local Unionists suspected that he was a Confederate spy.

Kennedy was a native of Giles County, a veteran of the Confederate Army, and was one of the six original members of the Ku Klux Klan, which was founded in Pulaski in 1865. Some years after the war, he moved to Lawrenceburg, married the only daughter of Dr. Ephraim McClain, and settled in the house known as Monument Hill, just south of the Public Square.

When Garner and Kennedy approached Chaffin to take him to jail that day in 1876, Chaffin saw them coming, and drew his pistol on the sheriff. Acting fast, Kennedy took up a nearby spade and struck Chaffin in the head twice, the first blow with the flat side of the spade, and the second blow with the sharp edge.

The second blow fractured Chaffin’s skull. The paper tells us that Dr. Grant was summoned to the scene, but there was little he could do. Chaffin clung to life, and appeared to make a slow recovery until suffering a relapse of continual convulsions on November 30 of that year. He died on December 22.

The paper reports that Kennedy was to be tried for the action on July 19. Although it doesn’t give us the verdict, whatever punishment he faced must not have been too harsh; Kennedy is listed as among those who attended a reunion of the Third Tennessee Infantry in Lynnville the following October.

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.

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!