The Long Way Home

Last night I watched the movie "Follow the River" on the Hallmark channel. This film held a particular interest for me, as I was already intimately familiar with the story that it told.

When I was young, my father served a church in the town of Radford, Virginia for nearly eight years. I essentially grew up there, as I was three when we arrived and had just turned eleven when my father later transferred to Cokesbury UMC here in Knoxville. Radford was a college town then as now, and each summer a number of the students were involved in a locally produced outdoor drama known as "The Long Way Home". The drama told the story of Mary Ingles Draper, a young woman from the New River Valley (the play was actually presented on the original site of the Drapers' farm) who, along with her two sons, was captured by Shawnee Indians, transported hundreds of miles overland to the Ohio River Valley and who later managed to escape captivity and miraculously find her way back to the New River and the Virginia settlement from which she was initially abducted.

The story of her arduous journey was vividly portrayed each night by the theater group, and the outdoor drama drew people from all over the southeast. When I was really young, I remember being particularly terrified of the gruesome characters representing the spectres of hunger and death that followed Mary throughout the latter portions of the production.

After her ordeal, Mary remained in the New River Valley with her husband and the family operated a ferry across the river, the remains of which could still be seen at the time I lived there. Mary was buried in the Radford town cemetery, which was located just adjacent to my elementary school. Her large memorial marker was constructed of the stones from the chimney of the original cabin, and I must have walked past it a hundred times on my way home, never realizing just what it was.

The movie last night was entertaining, if not entirely accurate. However, the true story of Mary Ingles Draper is as harrowing (and as interesting) as anything Hollywood could ever come up with.
As for me, the version of the story that will always resonate the most holds with it memories of warm summer nights, of wild and exotic figures dancing on an outdoor stage and, just beyond, the sight of that ancient river meandering by, just as it had those 200 years earlier.

In a Sea of Seccessionism.....

A couple of years back, there was a great article in the Metro Pulse by Knoxville historian Jack Neely. The article centered around a situation at one of the local high schools that had gained momentum and had suddenly, it seemed, become newsworthy. Apparently the African-American students at Maryville High School in Blount County had taken issue with the school's tradition of flying the "Stars and Bars" during local football games in keeping with the theme of the school's athletic program and mascot, the "Rebels". Black students described the display of the rebel flag as tantamount to the flying of a swastika, to which many white students responded by decrying the "Heritage not Hate" slogan. To them, they explained, the display of the rebel colors was simply a celebration of the heritage passed down by their forefathers. The problem, Mr. Neely noted in a wryly presented argument, was that during the American Civil War, the citizens of Blount County were overwhelmingly Unionist; by some accounts as much as 80% so.

So what made East Tennessee different? The answer is probably more topographical than ideological, at least at its root.

On June 8, 1861, just months after the fall of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, the state of Tennessee, first by executive order of the pro-South governor and then subsequently by popular vote, followed many of its southern neighbors by officially declaring its independence from the United States. Mountainous eastern Tennessee, having little in common with the agrarian regions to the west and south, remained staunchly Republican and pro-Union. As the high ridges and rocky soil of the region were not conducive to the development of plantation society, the majority of the white population of eastern Tennessee (or East Tennessee, as it was officially referred to following secession) had little use for slavery. Whatever lofty ideals were assigned to the region later on by revisionist historians, the fact of the matter remains that the politics of East Tennessee, much like those of what was to become West Virginia, were forged first and foremost by the general topography of the land on which its people had settled. Following the example of western Virginia (or the State of West Virginia, as it would later be known), East Tennessee quickly moved to secede from its secessionist parent state. However, the subsequent occupation of the area by nearly 55,000 confederate troops precluded any attempt by pro-Union groups to organize.

The Unionist sentiments of the people of East Tennessee continued to flourish in the face of secessionist oppression, and Knoxville rapidly became, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, the seat of a “unionist island in a sea of secessionism”.

As the conflict gained momentum, many of the men of East Tennessee were, regardless of conviction, pressed into service among the ranks of the Confederate Army. Others escaped under cover of night and made their way across the occupied Cumberland Mountains to join the Union Army in Kentucky. Edward Best, one of Blount County’s leading historians, tells of one young man from Morganton who, despite the fact that his family was pro-slavery, absconded in the middle of the night and crossed into Kentucky. His venture was funded in part by money secretly donated from among the family’s slaves.

While Knoxville and the highlands to the East were overwhelmingly Republican, the counties to the West became increasingly Democratic the farther one traveled from the mountainous regions. Some counties, such as Blount, Loudon, Monroe and McMinn spanned the topographical extremes and encompassed both jagged ridge and rolling farmland. As expected, the politics of these counties changed with the contours of the land, and to this day, though the principal ideologies of the parties have long since reversed themselves, the highland sections of the counties remain steadfastly Republican while the lowlands remain, with few exceptions, Democratic.

Our family in East Tennessee gave its fair share of young men to the conflict, the majority of whom mustered into the Union Army early in the war. The Andersons, Cryes, Simpsons, Moores, Flennikens, Edingtons and Pickens all produced soldiers for the Union, while the Kerrs, Wimberlys and a few of the McCammon line tended to support Secession. This war pitted brother against brother and father against son, and our family, like most others, broke down along lines of ideological conviction.

When We Were Sick

On the grounds of one of the facilities my office regulates in West Nashville lies a little family cemetery. The plot is not at all well maintained; many of the stones are down and many more have become nicked and broken by the large mowers used to keep the grounds cleared. The site has the potential to become completely obliterated within the next 10-20 years without some serious conservation efforts. I can't visit the facility each year without walking out to the little cemetery; if nothing else just to mark its ongoing deterioration.

Two years ago I was studying a few of the remaining intact gravestones and I noticed that several members of one family, from infants to older adults, had died within just a short period of time in the year 1878. Oddly, the groundskeeper, having similarly noted this occurrence, knew exactly why this was- in the year 1878 there was a yellow fever epidemic in the Southern United States that killed nearly 20,000 people, including, it would seem, most of the members of this one little family in West Nashville.

Since that time, I have become more keenly aware of noting common dates of death in cemeteries and comparing them with major epidemics in the United States. The most common, of course, is the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918, which killed nearly 500,000 people in the U.S. and 20 million worldwide. I've seen evidence of the heartache wrought by that particular outbreak in several cemeteries I've visited over the past couple of years.

I believe as a nation, we tend to forget that things like this happen; unfortunately often in relatively common cycles. Right now, faced by another potential pandemic, we are reminded that the world is an uncertain place- yellow fever, cholera, typhoid; even polio has recently made a reappearance. Hopefully, the swine flu epidemic will pass quickly and serve as nothing more than a sobering experience for our health care communities. Here's hoping, at least...

Jesse Simpson, Sr.

Recently I received this photo of what is widely held to be the pioneer cabin of Jesse Simpson, Sr.; early Knoxville settler, patriarch of the Simpson clan here and my 5th great grandfather. As the photo was taken by Ms. Edna Guilford, an impeccable researcher and an almost unimpeachable source for this line of the family, I have no real doubts that the photo is accurately identified. Ms. Guilford passed a way a few years ago, but her lifetime of research makes for a pretty incredible legacy. The following are the notes I wrote on Jesse Simpson, Sr. and his family a number of years ago.

“Jesse Simpson Sr. and family removed from near Saltville, Montgomery County, Virginia, early in 1800 settling in Knox County Tennessee on the south side of the French Broad River about five miles east of Knoxville.”

So begins Ms. Katherine Baker-Johnson’s brief narrative of the life of Jesse Simpson, Sr., the fourth great grandfather of Jerry A. Anderson. Despite the fact that Saltville, Virginia, is actually about one hundred miles southwest of Montgomery County, and that several of the Simpson children were obviously born in Virginia six or seven years after the date she gives for the family’s arrival in Knox County, KBJ is relatively accurate in her introduction. It is true that Jesse Simpson, Sr., (born May 19, 1772; died May 20, 1850), and his wife, Mary Griffin, (born February 10, 1772, died August 20, 1841) were the first of our Simpson line to reside in Knox County. However, there is a great deal of discrepancy over when the family actually arrived in Knox County. KBJ gives the year as 1800, the published obituary for Jesse Simpson, Jr., states that the family arrived here in 1818, and information contained in the 1850 US census indicates anything from 1806-1807 to 1817. Edna G. Simpson (who has written the most exhaustive compilation on the Simpson family) sets the date of arrival sometime between 1817 and 1819. I am therefore assuming that the family probably did arrive here sometime around 1817-1819. The first real estate transaction involving Jesse Simpson did not take place until 1831, so the Knox County deeds do not lend any real clarification on the subject.

There is also some confusion regarding the family’s location prior to settling in Knox County. Based on the wills and deeds of Montgomery County, Virginia, it is obvious that Jesse’s father, John Simpson, lived in Montgomery County for a time with his family. However, according to Edna Simpson, Jesse and his family were living in Pittsylvania County, Virginia at the time John Simpson’s will was probated. (Pittsylvania County is about thirty miles southeast of Roanoke, which is a good ways from Montgomery County.) Both Edna Simpson and KBJ state that Jesse and his family moved from near Saltville in Montgomery County, but, as I have previously stated, this is very much an either/or situation. As Saltville is a pretty specific location, I would assume that, in all likelihood, this is where the family removed from just prior to settling in Knox County. (KBJ may very well just have assumed that Saltville was in Montgomery County. Saltville is actually in Smyth County, about an hour’s drive from the Tennessee border.) All of that said, the following is the extent of the information I have on Jesse and Mary G. Simpson that is reasonably reliable.

Jesse Simpson was the son of John and Hannah Simpson of Montgomery County, Virginia. KBJ claims that this John Simpson is probably the one who married Hannah Roberts in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, on November 25, 1862. John reportedly died in Montgomery County in 1786, but his will was not probated until January 31, 1800. The actual deed was presented in Halifax County, and bore the signatures of John’s eleven children as well as that of their mother, Hannah Simpson. ed)

Goodspeed’s History of Tennessee, Knox County Edition, page 1050, states that this family of Simpsons came to Virginia from New England, but KBJ refutes this assertion. She does not, however, offer her own conclusions regarding the origin of the family, other than those already mentioned.

On December 22, 1791, Jesse married Mary Griffin in Halifax County, Virginia. This county lies just to the east of Pittsylvania County, where the family was apparently living at the time John Simpson’s will was probated. Seven of the couple’s ten children were born in Virginia, prior to the family’s relocation to the Tennessee frontier.

The Simpsons were apparently in Knox County by 1819, and did settle on the south side of the French Broad River, in relative proximity to the present-day Island Home Community in Knoxville. Jesse’s land holdings appear to have been fairly substantial. The family attended Lebanon Presbyterian Church, which was, prior to its accidental destruction by fire in the early 1900’s, situated just a few hundred yards northeast of the “fork” of the Tennessee River (actually the confluence of the French Broad and Holston Rivers), and is the oldest church in Knox County. According to family tradition, Jesse feared for his children and their families having to cross the river in all types of weather to attend the church (Lebanon was the only Presbyterian church in the area at the time), and therefore donated a tract of his land south of the river for the chartering of a new church, New Prospect Presbyterian. I have not been able to find anything in New Prospect’s records or in the Knox County wills and deeds to irrefutably substantiate this claim, but, as at least two of Jesse’s sons, Matthew and Deamarcus, were, along with their families, charter members at New Prospect, and, as the church was originally located in close proximity to the Simpsons’ homestead, I have no reason to doubt that this is the case, or that I will be able to substantiate this claim in the future. Information contained in the historical compilation “Faith of Our Fathers, Living Still: New Prospect Presbyterian Church” reflects that the church was chartered in response to an incident in which several parishioners of Lebanon Church were drowned when their boat capsized in a storm while crossing the Tennessee River on their way to services. This account seems to at least partially substantiate the claims by the family regarding Jesse’s involvement in the chartering of this particular house of worship.

Jesse died May 20, 1850, in Knox County. The 1850 Mortality Schedule lists his cause of death as “unknown”. Jesse was interred alongside his beloved wife, Mary, and their marker still stands in the little churchyard as a testament of their life together. The subsequent estate settlement, dated July, 1850 and currently on file at the Knox County Archives essentially identifies Jesse’s son, Matthew, as the administrator of the estate. The actual record is nearly indecipherable due to the penmanship of the clerk and the age of the document, but I have included a copy of this document elsewhere in this compilation.

The Pit

"This was the orchard road, red and quiet in the early sun, winding from the mountain's spine with apple trees here along the road and shading it, gnarled and bitten trees yet retaining still a kept look and no weeds growing where they grew. Farther up was a side road that went off among the trees, shade-dappled, with grass as fine as silk in the ruts. It went to the spray pit, a concrete tank set in the ground that had once been used to mix insecticide. This six years past, it had served as a crypt which the old man kept and guarded. Passing it now he remembered how he had been coming up from the hollow with a gallon bucket, when a boy and a girl, neither much more than waist high to him, had rounded the curve. The stopped when they saw him and it took him a while, coming toward them with his pail, to see that they were scared, huge-eyed and winded with running. They looked ready to bolt so he smiled, said Howdy to them, that it was a pretty day. And them, there in the road, balanced and poised for flight like two wild things, the little girl's legs brightly veined with briar scratches and both their mouths blue with berry stain. As he came past, she began to whimper and the boy, holding her hand, jerked at her to be still, he standing very straight in his overall pants and striped jersey. They edged to the side of the road and turned, watching him go by.

He started past, then half-turned and said: You'ns find where the good berries is at?

The boy looked up at him as though he hadn't been watching him all the time and said something which cracked in his voice and which the old man couldn't make out. The girl gave up and wailed openly and so he said:

Well now, what's wrong with your little sister? You all right, honey? Did you'ns lose your berry bucket? He talked to them like that. After a while the boy began to blubber too a little and was telling him about back in the pit. For a few minutes he couldn't figure out what was the pit and then it came to him and he said:

Well, come on and show me. I reckon it ain't all this bad whatever it is. So they started up the road, although it was pretty plain they didn't want to go and when they turned down the road to the spray-pit, the boy stopped, still holding the little girl's hand and not crying anymore but just watching the man. He said he didn't want to go, but for him, the old man, to go on and see. So he told them to wait right there and it wasn't nothing.

He saw the berry pails first, one of them turned over and the blackberries spilled out in the grass. A few feet beyond was the concrete pit, and and even before he go to it he caught a trace of odor, sour...a little like bad milk. He stepped onto the cracked rim of the pit and looked down into the water, the furred green top of it quiet and touched with light. Sticks and brush poked up at one corner. The smell was stronger but other than that there was nothing. He walked along the edge of the pit. Down the slope, among the apples, some jays were screaming and flashing in the trees. The morning was well on and it was getting warm. He walked halfway around catching his step along the narrow sandy concrete. Coming back, he glanced down at the water again. The thing seemed to leap at him, the green face leering and coming up through the lucent rotting water with eyeless sockets and green fleshless grin, the hair dark and ebbing like seaweed.

He tottered for a moment on the brink of the pit then staggered off with a low groan and locked his arms about a tree trying to fight down the coiling in his stomach. He didn't go back to look again. He got the berry pails and went back to the road, but the children weren't there...."

The passage above is from Cormac McCarthy's 1965 novel, "The Orchard Keeper". The book, McCarthy's first published work, tells the story of an old recluse living on the south side of Brown's Mountain in South Knox County. The scene above describes the old man's discovery of a rotting corpse mired in a concrete pit in some woods near the orchard road. This scenario may have been particularly easy for McCarthy to put to paper, as it was based on an actual event.

Cormac (Charlie at the time) was friends with my father growing up in South Knoxville, and my father often told me the story of how early one evening, after an afternoon spent squirrel hunting on the south side of the mountain, he and Cormac and two other boys were crossing the ridge heading back home when they smelled something putrid. As they walked on through the gathering dusk, they came to an old concrete pit at the end of a pull-off from the main orchard road. It quickly became apparent that this was the source of the smell, and as they peered down in the half light of the gathering dusk, they could just make out a set of white ribs poking up through the fetid water at the bottom. My father said that once they realized what they had discovered, the boys became terrified and ran all the way home.

The following day curiosity got the best of my father and the others and they returned to the scene to look again at their gruesome discovery. When they got to the pit, they immediately realized the "corpse" they had seen the night before was not human, but rather the carcass of an unfortunate pig that had either fallen or been thrown down into the pit and, having obviously starved to death, had been decomposing there for some time.

When I was a child, my father and I would often climb Brown's Mountain and he would point out the various places from all the boyhood stories he frequently shared with me at bedtime. One of my favorite destinations was always the pit. I remember feeling a particular sense of dread as we neared its edge, as if it were completely plausible that something much more disturbing than the carcass of a pig might actually be lurking there, peering up at us with rheumy eyes from down in the mire.

This past weekend, my oldest daughter and I climbed Brown's Mountain with Dr. Wes Morgan, a preeminent local authority on McCarthy and his work, for the purpose of helping him locate and map the location of the pit. After arriving at the crest, we bushwhacked through undergrowth and brambles for what seemed like an hour in what I was sure had been the general vicinity of the site. Finally Dr. Morgan himself managed to stumble upon it.

The pit was much as I remembered it, only much drier in the bottom now that a majority of the tree cover around it has disappeared. An irregular concrete shelf on one side immediately brought back a vision of box turtles lined up above the muck, each resigned to live the remainder of its days in its new, and suddenly very limited, green and fetid world.

After all of that climbing and bushwhacking, it might have been a pretty anti-climactic discovery- an old insecticide pit, all of seven feet deep, dappled in sunshine and slowly eroding back into the Tennessee red clay. But for just a moment as I watched my own daughter fearlessly walking along the rim, I was an eight year old boy again, holding my father's hand as I stepped out onto the edge of the concrete wall for a glance down; staring deep into the abyss of my own childhood fears.

photo courtesy of Wes Morgan

Google Maps

I've been working on a Google map to indicate family history related sites around the Knoxville area. I hope this works....

Also turning on comments. I'd really like to know if anyone has related info on our family or the posts here.

Faith of Our Fathers

This past Sunday, my oldest daughter and I decided to drive down to Blount County and attend services at Williamson's Chapel United Methodist Church. The church is small, and its current congregation appears to be a fraction of what it once might have been, but the people were gracious and kind, and the service really warmed our hearts. Part of what made the service so meaningful, at least to me, was that this was the same church my 3rd great grandfather, Allen Anderson, began attending with his family in the early 1840's. His oldest son, Thomas, grew up and fell in love with the daughter of another family within the church, and they eventually married and raised their own family while members there.
There's something particularly poignant about being able to worship, not just alongside good people, but also among the echoes of those who shared a common faith and whose hearts beat with a common blood nearly 170 years ago.

Cormac McCarthy Home Destroyed by Fire

Last October, my daughter and I were driving down Martin Mill Pike and as we passed the almost imperceptible break in foliage that represented the McCarthys' old driveway, we paused for just a moment; debating as we often had, about parking and sneaking onto the property to have a look. However, it was going on dusk (and we didn't have a camera) and so we passed. I guess we'll never again get that opportunity.

It's ironic that the old McCarthy home was just recently listed among Knox Heritage's "Fragile 15" endangered historical homes. The cause of the blaze is still unknown, but is likely attributed to indigent folks living on the property.