In this tedious, desultory, and confused way, I have gone through "the books of generations" of many, but not half, the numeous kindred of my family; a matter which may, possibly, some day to some of my children, or to myself in old age, be of some interest in taking a retrospect of old things. There is a good deal more to be added, for I have not come home to my own immediate family yet- nor to some of the Kings, Porters, Berrys, McFerrins etc. who will yet be in some way noticed according to the best recollections I have.

My father I have stated, was born on the 4th of November 1773, in the same state. They were married in Washington County Virginia, at the place where my grandfather lived and died after the Revolution, sometime in the year 1794. I was born of that marriage, on the 1st day of May, 1799, in the same state and county.

My father and mother had the following children that lived to years of discretion-myself, Nathan Montgomery, John Randolph, Henry Clinton, Sydney Nelson, Nelson Singleton, Washington Sharpe, and Laura Matilda. Of those, Nathan Montgomery married in Virginia, and removed with his uncle and cousin John D. Laughlin to Ohio, and then to Indiana, I think Johnson County, where he died in 1842, leaving a widow and numerous family, yet living there. John Randolph came to Tennessee, by my request in 1816, wrote in the clerk's office in Murfreesboro, Rutherford County, under Gen. Blackman Coleman, until he resigned the office in 1821 or 1822, when my brother was elected to his place as County Court Clerk, and held the office until the change of the Constitution in 1834-35, when he went out of office, and was not a candidate for re-election. With me he had studied law in 1817, 18 and 19, and obtained a license, and never practiced but a short time, but such were his habits and clearness and strength of mind, that with attention to his profession, he could have risen to its first honor. About 1821 or 1822, he married Nancy Ledbetter, sister of W. Ledbetter, long a member of the Tennessee Senate, and now cashier of the Bank of Tenn. The father of his wife was the late Isaac Ledbetter of Rutherford, formerly of Brunswick or Greenville Co. Va. By his marriage, my brother had two children, a daughter and a son. His daughter, Adriana, is now grown and is a lovely girl. His son, whose name is John, was born in the fall of 1837 or early in 1838, just after his father's death.

In 1837, my brother (John) being a candidate for the legislature in which he was defeated by the falsehoods and slanders of one Beverley Randolph, and Alexander Blair, my brother just before the election, at a public meeting at Pacer in July (the election was in August) took occasion to cane Blair in company. Just after the election, at a public collection of people at Maj. John Bradley's at the fall races, Blair sought an opportunity, having been furnished with a knife by one Henderson, his kinsman, insulted my brother so grossly, that he again raised his cane, when Blair ran in under, no one at the moment thinking of a knife except those who knew his intent, and stabbed my brother in the proin or pelvis, and in other places before he could be prevented, of the first mentioned would, he died in seven or eight days from mortification. When it happened, it being in September, I was staying with my family during the sultry season at my place called Runnemede in Cannon County Tennessee. A messenger arrived at my house, twenty-six miles from Murfreesborough, before day the next morning, it having happened late in the evening. I got to his house in Murfreesborough by breakfast time next day, in company with my sister who then lived in Woodbury, and found that he had been removed from Bradley's home, two miles, and after his wounds were dressed, was easy and doing well. I staid with him several days. He seemed to improve hourly. He received visits from friends from all parts of the county, and sat up in bed and wrote some short letters. He was deemed almost wholly out of danger. I returned home and the second evening after, Maj. Ledbetter's boy, Henry, (now Ridley's) came to me with a message that my brother was dead-that his wound had mortified.

I again returned to Murfreesborough, and attended his funeral with my daughter Sarah, who had gone down to see him a day or two before from Squire Henry Goodloe's where she had been on a visit when the assassination occured. He was buried and now lies where an infant child he had lost was previously buried, at the old Ledbetter place, two and a half miles south west of Murfreesborough. Requiescat in pace. A nobler or better heart was never laid cold by the hands of death-and never had any man more nobly sustained, by pen and in speeches, and his whole conduct through life, the cause of Republican principles, and his own honor, amid the fiercest persecutions, in which his brother-in-law Ledbetter, a Whig, and Geo. A. Sublett, another Whig who had married his wife's older sister, all deserted him. He fell, the victim of party persecution and party rancor. His party were and still are in a minority in the county (Rutherford) and have ever been since Judge White, under the traitor Bell, became a candidate for the Presidency in 1835. There is not now a democrat in Rutherford who does not love the memory of John Laughlin. In 1839, owing to the personal unpopularity of Charles Ready, Col. Yoakum beat him for Senate, but in 1841 the Whigs again triumphed, and elected Ledbetter to the State Senate over Yoakum.

My brother's wife, still a widow, lives with her brother, Richard Ledbetter, as does her children, in Holmes Co. Miss. Geo. A. Sublett, who deserted and joined the swindler Beverly Randolph to destroy my poor brother, has been broken up and disgraced since. Randolph has fraudently taken the benefit of the Bankrupt Law of Clay and theWhigs of 1841 -by perjury, and is in perfect disgrace. Wm. Ledbetter, though a better man than either of the foregoing, has lost his popularity, and if the democracy elect majorities to the Assembly next August (1845) he will loose his office, though all in all, he is nearly the best full-blooded Clay Whig I have known.

My brothers, Nathan and John, both died full of Christian hope.

My brother, Sydney N., died of inflamatory fever at my old farm, now owned by Daniel Hoskins, on the East fork of Stones River, 1832, and is buried in the Presbyterian Church burying ground in Murfreesborough. He was a good, industrious, faithful young man.

My still younger brother, Washington Sharpe, died of the same kind of fever in his seventeenth year, in Murfreesborough, in 1831 and he and Sydney-lie together, buried side by side. In life, they loved like brothers, and in death, they are not divided, as I hope they will not be in the resurrection.

My brother, Henry Clinton, a batchelor, removed to Indiana-going out with John D. Laughlin, about the year 1827, or 1828, from Virginia. John D. having been in on a visit, and to sell an interest in lands inherited from his father. He lived with my brother Nathan until his death, and then, in 1840-1, removed away farther west with a son of my brother, Nathan. I have not been able to hear where he is for the last three years.

My brother, Nelson Singleton, went from my house in Nashville, where I then lived, in 1834 to Mississippi, from thence he went to West Feliciana in Louisana to live with one Parker, and I had had letters from him up to summer of 1844, promising to come and live with me and my father at Hickory Hill, but from that date I have heard no more of him though I have often written to his address since.

My sister Laura M. Married Maj. Henry Holt, of Rutherford, in 1830. They soon moved to Woodbury, Cannon Co. from my house in Rutherford, where he became a merchant on the death of his brother-in-law Henry Wiley. In 1840, in September, they parted. On a divorce being granted, he is married again to a Miss Hannah Shaw, and they have parted several times, one of which occasions, I interfered to get them together again, to save his election to the Assembly in 1843 from Cannon. He succeeded in both-but they have had quarreling since, and separations temporarily. He is a drunken, libidinous beast, keeping several concubines-one Jonathon Wimberly's wife being one of them with whom he staid more than half his time before my sister left him. Since the divorce, my sister is married to a man named James M. Brown, who is some kind of suttler or contractor at some small U.S. post in the Indian country on the west of Arkansas.

My father and mother emigrated to Kentucky as has been before incidentally stated, about the year 1798. My father thinks 1797, but I think it was nearer 1799 or 1800.

As they, and their friends were moving out towards Cumberland Gap, in what is now Scott Co. Va., my mother was riding along on a quiet horse, in a calm, beautiful autumnal day, when a dead limb, from an oak tree, about three or four feet long weighing 15 or 20 pounds-dead but still not rotten-fell from a height of thirty or forty feet-without any noise-not a breeze or breath of wind being perceivable-and struck my infant sister in my mother's arms on the temple. Her name was Emily-about six or eight months old. The blow caused the horse to start, which occasioned my mother a sudden fall to the ground but without hurt. The limb was seen just as it struck in my mother's lap where the child was asleep, as she rode along, but no one saw it in time to give any alarm. In families, there were thirty or forty persons along. The child was found to be stunned and as it died in the evening, and never was roused from the stupor into which it was thrown, it is supposed its skull was fractured. The death of this infant-the first in our family-happening so strangely-was a sore blow to my father and mother. The whole caravan of movers stopped and camped until the next day when the child was interred-and then we proceeded on without any new accident to Kentucky. In Kentucky, on Indian Creek, Knox County, where my father had secured two hundred acres of land by Head Right-that is by being the head of a family and having built a cabin and cultivated a crop of corn of six or eight acres, which he enclosed by a good fence the previous season. We removed early in the fall, going from Washington County, Virginia, out through Lee County, by Jonesville to Cumberland Gap-the old crab orchard road down yellow creek and accross the Cumberland River-and thence down the north side by the place where Barbourville now stands, crossing Richland Creek, down to Indian Creek.

On Indian Creek, my father's family, and Uncle Wm. Martin's family lived for some time in the same cabin. During the winter after our arrival, my father and uncle killed great numbers of fat bears, deer almost without number, turkeys etc. A good stock of cattle, easily kept fat on the cane which abounded all over the bottoms and rich sides of hills. We, therefore, had milk and butter in plenty. Salt was procured from Powell's Valley. There were then no mills in the country, and meal had to be packed fifty miles also from Powell's Valley accross the mountains. We lived in great comfort and plenty. Persons looking out for lands visited the country constantly from Virginia and elsewhere. So we were never lonesome. Although the distance of the whole removal was only 150 or 160 miles, yet in those days even that distance was considered a long way off.

At this place, my father lived several years-until the country became very thickly inhabited. He then removed to the Laurel Country, on a branch of Spruce Creek, near Uncle Martin's, and near where one brother, Arthur, built a small tub-mill. From 1803 to 1806 or 1807, he lived at this place, and hunted much, and with great success in the country around the falls of Cumberland, a fall of 70 or 80 feet perpendicular to that river, ten or fifteen miles on a straight line above the mouth of Laurel River. Below the falls, the river abounds in all the varieties of fine fresh water fish-above, there are none but minnows, and endless numbers of the lamper eel, even in the creeks. It is about 150 miles above the falls to the head branches of Cumberland River, in the Virginia and Kentucky mountains-spurs of the great Alleghany chain-bordering on the heads of Sandy, Kentucky, and other rivers running north and north west into the Ohio.

About 1807-the year before or year of the Embargo-the time of the attack of the leopard on the Chesapeak in Hampton Roads, our family removed from Laurel, as we called it, to a fork of Watts Creek near my Uncle Thomas Laughlin. I think we were removed there in 1806, when there was a remarkable eclipse of the sun.

While we lived on Indian Creek, my mother gave birth to two sons who died in infancy, Thomas and Joseph, who are buried on a hill, above where our cabin stood at the mouth of a branch. The exact appearance of the whole place, as it then looked, with every locality, is fresh and vivid in my memory.

After remaining here until 1810, after the death of my grandmother Laughlin, my father, mother, and all our family removed back to Virginia, in the fall, and settled on the place which my father had bought, from which Uncle Thomas Laughlin, had removed when he went to Kentucky, about a mile and a half north of grandfather Duncan's old place, on which my father afterwards lived, and where the late Wm. Maxwell, to whom my father sold it, lived at the time of his death, about the year 1830.

On the death of my Grandmother Duncan, about the year 1816, my father and family moved on the place, and into the house with my grandfather. He died about the year 1818. My father and his family, except myself and John R. who had gone to Tennessee-lived on this place, having purchased it after the death of my grandfather, until the fall of 1829, when I removed the old people, and my brothers, Sydney N. and Nelson S. to Rutherford County. In the year 1828, John and myself had removed our brother Washington Sharpe to Tennessee, to educate him, where he died, as afterwards did Sydney and John as is before noted. I must not forget to mention that my sister, Laura, about 14 years of age, removed with my parents. I went after them all myself, carrying a servant girl named Suzy, to wait on my mother on the road.

When I removed my parents to Tennessee, I was living on the East Fork of Stones River, on an excellent tract of land below the mouth of Bradley's Creek, opposite John L. Sutton, bought of James Gordon. In 1832, in March, I removed to Nashville, leaving my parents, and brother Sydney, and some negros on my farm. In removing my parents to Tennessee, they both having become measurably helpless from decrepitude occasioned by rheumatism. I hoped to consult their care and comfort for the rest of their lives. Shortly after my mother's removal she became wholly helpless, and for the last twelve years of her life never stood alone, or walked a step. For the last ten years, up to October 1843, when she died, she had lost the use of her hands so far as to be unable to knit or use a needle, in which she had previously taken great pleasure. She was, however, an incessant reader, and her eyes continuing good, especially with the aid of glasses, she read from ten to fourteen hours out of every twenty-four, and her faculties were sound to the last, with, perhaps, a slight defect of memory of recent events. She was a most exemplary and wise woman.

My father, now (March 1845) in his 79th year, though so lame and crippled by rheumatism, by which he has been more or less afflicted since his 30th year, has general health sound and vigorous, and no failure of mind except in memory of late events-walks with the aid of a staff, or rides a gentle horse a mile from Hickory Hill to McMinnville to the post office, to see his grandchildren, or to vote in the election. In 1799-1800, he aided actively in the election of Mr. Jefferson to the Presidence, and has all his life been a warm democratic republican, and in 1824, 1828, and 1832 warmly supported Gen. Jackson for President, as he did Mr. Van Buren in 1836 and 1840. and President Polk in 1844. He never voted for a federalist or whig for any office, high or low, in his life. Both he and my mother were extensive readers of newspapers-and both more minutely read in the details of our national history than any two persons I have known.

My great grandfather John Laughlin, of the date of whose death I have no knowledge, is represented by Mr. Benjamin Sharp in his correspondence, who knew him well, and by my father and grandfather-all of the same name-as having been a most exemplary man. He was a native of, and came from the County Downe, Ireland. My grandfather, John, as I have him repeat often, was sixteen years old when they arrived in the United States, then colonies. My grandfather, as his father was before him, was a man of remarkable piety, benevolence, and active cheerfulness. They were both of the branch of the Presbyterian Church denominated Seceders. In the latter years of my grandfather's life, he contributed himself nearly the entire support of the Rev. Mr. Harper, a clergyman of his own sect-but his charity, as was that of his father, was universal for all sincere christians. I have a full recollection of the person and character of my excellent grandfather. Up to extreme old age, he had all the cheerfulness and vivacity of a boy. My father is of the same temperament.

My grandfather Duncan*, was, ever after I know him, a taciturn, serious and rather melancholy man. He was a large, stout man, and in his younger days, and until his spirits were broken and his health impaired by his Canadian captivity and the loss of his property, had been a man of great vigor of mind and body-and fond of hazardous arduous enterprises. He, as my father assures me, kept a journal of his whole captivity, which he remembers to have seen in manuscript, late in his life. I have been trying, but without success so far, to recover possession of it if it is not destroyed. It would supply an interesting desideration in the History of Kentucky, and as a family memorial. I should consider it above all price. Marshall, Butler,Tomlay, and all who have written the history of Kentucky, and of Bird's expedition, and the capture of Martin's and Riddle's Stations, seem to have had but few authentic materials.

*For further and more interesting particulars of both my grandfathers and their families-more authentic than what is here stated, see Relation commencing at page 162 of this book-see also page 22 of this book.

My grandfather considered Riddle, not Ruddle, as his name is commonly written, as a bad man. When confined on parole, or in close prison at Montreal, he often saw Riddle, who was his senior officer in the station when it was surrendered, walking the streets, finely dressed, and under no restraint, or associating with British officers. On the march to Canada, and at Detroit and Montreal, he often saw among the Indians and associating with the British officers of rank, the renegade and incarnate Devil, Simon Girty. This demon in human shape dealt large in the scalps of American men, women, and children bought and paid for by the British authorities. Girty's influence among the Indians was very great. In history his name desends embalmed in the execrations of all mankind. A Mr. Samuel Porter of Russel was married to a sister of my grandfather Duncan-so was Capt. Francis Berry to a sister of my grandmother Duncan (Eleanor Sharp). Mr. Porter had a numerous family of sons, several of whom lived in Rutherford County, Tenn. Among these, as I remember, were Samuel, Hugh and James, the latter a Methodist preacher. They lived on Bowley's fork, near the place where Bradyville now is. About the year 1830, they removed to Missouri. Another brother of their's, a Methodist preacher, a man of much worth, married the widow of Thomas E. Sumner in Williamson Co. Tenn. He afterwards died at Galveston, Texas, about the year 1839. He was a worthy man, but was persecuted by Gen. John L. Russwurm, the mercenary nephew of his wife's first husband, who left a large estate and no child-Russwurm being the principal heir at law.

John Berry and Lewis Berry, two of the sons of Francis Berry, removed to Kentucky, Knox County, while my father lived there. John settled on Spence Creek, above Arthur's mill, and one of his sons, Dr. Berry is now married to a daughter of my cousin Thomas Laughlin, and lives at Philadelphia, Monroe Co. Tenn. Lewis removed to Dickson Co. Tenn. after he married, and, I believe, died there soon after the late war.

Another branch of our family consists of McFerrins. Old Wm. McFerrin married a sister of my grandfather John Laughlin and had a number of sons and daughters. Col. James McFerrin, his oldest son, married a Berry in Washington, Virginia, where his father lived, and removed to Rutherford Co. Tennessee. He was a Captain of Volunteers in the expedition of Gen. Jackson to Washington Mississippi in 1811-12. He served again in the Creek Nation in the War of 1813-14. After the war, he embraced religion, joined the Methodist Church and resigned his commission as a Col. of Militia, and became a popular preacher. He removed to Jackson County, Alabama, where Thomas Berry who had married his sister, had previously removed from Rutherford. He became in time a travelling preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Connection, and removed again to the western district of Tennessee where he was a residing Elder, and died in the year 1840, universally respected and esteemed as a good man-and for his limited early education-an able and useful Minister of the Gospel. His brother, Burton L. McFerrin removed from Tennessee to Missouri some years since. William, another brother, lives in Cannon Co. Tenn. and has several sons-Alexander and Burton, neither very much esteemed, being two of them. Old Wm. McFerrin, who sold his place on Holston River, adjoining my father's old residence in Virginia, to Wm. Berry, removed to Tennessee. He was still alive last fall, being about 95 years old, in the Western District, living with C. Curlee, Esq. who married one of his daughters.

Col. James McFerrin left several sons and daughters. John B. McFerrin, a Minister of high standing in the M.E. church, now Editor of the South Western Christian Advocate, is one of them. Wm., another son is also a popular preacher in the same church. John B. I esteem as one of my most respected friends. I think him a sound christian, and warm hearted kinsman. I hope some of his letters may be found in my letter book.

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