OK, last time I gave you a rundown of the ownership of the Roddye property through the years (specifically narrowing down to the 28 acres where the house now sits). Today, we’ll talk about the founding Russellville.
Our little town was named either for George Russell, the colonel’s friend and father-in-law, or for the entire Russell family, and it’s pretty certain that James Roddye was behind the choice of that name. Roddye married Russell’s daughter, Lydia, either just before or just after King’s Mountain, while both were still living in the Watauga settlements. After King’s Mountain, Russell and Roddye were among the men who came looking for land further west and landed in our area.
Roddye’s land grants are all along Bent Creek, which puts him in what’s now Whitesburg, and Russell’s were along Fall Creek, which plants him in what we call Russellville (I have seen one or two mentions of “Russelltown” in some really old documents, but apparently it was the ville that won out).
I’m not altogether certain that George Russell ever lived here. He was living across the river in what’s now Grainger County (German Creek, to be specific) fairly early on, and the documentation we have says the Roddye built his house in 1783, which is the same year that both men applied for their land grants.
One of Russell’s surveys, showing Fall Creek
Now, applying for the grants and actually having them officially recorded in the deed book sometimes took quite some time. The reasons for that involve the time it takes to send a surveyor out to do the official survey, come back and record it, which takes people to handwrite them into the deed book, along with copies of the deed and survey for the new “owners.” And there were a lot of them. The Europeans were grabbing as much Cherokee land as they could and making a fortune selling it to other Europeans, all the while heading out to force the Cherokee further and further away from their newly grabbed land. It takes a lot of time, all on horseback or foot.
So Russell’s Fall Creek grants, applied for in what was then Greene County, North Carolina, moved next (and very briefly, since it didn’t make it to actual state-ness) to the State of Franklin. The deeds were finally written into the deed book in 1787, still in the not-really-real Franklin and also North Carolina at the same time. At about that time, William Armstrong’s land around his Stoney Point and some acreage around it, including Roddye’s and Russell’s, ended up in the newly formed Hawkins County, North Carolina. So the deeds are transferred to the new county seat, Rogersville, and the following year – 1788 – the idea of Franklin bit the dust forever.
Meanwhile, Russell has sold the Fall Creek properties to Roddye for 300 pounds. That deed is recorded in Rogersville in 1790, and at about that time, North Carolina cedes the territory west of the Appalachians to the US government, and it become the Territory South of the Ohio River. Two years later, Jefferson County is formed, and our area falls into that county. Four years after that, the territory south of the Ohio is admitted to the union as the 16th state, Tennessee.
Whew. Once Tennessee is a state, Roddye got really busy buying and selling. He even briefly disappears from his Jefferson County lands in the early 1800s. I once thought he may have gone down to Rhea County, where his son Jesse had gone, but it appears that instead he went to Claiborne County, where he operated a ferry over the Powell River on the Kentucky Road as well as a tavern. He was there for a few years before returning to Russellville, where he owned most of what eventually became “downtown.”
1810 deed from Roddye giving Deaderick the rights to run a mill race over his property
In 1810, he gave William H. Deaderick, a Hawkins County doctor, a deed to build a dam on Fall Creek and a mill race to cross Roddye’s property for a mill the good doctor built on his own property, adjacent to Roddye’s. It must have been around this time that Roddye and Deaderick began talking about the idea of an actual town.
In about 1819, the two men created a plan for said town. I’ve not found that plan yet, but I’m still searching. I know there was one because it’s mentioned in the official act to create the town of Russellville, which we’ll get to shortly.
Meanwhile, from about 1819 forward, Roddye and Deaderick are involved in selling land along what they call the Cross Roads Street – what we’ve known as Russellville Pike, Main Street, or just the old road. Deeds show that there were 18 “town lots” created along Cross Roads Street, each 1/4 acre. Some of them have alleys between them. Here’s a very rough sketch of those lots (not to scale!!!):
Somewhere I wrote down the size of the lots, but just now I can’t find it. They were about 60 feet by 160, but please don’t quote me on that. Fall Creek ran probably through lots 1 and 3 on the east side of town, which were owned by Roddye. Deaderick owned 2, 5, and 6, so the 1810 deed gave Deaderick the right to run a mill race across Roddye’s property to reach his mill, probably on lot 5 or 6. I say that because Deaderick later sold lots 5 and 6 to Patrick Nenney, and the mill race is mentioned in those deeds – which also leads me to believe that the Nenney House/Longstreet Museum probably sits on the back side of those two lots (the old town lots of Russellville got further chopped up in the 1910s when the Russellville Land Company bought up most of the Nenney property and sold it with a new layout).
Anyway, there’s a lot of buying and selling of the town lots during this time, and Roddye’s son Thomas continues that after his father’s death in 1822. Since Roddye and Deaderick had created this plan, I have to believe that they were working to get the Tennessee legislature to officially create the town of Russellville. Maybe there’s even correspondence about this somewhere. But we do know that in 1826, the legislature finally did just that, establishing the town (citing Deaderick and Roddye as the ones who laid out the plan) and naming “commissioners,” who may or may not have ever met, but they certainly had the right to do so.
The act creating the town of Russellville (Chapter CLXXXVII)
The commissioners were William Felts, who owned a tavern probably on lot 3 (which later became the Riggs Tavern), James Phagan, James L. Neal, John Cox, and Joseph Austin. Another maybe, but maybe somewhere there’s correspondence about these commissioners and what they may or may not have done in their official capacity.
Oh – there’s also the handwritten bill creating the town of Russellville. You’ll see on the third page the notations about all the readings in the Tennessee House and Senate before it’s officially passed, signed by the governor (William Carroll), and recorded in The Acts of Tennessee:
The original bill establishing the town of Russellville
Obviously, Russellville ended up being just a little village, with no commissioners. I have not yet found anything in the Acts of Tennessee disestablishing the town, so I can’t say how that may have come about. It was a bustling little town for a while, though, right up through the establishment of Hamblen County in 1870 and into the 20th century.
Well, I kinda feel like I hit the historical document jackpot anyway. I’ve been using Family Search’s experimental AI search of online documents, and it’s kinda working out – although I can say that I can read cursive marginally better than the AI can. Still, the machine function gets me close to where I want to be in the scanned documents, then all I have to do is page through and find all manner of surprising things.
It’s a little tedious, but also fun. Today, Imma give you the biggest news first: I found the document in which George Russell, the colonel’s father in law, sells his Russellville property to James Roddye. We knew something like that happened, since Russell’s land grants were on Fall Creek and Roddye’s were mostly on Bent Creek, but had not found the proof of it. Now we have. But we found it where we hadn’t looked before – in Hawkins County, not Greene as we’d supposed. Here’s how it went down.
George Russell’s deed to James Roddye
Russell put in for the property in 1783, around the same time that Roddye put in for his grants on Bent Creek (there is a grant for Roddye from 1780 on the south side of the Holston, which might or might not be in Russellville, but I’ve not sussed out details on that one yet). The 1783 Russell grant is for land on Fall Creek, bordering Donalson’s and Cheek’s lands and definitely corresponds to what we know of the Roddye-Nenney-Graham-Rogan property of the 19th century. Anyway, Russell put in for the property in 1783, the same year that Greene County was carved out of Washington County, then in North Carolina.
The grant wasn’t issued until nearly four years later, in 1787. Now, this is fairly common. It took 11 years for one of Roddye’s grants to be officially issued, and most of them took anywhere from three to eight years. As far as I’ve been able to tell, that has to do with there being a lot of land grants and the time and personnel to do all the recording and surveying. By hand. In duplicate and sometimes triplicate. Not to mention travel times.
And then, of course, there’s the changing political landscape in East Tennessee. By the time Russell’s grant was finally issued, that little corner of Greene County had just become Hawkins County, still in North Carolina. Meanwhile, in between 1783 and 1789, Roddye is selling his properties on Bent Creek (to names like Kilpatrick, Horner, and White that you’d recognize from our area’s history). And it takes time to record all those too.
So over in Hawkins County is the deed transfer from George Russell to James Roddye for the property listed in the 1787 grant. That’s mentioned right in the deed, which was recorded in January 1790, by which time records show Russell living across the river in what would later become Grainger County.
I have no doubt that Roddye built the house on the property, apparently before he officially owned it. Russell was the colonel’s father-in-law, after all, and the two were apparently very close. Roddye served, with Russell’s wife Elizabeth, as Russell’s executor when he died in 1798. Russell, Roddye, Bean, all those guys – they came to our area from the Watauga settlement after King’s Mountain. Bean settled on the north side of the river immediately, and apparently Russell yeeted over there pretty quickly. Roddye stayed on the south side, and, I suspect, saw to it that Russellville took the name of his wife’s family.
Lot-tery
I’ve mentioned before that most of these guys were land speculators, buying and selling and farming and running businesses, and Roddye was no different. As best as I can tell, he owned a large portion of what we know as Russellville – the little village, in particular. The Jefferson County deed book tells us that somewhere around 1820, probably just before, the colonel divided up his property in Russellville proper into lots – at least 22 of them – and began selling them at $50 a pop. These lots appear to start around where Fall Creek crosses what’s now the Andrew Johnson Highway and the old Main Street and move back west from there. That starting point is also where the colonel sold the rights for a mill race to one William H. Deaderick in about 1810, and mention of that mill race shows up frequently in the deeds. That tells me there was a mill right about there before Cain Mill was built a little further north along the creek.
Russellville now. Photo by Dakota Carmichael/The Old History Project
The colonel didn’t sell all his lots. His son Thomas sold several in the late 1820s, around the same time he signed the bulk his father’s property over to Patrick Nenney’s estate to pay for a debt he owed. Patrick was Thomas’s father in law, and he owed this debt at the time of Patrick’s death in 1824 but never paid it. The Nenneys got the property in 1829. At the same time, Thomas was having a fire sale, disposing of properties – including enslaved people – before he split Tennessee to try his hand at gold in Georgia. And before the sheriff of Jefferson County, James Bradford, seized what property he had left in downtown Russellville and sold it on the courthouse steps in Dandridge in 1835 to pay a substantial debt he owed some folks in Baltimore. His debtors bought the whole “lot” of it for $100, and, I’m assuming, made more than that selling it again, but I haven’t gotten that far in the deed book just yet.
What happened to Thomas Roddye is still a mystery. There’s an 1834 JeffCo document that says he is “lately deceased,” but I don’t know how accurate that is. Needham Jarnigan, who travelled with him to Georgia, wrote to Charles P. Nenney (both Roddy and Jarnigan’s brother in law) in 1837 saying that his whereabouts are unknown and that he suspects rumors that he killed himself over the substantial debts he owed, a sizable portion apparently incurred while in Georgia, were true. It was around that time that Thomas’s wife, Lydia, came back to Russellville/Whitesburg.
Charles P. Nenney was by then almost certainly living at what would eventually be known as Hayslope. The executors of Patrick’s will, Hugh Graham and Lucy Bramblette Nenney, Patrick’s widow, signed the property over to him in 1835. He was living there in 1845, when he sold it to Graham. So there you have it – the Nenney ownership was from 1829 to 1845.
Lydia Nenney Roddy, Charles P.’s sister and Thomas’s wife, lived in Whitesburg on property she inherited from her father for the rest of her life, by the way.
The Rogans forward
Graham’s will, written in 1861, designates how his children were to divide his property after his death. As far as the old Roddye property is concerned, the will says for Theo Rogan, Louisa’s husband, and Absalom Kyle, Mary Ann’s husband, to hire surveyors to divide it in half, and then Louisa, “being the youngest,” gets first pick. She picked the half with Roddye’s old home on it
The will gives the property to Mary Ann and Louisa (specifically the daugthers and not their husbands) on January 1, 1862, or Graham’s death, whichever comes first. Graham died in 1865, and we know the Rogans were living at the house in the latter part of the Civil War, but we also now know that the official deed transfer didn’t take place until 1868, likely because of that war.
The Kyles held onto the other half until the 1880s, when their heirs sold it to another Graham sister, Connie, and her husband William Houston Patterson. The Rogans kept the their half until their deaths, Theo in 1904 and Louisa in 1910, when it went to their five surviving children. They divided the property up and drew lots from a hat to see who got what.
The colonel’s property south of Russellville. Dakota Carmichael/The Old History Project
Ellen, the youngest, got the 28 acres with the house. As she was married to a citrus magnate and living in Florida, with no intentions of returning to Tennessee, she told her sister Cassie she could live in the house. Cassie, the oldest Rogan and the only one who never married, sold her own lot, which was down by Sugar Hollow, and moved into the old Roddye place, now called Hayslope by her mother.
The other three children – Griffith, Hugh, and Maggie – eventually sold their portions as well. Griffith and Hugh eventually moved to Florida, near Ellen, and Maggie already lived in Virginia. Cassie lived in the house until she died in 1932, and Ellen sold it to Escoe and Briscoe Thomason – whose family by that time had bought a substantial portion of the colonel’s Russellville “town lots” and sold many of them again — in 1937. Escoe sold his portion of the property to Briscoe about 10 years later.
My dad inherited those 28 acres from his dad, and I inherited from him.
And that, my friends, is the story of James Roddye’s property in Russellville.
After threatening to do it for a while, I did it. I wrote the book about Hayslope. It’s small, 61 pages, with a few pictures, but it tells you everything we know and don’t know about the house, the land, and the people who’ve lived there.
And it’s ready for purchase. “A Brief History of Hayslope and Its People” is $13, including shipping, and available here on the website. So if you’d like a copy, now’s the time. Shipping begins mid-week.
And thanks to all of you for supporting this project of love in all the ways you have!
I read a lot. It’s one of my favorite pastimes, soaking up information from as many sources as possible, especially about history. I can spout off factoids with the best about history, especially East Tennessee history.
I do have one terrible habit, especially for a journalist like me. I tend to read some interesting fact and file that piece of information away in the appropriate part of my mind, forgetting entirely to file away the source.
A example from a few months past: During a discussion of the creation of Douglas Lake, I distinctly recalled having seen a photograph of the raising of the Walters bridge carrying US25 over the French Broad to accommodate the lake. I couldn’t find it. I looked through every book I had with no luck. Just last week, though, I found it in a book I’d forgotten I had.
And here’s another: I read in some old something that our man James Roddye was buried at Bent Creek Burying Ground in an unmarked grave. Now, there is a marker at the cemetery these days, but reading that brought so many questions. Was Roddye’s grave actually left unmarked when he was buried, or did the marker vanish with time? Did people remember where the grave was, and does the modern marker actually mark his grave? Who put that modern marker there and when? And if James Roddye went into the ground without a marker, how could that be? The man was one of the founding members of the Bent Creek church, which, by the way, was one of the first churches established in what was to become East Tennessee.
Well, he wasn’t a colonel in the Revolutionary War. That was the State of Franklin.
Incidentally, I found that source too. It’s in the introduction to a transcription of the minutes of the Bent Creek Church made by the Works Progress Administration in 1938. Still don’t have the answers to the other questions.
It’s hard to establish first churches in what was such a sparsely populate frontier. Early services were often conducted outside, spontaneously, and in a most unorganized fashion. Several churches in East Tennessee lay claim to that “first” honor, and two seem to have the best claims.
Sinking Creek Church says it’s the oldest still in its original location, organized in 1772 in Washington County (now Carter County). A 1783 church building still stands on the property, although a new building houses services, especially after a vehicle crashed into the old log structure in 1965.
Buffalo Ridge Church was built in 1779, calling itself the “first Baptist church on Tennessee soil.” Buffalo Ridge was established by Tidence Lane, who came across the mountains from North Carolina, having learned his preaching arts from Shubal Stearns at Sandy Creek. Buffalo Ridge eventually moved from its original location to Gray, although its burying ground is still there where it started.
Tidence Lane, however, had already moved on. And he came to Bent Creek.
Lane was among a significant number of Sandy Creek Baptists who came across the mountains in 1771. They left partly because of divisions beginning to form within the church and partly because Gov William Tryon blamed the Baptists for the Regulator Movement that harassed the colony’s rich, elite-run government until Tryon put it down by force. The Sandy Creek Association shrank considerably as its members fled over the Alleghenies, although many, if not most, of them retained their allegiance to the “mother church.”
Tidence Lane was among that number. He was christened Tidings Lane in Maryland, named for his paternal grandmother Pretitia Tidings, and we can just imagine how the spelling might have changed if the “g” were to be dropped, as often happens. Tidence had an older brother, Dutton, who was a preacher, but Tidence wasn’t so into the idea – especially the Baptists, and even more especially the Separate Baptists, for whom he admitted having “hateful feelings” – until he met Sandy Creek’s Stearns.
Sandy Creek Primitive Baptist Church, 1802. Randolph County Historic Landmark Preservation Commission.
He’d heard of Stearns, and curiosity got the better of him. Must have been some fierce curiosity, too, because he took a 40 mile horseback ride to Sandy Creek to hear him. And here’s what he said about the meeting:
“When the fame of Mr. Stearns’ preaching reached the Yadkin, where I lived, I felt a curiosity to go and hear him. Upon my arrival I saw a venerable old man sitting under a peach tree with a book in his hand and the people gathering about him. He fixed his eyes upon me immediately, which made me feel in such a manner as I had never felt before. I turned to quit the place, but could not proceed far. I walked about, sometimes catching his eyes as I walked. My uneasiness increased and became intolerable. I went up to him, thinking that a salutation and shaking of hands would relieve me, but it happened otherwise. I began to think he had an evil eye and ought to be shunned, but shunning him I could no more effect than a bird can shun the rattlesnake when it fixes its eyes upon it. When he began to preach my perturbations increased, so that nature could no longer support them, and I sank to the ground.”
This was about the 1750s, and it wasn’t long before Lane was a convert, remaining with Stearns until his quick flight to Tennessee in 1771. Stearns, by the way, died later that same year.
Big Spring Primitive Baptist Church in Claiborne County. Tidence Lane reportedly built this church himself.
Lane is often called Tennessee’s first Baptist preacher, and he’s something of a legend in East Tennessee, having been involved in the beginnings of so many of the region’s churches – Buffalo Ridge, Bent Creek, Big Spring, Cherokee Creek, and many of what were called “arms” of the Bent Creek church. Lane was the first moderator of the first religious association of any kind in what would become Tennessee, the old Holston Baptist Association.
Lane must have come to Bent Creek with the many other Watauga colonists who came here after the Battle of King’s Mountain, and indeed Lane, his brother Isaac, and son Aquilla fought in that battle. Our man James Roddye’s land grants were largely on Bent Creek, and he was among the original members of the church.
The stories say that Lane and Isaac Barton did the first preaching at Bent Creek, beneath a towering elm tree, or it might have been an oak tree, on the old Stagecoach Road near the Bent Creek Cemetery is now, or maybe on the banks of the creek. Or maybe they preached on the Coffman farm just down the road first, and possiby some of the homes of other early members. Or maybe he stood on a log stretched across the creek. Or maybe all those. We all know how these stories go. The stories say that Lane and William Murphy organized the church in 1785, the same year Roddye built the Tavern with the Red Door. Barton, Roddye, and Caleb Witt were also involved in establishing the church. Barton, by the way, later left Bent Creek – with permission – to establish Bethel South in Morristown, the church that eventually became First Baptist.
The Bent Creek church’s original log structure may have been adjacent to the cemetery, although some older stories say that the church was built beneath the big old tree where the original preaching took place, and that that tree was across the road from the Kirkpatrick House, just down Stagecoach Road less than a half mile to the west. Or on the banks of Bent Creek, possibly.
An artist’s conception of what Bent Creek might have looked like in 1785. Debbie Bruce
The early history of Baptists come with plenty of dissension and division, as is true for most Protestant denominations. Once they came to North America, those divisions continued to crop up. I’m not going to try to explain all those controversies, but the first signs of dissent within the Bent Creek church appear in the minutes of the meeting on the second Saturday of June, 1839. It was the second order of business that day:
“took up the Institution named in our minutes and decided we will not make them a test of fellowship – vote 38 to 27 the minority rent off from this church and hold their meeting on a different day claiming to be old bent creek church but call themselves by the name of Primitive Baptists.”
There’s no explanation of the doctrinal differences that led to this move, just the note that whatever are the differences, the original Bent Creek church does not consider them out of fellowship.
There’s not another mention of this breakaway church in the minutes through August 1844, nor is it clear whether this group met at a different location or continued to use the Bent Creek meetinghouse. It’s entirely possible that both groups use the old log building until 1875, when most of the members of the original voted to move into a new brick building in Whitesburg proper and change its name to Whitesburg Baptist.
Thirty-seven of the more than 135 church members voted against the move. What exactly happened next isn’t clear: What became of the primitive baptists who broke away in 1839? And what about this group, who are known to have left the mother church at this point? This is a story to be told after more reading of church minutes, I suppose. What we do know is that at some point, the 37 breakaway members in 1875 eventually moved to the old Cave Spring school house nearby.
Whitesburg Baptist Church moved into this building in 1875, meeting downstairs while the Kyle Masonic Lodge met upstairs until the church built its current building a short distance away. Courtesy Joe Moore.
This group was supposedly calling itself Bent Creek Primitive Baptists, or sometimes the Second Bent Creek Church, and it maintained many of the old Separate Baptist beliefs of Lane’s time while Whitesburg Baptist “modernized.” Within a few years, the small group merged with Cedar Hill Baptist Church, a relatively new congregation that was meeting on Silver City Road between Bent Creek and Rocky Point Baptist Church, and renamed itself Catherine Nenney Memorial Church, after Catherine Nenney Graham, daughter of Patrick Nenney and widow of Claiborne County’s Hughe Graham, who provided the money to build a new meetinghouse on Silver City Road.
Whitesburg Baptist for a time shared its space with the Kyle Masonic Lodge, the church occupying the first floor while the lodge met in the second. In 1984, though, the church moved to a new brick building all on its own. That building was built on property once owned by Tidence Lane.
Both Whitesburg Baptist and Catherine Nenney have historical markers noting their beginnings at Bent Creek. The marker in front of what’s now all Kyle Lodge, installed by the Tennessee Historical Commission, reads:
“This Baptist church is successor to the church established about one mile southwest, by Elder Tidence Lane and Elder William Murphy in 1785. A cemetery is near the original church site, which stood on the Old Stage Road from Abingdon to Knoxville. This road, made by immigrant pioneers, followed game and Indian trails.”
The marker at Catherine Nenney, a carved stone, reads:
“A part and minority of the Bent Creek Church of 1785 est. here 1881. The Cedar Hill Church merged with this church 1887. Name changed to Catherine Nenney Memorial 1888 in honor of Catherine Nenney Graham, wife of Hugh Graham, wealthy landowner and legislator, and descendant of Samuel Doak.”
And the old log church? An article by Don Floyd in “Historic Hamblen” says the building was eventually moved to the nearby Coffman farm and used as a barn, until an effort began to rebuild and preserve the old historic structure. At that time, the logs were moved back to Whitesburg, but money was not forthcoming, and the logs rotted away.
The old Bent Creek Church, in use as a blacksmith shop at this time
There’s one old photo of the log structure, found in Jim Claborn and Bill Henderson’s Pictorial History of Hamblen County as well as Emma Deane Smith Trent’s “East Tennessee’s Lore of Yesteryear.” The date is uncertain, but it must have been after the congregation moved away, as Trent says it was in use as a blacksmith shop at the time.
From the beginning, Bent Creek church welcomed slaves as full members of the church. A read-through of the church minutes shows mentions of Black George or Negro Sal, sometimes a man or woman “of color.” In the early years there are few references to slavery, although Black George was once admonished for spreading a false story about his “master.” In later years, however, mentions of enslaved members are often accompanied by their “masters'” names. Still, the church liberated “Banet a man of couler to exercise his gift” (without a mention of his “master”) on the second Saturday of May in 1835 – meaning they recognized he could preach and told him he could do so. I’m not clear if “Banet” was a typo – by the end of the year, the church had granted a “letter of dismission to … black man Barnet,” a phrasing that means Barnet had requested to be dismissed from Bent Creek – likely to join another congregation, as such letters meant the bearer was in good standing with the church and could be used to be “received” elsewhere. Having not yet seen church minutes closer to, during, and immediately after the Civil War, I can’t say how they reflected their times.
While Tidence Lane might have been happier with the primitive baptists, at least for a time, he died long before that change, in 1806, having been Bent Creek’s pastor from the beginning. He was buried in the Lane family cemetery on his property, because Bent Creek had no cemetery at that time.
The grave of the unknown traveler
That came in 1810, when William Horner, another early member of the church, donated an acre of his land to be the church burying ground. He was the original owner of the Kirkpatrick Farm (the Kirkpatricks, incidentally, apparently initially owned land a little further out from Whitesburg, still on Bent Creek, perhaps near where James Roddye’s original lands were). Another story: There was already a grave on the acre Horner gave to the church trustees – Caleb Witt, Samuel Riggs, and Joseph Coffman – that of a traveler from North Carolina who died while spending the night at Horner’s farm. Horner reportedly traced the man’s family and traveled himself to North Carolina, with the man’s horse, to tell them what befell their relative, but his name was never recorded.
The Bent Creek Cemetery is now about eight acres and holds the final resting places of a number of early area illuminaries. Revolutionary soldiers like Roddye, John Kilpatrick, John Day, William Horner, Samuel White, John Arnott, Alexander McDonald, George Russell, Caleb Witt, and Tidence Lane Jr, the pastor’s son; Andrew and David Coffman; and Patrick Nenney are all buried in the old burying ground.
Also resting at Bent Creek are three-time light welterweight world boxing champion Frankie Billy “The Surgeon” Randall and World War I Medal of Honor winner Edward R. Talley.
Talley is one of two Medal of Honor winners from Hamblen County, the only county in the country to have more than one. Talley was born in Russellville and chose to have his medal awarded to him at his alma mater, Russellville High School. The other Hamblen County medal winner was Calvin John Ward, an Army National Guard soldier also awarded for his actions in World War I. Ward was born in Greene County and lived most of his life in Morristown. He was buried in Bristol.
An interesting note – the Talley-Ward Recreation Center was named for these two gentlemen.
Photo: Madison Turner, Tennessee Baptist Mission Board
And what of Tidence Lane, the pastor? Well, he’s no longer resting in the middle of a lonely field. In 2017, Whitesburg First Baptist Church disinterred Lane and his family and reburied them next to the church in a place of honor.
Sources:
The Sesquicentennial History of the Nolachucky Baptist Association, Glenn A. Toomey
Bent Creek Church Minutes 1786-1844
Faces, Places, and Things of Early East Tennessee, Emma Deane Smith Trent
East Tennessee’s Lore of Yesteryear, Emma Deane Smith Trent
Historic Hamblen: Centennial souvenir book
Hamblen County, Tennessee: A Pictorial History, Jim Claborn and Bill Henderson
Bi-Centennial Holston: Tennessee’s First Baptist Association, Glenn A. Toomey
“From cow pasture to memorial: Tennessee Baptists move remain’s of state’s first preacher,” Amy McRary, Knoxville News-Sentinel, November 26, 2017
