Posted on 02/09/2010 5:39:32 AM PST by jay1949
You mean the marker saying "Gone with the wind"? Yea that's my neighbors family. I have a picture of it. I'm up in the Anderson/Knox/Union triangle myself. The marker besides name reads as follows.
During Reconstruction days robbed by the Carpet Baggers of 4000 acres of land. 60 Odd years later TVA Confiscated several thousand acres of mineral land left to his grandchildren Gone With The Wind.
I know many of the families shown in tose pictures. Andersonville is several ridges over from me and many of the family's stayed in the area even after Norris Lake was built including mine. My great grandfather on my dads side lived in an area known as Lickskillet and operated a store LOL. He left there to become a doctor in Knoxville.
There was also an area where the Clinch and Powell rivers meet which is now a game management area where my moms family lived. When the lake was built most persons in that area were bought out because it was such a remote area. But I can remember persons still living in that area in the late 1960's. When my grandmother was alive we'd drive through the area and she could literally tell us who lived where. This was in an area called White Creek and Lost Creek on the Clinch River side. My mom was born in the town of Loyston shown in the pictures which was flooded for Norris Lake. I like doing genealogy look ups on my mom and dads family when I get a chance. With that you learn a lot of history.
Looking at the picture captioned "Mule-powered plowing on the Melton farm, Anderson County, TN. National Archives." If I'm looking at where I think I am a Walmart and interstate would be in the background. That area is also called Bethel. I suspect this because my uncle was related to the Melton family and he was raised in that neighborhood. The Faust family mentioned is most likely "Foust" and is a mis-print. I say this because Foust is a very common name in this area and there are no Faust listed in the local phone book. It's like looking up the name Vandergriff/Vandagriff/Vandargriff it's all the same family. I know of a cemetery where a lot of that family is buried some of which are kin and about six spelling variants of the same family name.
My wife's family is from the other side of the valley in the Sevier County area in the Smoky Mountain foothills. She is decended from the Thomas/McCown families who first settled and at one point owned a good chunk of land in what is now Sevierville and Pigeon Forge.
I thought you might like the article. I don’t know if any of my ancestors on one side spent much time in East TN. One ancestor named Armstrong came from NC rather early (c1800) and came to middle TN, only a county or so east of Nashville. He was a farmer, but I think he was frustrated by the terrible soil. You can’t dig a few inches without hitting hunks of broken limestone, and we have gargantuan rocks unearthed in the yard. I can’t imagine having to actively till the soil and remove all those rocks, what a nightmare !
He had a nice out, though, he signed up with Gen. Andrew Jackson and went on the Creek Campaign and ended up at the Battle of New Orleans (War of 1812). Apparently married a woman of French ancestry down there who herself was a widow of a riverboat captain (who died in one of the yellow fever outbreaks). They appeared to eschew staying in the brand new state of Louisiana or returning to Middle Tennessee and went up the Mississippi to the Illinois Territory with the better soil to farm. Not until my parents came to Middle TN in the ‘70s would our family return to this state.
I live on a rock farm myself LOL. The most prime farmland East of Nashville the snake oil flood control salesman FDR flooded. In doing so to save Chattanooga he flooded a great portion of useable farmland north of it. The first was in 1930’s at Norris Lake and the last was in the late 1970’s I think at Tellico Lake.
I used to hunt for old bottles and doing so I used to look for old house sites. You’d see the rock piles along sides of old fields where they cleared the land. But many of the persons coming into this area had dealt with as much in places like Ireland, Germany, Britan, Scottland, and Spain, etc.
My dad’s dad’s family didn’t get down here till the 1920’s via New York, Michigan, then Kansas & Oklahoma. They sarted out in Barnstable Co Mass and stayed north for 300 years.
Generally there was two ways into Tennessee early on. Either cross the gaps from North Carolina in places like the Little Tennessee River or go on up and come down through Viginia around Maryland. Likely most persons followed rivers for the necessities of life.
Yeah, it would be interesting to see how my ancestor arrived in Middle TN, because I’m not quite sure. The folks that settled here about 20 or so years before he arrived came on flatboats on the Cumberland. They’d often repeat the story that they arrived during that brutal winter when the river froze hard and they could walk across it. The Cumberland hasn’t froze hard in some time.
A past midnight bump to myself to answer this one to my favorite freeper billhilly.
My FR ping list is acting strange — I had to search for your freeper name to find this thread, although lurking I found it recently. Maybe I am just too tired or getting too old (LOL). Or on too many ping lists.
It’s past my bedtime, but I haven’t forgotten my buddy from crappie fishing and duck hunting heaven.
More later. Hope you haven’t foundered yourself on cornbread. You’ve probably scared every crappie in Mississippi, or devastated their numbers (LOL). Wish I was doing so.
There was a wagon road from southwest Virginia, going through the Cumberland Gap by the Wilderness Road and then going southwest into Middle Tennessee. From the same starting point, another wagon road ran southwest into Northeast Tennessee. Of course, such roads were for those who couldn’t afford a luxury cruise down the Cumberland River ;>). There’s a map linked here:
http://www.backcountrynotes.com/history/2009/7/25/ramseys-map-of-cumberland-and-franklin.html
The Faust name in the picture is spelled right. I saw an obit in my local paper the other day likely from this same family. But there is also Foust and likely the same family also. All it took was for someone to mis a letter in a name or make an a look like an O and family names were changed forever.
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