Independent Herald: Echoes in Time

Remembering public education pioneer Ovia Cross

Ben Garrett — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 01:21:23 GMT

You’re reading “Echoes in Time,” a weekly newsletter by the Independent Herald that focuses on stories of years gone by in order to paint a portrait of Scott County and its people. “Echoes in Time” is one of six weekly newsletters published by the IH. You can adjust your subscription settings to include as many or as few of these newsletters as you want. If you aren’t a subscriber, please consider doing so. It’s free!

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Today’s newsletter is sponsored by the Scott County Chamber of Commerce. Since 1954, the Scott County Chamber of Commerce has advocated for a strong community by supporting stronger infrastructure and leadership.

Remembering Scott County’s public education pioneer, Ovia Cross

Ovia Cross was a man of many firsts.

He was Scott County’s first school superintendent to be popularly elected by the people of the county. He was also the first (and, to date, the only) person to serve as superintendent of schools on two separate occasions.

But his impact on education in Scott County extended beyond those notable achievements. He also organized the first four-year high school in Scott County, and coached the county’s first high school basketball team.

Born in 1889, Ovia Cross was the son of Rev. Harrison Maynard Cross and Cordelia Adkins. His paternal grandfather was Caswell Cross, whose Buffalo farm was raided by Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. That same day, his great-uncle, Larkin Cross, was murdered in the Buffalo area. He was a second cousin to Bailey Cross, who served as Scott County School Superintendent in the 1970s. He was part of the Cross family that lived on Jellico Creek east of Winfield.

Cross graduated from Huntsville High School, then attended Maryville College and East Tennessee State Normal, which is now East Tennessee State University.

After college, Cross married Barbara Evelyn Terry (1897-1959). Their children were Ira Lee Cross and William Maynard Cross.

Back home after college, Cross landed a job teaching in the Oneida Special School District. It was there that he helped organize the first basketball team in Scott County’s history.

In 1924, Cross was elected superintendent of schools, at the age of 35. He wasn’t the county’s first school superintendent; seventeen different men had served as school superintendent before him. However, each of those men had been appointed by the Scott County Quarterly Court — a precursor to what we know as Scott County Commission today. In 1924, a state law change allowed the voters of each county to elect their school superintendent.

The term in those days was just two years, and Cross was succeeded in 1926 by O.E. Jeffers. He ran for election again in 1928 and won, becoming the only person in Scott County’s history to serve as school superintendent on two separate occasions. This time, he served until 1930, when he was replaced by O. Earl Byrd.

Cross is credited with organizing the first three four-year high schools in Scott County: Huntsville, Norma, and Robbins. All three continued to be used until 1971, when Scott High School was built and the county consolidated its high school classes.

Following his second stint as school superintendent, Cross returned to the classroom, and spent 28 years in the Oneida Special School District before retiring in 1960.

Cross died on March 20, 1980, at Scott County Hospital. He was 91. He was buried at Litton Cemetery in Oneida.

Echoes in Time is published each Tuesday by the Independent Herald.

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Scott County's last vote for a Democratic presidential candidate

Ben Garrett — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:06:24 GMT

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Scott County’s last vote for a Democratic presidential candidate

Only once in Scott County’s 177-year history has its people supported a Democrat for president. And only three times have a majority of the voters here not supported the Republican nominee for president. And there’s a reason behind that.

To find the only time a majority of Scott Countians voted for a Democrat for president, you have to go back to 1856, when the county’s voters narrowly supported Pennsylvania Democrat James Buchanan over New York Know Nothing party nominee Millard Fillmore.

That year was the first presidential election for the newly-formed Republican Party, which had been born in Wisconsin with opposition to the expansion of slavery at its core. Its candidate, John C. Frémont, was not on the ballot in Tennessee.

Buchanan, who won a narrow majority of the vote in Scott County in 1856, had originally been a member of the Federalist Party. During his five-term tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives, he had aligned himself with Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party. He was generally supportive of slavery — the issue that was tearing at the fabric of the union of states even by 1856 — and intervened in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision after winning the election (but before taking office).

Officially, Scott County is one of three in Tennessee that have not supported a Democrat for president since 1856. The other two are Hancock County and Washington County. However, voters in both Hancock and Washington supported Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge in the 1860 election, after the Democratic Party had fractured. This leaves Scott County as the only county in Tennessee that has not voted for a Democrat for president since 1856.

What happened?

The same thing that led Scott County to defy Nashville and declare its independence from Tennessee in 1861: the secession crisis and the civil war that followed.

In 1852, the first presidential election after Scott County was formed, Scott Countians voted for Whig candidate Winfield Scott — the county’s namesake — in his race against Democrat Franklin Pierce. In fact, this area had routinely supported the Whig Party prior to 1856. In 1848, Campbell County, Anderson County and Morgan County — the counties that Scott County would be formed from the following year — voted for Zachary Taylor, the Whig from Louisiana. Four years before that, they voted for Whig Henry Clay over Tennessee’s own James K. Polk.

But the 1856 election showed that Scott County would also support a Democrat. Jehu Phillips, a prominent Scott Countian who was deeply involved in local politics, would later write that Scott County was evenly divided between Whigs and Democrats prior to the Civil War.

Then came 1860, and everything changed.

That year, the still-new Republican Party created a firestorm by nominating Illinois attorney Abraham Lincoln for president. Lincoln — a rough-around-the-edges frontier lawyer — had emerged as a national political figure because of his stance against the expansion of slavery. The South was convinced that his election would mean the end of slavery, and Tennessee’s governor, Isham Harris, had already threatened secession — as had other Southern political leaders.

Lincoln was not on the ballot in Tennessee that year, though he received a single vote in Scott County from Shade Lewallen — presumably a write-in vote. Instead, Scott County joined the rest of the state in supporting Constitutional Union party candidate John Bell — a native of Tennessee — over Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, who was Buchanan’s vice president.

Fentress and Morgan counties supported Breckinridge. Campbell and Anderson counties voted the same way Scott County did.

In Scott County, more than 60% of the voters cast their ballots for Bell. Only one voter was for Stephen Douglas, the Democrat nominee who had risen to fame through his debates with Lincoln.

Despite not being on the ballot in the South, Lincoln won the election. The South was incensed, and secession followed. Tennessee’s first secession vote, held just three months after the 1860 election, failed. But Harris forced a second secession vote, and Middle Tennesseans — influenced by the events at Fort Sumter that had started the war — switched their support from pro-Union to pro-secession.

The secession vote incensed East Tennessee, which remained strongly unionist. Representatives from counties throughout the region met in Knoxville and Greeneville and voted to petition the state to allow a split, with East Tennessee becoming its own state. When Nashville said “no,” Scott Countians decided to put rhetoric into action. In December 1861 — at least, that was the theory of Independent Herald founder and historian Paul Roy; the official records were lost or destroyed during the war so no one knows the exact date — Scott County Court voted to secede from Tennessee and form the Free & Independent State of Scott.

The Unionist stance in Scott County was complicated. Unlike the plantations of West Tennessee and the expansive farms in Middle Tennessee, the rocky soil of the Cumberland Plateau did not make commercial farming much of an option here. As such, the farms were largely subsistence operations — supporting single families, and not generating anything more than what the family needed to survive. Slaves were nearly non-existent. There were fewer slaves owned in Scott County — only 59 when the 1860 census was taken — than in any other county in Tennessee.

With slavery a moot issue here, Scott Countians were deeply opposed to secession — not because they favored abolishing slavery, but because most of the people who lived here were descendants of Revolutionary War veterans who were deeply keen of the sacrifices that had been made by the nation’s founding generation and believed strongly that the Union was worth saving.

“East Tennesseans stood their ground. They proved to the overwhelming majority of Tennesseans their loyalty to the Union. East Tennesseans had played important roles in helping to make the United States; they were not going to be a party to its destruction — no never!” historian Esther Sharp Sanderson wrote in her book, County Scott and Its Mountain Folk.

This view was exactly opposite of men like Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, who opposed secession but ultimately believed that loyalty to state was more important than the Union because — in their view — the Union was built on the explicit consent of the states.

Writing for the Cumberland Chronicle in 1904, Jehu Phillips said: “I was raised a Democrat, but after the war nearly every citizen in this county voted the Republican ticket and have been doing so in this county since that time.”

The war forever changed the politics of Scott County. When Abraham Lincoln ran for re-election in 1864, he won Scott County, although the votes didn’t count because Tennessee had not been readmitted to the Union. And every Republican candidate since has carried Scott County — almost always by overwhelming margins.

In 1872, when Ulysses S. Grant ran for re-election, Scott Countians supported him by the largest margin of any county in Tennessee.

Four years later, in the presidential election of 1876 that resulted in a constitutional crisis and a premature end to Reconstruction, Scott Countians voted for Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by the largest margin of any county in Tennessee.

Throughout the remainder of the 19th century and into the early 20th century, Middle Tennessee and much of West Tennessee generally voted for the Democratic candidate for president, while East Tennessee — where secession had soured the people who were mostly Union loyalists — generally voted for the Republican candidate.

And, in each election, voters in Scott County and Sevier County consistently voted for the Republican candidate by larger margins than almost any other county in the state. This continued until 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt — who had easily carried Scott County eight years earlier — switched to the Progressive Party and much of East Tennessee cast its support to him. (Scott and Sevier counties voted for Roosevelt by a larger margin than any other county in Tennessee.)

For more than a century after the Civil War, secession and the war shaped the politics of Tennessee. East Tennessee always supported the Republican Party — viewing the Democrats as the party that had pulled them into a war they hadn’t wanted to fight. But West Tennessee (and, for the most part, Middle Tennessee) usually supported the Democrat Party — associating Republicans with the deeply unpopular Reconstruction policies.

In time, the impact of the Civil War on Tennessee’s presidential votes faded. But in Scott County, it has remained strong. In 2016, Scott Countians voted for Republican Donald Trump by the second-largest margin of any county in the state. In 2020, nearly 90% of Scott Countians voted for Trump — the largest margin of any county in the state. In 2024, an even larger margin of Scott Countians voted for Trump, again the largest of any county in the state.

Even Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democrat president who helped guide the nation through the Great Depression, couldn’t flip Scott County. He made deep inroads in East Tennessee, flipping 22 counties (including Pickett and Campbell counties) from red to blue. In his 1936 re-election bid, he won Morgan and Anderson counties, as well.

But Scott Countians never voted for Roosevelt. And in 1944, East Tennessee shifted back to the Republican side, favoring Thomas E. Dewey over Roosevelt.

In 1964, when Lyndon B. Johnson was winning Morgan, Campbell and Anderson counties, Scott County again bucked its neighbors, supporting Republican Barry Goldwater by a slim majority.

And in 1968, as the civil rights turmoil roiled the region and caused many voters to switch their support to George Wallace, Scott Countians voted for Richard Nixon. (The rest of East Tennessee also voted for Nixon.)

Jimmy Carter was just the second Democrat presidential candidate since secession to make serious inroads in East Tennessee. He carried the vote in every county adjoining Scott County except Pickett County. But he didn’t win Scott County; voters here narrowly supported Republican Gerald Ford. It was the closest Scott County had come to voting for a Democrat for president since the Civil War, but Ford won 51.4% of the vote here.

In 1992, Bill Clinton became the third Democrat since secession to gain major support in East Tennessee. He won every county adjoining Scott County — but, like his predecessors, he didn’t win Scott County. Scott Countians voted for George H.W. Bush (though it was the first time since the Civil War, with the exception of Roosevelt’s third-party bid in 1912, that fewer than 50% of Scott Countians voted for the Republican candidate, with Ross Perot gaining nearly 10% of the vote here).

Scott County’s neighbors continued to support Clinton in 1996, but a majority of the voters here cast their ballots for Republican Bob Dole — though, again, Dole got less than 50% of the vote in Scott County due to Perot’s presence on the ballot. Dole received 46.9% of the vote in Scott County that year, while Clinton received 44.5% of the vote. It was the closest a Democrat has come to winning Scott County since the Civil War.

The last time a Republican candidate received less than 60% of the vote in Scott County was in 2004, when George W. Bush received 59.1% of the vote and John Kerry captured 40.5%.

Here is the presidential candidate Scott Countians have supported by year:

1852: Winfield Scott, Whig
1856: James Buchanan, Democrat
1860: John Bell, Constitution
1864: Abraham Lincoln, Republican
1868: Ulysses S. Grant, Republican
1872: Ulysses S. Grant, Republican
1876: Rutherford B. Hayes, Republican
1880: James A. Garfield, Republican
1884: James G. Blaine, Republican
1888: Benjamin Harrison, Republican
1892: Benjamin Harrison, Republican
1896: William McKinley, Republican
1900: William McKinley, Republican
1904: Theodore Roosevelt, Republican
1908: William Howard Taft, Republican
1912: Theodore Roosevelt, Progressive
1916: Charles Evan Hughes, Republican
1920: Warren G. Harding, Republican
1924: Calvin Coolidge, Republican
1928: Herbert Hoover, Republican
1932: Herbert Hoover, Republican
1936: Alf Landon, Republican
1940: Wendell Willkie, Republican
1944: Thomas E. Dewey, Republican
1948: Thomas E. Dewey, Republican
1952: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Republican
1956: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Republican
1960: Richard Nixon, Republican
1964: Barry Goldwater, Republican
1968: Richard Nixon, Republican
1972: Richard Nixon, Republican
1976: Gerald Ford, Republican
1980: Ronald Reagan, Republican
1984: Ronald Reagan, Republican
1988: George H.W. Bush, Republican
1992: George H.W. Bush, Republican
1996: Bob Dole, Republican
2000: George W. Bush, Republican
2004: George W. Bush, Republican
2008: John McCain, Republican
2012: Mitt Romney, Republican
2016: Donald J. Trump, Republican
2020: Donald J. Trump, Republican
2024: Donald J. Trump, Republican

Echoes in Time is published by the Independent Herald each week on Tuesday.

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Scott County's sheriffs through the years

Ben Garrett — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:17:41 GMT

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This computer-aided composite photo depicts Scott County’s three longest-serving sheriffs: Jim Carson, Jack Laxton, and Frank Butler.

Scott County’s sheriffs through the years

It’s not a term that’s as common as it once was, but you’ll still find a few old-timers in far-flung parts of Scott County who make reference to the “high sheriff.” It was once common terminology, carried over from the “old country” — England, Wales, and Northern Ireland — where the “high sheriff” was the top peace officer and the undersheriffs were his deputies.

“High sheriff” has never been an official title in Scott County — or anywhere else in Tennessee. Around here, the official title has always been, simply, “sheriff.” And his deputies are called just that — “deputies,” though their official title is “deputy sheriff.” There are a few states where the office of “high sheriff” exists. In Rhode Island, for example, there’s a statewide sheriff’s department, and its top official is called the “executive high sheriff.” Hawaii also has a high sheriff. And in Rhode Island, each county has a “high sheriff” that has police powers throughout the state.

Later this week, Scott Countians will go to the polls to select a sheriff for the next four years. Brian Keeton, the first-term incumbent, will be seeking another term in office, and is being contested by two veteran law enforcement officers: Dennis Chambers and Kris Lewallen.

Keeton is the 33rd person to serve as Scott County Sheriff. Here’s a look at the others through the years:

Scott County’s first sheriff was John Lewallen (sometimes spelled Llewellyn). He was elected in 1850, in the county’s first election, and served until 1858. He was part of the Lewallen family from the Glenmary area. His father, Anderson Grant Lewallen, was the first settler in that part of what would eventually become Scott County.

Bailey Buttram, of New River, was Scott County’s second sheriff. He was elected in 1858 and served until 1964. He had the distinction of being the person who certified Scott County’s vote against secession. He carried the results to Nashville on horseback, and his handwritten note relating Scott County’s 521-19 vote against secession is still preserved in the state archives. (Interestingly, Buttram’s parents were Scott County’s most prominent slaveholders, but Bailey and his family were loyal to the Union. He had two sons who fought for the federal army and were captured at the Battle of Rogersville in 1863. One of them, Iradel, died in a Confederate prison camp. The other, Joel, survived, but died at a young age, likely as a result of illness he contracted while imprisoned. Buttram’s son-in-law, Beaty Cecil, also served in the Union army, riding to Nashville to enlist. He would later serve as Scott County Sheriff in his own right.

In addition to Lewallen (Glenmary) and Buttram (New River), most of Scott County’s early sheriffs were from the southern part of the county. James Sharp, the third sheriff, was from Winfield, and Milton Terry, the fifth sheriff, was the son of Oneida’s first settler, Josiah Terry.

Reuben Hurtt, the county’s seventh sheriff, was from New River, as was Cecil, the eighth sheriff. Frank Hughett, who served as sheriff on two different occasions, was from Brimstone. So was his successor, John Goad. The two men were related by marriage, and Goad served as sheriff in between Hughett’s two terms.

In between those men from the southern end of the county, Fowler Hatfield — a farmer from Bull Creek — served a single term as sheriff in the 1870s.

There was a time when the office of county sheriff was term-limited in Tennessee. Each person was limited to three terms in office, and terms in those days consisted of only two years. So after a maximum of six years, a sheriff had to sit out at least two years before being eligible to return to office.

Among the sheriffs who were term limited were Buttram, Sharp, Hurtt, and Hughett. Hughett was the first sheriff to return to office. After sitting out two years while his cousin-in-law, Goad, served a term as sheriff, he was elected again in 1898. He only served one term the second time around, and was unsuccessful in election attempts after that.

Speaking of Goad, he has the distinction of being the only sheriff from Scott County to ever legally hang a man. That man was Mike King, a Winfield resident who was convicted of murdering a school teacher. The duty bothered Goad so much that he considered resigning — King famously told him to stay on as sheriff and carry out the duty — and he did not run for a second term. Instead, he ran for other elected offices.

Other sheriffs who were term-limited through the years included Gilbert Sexton, Frank Butler, Dorsey Rosser, and Jack Laxton.

Richard Ellis would have been term-limited, as well, but he was assassinated in office in 1925. He was a Baptist preacher who campaigned on a promise of cracking down on Scott County’s moonshine problem. It was the Prohibition era, and illicit liquor was rampant in the county’s remote hills and hollers. The 1920s proved to be the most violent era in the county’s history for law enforcement, as a full-scale moonshine war unfolded. Multiple people were killed, including Oneida Chief of Police Johnny Acres, who served as one of Ellis’s deputies.

On Aug. 11, 1925, Ellis was shot dead on the steps of the old county jail in Huntsville as he escorted a prisoner inside. The killers shot him from ambush, and it was never conclusively proven who was responsible, although several arrests were made.

Ellis was not the last person to die in office. In fact, his successor, Isham Chambers of Buffalo, died of the flu in 1929. Many years later, Mike Cross died of cancer in 2013.

Another sheriff, Butler, almost died in office. He was severely wounded during a gun battle outside a Winfield tavern in 1947.

Two other sheriffs were assassinated shortly after their terms in office. Hughett was killed from ambush in the Smokey Junction area in 1910 after leading a posse that had killed Riley Low. He was a candidate for election at the time of his death. And William J. West — who had famously helped three black murder suspects charged with killing a supervisor at the Robbins Brickyard escape lynching by leading them out of Scott County under the cover of darkness — had been shot from ambush outside his home in the New Light area near Winfield in 1909.

Hughett had been the first sheriff to serve on multiple occasions, first from 1888 to 1894 and then from 1898 to 1900. The second to do so was Esau Laxton, who replaced Isham Chambers after Chambers died of illness in 1929. Laxton served until 1934, and then from 1936 to 1938.

Laxton was also part of the first — and, to date, only — father-and-son team to serve as sheriffs. His son, Jack Laxton, was first elected sheriff in 1962, and later served as sheriff from 1986 to 1994.

The 1940s saw an interesting political rivalry unfold between Frank Butler and Dorsey Rosser. Butler served as sheriff for six years before being term-limited in 1944. Then, after Rosser served as sheriff for two years, Butler beat him in 1946 to take the job back. After being wounded in the Winfield shootout, Butler did not run in 1948 while he recovered, and Rosser won again. But Butler was elected again in 1950, serving six more years before again being term-limited in 1956. Rosser then took office in 1956 and served until 1962, when Laxton was elected.

Butler and Jack Laxton were Scott County’s longest-tenured sheriffs, each serving a total of 14 years in the office. The longest anyone has served consecutively is Jim Carson, who served 12 years, from 1994 to 2006. His brother, Marion Carson, would have served at least 12 years, but was indicted by federal authorities in 1986. He was one of nine current or former sheriffs in East Tennessee indicted by the FBI as part of “Mach Tenn,” a lengthy undercover investigation. Federal agents posed as cocaine smugglers and worked their way into Carson’s trust before asking him to aid their efforts. Carson pleaded guilty and resigned his office. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but died of cancer a few years later.

Carson had been one of the most popular sheriffs in Scott County’s history prior to his arrest. He and Jack Laxton developed a fiercely competitive political rivalry in the 1970s that was much the same as the Frank Butler-Dorsey Rosser battles of the 1940s. Laxton had been term-limited in 1968 and replaced by Bernard Brummet. Later, when Julius Lewallen was elected sheriff in 1972, Carson served as one of his deputies. When Lewallen opted against seeking re-election to a third term in 1976, Carson ran. So did Laxton. Only a few votes separated the two, with Carson winning. They squared off again in 1978 and again Carson won narrowly.

When Carson resigned his office, his chief deputy, Chester Sexton, was appointed by County Commission to fulfill the remainder of his term. Sexton did so, serving as acting sheriff until Laxton won the 1986 election.

Laxton then served two more four-year terms before losing to Jim Carson — Marion’s brother — in 1994. Jim Carson served three terms before Anthony Lay won the 2006 election to become the youngest sheriff in the county’s history. Lay resigned near the end of his first term to take a job with the U.S. Marshal Service, and Mike Cross — then the Oneida chief of police — was elected to replace him. Following Cross’s death, his chief deputy, Ronnie Phillips, was appointed by County Commission to fill the remainder of his term. Phillips was elected in 2014 and re-elected in 2018, serving a total of nine years in office before Brian Keeton — who had lost to Cross in the 2010 campaign — won election in 2022.

The first sheriff in Scott County who killed a man was John Goad, who hanged Mike King as part of his official duties. A decade later, Frank Hughett killed Riley Low while executing an arrest warrant, and was assassinated as an act of revenge a few months later. Gilbert Sexton had been accused of gunning down Riley Cecil in 1883 — along with his brothers — as part of the Cecil-West-Smith feud, though that was well before he became sheriff. Richard Ellis was part of a moonshine still raid that killed Filmore Sexton in 1924, though it isn’t clear who fired the fatal shot. Herbert Bilbrey was present when game warden Lindsay Phillips was killed in 1936. In fact, Phillips was there to serve a warrant on Bilbrey. Bilbrey was not implicated in Phillips’ death. However, one of the men who was, Dorsey Rosser, would later serve as sheriff on multiple occasions.

Echoes in Time is published by the Independent Herald each Tuesday.

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Remembering Adelbert Doisy and the Huntsville Supply Store

Ben Garrett — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:53:45 GMT

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This is a computer-assisted restoration of an original portrait of Adelbert Doisy.

Remembering Adelbert Doisy and the Huntsville Supply Store

Adelbert Doisy came to Scott County on a hunting expedition. He fell in love with the community, fell in love with one of its young ladies, and wound up spending the rest of his life here as one of the most influential business owners in Huntsville’s history. This is the story of the man behind the old Huntsville Supply Company.

Born Oct. 3, 1862, in Cincinnati, Ohio, Adelbert Henry Doisy was the son of Adelbert Edward Doisy (1837-1931) and Mary Neal Kennedy (1842-1925). In some ways, he was behind the times. Scott County — or, rather, the area that would become Scott County, since the county wasn’t actually established until 1849 — was originally settled by longhunters, men who came here on long hunting expeditions and decided to stay. These longhunters first ventured onto the northern Cumberland Plateau in the mid to late 18th century (the earliest written record is of a “station camp” along what we now know as Station Camp Creek in the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area in the 1760s). After returning to the East to fight in the Revolutionary War, some of the longhunters returned to this frontierland and settled down permanently in the 1800s and 1810s.

By the time Bert Doisy came along, in the 1880s, there were thousands of people living here, many of whom were third- and fourth-generation descendants of the original longhunters. Scott County was still rugged and remote, but it was no longer the frontierland that the earlier longhunters had encountered.

The Doisy family was well-established in Cincinnati, and had been for generations. Bert’s mother’s family — the Kennedys — had also been well-established there for several generations. Bert had no intention of leaving Cincinnati permanently when he hopped a train on the brand-new railroad to Scott County for a hunting trip. But then he met Lina Belle West.

Born April 20, 1876, Lena was the daughter of Jeremiah West (1843-1890) and Malissan Sexton (1844-1893). As much a fixture as Bert’s family was in Cincinnati, Lina’s was in Scott County. Her father had served in the Civil War, and was part of the expansive West family of Helenwood. Her mother was a descendant of Revolutionary War veteran Timothy Sexton, and was part of the Sexton family that had also settled in Helenwood.

Exactly when Bert and Lena met and began courting is not clear. She was, after all, 14 years younger than he was. When the 1900 census was taken, Bert was boarding with James F. Baker (his business partner), and Lena was still living with her parents. The couple were married in 1906 in Boone County, Ky. — near Bert’s native hometown. In 1910, the couple were living in Scott County, and their daughter, Mary Helen, was two.

Bert is best-known, of course, as the owner-operator of the Huntsville Supply Co. store that dominated the retail scene in the county seat for many years. He and James F. Baker, a Huntsville attorney who was the father of Congressman Howard H. Baker Sr., opened the store together in 1897.

Baker’s family played its own indelible role in Scott County’s growth. Everyone is familiar with the story of James’s son and grandson, of course. Both served in Congress, and the latter became one of the most powerful men in Washington as Senate Majority Leader and later as White House Chief of Staff to President Ronald Reagan. But Baker’s wife was Helen Blanche Keen. Her father, Alderson Thompson Keen, was a major in the Union army during the Civil War. It was he who convinced Gen. Ambrose Burnside to march the Army of the Ohio through Scott County en route to seize Knoxville and liberate East Tennessee from the Confederacy in 1863. Keen had become familiar with the area after leading a scouting party of 50 men through the region. He later moved his family to Scott County in the late 1880s.

Burnside’s successful march through Scott County helped to cement the city of Cincinnati’s decision to follow a similar route when it built a railroad linking itself to Chattanooga in the decade after the war ended. It was aboard a train on that railroad that Bert Doisy traveled from Cincinnati to Helenwood in the 1880s, and wound up linking up with Maj. Keen’s son-in-law.

The Huntsville Supply Co. store became a sort of commerce and social hub in Huntsville. Nat Hancock, a former slave who remained in Scott County after gaining his freedom in the early 1860s, was a familiar figure at the store, playing checkers and entertaining the other townsfolk who stopped in to trade or just to socialize.

The historian Esther Sharp Sanderson wrote of Bert Doisy: “Since Huntsville was the county seat and centrally located, people came from all sections of the county to do their trading. Mr. Doisy made many warm and lasting friends due to his jovial disposition and his congenial personality. He was a diligent, efficient businessman and the long years of successful operation of the Huntsville Supply Store can be attributed, in large measure, to his honesty, integrity, and keen business judgment. People from all walks of life felt free to come to him for advice and favors. He was prudent in his business, but he was never known to refuse an honest man a favor.”

As for the store itself, “He bought every kind of produce from the farmers who were glad to exchange them for ‘store boughten’ things. He always paid the highest possible prices for hides, tallow pelts, molasses honey, chickens, eggs, feathers, wool, mountain herbs, gin sang, yellow root, sassafras, sarsaparilla and numerous other things.”

Sanderson wrote that on court days, the store “would be packed to overflowing. Since there was not a restaurant in town, and it was impossible for the hotels to feed the large crowds, the long counters in the store were used to serve food to the public. The bill of fare consisted of cheese and crackers, sardines, salmons, and peaches and tomatoes ‘fixed up’ in a bowl with spoon and crackers.”

Bert and Lina built what would become known as the “Doisy House” that set just off the courthouse square in Huntsville. The home was later owned by Howard H. Baker Jr. and donated to the Scott County Historical Society, serving as the organization’s headquarters for many years. Today it’s owned by Eric Blakley, the son of Huntsville attorney Mark Blakley, who grew up next door.

The Doisys had one surviving child, Mary Helen, born in 1908. (A second daughter, born earlier, died as a baby.) Mary Helen married Daniel Boone Walker in the 1930s. They had two children: Louise Doisy Walker and Daniel Adelbert “Bert” Walker.

Lina died on April 10, 1952, at age 75. Bert died on Feb. 1, 1962. Both are buried at the Buttram Cemetery across from White Rock Baptist Church in Huntsville.

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The man who laid out Huntsville

Ben Garrett — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:35:27 GMT

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This is a computer-aided restoration of the earliest known photo of Huntsville (undated), which appeared in a 1990s edition of the FNB Chronicle.

The man who laid out Huntsville

In 1850, Wayne White-Cotton was charged with engineering the design of the seat of government for Tennessee’s newest county.

Scott County had been formed by the Tennessee General Assembly in 1849. The legislature carved out parts of Anderson, Campbell, Morgan and Fentress counties to create the new county, which was named for War of 1812 hero Gen. Winfield Scott. The reason for the new county: settlers in the areas of Oneida, Helenwood, and Huntsville (though the towns weren’t known by those names at the time) had to travel too far through the mountains or across the river to reach county seats in Jamestown or Jacksboro. And, so, Scott County came to be.

One of the first decisions that had to be made when Scott County was formed was where to place the county’s seat of government. A committee was appointed, and they considered three different possibilities — a farm on Buffalo Creek, a farm on Paint Rock Creek, and the site we now know as Huntsville.

Ultimately, the committee chose Huntsville. There was a natural spring that flowed heartily, providing a good source of drinking water. The land was relatively flat. And it was centrally located.

That job complete, another committee was appointed to acquire the land. Those men were John L. Smith (the county’s first circuit court clerk), Allen McDonald (the first county clerk), John Lewallen (the first sheriff), Isaac Reed (the first trustee), and Riley Chambers (the first registrar). The committee purchased 25 acres of land owned by George McDonald and Emanuel Phillips.

Once the land was purchased, it needed to be surveyed, and that’s where Whitecotton came in. He engineered the survey team, plotting the town into 49 lots — beginning with the county’s first courthouse, and the lots that would surround it.

And the Town of Huntsville was born.

Born William Wayne Whitecotton on Feb. 4, 1811, Whitecotton was the son of Aaron Whitecotton (1780-1870) and Nancy Ann Hatfield (1786-1870). He had several siblings: Keziah Thompson, Elizabeth “Betty” Chitwood, Nancy Ann Smith, Dorcas Pennington, Helen Mary O’Dell, Elvira Murrill, and Smith Whitecotton.

Wayne’s mother, Nancy Ann, was the daughter of Revolutionary War veteran Joseph Hatfield who later settled in what would become Scott County. His father, Aaron, was the son of James Whitecotton and Ruth Newton. He was originally from Virginia, but the family moved to Kentucky, and he married Nancy in Wayne County in 1807.

Around 1844, Aaron Whitecotton moved his family from present-day Scott County to Missouri. They also changed their name; Aaron adopted “White” as his middle name and left his last name as “Cotton.”

Several of Wayne’s siblings moved to Missouri with their parents. However, Wayne remained in Scott County, and played the role in the Town of Huntsville’s creation a few years later. He had just married at the time his parents moved, to Mary “Polly” Owens (1821-1885), the daughter of William Solomon Owens and Nancy Chambers of Buffalo Creek.

Wayne and Polly had seven children: Celina, Martha, China, Tasmon, French, and Walker. (Wayne may have also fathered a child, Elizabeth, with Sarah Lee West, who later married Johnathin “Egg” Phillips.)

The Whitecottons who moved to Missouri were noted supporters of the Confederacy during the Civil War. An 1865 Union report listed Wayne’s sister, Keziah Whitecotton Thompson, as a “notorious rebel family.” She and her son, George Washington “Wash” Thompson, took food to rebel soldiers who were encamped on their farm. (Her husband, Henry Thompson, was a grandson of Revolutionary War veteran Randolph Lawson of Scott County.) And Wayne’s only brother, Smith, served in the Confederate army.

But Wayne was a Union loyalist, like most other Scott Countians. When Col. William T. Clift of Chattanooga traveled to Scott County and formed the 7th Tennessee Infantry in Huntsville, Whitecotton enlisted. He mustered into service on June 14, 1862. A few months later, when Confederate forces marched on Huntsville and engaged the entrenched 7th Tennessee along River Road in September 1862 at the Battle of Huntsville, Whitecotton was captured and taken prisoner. He remained in rebel captivity until Nov. 8, 1862, when he was released in a prisoner exchange at Richmond, Va.

The 7th Tennessee had been routed at the Battle of Huntsville, and many of its men — who were untrained Scott County farmers, not career military men — simply went home. They were considered deserters, and once Whitecotton had been released from rebel captivity, Col. Clift hired him to round up the deserters.

It was on his second excursion back to Scott County to find the deserted men and coerce them back into service that Whitecotton fell ill with smallpox. He died at his home on April 21, 1863, at the age of 52. He is buried somewhere on Paint Rock Creek, though no one is sure where.

Polly lived until April 13, 1885. It’s also unclear where she was buried.

One of Wayne and Polly’s children, China, married John Marion Cordell. He was elected Scott County Judge in the 1870s and went on to the state legislature in Nashville.

Meanwhile, Wayne Whitecotton wasn’t the only person involved with the formation of Huntsville who died in the service of the Union during the Civil War.

Allen McDonald, who had been elected the county’s first court clerk and served on the committee to lay out Huntsville, served in the 7th Tennessee Infantry with Whitecotton. And, like Whitecotton, he was taken captive by rebel forces at the Battle of Huntsville. He was paroled or escaped — no one is sure which — but was suffering from camp fever when he arrived back in Scott County from Knoxville in November 1862. He died at the home of Andrew Lawson. His burial location is unknown.

And Emanuel Phillips, the man who provided the property where Huntsville was located, enlisted in the Union army at Chitwood (Winfield) on June 7, 1862, assigned to the 8th Tennessee Volunteers. He died of smallpox in Knoxville on Feb. 12, 1864, and is buried at Knoxville National Cemetery.

Emanuel Phillips was a grandson of Revolutionary War veteran Abraham Goad of Scott County.

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Remembering Scott County Judge William A. Terry

Ben Garrett — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 21:49:55 GMT

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Remembering Judge William A. Terry

Before it was called Scott County Mayor, and before it was called Scott County Executive, the county’s top executive officer was termed the County Judge. And one of the men to hold that title, more than 100 years ago, was William A. Terry.

William Abner Terry was born May 8, 1873, the son of Milton Terry (1834-1904) and Jane Thomas (1830-1908).

The Terry family figured prominently in the early days of Scott County. William’s paternal grandfather — Milton’s father — was Josiah Terry, who lived about where Hardee’s is now located in Oneida and was said to be the town’s first permanent settler. A plaque outside city hall recognizes him as such. Josiah had a brother, Elijah Terry, who lived about where Burchfield School is now located before moving to Parch Corn Creek in what is now the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area. Together, the Terry brothers owned most of present-day Oneida. Josiah’s land holdings stretched from about Grape Rough Road to about where the Scott Farmers Co-Op is currently located.

Josiah Terry had been dead for five years by the time William Abner Terry was born in 1873. Meanwhile, his maternal grandfather was Abner Wiley Thomas, who owned the land around what is now Dexter Laxton Road on the east side of town. (William was named after him.)

William grew up and married Rosetta “Rosa” Litton (1872-1965), the daughter of Cornelius “Neal” Litton (1828-1890) and Eliza Ann Chitwood (1831-1909). Her father’s family was the Littons who settled the area that is now Litton Road, west of the Oak Grove intersection. Her mother was descended from Revolutionary War veteran James Chitwood, who founded Winfield.

All in all, you could say that William and Rosa’s folks were a sort of who’s who of the Oneida and Winfield pioneer days.

William and Rosa had seven children: Ethel Chester, born in 1894; Evelyn Barbara, born in 1898; Edgar, born in 1900; William Elso, born in 1902; Estele, born in 1904; Elbert Aubrey, born in 1906; and Virginia (Jennie), born in 1913.

Terry was extensively involved in public life. He served as a county court clerk and was the city recorder for Oneida. He also taught school and was a rural mail carrier. At various points in his adult life, he also farmed, mined, and owned a mercantile store.

Terry was active in the Scott County Republican Party, and in both the First Baptist Church of Oneida and Bethlehem Baptist Church. He served as Sunday school superintendent at both churches.

As for elected politics, Terry was elected justice of the peace to represent Oneida on the county court (what we now know as county commissioner), and in 1934 was elected Scott County Judge, replacing Mitt Robbins.

Terry was re-elected County Judge in 1938, serving a total of eight years before being replaced by C.W. Wright in the contested election of 1942.

Terry had a nephew, William Claude Terry, who served as mayor of Oneida in the 1920s. His cousin, Inman Terry, was the town’s mayor in the 1930s.

Terry’s brother, Milt, shot and killed a man — Thomas Phillips — in 1935, after Phillips entered Milt’s restaurant north of Oneida with a gun after Milt refused to sell him beer. Milt was seriously wounded, and his 17-year-old daughter was also wounded.

Terry died at his home in Oneida on Feb. 27, 1967, at the age of 93. A funeral service was held at Oneida Funeral Home with Rev. Roy Blevins and Rev. Philip Kazee officiating. He was buried at Litton Cemetery, where his wife had also been buried several months earlier.

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Remembering Oneida Mayor Bob Carson

Ben Garrett — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 17:12:59 GMT

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Remembering Oneida Mayor Bob Carson

This is a computer-aided restoration of an original newspaper clipping of Oneida Mayor Robert L. Carson. The original can be seen on the Encyclopedia of Scott County, at www.ihoneida.com.

Since the earliest days of Oneida, the Carson family has been one of the town’s most prominent, first settling the Tunnel Hill area east of town, then spreading into the Ponderosa and Cherry Fork areas, and eventually beyond.

In the 1970s, one of the family, Robert “Bob” Carson, was elected mayor of Oneida, serving three terms (for a total of six years) and overseeing significant growth of the town.

This week’s “Echoes in Time” remembers the tenure of Bob Carson, the educator-turned-mayor of Oneida.

Born July 23, 1908, Robert Lee Carson was the son of James Monroe Carson (1872-1934) and Nancy Cecil (1874-1948).

Robert Carson was from the branch of Carsons that settled on Cherry Fork. The Cecil family was well-established there by the time his father and mother were married. Nancy was the daughter of William Riley Cecil (1828-1903) and Nancy West (1833-1900). Her brothers included John Wesley Cecil, Reason Burl Cecil and William Riley Cecil Jr., all of whom were killed in the Cecil-West-Smith feud of the 1880s, as well as Rev. George Washington Cecil, who would become one of the best-known ministers in Scott County’s history. James Monroe Carson was the son of Samuel Carson (1838-1925) and Emily Reed (1849-1917). Emily was descended from the Reed family at New River that dated back to Revolutionary War veteran John Reed — her great-grandfather. Samuel Carson was the son of John Linn Carson and Jane Triplett, the first generation of Carsons to settle in what would become Scott County.

Robert Carson graduated from Oneida High School and then attended Tennessee Polytechnic Institute in Cookeville, which we know today as Tennessee Tech University. There, he obtained his teaching license and returned to Scott County to enjoy a notable career as an educator — teaching for 43 years at Huntsville High School, Oneida High School, and various other schools, including schools at Low Gap, Sulfur Springs (near Helenwood) and Annadell.

Carson was civic-minded, and eventually entered the field of politics. He was elected to the Scott County Quarterly Court for two terms as a squire (which we know today as County Commissioner), and also served on the board of directors for the Scott County Hospital.

It was in 1973 that Carson made his first run for mayor of Oneida. He won that election, replacing William N. Proctor. He won the election on Nov. 7 by a count of 310 votes to 282 for Carson. (Robert Blevins received 69 votes.) Carson was re-elected in 1975 and 1977 without opposition.

Carson oversaw a period of notable growth as the mayor of Oneida. It was during his tenure as mayor that the current Oneida Municipal Services Building was constructed at the corner of Alberta Street and Municipal Drive on what we now know as the “Four Lane.” The new building housed the town’s administrative offices, police department and jail, fire department, city court, street department, and water department. Previously, city hall and the town’s jail were located on North Main Street, where the Scott County Senior Citizens Center is now located.

Carson’s tenure also saw Oneida City Park established. The park has grown to become recognized as one of the best small-town municipal parks in Tennessee. And it was during his time in office that construction began on the railroad overpass on Paint Rock Road, which allowed the highway to bypass the Tibbals wood flooring plant. Prior to the overpass, which was completed after Carson left office, traffic traveling to or from Paint Rock into the downtown area had to stop for passing trains, then travel through the heavily industrialized area where Tibbals was located.

Finally, Carson’s tenure saw Oneida expand west into the Coopertown area, with the annexation of the Green Hills and Skyline subdivisions.

Although not directly impacted by the mayor’s office, Carson was in office when the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area was established by Congress in 1974, and while it was being developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He said in 1978 that the town is “optimistic” aobut the BSF, adding that “we’ll be ready when the visitors come.”

The most colorful part of Carson’s tenure as mayor came in 1977, amid a feud with businessman George Taylor, who chaired the Oneida Planning Commission. By that time, Carson was in his 70s, and he was accused of punching the 41-year-old Taylor during an argument, resulting in a black eye. The incident made headlines in Knoxville, but Taylor opted not to press charges. “He has my sympathies because he has a tough job,” Taylor said, and added that the incident was “unfortunate.”

The two had been arguing over a proposed youth shelter, which had proven to be a controversial topic. Taylor was for the shelter, and the mayor (along with the city council) was opposed to it.

Carson was succeeded as mayor by Rodney West.

Carson married Alta Gibson (1913-1955), and they had two sons: Robert L. “Robby” Carson Jr., and Anthony “Tony” Carson.

Robby Carson, who later served as chief detective under his cousin, Scott County Sheriff Jim Carson, was Oneida’s municpal judge for a period of time after his father was the town’s mayor.

Bob Carson died in 2009, at age 100. He is buried at Cecil Cemetery in the Cherry Fork community.

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Remembering the Paint Rock Coal & Coke Company

Ben Garrett — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 13:20:31 GMT

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Remembering the Paint Rock Coal & Coke Company

The old Almy School at Paint Rock, although it was not built until after the Paint Rock Coal & Coke Company that gave rise to the community had folded.

It’s been many years since the Paint Rock Coal & Coke Company existed. But its impact is still felt strongly in Scott County today, with remnants of this once-major industrial enterprise felt throughout the community.

Paint Rock Coal & Coke was one of Scott County’s first major industries — perhaps the first, although it’s tough to nail down the exact timeline of the rapid industrial growth of the 1880s and 1890s. But one thing is for sure: it gave rise to the county’s first short-line railroad, which would become a defining artery of Scott County’s coal and timber economy, and the future of which is being debated as we speak. And the name “Almy,” still remembered fondly by long-time residents of Paint Rock, came from one of the land procurement agents for that railroad.

Today, the Paint Rock community is loosely described as everything between where S.R. 456 (Paint Rock Road) descends into the valley east of Oneida until it leaves it again at Annadale, near Huntsville. Paint Rock Creek itself actually turns away from the highway at the old coal mining community’s hub of Almy. The western part of the Paint Rock valley is drained by Stanley Creek, which empties into Paint Rock Creek near Almy — or, as it was originally known — Morning Glory. Paint Rock Creek then follows Tunnel Hill Road into the gently rolling hills south of the valley. From just a trickle near Tunnel Hill, Paint Rock Creek rolls through Sugar Camp Hollow, merges with Cherry Fork Creek, and then with Stanley Creek to become a major stream before flowing on to New River at a place the locals once called River Junction. It was in those rolling hills south of the valley, between Cherry Fork and Tunnel Hill, that coal was first discovered.

The story of the Paint Rock Coal & Coke Company begins with the arrival of the Cincinnati-Southern Railroad through Scott County in the 1870s and 1880s. Prior to the railroad, most Scott Countians lived a subsistence lifestyle — which is to say that they still literally lived off the land. There were a few folks who were employed, usually self-employed with small general stores or mills or blacksmith shops. But for the most part, there was no organized industry here. The railroad changed that.

When the railroad came, outsiders who were intimately familiar with the coal and timber industries arrived on the scene and discovered the vast natural resources that had been right under our noses the entire time. Perhaps there were Scott Countians who were well aware of the value of those resources but didn’t want to alter the landscape, which looked remarkably different back then, around 1880, than it does today. But as organized industry sprang up to extract the resources, jobs became available for the first time. It was an era that fundamentally changed Scott County — not just because there were paychecks to be had, but because competition for the jobs placed a much higher value on education.

In time, seven different short-line railroads would spring up in Scott County — more than in any other county along the Southern Railroad route. There was the Oneida & Western, the Brimstone, the Kentucky & Tennessee, the short-lived Knoxville & New River, short spur lines at Helenwood and Glenmary, and the Tennessee Railroad, though it was known back then as the Paint Rock Coal & Coke Company Railroad. And that is where the story begins.

Among those who came to survey the Southern Railroad route was a man recorded in local historical records only as “Dr. Gruno.” He was described as a Union physician during the Civil War who later worked as a railroad surveyor. Efforts to further identify him have proven futile.

During his survey work, Gruno discovered large coal deposits along the headwaters of Paint Rock Creek, east of Oneida. He returned to Cincinnati and brought several investors to Scott County, including a W.M. Appleby (or Applebee) and Robert Hibbler. Together, they formed the Paint Rock Coal & Coke Company.

At about the same time the Paint Rock company was being formed in 1889, major mining operations were springing up in Helenwood and Glenmary. Like the one at Paint Rock, these would be relatively short-lived, but each of them gave rise to a community that has long out-lasted the mining days.

Almost immediately after Gruno, Appleby and Hibbler founded the Paint Rock company, they began building a short-line railroad from the Oneida station on the Southern Railroad to Morning Glory, which would come to be known as Stanley Junction. The railroad was the essential first step. Without it, any coal extracted from the Paint Rock headwaters could not be moved to market at viable cost.

But the aspiring entrepreneurs faced a huge obstacle: a large hill along the headwaters of Paint Rock Creek. It stood between Oneida and the coal-bearing valleys below. The company’s construction crews resolved the problem by tunneling directly through the hillside, cutting a 402-foot-long passage lined with timbers. It became the fourth railroad tunnel in Scott County (the other three were along the Southern Railroad in the New River area), and it gave the Tunnel Hill community a name that endures to this day, although the roof of the tunnel was taken off more than 50 years ago.

Beyond Tunnel Hill, the grade into the valley descended at 3.6% at its steepest point — a gradient severe enough to fundamentally shape the economics and operations of every railroad that would subsequently use the line. The grade so limited the number of loaded coal cars that engines could pull up the hill that it was estimated to have doubled the railroad’s operating expenses. A dedicated “hill run” engine was later stationed at Stanley Junction specifically to pull loaded trains up the steep climb to Oneida.

In the decades that followed, railroad engineers periodically revisited the problem, considering alternate routes that would have linked to the Knoxville & Ohio Railroad in Jellico via a massive tunnel through the Cumberland Mountains, or crossed Fork Mountain south of Brimstone to connect with the Harriman & Northeastern Railroad. Both were ultimately deemed cost-prohibitive.

In the fertile valley near where Stanley Creek emptied into Paint Rock Creek, the mining community took shape with miners’ houses, a commissary, and coal tipples — where the extracted coal was weighed and loaded onto rail cars.

In September 1890, a man named Adrian Almy opened a post office there, and the community became known as “Almy.” It was later the site of Almy School. The road across the mountain that we know today as Huntsville Hill Road was originally called Old Almy Road.

The largest mines at Paint Rock were known as the Cornbread Mines. Caswell Sexton — part of the large Sexton family that lived at Paint Rock before the mining operations began — served as a check weighman at the Cornbread Tip House. He was elected by his coworkers as a sort of ombudsman, checking against the company’s weigh master to ensure accurate measurement of the output. In other words: he made sure the miners were getting paid for the proper amount of coal they extracted; that the company didn’t short them. He remained in that position until the Paint Rock company went out of business.

The Paint Rock Coal & Coke Company mined the bituminous seams of coal underlying the ridges along Paint Rock Creek’s headwaters, and also converted raw coal into metallurgical coke through a process of high-heat carbonization in beehive-style ovens. Coke was a critical industrial commodity during that era, serving as the primary fuel for iron and steel blast furnaces throughout the industrial South and Midwest. Unlike the coke ovens at the much larger coke operation in Glenmary, the ones at Paint Rock do not still exist.

In 1902, the Paint Rock Coal & Coke Company was sold to investors from New Rork. Letcher Sexton, the son of Caswell Sexton who provided a deep history of the Paint Rock community, indicated in his oral recordings that a Colonel Roberts took over the operations.

As part of the reorganization, the railroad began expanding. From the Cornbread Tip House, where it formerly ended, it was extended about two miles to just below Jake’s Branch.

In 1905, the railroad sold again, this time to Samuel Spencer, who was president of the Southern Railroad. It was Spencer who reorganized it as the Tennessee Railroad, a name that would stick for the remainder of the railroad’s existence.

Spencer realized that the New River Lumber Company, which had recently established a band mill at Norma and was sitting on nearly half a billion board feet of standing timber in the Bird Lands, would need a rail outlet to the Southern Railroad connection to Oneida. So he continued expanding the Tennessee Railroad toward Norma, following Paint Rock Creek to New River, then following the river south to Norma. His son, Henry B. Spencer, continued that vision after his father was killed in a Thanksgiving train crash in Virginia in 1906. By 1912, the railroad had made it past Smokey Junction to the Scott-Campbell county line. Finally, in 1925, it reached its terminus at Devonia in Anderson County.

The Almy Post Office, which had given the community its name, closed in August 1909, and postal operations moved to Oneida. In time, the “Almy” designation faded from common use and was gradually replaced by the more descriptive name, “Paint Rock.”

It has been more than 120 years since the original coal mines played out on Paint Rock Creek. Later strip mining operations would extract more coal from the headwaters of the valley, but it was that original operation, between 1889 and 1905, that defined — and continues to define — the Paint Rock community.

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50 years ago tomorrow: The first edition of the Independent Herald

Ben Garrett — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:31:02 GMT

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Fifty years ago: The Independent Herald’s first edition

Paul Roy was never particularly comfortable with accolades.

If he were still with us today, a couple of things would probably be true:

One, the Independent Herald would still be publishing print editions each week; he would’ve been too stubborn to have abandoned print, and too good a salesman to not allow print to be profitable — or, at least, pay the bills, which has always been the economic reality for small-town newspapers in the United States.

And, two, he would’ve been immensely proud to have accomplished 50 years of publication, but you would’ve never known it. It would’ve been business as usual.

Roy — a Vietnam War veteran who was just as much a historian as he was a journalist — never accepted praise. In fact, he shied away from it. When someone tried to commend him for starting and running a hometown newspaper, he’d often say, “I’m just a paper boy.”

Roy always knew he wanted to be a “paper boy” — from the days when he actually was a “paper boy,” walking a daily delivery route to sell Grit newspapers door-to-door, to his high school years when he started an Oneida High School newspaper that lasted exactly one issue before it was shut down by school administrators as an unauthorized activity.

It was during his days in the U.S. Navy that Roy — who was raised in Scott County and studied journalism at Tennessee Tech University — decided to return to his hometown and start his own paper. He later said that his shipmates would poke fun at the hometown paper that he received in the mail, pointing out that big news was the installation of a new traffic light in town. (“All these years later,” Roy said late in his life, “a new traffic light is often the biggest news of the week.”)

After stints with the Cookeville Herald-Citizen newspaper, the Cleveland Daily Banner and The Morning Sun, Roy returned to Oneida in 1976 and started the Independent Herald. He later said that it was during his tenure at The Morning Sun, a Cleveland start-up newspaper, that he learned how not to run a paper.

When Roy began soliciting investors to join his effort to establish a second newspaper, three of them signed on board: John Litton, owner of Big John’s Foodette; Jack M. Lay, manager of Lay’s Oneida Furniture Co.; and Bill R. Duncan, owner of Duncan & Sons Insurance. Jan Jeffers, who would later establish Mrs. Winner’s Chicken & Biscuits, became an early stockholder, as well.

The investors founded Liberty Press Inc., and the first edition of the Independent Herald was printed on June 17, 1976. America was in the midst of celebrating its bicentennial — which led to the newspaper’s tag line, “Founded in America’s 200th Year, in the Spirit of ‘76.”

“Our cause will not be to crusade, but to act as a means of furthering the people’s right to know,” Roy wrote in that first edition. As an explanation of the newspaper’s name, he said: “It is our desire to stand alone in an attempt to be as objective in our reporting as possible.”

For more than 39 years, until his health forced him to take a step back, Roy never missed an issue of the newspaper. He worked on more than 2,000 consecutive issues of the Independent Herald, writing news and feature stories, photographing events within the community, and compiling advertising. He often worked 24 hours and even 36 hours straight to meet the newspaper’s weekly press deadlines.

It’s easy to forget just how good a journalist Roy was. He was viewed as controversial in some circles — which is precisely because he was a good journalist. One of the first issues he tackled was illegal roadside dump sites, which doesn’t seem too controversial today but actually was then because it was such a common practice. He also exposed illegal cock fighting that was taking place in Scott County, which earned him a bullet through the window of the Independent Herald'‘s first office downtown. No one was ever charged.

The Independent Herald quickly became recognized as an award-winning newspaper. Through the years, the newspaper was a frequent winner in the annual Tennessee newspaper awards contest co-sponsored by the Tennessee Press Association and the University of Tennessee, and earned several first place awards for the best education reporting in the state. The awards culminated with the newspaper winning the prestigious “General Excellence” award as the state’s best newspaper in its circulation class in 2015.

Roy was a newspaper publisher through a tidal wave of changes within the industry. When he began publishing the Independent Herald in 1976, newspapers were composed using typewriters, wax machines and paste-up boards. By the time he oversaw his final issue of the newspaper, the production process had transformed to digital pagination, eliminating the need to drive an hour or more through the pre-dawn darkness to deliver the paper to the printing press.

Through the years, Roy remained true to the guiding principles that led to the establishment of the newspaper. He developed a reputation of unwavering impartiality: stubborn, but fair. With his wife, Debbie, working alongside him — and often with at least some of their three kids in the office — more than 2,000 issues of the Independent Herald were churned out, one page at a time and one story at a time.

Besides being a “paper boy,” Roy was also a student of history. Perhaps his biggest accomplishments were his contributions to the Scott County Historical Society. He didn’t start the historical society; in fact, he never served as its president. But without him, the historical society would likely have folded. He was instrumental in the reactivation of the society in the early 1980s. He spent years documenting Scott County’s families and historical events, devoting thousands of hours to work on projects, including typesetting books and compiling a quarterly newsletter. Later, he served on the board of directors for the Museum of Scott County.

He had a special interest in Scott County’s military veterans. He collected photos and wrote hundreds of articles about military veterans, maintaining a database of thousands of Scott Countians who served in the armed forces through the years. He spent several years researching Scott County’s Civil War veterans, and wrote an exhaustive book entitled “Scott County in the Civil War,” which he donated to the historical society to be published in 2001. The book remains the foremost source of information about Scott County’s involvement in the Civil War.

Roy earned the respect and admiration of U.S. Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr., who was a native of Huntsville. Baker invited Roy to the White House during his tenure as President Ronald Reagan’s Chief of Staff, and many years later encouraged Roy to take over the lead role at the historical society following the death of his cousin-in-law, Irene Sobodoski Baker. Roy declined, choosing instead to continue his life’s work at the Independent Herald.

Roy was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2014. He died at his Huntsville home on Oct. 6, 2015, at the age of 67. He was interred at Mossop Cemetery in Huntsville — the same cemetery where Sen. Baker, who he greatly admired, is buried.

Roy was inducted into the Scott County Hall of Fame in September 2015, just one week before his death. Months later, he was recognized for his life’s work and accomplishments by the Tennessee General Assembly. A resolution honoring him was authorized by state Sen. Ken Yager and signed by Gov. Bill Haslam.

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The short life of prominent attorney H. Clay James

Ben Garrett — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:07:46 GMT

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The short life of prominent attorney H. Clay James

Mention the name “H. Clay” in Scott County, and most people will immediately think of the historian H. Clay Smith, author of Dusty Bits of the Forgotten Past.

But there was another H. Clay in Scott County’s past who might have been immensely more prominent had his life not been cut short by illness just as he was reaching his prime.

Look through newspaper archives out of Knoxville, and you’ll see one name appear over and over whenever court cases from Scott County are mentioned: H. Clay James. He wasn’t just an attorney from Scott County in the 1900s; he was the attorney from Scott County — the one who both tried accused criminals and defended them, the one who captivated courtrooms and demanded attention when he spoke.

Perhaps the only reason H. Clay James didn’t go down in history as one of the most prominent Scott Countians who ever lived is because his life was so short. He died in 1906 at the age of just 37, befelled by a mysterious illness that kept getting worse and worse until it finally claimed him. That was the same year that Scott County’s other H. Clay — H.C. Smith, the historian — was born.

Henry Clay James was born May 1, 1869, in Virginia. Unfortunately, his early life is a complete mystery — perhaps because he died so young, before the narrative of his childhood could fully be recorded. There’s no written record of who his parents were, and the only background information comes from an obituary that was printed in a Knoxville newspaper when he died, mentioning that he was born in Wythe County, Va. While there were a number of Jameses living in Wythe County in 1870, H. Clay James is found in neither the 1870 or the 1880 census. There is an 1870 census record for a Henry James living in Memphis, who was born in Virginia in 1869, but he was listed as black. Scott County’s H. Clay James was white.

H. Clay James came onto the scene in the 1890s, when he married Bettie Walker (1873-1944) from Crossville, Tenn. She was the daughter of John Monroe Beaty Walker and Mary Adeline Frost. They had four children: Virginia White Walker James, born in 1895, Mary Elizabeth James, born in 1899, Charles Clay James, born in 1901, and Bettie James, born in 1906.

H. Clay moved his family to Scott County for work. The first record of him living here was in 1895, when he was appointed the postmaster of the Huntsville Post Office.

So who was this mysterious young attorney? Where did he come from? He may have been one of the very few Scott Countians who was Harvard-educated. An old Harvard University student roll in Massachusetts from 1890 shows that a 20-year-old H. Clay James was enrolled there. Before that, it is as if he simply didn’t exist. There’s no record of him anywhere.

Later records show that he entered the law profession in Wartburg, employed by attorney Will H. Wright, who would later serve as district attorney general. He was admitted to the bar when he was in his mid 20s, and entered a partnership with W.H. Potter in Huntsville. Potter served as a state prosecutor, was elected Scott County Judge, and was later elected to the state legislature.

In a county that was predominantly Republican, and had been since the Civil War, James was a prominent Democrat. That, perhaps, made him an unlikely partner for Potter, who was a staunch Republican and was elected to the state senate as the GOP’s nominee from this area. But the partnership worked, and the two men found plenty of success in the field of law by working together.

James quickly became one of the most prominent attorneys in Scott County. Newspaper records from the first five years of the 1900s bear witness to the many cases he was involved in — both as a prosecutor and as a defense attorney. Most murder and manslaughter cases from that era involved James on one side or the other.

In 1905, when the state’s 2nd Judicial District became overburdened by its large case load, the Tennessee General Assembly created a temporary circuit court. Governor John I. Cox appointed James as the judge of the temporary court.

At the time of his death, the Journal & Tribune newspaper in Knoxville noted: “As a judge he was quite able for a new man and a man of his experience as a lawyer. He was popular with member of the bar and had bright prospects in his profession when his career was cut short by death. As an attorney he was employed by a number of corporations in Scott County, representing the C., N. O. & T. P. railway and being general attorney for the Robinson interests. He was just reaching a point in life when he could accomplish most.”

In August 1906, while holding court at the Fentress County Courthouse in Jamestown, James fell ill. He battled the illness for several weeks, but then it became serious. He was diagnosed with Bright’s disease, a form of kidney disease. It quickly became clear that he would not survive the illness. He died on Oct. 1, 1906, at the age of 37. He was buried at his wife’s family cemetery, the Frost Cemetery, in Crossville. His wife and her parents are also buried there.

Bettie Walker James and her children left Scott County after H. Clay’s death. Charles “Clay” James followed in his father’s footsteps as both an attorney and a Democrat. He served on Knoxville city council in the 1940s and was a candidate for Congress in Tennessee’s 2nd Congressional District. He was single until near the time of his death, and shared a home with his sister, Virginia. He died of a heart attack in Knoxville in 1964.

H. Clay James’ last surviving child, Bettie James Sowell, died in 2003 and was buried at Frost Cemetery.

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New River man asked to stay in jail to avoid the cold

Ben Garrett — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 20:30:33 GMT

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Man asked to stay in jail to avoid the cold

Mark Twain once said, “Truth is stranger than fiction.” He was actually paraphrasing Lord Byron, who wrote in his 1823 epic poem Don Juan: “Tis strange – but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction...”

In 1911, one of those truth-is-stranger-than-fiction moments arose when a Scott County man was released from jail … and refused to leave!

The Knoxville Sentinel recorded the incident in its Jan. 9, 1911, edition, headlining the story: “Wanted To Stay In Jail; Too Cold To Go Outside.”

The story involved John Potter, a 63-year-old man from New River, who had been arrested in Scott County on charges of violating the internal revenue laws.

Potter was transported to Knoxville to appear in federal court. He apparently pleaded guilty, and was fined $100 and sentenced to six months’ confinement in the Scott County Jail. However, the sentence was delayed for six months due to Potter’s health condition, and he was ordered released from jail.

The newspaper reported that when the court dismissed him, he returned to the jail and asked the jailer to go into his cell and get some clothing that he had left behind, and to “see the boys,” a reference to the prisoners he had shared a cell with.

But once he was inside the jail cell, Potter refused to come out. He told the jailer “that he wasn’t coming out in the cold … that he had no money with which to secure a room for the night.”

National Weather Service records show that the temperature in Knoxville got up to only 33° that day, and dropped to 14° at night.

Newspapers were quite different in 1911 than they are today. There was no gossip that was deemed unfit to print, and the newspapers pulled no punches. They could make a good man sound like the devil … or a scoundrel sound like a saint, depending on which angle the writers chose to take.

In any event, records show that John Potter and his wife, Mary, were still living at New River in 1920, and were raising their teenage granddaughter, also named Mary. She later married Clarence Chambers.

John Potter didn’t stay in jail long. After one night, he was ready to go home. The newspaper reported: “Saturday morning after getting his breakfast the old man called to the jailer to let him out as he was now ready to go home to see the ‘old lady.’”

There are plenty of old stories about men from Scott County who tried their darnedest to avoid going to jail, but this appears to be the only time on record that a man from Scott County tried to avoid leaving jail.

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Jehu Phillips taught us about early Scott County

Ben Garrett — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:31:03 GMT

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Scott County’s first historian: Jehu Phillips

Before H. Clay Smith wrote Dusty Bits of the Forgotten Past, and before Esther Sharp Sanderson wrote County Scott and Its Mountain Folk, Jehu Phillips gave an early account of Scott County in the Cumberland Chronicle newspaper. Republished many years later by the FNB Chronicle, these remembrances — which were told by Phillips near the end of his life — provide an invaluable glimpse at the early community structure and lifestyles of Scott County during its pioneer era.

The Cumberland Chronicle was published in Huntsville from 1889 to 1917, and was one of Scott County’s earliest newspapers. It was in 1904 that Phillips — then an 84-year-old man — provided a series of reminisces. These writings were later compiled into a two-part series by the FNB Chronicle in the 1990s.

Phillips was the son of one of Scott County’s earliest families, an early elected official of Scott County, and a Civil War veteran.

Born Sept. 14, 1821, he was the son of Joseph Phillips (1787-1881) and Elizabeth “Millie” Lawson (1786-1838), and grew up in the Bull Creek area south of Huntsville.

Both of Jehu’s grandfathers were Revolutionary War veterans. His paternal grandfather, Tobias Phillips Sr., was a plantation owner in Virginia. His maternal grandfather, Randolph Lawson, was one of four Lawson brothers who served in the war and later moved to what is now Scott County. Randolph Lawson settled near the mouth of Paint Rock Creek. Randolph and his wife, Susannah Cross, had eight children. However, they left Tennessee after a short time, and most of their children did, as well. The only two who spent their entire lives here were Millie and her sister, Catherine Lakey Chambers, who married Thomas Chambers, son of Revolutionary War veteran William Chambers of Buffalo.

Jehu’s father, Joseph Phillips, was just 15 years old when he moved to Tennessee in the early 1800s. He came with his brother, Thomas Phillips, who was married to Abraham Goad’s daughter, Mary Goad. Abraham was a Revolutionary War veteran from Virginia who led a caravan to present-day Scott County sometime between 1803 and 1807, settling on New River at what is now known as the Vanderpool Place south of Huntsville.

Shortly thereafter, Joseph married Millie Lawson. The Lawson family was Abraham Goad’s “next-door” neighbors on the river. Joseph and Millie moved up the river to Bull Creek, which is where they established their family. Jehu was their third-born child.

Jehu grew up to marry Rebecca Sexton (1823-1905), the daughter of Moses Sexton and Leander “Laura” Hatfield, in 1841. Rebecca was also descended from Revolutionary War veterans. Her grandfathers were Timothy Sexton and Joseph Hatfield, both of whom moved to present-day Scott County after the war.

Jehu and Rebecca had 11 children. Among them: Fountain (1842-1911), Riley (1843-1910), Almira, Melvina, Jane Thomas (1853-1926), Martha Hughett (1868-1955), James, Harvy, Olive, Mildred (1865-1937), and Caldonia.

Given his family’s strong Revolutionary War heritage, it isn’t surprising that Jehu Phillips enlisted in the Union army during the Civil War. At that time, Scott County’s population was mostly descended from about 16 Revolutionary War veterans, and was strongly pro-Union. Hundreds of Scott County men signed up to fight with the federal army. Jehu was 40 years old when the war began, and did not initially join the fight. However, when Gen. Ambrose Burnside marched his Army of the Ohio through Scott County in 1863, Phillips was one of many Scott Countians who joined the march. He was assigned to Co. C of the 1st East Tennessee National Guard, and quickly promoted to sergeant. He and his unit traveled in advance of the main army, clearing roads for the 12,000 men and their cannons and supply wagons.

Two of Phillips’ sons also served in the Union army. Fountain Phillips was 18 when he enlisted on Oct. 26, 1861. He was among the Union soldiers captured at the Battle of Rogersville, Tenn., in November 1863. Unlike many of his comrades, he survived the Confederate prison at Belle Isle in Richmond, Va.

Riley Phillips was also 18 when he enlisted on June 1, 1862. He developed a lung disease while training at Camp Dick Robinson in Kentucky.

Jehu was a well-known Scott Countian by the time of the Civil War. He was a Baptist preacher, a chain carrier, and he had served on the survey team that helped mark Scott County’s original boundary lines in 1849. The survey team walked the mountaintops, establishing the line that separated Scott County from Campbell and Anderson counties.

Phillips was the first Scott County Trustee elected after the Civil War ended and life began to return to normal. He served in that capacity for six years.

By far, Phillips’ most lasting contribution to Scott County’s past was his remembrances in the Cumberland Chronicle in 1904. This series provides invaluable insight into what Scott County was like prior to the Civil War.

On Indians: “I can remember seeing Indians in this country. There were two families living up New River near the mouth of Bull Creek and one family lived near where the town of New River now stands. There was an old Indian trail leading by where the town of New River now stands and on up the river. The Indians wore, both summer and winter, caps made of fox skins, with tails hanging down behind and they also wore moccasins. I have talked with Indians in this county who said that they had never eaten bread made from corn ground on a water mill. The Indians had what was called a sweep cole with which to beat the corn. They also had sifters made out of a hide and would split the crushed corn through these and then crush again.”

On early education: “I suppose the first school house in what is now Scott County, was built about the year 1826 at the mouth of Buffalo Creek. It was a one room log house. The first teacher was a man named Brawhill who came here from Virginia. I never went to school a day in my life and yet was elected the first Trustee of Scott County after the Civil War of 1861-65. I held this office for six years.”

On early religion and health care: “When I was a boy there were no doctors in this country, and I never saw a doctor until I was grown. There were no preachers living here then. Occasionally a few preachers would come from Powell’s Valley and stay three or four days. I remember going to meeting in a log house which did not have the cracks stopped and which had no floor or door. I have been to many a meeting where the seats were just split logs which did not even have legs in them. In those days the preachers were all Baptist. I suppose the first preacher raised in this county was a man named Cutbearth (Cuthbert) Webb who lived on Brimstone Creek.”

On early commerce: “Perhaps the first store in the county was put up by a man named Jim Williams. When I was a boy he had a store on Buffalo Creek near where Alec Chambers now lives. When I was about 10 years old I went with father to this store and Williams had a few men’s shoes (but no boy’s shoes), some calico and a few other dried goods. I believe John L. Smith was the first merchant in Huntsville. About the year 1852 or 1853 he put up a store where Dan Chambers now lives. He only had a few dry goods and shoes and bought them from a retail merchant at Jacksboro. He bought and sold home made jeans and linsey … I remember that when the Civil War broke out there were three stores in Huntsville and they were owned by Carland, Cain, and John L. Smith. There were also three saloons here and they were run by Abe Hatfield, Jim McDonald, and Looper.”

On early entertainment: “Before the Civil War the people in this county had many interesting and exciting horse races. There used to be a race track where Allen McDonald now lives about two miles south of Huntsville and another track where Rob Sexton now lives near Brimstone. The tracks were straight and about one-fourth of a mile long. Only two horses could run at the same time. The horses used in the races were a breed of small horses called Brenens. You never see that kind of horse here now. The women attended the races as well as the men. The men could often bed saddles, bridles, hats and clothing as well as money on their favorite horse and often the races were very exciting … When I was a young man, it was the custom to have log rollings, house railings and corn shuckings. These would always be followed at night by a frolic and I tell you the people used to have some good old times in those days. At the frolics there was always one or more fiddles. The fiddles were home made but I tell you they were good ones … Let a fiddle start and I tell you somebody was out dancing. I never saw a banjo until I was grown. I never saw a drunk rowdy man at a frolic or log rolling. People always had peach brandy which was home made and it was fine.”

Jehu Phillips died on June 2, 1910, at age 88. He was buried at Huntsville Cemetery. His wife, Rebecca, died in 1905 and was also buried at the cemetery.

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Remembering the Helenwood Devil

Ben Garrett — Tue, 19 May 2026 12:31:54 GMT

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Remembering the Helenwood Devil

This is a computer-aided restoration of the Helenwood Devil built by Crusie Sexton in the 1920s. While it strongly resembles the Devil, it is NOT an original photo (the original can be seen below).

Reuben Caruso “Crusie” Sexton created quite a stir in Summer 1921 when he “unearthed” a giant devil in an abandoned coal mine east of Helenwood. The Devil of Scott County — also called the Helenwood Devil — made newspaper headlines throughout the region, brought scores of tourists to Helenwood by train to catch a glimpse of it, and wound up being displayed at the World’s Fair.

Of course, the real story was that Sexton didn’t “discover” the devil at all. He made it, out of clay. It was entirely a work of art. But it looked real enough to deceive many, and it made Sexton a nice chunk of money in the process.

To understand why so many people fell for the devil — which was allegedly a 6-foot-4 petrified being with four-inch horns protruding from its skull and wings stretching out of its shoulders, a chain binding one of its arms to one of its legs — you have to understand Helenwood in 1921.

Originally established as Homestead in the 1850s, Helenwood grew up with the opening of the Southern Railroad in 1880, and exploded when coal was discovered nearby along Sulpher Creek. As the town grew, so did the saloons. And as the saloons grew, so did the town’s reputation as a place that bordered on lawlessness. There were more killings in Helenwood from the 1880s to the 1920s than in any other part of Scott County. Many folks said it got its name from “Hell in the Woods.”

Little wonder, then, that folks believed Crusie Sexton had really found Satan himself.

The truth is that Crusie Sexton — the son of Bill Sexton (1869-1912) and Eldora Jeffers (1876-1965) — had been stationed in China during his time in the U.S. Army (he was a World War I veteran and was even held captive as a prisoner of war). There, he observed giant statues and decided to make one of his own when he returned home.

Crusie was a 26-years-old when he worked on his devil that summer. Every day, he would steal off to the old coal mine, where he was carefully crafting the being out of bed clay. When he finished, the creature was larger than the average man and reportedly weighed over a ton.

The devil’s features were so lifelike that it is said that Sexton scared himself while he was inside the dark mine working on the creature.

Sexton’s mother, Eldora, became concerned that her son was slipping off to the coal mine every day. She convinced herself that he was cooking moonshine. One day she followed him to see what he was up to. When she entered the mine and saw the devil, she was nearly scared to death. From there, word began to spread.

Sexton moved the devil to the home of his relative, Jerry Smith, who lived close to the railroad in Helenwood. As word spread that there was a giant devil in the man’s backyard, trains began to carry people to see it. The tale spread through railroad communities from Cincinnati to Florida, and folks would pay a quarter to look at the devil for 20 minutes. Like the tale of a caught fish, the story became bigger and bigger as it spread further and further. Some folks who traveled to Helenwood to see the devil reportedly fainted at the sight of it.

By August, there was so much notoriety surrounding Crusie’s devil that the New York Times wrote two stories about it.

In September, J.C. Pemberton, an Oneida resident, paid $2,000 for the devil and put it on display at the Somerset Fair in Pulaski County, Ky. It was the top draw at the fair. Pemberton placed iron bands around the box, put four padlocks on the box, and drove nails into the lid. He stationed a guard with the box, and hired a professor from an “Eastern school” to claim that the statue was an idol from an early race. Crusie signed an affidavit stating that the statue was authentic.

The devil was later sold again, and was shown at the Chicago’s World Fair of 1923. It would never come back to Scott County, but no one is quite sure what ever happened to it. Some believe that it is in a museum “up north” somewhere, though there’s no evidence of that. Others believe the clay simply disintegrated.

In recent years, the story of the Helenwood Devil has generated renewed interest online, and some devout fans even insist that it might have been real.

As for Crusie Sexton, he married Sibyl Robinson on Dec. 30, 1921, shortly after selling his devil to Pemberton. They divorced in Michigan a few years later. He later married Stella Craig, an Anderson County woman, in 1934. He died on June 16, 1936, at age 41. The cause of death was undetermined; Dr. M.E. Thompson wrote on the death certificate that Crusie was unconscious when he arrived. Crusie was buried at Sexton Memorial Cemetery in the Paint Rock community.

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Remembering the 1935 Helenwood explosion

Ben Garrett — Wed, 13 May 2026 16:13:00 GMT

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The dynamite blast that rattled Helenwood in 1935

The site of George Webb’s mine supply store in the aftermath of the April 1935 blast that destroyed much of Helenwood.

On April 16, 1935, the peaceful town of Helenwood was rattled by a dynamite blast that destroyed several buildings, damaged others, but miraculously killed no one. It is an event that is still remembered today, more than 90 years later.

To set the scene: Helenwood sprang up as a railroad town, thanks in large part to the coal mines along Sulpher Creek to the east. Helenwood dates back as far as the late 1850s. On July 27, 1859, the town of Homestead was surveyed and laid out in 50-ft. by 200-ft. lots, according to Kathleen West Robbins. Ninety of those spots were sold. Among the plots were designated locations for a school, a church, and a town square.

For one reason or another, the town of Homestead never took off as it was envisioned. But things changed when the railroad was built in the late 1870s. Helenwood became an important depot on the Cincinnati & Southern Railroad.

It started merely as a siding when the railroad was built. But then coal was discovered along Sulpher Creek, and a new town was born. A rail spur was built across from about where Cumberland Wood Products is located today, traveling along the old Paint Rock Road (which is today Sulpher Creek Road) and up Sulpher Creek itself to the mines.

The Helenwood post office opened in 1880, and the town’s first store — owned by Ike Shoemaker — opened that same year. The town was the site of Scott County’s first newspaper, The Scott County Call, and was connected to the county seat at Huntsville by a narrow pike that was Scott County’s best road at that time. We know it today as Monticello Pike. A Presbyterian church was established in 1883, and the Baptist church that remains in the center of town soon followed.

As buildings sprang up around the railroad depot, several saloons opened, and Helenwood gained a reputation as a wild and woolly barroom town. A number of murders took place there — more than in any other location in Scott County, though several of them were considered justified killings for one reason or another and were never prosected.

In time, the coal played out and things quietened down around Helenwood. The mines closed for a period of time, and the old Campbell Coal Company buildings were used to start the Treat School for Boys in 1910. However, the mines were reopened by Church Pemberton and James Baker, who founded the Ridgeway Sprinkle Co. But in the 1920s, the mines closed for good.

The old dynamite, though, continued to be stored in an abandoned warehouse building in town. The commissary had closed, with the top story of the building being used as a Masonic hall for Helenwood Lodge 570 F & AM.

“Most of the people living in this small town knew that (the warehouse) was being used for storing ‘bootleg’ powder and dynamite,” Kathleen West Robbins wrote for the FNB Chronicle in 1989. “Some of the townspeople had brought charges against the man, George T. Webb, who had been selling this powder and dynamite and he had been ordered to move it out of town on several occasions. But the ones who lived nearby had seen and heard him unloading more of it into the building at night sometime in the early part of the Spring of 1935. They knew it now contained more of this material. They were aware that it was a dangerous situation but they had not gotten around to doing anything about it.”

Robbins, the daughter of Lawrence and Florence West, lived in a home about 500 feet from the warehouse. On the morning of April 16, 1935, Lawrence West left for the rock quarry in Glenmary, where he worked, and Kathleen and her brother, Kenneth, left for school. Florence West was home alone when the explosion occurred.

“She heard several shorts fired from a gun, some loud hollering, etc.,” Robbins wrote. “When she went to the window to see what was happening she saw the smoke.”

A fire had broken out in the warehouse. Reason Cecil, who owned a store nearby, had fired the gun to warn the townspeople. He was yelling for everyone to get as far out of town as possible.

It was later determined that a child who lived next to the warehouse had climbed onto a cabinet in his home — the Burdette Keeton residence — and pulled it over. It fell onto a wood-burning stove, knocking the pipe down and setting fire to the kitchen.

Burdette Keeton’s widow, Sarah, lived with her five children. She had left to go to Oneida for a job, leaving the five children at home alone. According to an article written at the time by Anna O’Connor, wife of the railroad agent, James O’Connor, one of the children — Anvilee Keeton — ran to her home to let her know the fire was spreading to the nearby mine supply store operated by Webb. It was O’Connor who alerted Reason Cecil, who in turn alerted the rest of the townspeople. Together, they likely saved many lives that day.

“I yelled to him to get his gun and shoot it, to attract people’s attention,” O’Connor told the Knoxville newspaper. “And took out across the road, shouting to everyone to run for their lives.”

O’Connor’s last stop was her own home, where she rounded up her five children and sent them out of town.

“All that running nearly finished me,” she said. “I don’t know how I did it. I have not been well since January, when I had the flu and pneumonia right after my baby was born. But somehow I kept going, and I’m sure glad I could. These people would have been killed if they hadn’t got out of town before that explosion, and I knew it.”

Cecil herded his family, including nine children, into a storm cellar to escape the blast.

“The debris could be seen in the air for miles around — and such a loud noise and concussion!” Robbins wrote. “After everything had settled down and an inventory taken, it was found that no one was killed, a few were injured but lots of damage was done to surrounding buildings.”

Most buildings within a half-mile radius were damaged or destroyed. Among the buildings damaged beyond repair was the commissary and the Masonic hall above it.

“I don’t know what the people are going to do,” O’Connor wrote. “I have my little child in the car, outside the depot, now. And we may spend the night in it. The town is wrecked.”

The American Red Cross sent a team of volunteers to Helenwood and set up a command post for residents who had lost everything they owned in the blast. For the next few weeks, the townspeople cleaned up the mess and repaired the buildings that weren’t too badly damaged. The West home was able to be repaired, and Lawrence and his family continued living in Helenwood. However, Kathleen wrote that one of the walls in her bedroom had been knocked down onto her bed. “Had it happened in the night and not been discovered in time, I probably wouldn’t have been here to write this story,” she said.

The blast made headlines throughout the South. The Chattanooga Daily Times wrote that the explosion “all but destroyed the mountain town of Helenwood.”

One man, John Young Phillips, led his family out of town and then realized he had forgotten his cow. He rushed back to save the cow, but the blast occurred, and both Phillips and the cow were “thrown violently to the street,” according to the Chattanooga newspaper. Phillips suffered broken ribs. As the cow fled the scene, “just in the nick of time, Phillips grabbed onto her tail and both ‘took to the woods',” the newspaper wrote.

The Knoxville News Sentinel reported that 250 kegs of blasting powder and 20 cases of dynamite were stored in the building at the time of the blast. The newspaper quoted Ed M. Gillenwaters, as saying former state fire prevention commissioner, as saying that the explosives were illegally stored.

For many years, the dynamite blast was referred to as “The Webb Explosion,” after the man who purportedly stored the explosives in the old warehouse. Today, though, it is generally known as “The Helenwood Explosion.”

On the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area’s website, the National Park Service says that it was this dynamite blast that gave Helenwood its name, for “Hell in the Woods.” However, the town was called Helenwood long before the dynamite blast. No one is sure where the name came from — it is said by some that a “Captain Wood” had a daughter named Helen, while Robbins theorized in a separate article for the FNB Chronicle that it came from the saloon days (“Hell in the Woods”). Either way, newspaper records show that the town was called Helenwood as far back as Dec. 25, 1881, when the Chattanooga Daily Times reported on the opening salvo of the Cecil-West-Smith Feud that occurred there.

George Webb, the man who owned the mine supply store, was killed in an airplane crash at the Glenmary landing strip in 1941. The Keeton family moved to Ohio. The O’Connors moved first to Robbins, then to Rockwood. Reason Cecil remained in Helenwood. His nephew and great-nephews, Virgil Cecil and Virgil’s sons, Milford and Roger, were long-time pastors of Helenwood Baptist Church.

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The slow formation of Scott County, Tennessee

Ben Garrett — Wed, 06 May 2026 14:13:16 GMT

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The slow formation of Scott County, Tennessee

Scott County was created in 1849 from portions of Campbell, Anderson, Morgan, and Fentress counties. Prior to that, residents of areas like Oneida and Huntsville were part of Campbell County, Robbins and Glenmary were part of Morgan County, and Norma and Smokey Creek were part of Anderson County. But there was a time when there was no Morgan County, no Fentress County, no Campbell County, and — while it’s debatable whether any permanent settlers lived here at the time — even no Anderson County.

Here’s a look at how it all came about.

Prior to the signing of the Third Treaty of Tellico in 1805, the lands of the Cumberland Plateau belonged to the Cherokee. With the Third Treaty of Tellico, the Indians ceded ownership of the region to the U.S. government, and it was then that settlement in this area began in earnest. Were white people already living here, in Indian territory, prior to the treaty in 1805? Perhaps. It has been written that John Reed moved to New River in 1796, and there’s nothing to dispute that. The historian Esther Sharp Sanderson wrote that Mikel Low moved to Smokey Creek in 1776, but that’s almost certainly untrue (he was still living in his native Pennsylvania when he married his wife, Maria Elizabeth Bortner, in 1794).

If white people lived in the area that is now Scott County prior to 1805, settlement would have been very sparse, simply because it was not permitted by the U.S. government. In February 1804, Col. Return Jonathan Meigs — a Cherokee agent acting on behalf of the state — sent a letter to Archibald Angel and others telling them that they were “intruders on Indian Lands on the West Side of the Cumberland Mountain,” and giving them 30 days before being forcibly removed. Angel and his father-in-law — Dennis Trammell — probably hadn’t moved to the Gum Fork area east of modern-day Winfield by that time; it’s more likely that they still lived in southeastern Kentucky, where they last appeared on a tax list in 1807. Nevertheless, Col. Meigs’ letter indicates that the U.S. government was not prepared to let wholesale settlement occur on the Cumberland Plateau prior to the signing of the Third Treaty of Tellico.

In 1763, prior to the United States’ existence, when the American colonies were still part of Great Britain, King George III issued a decree declaring all lands west of the Appalachian Divide off-limits to colonial settlers. However, that didn’t mean that white folks didn’t wander here. Daniel Boone first ventured through the Cumberland Gap in 1767, and in 1772, a group of longhunters established a base camp where Charit Creek Lodge is now located in the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area — which is now Station Camp Creek got its name. In general, the civilization pattern in this area was extended visits by longhunters in the 1760s and 1770s, before they returned to the colonies to fight in the Revolutionary War. After the war, they returned to the frontierlands west of the Appalachian Divide — this time to stay.

Tennessee in 1776, when it was still considered the Washington District of North Carolina (RootsWeb).

In 1776, the same year the Declaration of Independence was signed, the Washington District of North Carolina was created. It included all the area of present-day Tennessee. It was referred to as “Washington County” beginning in 1777. Two years later, in 1779, Virginia sent Dr. Thomas Walker and his team of surveyors to mark the latitude line of 36 degrees and 30 minutes north, which was supposed to serve as the dividing line between western North Carolina and western Virginia, west of the Appalachian Divide — areas that would eventually become Tennessee and Kentucky. When the Walker team reached the Cumberland Plateau, the terrain was so rough that they took an easier route west and guessed at where the line was supposed to go until they reached the Tennessee River near what is now Clarksville, Tennessee. As a result, part of what was supposed to be Kentucky wound up in Tennessee. If the Walker Line had been correct, the TN/KY border would be about where the Oak Grove intersection is now located in Oneida. The “Four Lane” area of Oneida would actually be in Kentucky! For much of the early 19th century, northern parts of Scott County — particularly the Big South Fork River settlements of Station Camp and No Business — were often mistakenly referred to as being part of Wayne County, Kentucky.

In 1779, Sullivan County was created from part of Washington County, as settlement began to extend into what is now East Tennessee, east of the Cumberland Plateau. In 1783, Davidson County was created in the Tennessee River basin, encompassing all of what is now the Nashville area. It was named for North Carolina General William Lee Davidson, who had been killed in the Revolutionary War in 1781. Lands to the east and west of Davidson County — including the Cumberland Plateau — were still known as Indian lands.

In 1783, Greene County was created. There were now three counties in what is now East Tennessee: Washington, Sullivan, and Greene. The Cumberland Plateau, including present-day Scott County, was still Indian land.

The year after that, in 1784, North Carolina ceded its territory west of the Appalachian Divide to the federal government as payment for Revolutionary War debts. This territory was called “The State of Franklin,” which would have been the 14th state, but it was never formally admitted into the union. It consisted of several growing white settlements in what is now East Tennessee, which were referred to as the “Overmountain Towns.” While settlement on the Cumberland Plateau did not occur prior to the Revolutionary War, it did occur in the area that became Franklin. The militiamen who won the Battle of Kings Mountain and turned the tide of the war were referred to as “Overmountain Men” because they lived “over the mountain” from North Carolina.

It was in 1785 that several new counties were created by the State of Franklin: Caswell, Sevier, Spencer, and Wilkes counties joined Washington, Sullivan, and Greene counties. Blount County was created the following year, and Hawkins was created the year after that, in 1787. That same year, Davidson County was divided in half, creating Sumner County. The Cumberland Plateau region was still Indian land.

In 1788, the State of Franklin ceased to function. As a result, all of the East Tennessee counties except Washington, Sullivan, Greene, and Hawkins went away. Davidson County was divided again, creating Tennessee County.

In 1790, North Carolina — which had reclaimed its western territory — ceded it to the federal government once and for all, and it was called the Territory South of the Ohio River, or the Southwest Territory. Tennessee was still not a state, but the territory took on the shape of the state that would soon be created. The upper east corner was divided into four counties, and the north-middle section was divided into three counties. In between, still considered Indian land, was the Cumberland Plateau.

Tennessee in 1796, when statehood was granted (RootsWeb).

Knox County was created, along with Jefferson County, in 1792. Two years after that, Sevier County returned, then Blount County in 1795. In 1796, Tennessee was admitted to the union as the 16th state, and Grainger and Carter counties were created, while Tennessee County west of Nashville became Montgomery and Robertson counties. Cocke County would be created the following year. The Cumberland Plateau was still Indian land.

It was in 1798 that the First Treaty of Tellico was signed and settlement began to encroach on the Cumberland Plateau. Knox, Grainger, and Blount counties were all expanded westward, and Grainger County included part of present-day Campbell County.

Anderson, Roane, and Claiborne counties were created in 1801. Anderson County included part of what is now Campbell County, but still did not include present-day Scott County, which remained Indian land.

In 1803, although the Cumberland Plateau was still considered Indian lands, the entire region was divided into counties. Anderson County and Roane County were greatly expanded, with Anderson County extending all the way to the TN-KY border and including what is now Campbell County. Present-day Scott County fell partially into Anderson County and partially into Jackson County. To the south was Roane County.

In 1805, the Third Treaty of Tellico was negotiated by Col. Meigs. It was signed on Oct. 25, 1805, and included 7,000 square miles of land between the Cumberland and Duck Rivers in Tennessee and Kentucky. Its purpose was to create East Tennessee with Nashville, the two areas where settlement was rapidly growing. The following year, Campbell County was created from parts of Anderson and Claiborne counties and included most of present-day Scott County. Overton County was created from Jackson County, and included the northwest part of present-day Scott County. A portion also fell into Anderson County.

Tennessee in 1806, the year Campbell County was created (RootsWeb).

Counties continued to be created in Middle Tennessee over the next several years, but it wasn’t until 1817 that change came to the northern plateau region. That was the year that Morgan County. It extended all the way to the TN-KY border. At this point, none of present-day Scott County was included in Overton County. It either fell into Campbell, Morgan, or Anderson counties — mostly in Campbell County.

Regardless of when the first settlers put down roots in present-day Scott County, we know that settlement had started by 1807, two years after the signing of the Third Treaty of Tellico and a year after Campbell County was created. It was that year that a land record was entered on New River (though it was mistakenly referred to as the Cumberland River) for Abraham Goad. He lived where the Vanderpool Farm is now located along River Road. His next-door neighbor, Randolph Lawson, had moved to the mouth of Paint Rock Creek by the following year, 1808, when he was listed as a chainman for Goad’s property survey.

The exact timing of Goad’s move to present-day Scott County has been written as 1803. There is no way to dispute that, and he last appeared on a tax list in Virginia in 1802. Meanwhile, Josiah Terry — the first settler of Oneida, along with his brother, Elijah Terry — first appeared on an Anderson County tax list in 1805. Remember that Campbell County was not created until 1806, so it’s possible — if not likely — that Josiah Terry was living in present-day Scott County by this time. He eventually built a home about where Hardee’s is located today, while his brother Elijah lived near what is now Burchfield School.

Over the next several years, between this period of 1803 to 1808 and when Morgan County was created in 1817, settlement was well underway in what is now Scott County. If they hadn’t already moved here by then, Mikel Low and Richard Harve Slaven settled Smokey Creek and No Business Creek at some point in those very early years, and Michael Robbins moved to Brimstone Creek. There were several other families arriving, as well. (See the developing narrative, The Scott County Lineage Project, on the Encyclopedia of Scott County.)

Tennessee in 1817, when Morgan County was created (RootsWeb).

When Morgan County was created in 1817, it began to become easier to pick out where these early settlers were living. At the time, Morgan County included the western part of Scott County, including areas like Glenmary, Elgin, Robbins, and parts of West Oneida, while Campbell County included the Oneida, Buffalo and Huntsville areas, and Anderson County included the Norma and Smokey Creek areas. Parts of the Big South Fork region, like Station Camp and No Business, were sometimes considered to be part of Wayne County, Kentucky.

In 1820, the states of Tennessee and Kentucky finally reached an agreement, and the Walker Line was no longer disputed. Places like No Business, Station Camp, and Winfield were now formally part of Morgan and Campbell counties, though some confusion would remain for several more years.

Fentress County was created in 1823 from parts of Morgan and Overton counties. It now included the western part of present-day Scott County, including the Big South Fork region, while Robbins and Glenmary still fell into Morgan County.

Scott County did not look much like it does today when it was created in 1849 (RootsWeb).

Things remained stable for many years after that. Putnam County was created — then abolished — but that didn’t impact the areas that are now in Scott County. It wasn’t until 1849 that another change came to the northern plateau. That’s the year the legislature created Scott County from parts of Campbell, Anderson, Morgan and Fentress counties. It didn’t look quite like it does today, however. Many changes to the boundary lines would be made over the next 50 years before Scott County’s current lines were finalized.

The first of those changes came in 1855, when parts of Morgan and Anderson counties were added to Scott County, and part of Scott County was added to Campbell County. It was that year that Scott County began to take on its current shape.

The last change occurred in 1920, when a portion of Scott County was added to Morgan County.

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Is there another forgotten Revolutionary War soldier from Scott County?

Ben Garrett — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:30:34 GMT

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This is not an actual photo of Robert Lawson, who died in 1837, before the use of photography became widespread in Scott County. However, it is an imaginitive depiction of what he might have looked like.

Scott County’s fourth Lawson brother?

Some months back, Echoes in Time featured a series of articles about Scott County’s three “forgotten” Revolutionary War veterans — Abraham Goad, Randolph Lawson, and Abel Peak. By “forgotten,” Echoes in Time simply meant that they were not included on Scott County’s Revolutionary War plaque when it was placed at the old county courthouse in Huntsville in 1976 as part of the nation’s bicentennial celebration. Twelve other men are. (See the list here.)

As America’s semibicentennial (250th anniversary of the nation’s founding) is celebrated this year, 50 years later, a new Revolutionary War memorial is being built at the John John Yancey Memorial Park in Huntsville. It will include the missing names that aren’t included on the original plaque at the courthouse.

But it turns out that there might be yet another missing Revolutionary War veteran not yet discussed. This week, we explore the possibility. Settle in, because all the dates and names tend to get a little tangled up.

The move to Tennessee

Randolph Lawson, one of those three Revolutionary War veterans whose name was left off the plaque in Huntsville, was actually one of three brothers who fought in the war and then moved to Scott County. Joining Randolph here were brothers David Lawson (1758-1852) and John Lawson (1755-1838). They were all the sons of Bartholomew Lawson and Susannah Simpkins, who lived in Bedford County, Va., and had around 15 children. Two other brothers, Morman Lawson and William Lawson, also fought in the war but did not move to Scott County.

Fast-forward a few years, to the early 1800s.

Sometime around 1803, give or take a year or two, Abraham Goad led a caravan to New River, setting up a farm at what we now know as the Vanderpool Place, south of Huntsville. Born in 1740, Goad was the son of John Goad and Catherine Jennings of Virginia. He was the Joannah Sevier — whose son, John, was Tennessee’s first governor, and the man for whom both Sevierville and Sevier County are named.

Goad was an old man by the time he moved to Scott County. He was in his 30s when he served in the Virginia militia during the Revolutionary War. His wife, Ann Ayers, had died in 1788. Their children were all grown by the time Abraham loaded up his possessions and made the move to Tennessee.

We know that Goad settled on the Vanderpool Place for two reasons. One, he was buried at Vanderpool Cemetery in 1816. His grave is the oldest identifiable grave in Scott County. Two, his 100-acre plot was surveyed in 1808, and the document noted that it was located on the north side of New River, “including the bend.” This was a reference to the unique U-shape that New River makes as it curves around the Vanderpool Farm — land that is today owned by Huntsville’s Steve and Marla Howard.

Listed as a chainman on that survey record was Randolph Lawson — another of the forgotten Revolutionary War veterans. Lawson had served in the North Carolina militia and later married Susannah Cross. When he moved to present-day Scott County, he purchased a small parcel of land near the mouth of Paint Rock Creek. He was Goad’s next-door neighbor, so to speak.

Making the journey

What we don’t know is whether Randolph Lawson made the move to New River with Abraham Goad. What we do know is that Lawson had two brothers, David and John, who served in the war and also wound up in Scott County. Their names were both included on the 1976 courthouse plaque.

Also making the trip to Tennessee with Abraham Goad were several people: his son, Joshua Goad, and two of his daughters, Mary and Ann, along with all their spouses.

Joshua Goad was married to Sarah Smiddy (or Smithers). They had a huge family, including son Joshua Goad Jr., who married Elizabeth Emily Robbins and moved to Brimstone Creek, where the Walker farm is located today. (Their daughter was Almira Goad, who married Daniel Walker in 1866. Almira’s brother, John Goad, served as a sheriff of Scott County in the 1890s, and their sister, Etta Tennessee Goad, married school superintendent William Lee and was the grandmother of U.S. Congressman and Knoxville Mayor John J. Duncan Sr.)

Mary Goad was married to Thomas Phillips (1768-1841). Making the move to Tennessee with them was Thomas’s 15-year-old brother, Joseph Phillips (1787-1881). Thomas and Joseph were the sons of Revolutionary War veteran Tobias Phillips (1750-1808), of Grayson, Va. Their maternal grandmother, Hannah Goad (wife of George Phillips), was Abraham Goad’s first cousin. Shortly after they arrived in Tennessee, Joseph married Elizabeth “Millie” Lawson (1786-1838), the daughter of Randolph Lawson. Joseph and Millie settled at Little Bull Creek, and so established the expansive Phillips family there. One of their children was Jehu Phillips, who served as Scott County Trustee in the 1860s and later wrote a series of articles for the Cumberland Chronicle in 1904 that provide valuable insight into early Scott County. In Jehu Phillips’ writings, he made reference to a “Reynold Lawson” building Scott County’s first grist mill on Paint Rock Creek. This was likely a reference to Randolph Lawson, his maternal grandfather. The mill was probably located about where Paint Rock Falls is.

Finally, Ann Goad was married to Robert Lawson in Montgomery, Va., on Aug. 1, 1793. The coincidence — Robert Lawson had the same last name as Randolph Lawson, who was Goad’s next-door neighbor on New River — was always striking, but it was always believed to be just that: a coincidence. Robert Lawson has traditionally been believed to be the son of William Lawson (1731-1826) and Anne Harvey (1715-1775), and not closely related to Randolph and his two brothers.

A fourth Lawson brother?

William Lawson migrated from Scotland to Virginia and is referred to by genealogists as “The Scottish Rebel.” However, modern DNA testing is casting doubt on whether he is truly the father of Scott County’s Robert Lawson.

DNA testing shows little evidence of a connection between Robert Lawson, husband of Anna Goad, and William Lawson, the man long presumed to be his father. Genealogical researchers now suspect that Robert Lawson was connected to the group of Lawsons from Virginia that they refer to as “The Falling River Lawsons” — a group that includes brothers Randolph, David, and John.

Some genealogical records list Robert Lawson as the son of Jonas Lawson (1707-1771) and Millie Lawson (born about 1710). Jonas Lawson was a brother of Bartholomew Lawson, who was the father of Randolph, David, and John. If this were true, it would make Robert and the other three Lawsons first cousins.

However, other genealogists take the connection a step further. They list Robert Lawson as the son of Bartholomew Lawson and Susannah Simpkins — a brother to Randolph, David, and John.

These assumptions are supported by tax records from Henry County, Va., dated 1789 and 1790. Those tax records place Robert Lawson with the other “Falling River” Lawsons. The records list Mormon Lawson (a brother to Randolph, David, and John) and David Lawson, in addition to Robert. Additional records list Bartholomew and his wife, Susannah, along with David, Thomas, Jacob, and Robert.

Taken at face value, these records strongly suggest that Robert Lawson was a brother to Randolph, David, and John Lawson.

Meanwhile, there are court records from Montgomery, Va., that reference a council meeting that took place on April 28, 1778. The records discuss Capt. Johnathan Isom’s company from the Revolutionary War. Among the men in the company are Abram Goad, Randolph Lawson, Robert Lawson, Robert Lawson Jr., James Goad, and James Goad Sr.

This is not confirmation that Robert Lawson served in the Revolutionary War, but with DNA evidence that he was not the son of William “The Scottish Rebel” Lawson, it’s reasonable to suspect that he was part of the Bartholomew Lawson family and served in the Revolutionary War alongside Randolph Lawson and Abraham Goad.

This record also explains how Abraham Goad and Randolph Goad wound up being next-door neighbors on New River: they knew each other from their Revolutionary War service. Given that Randolph Lawson was in Scott County by 1808, when Abraham Goad’s land was surveyed, it makes sense to assume that he was part of the Goad caravan — especially if Robert, who was married to Abraham’s daughter, Ann, and was part of the caravan — was also part of the journey.

Life in Tennessee

Robert Lawson died in 1837, some 12 years before Scott County was formed. His wife, Anna, died in 1850. It isn’t known where either of them are buried.

Robert Lawson was listed in Campbell County when the 1830 census was taken. The Huntsville area was a part of Campbell County prior to 1849. Anna Lawson doesn’t appear in the 1850 census — she may have died before it was taken — so we do not know for sure that they actually lived in Scott County.

However, there are some records to support the assumption that they did. One is an 1810 land grant for 100 acres on New River, adjacent to Randolph Lawson and “the Goads.” There was also an 1836 land entry referring to a tract of land along the “Montgomery Fork of New River.” This area would have been in Scott County when it was formed in 1849. Most conclusive of all is Anna Lawson’s court petition to request a dower of her late husband’s real estate, which was filed on April 3, 1837, in Campbell County. The court appointed a commission that included Allen McDonald and Blackburn Thompson. Both McDonald and Thompson lived in the Huntsville area, suggesting that Robert and Anna’s property was also located in the Huntsville area.

All of the evidence is circumstantial, but it supports the idea that there was a fourth Lawson brother in Scott County: Randolph, David, John, and Robert. And, if that much is true, it must also support the idea that there is a fourth Revolutionary War veteran who was “forgotten” when the courthouse plaque was placed in 1976: Robert Lawson, brother of Randolph, David, and John Lawson, husband of Anna Goad, son-in-law of Abraham Goad.

Robert and Anna had at least four children: Sophronia Jane Lawson, Lucretia Lawson, James Robert Lawson, and David Lawson. Sophia (1794-1880) married Richard Griffith, a son of Revolutionary War veteran Joseph Griffith of Brimstone Creek.

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The Goads of Buffalo

Ben Garrett — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 19:49:12 GMT

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The Goads of Buffalo

At the Laxton Cemetery in the Buffalo community, there are several Goads buried — 12 in all, nearly all of them with an uninscribed field stone marking their grave, and a plain funeral home marker that was added later.

Who were they?

The easiest answer is that they were tied to the Laxton family. Thomas Laxton, the forefather of all Laxtons in Scott County today, and one of the earliest settlers of Buffalo, married Elizabeth Goad. But who was she beyond that? And does her family tie to Scott County’s other Goad family, that of Revolutionary War veteran Abraham Goad, who settled on New River south of Huntsville?

Because the original stones at Laxton Cemetery were uninscribed, they provide no information on when these Goads lived and died. The funeral home markers, which came later (there was no such thing as funeral home markers in Scott County back in the 1800s), provide us with names but no dates.

One of the funeral home markers at Laxton Cemetery identifies its grave as being that of John Goad. Some genealogy websites — including the FindAGrave website — identify him as John Goad, wife of Margaret Chiles, who was born in 1729 and died in 1795.

If this were true, it would force us to revisit what we know about Scott County’s first settlers. Mikel Low, of Smokey Creek, is commonly credited with being the first settler of what would become Scott County, but he didn’t arrive until sometime after his wife, Maria Bortner, in Pennsylvania in 1794. It’s generally assumed that he didn’t arrive at Smokey Creek until just after 1800. The rest of Scott County’s first settlers — men like James Chitwood, Richard Harve Slaven, Drewry Carroll, Randolph Lawson, Archibald Angel, Dennis Trammell, Abraham Goad, and others — aren’t believed to have arrived until the 1800s — after the Treaty of Tellico opened the northern Cumberland Plateau to white settlement.

Further, the earliest identifiable grave in Scott County is currently known to be that of Abraham Goad, who died in 1816 and is buried at the Vanderpool Cemetery on New River. (The earliest identifiable stone is that of James Trammell, who died in 1826 and is buried at Angel-Wright Cemetery in the Gum Fork community east of Winfield.) If John Laxton who is buried at Laxton Cemetery did indeed die in 1795, that would pre-date Abraham Goad’s death by more than 20 years. And it would make Laxton Cemetery — not Davis Cemetery in Winfield, where the historian Robert Bailey found a broken stone dating to 1812 — Scott County’s oldest cemetery.

But is this the correct John Goad?

The answer is: probably not.

Exploring the identity of John Goad

The John Goad who died in 1795 was actually a brother of Abraham Goad. They were the uncles of John Sevier — Tennessee’s first governor, and the man for whom Sevier County and Sevierville are named; the sons of John Goad (1700-1771) and Catherine Jennings (1703-1741) of Virginia. It makes sense, then, that this John Goad would have migrated to present-day Scott County with Abraham. When Abraham Goad made the trip, he was part of a large caravan that included his son, Joshua Goad (1786-1880), daughter Mary and her husband, Thomas Phillips, and Thomas’s brother, Joseph Phillips, among others.

There is a problem with this story, however: The John Goad who died in 1795, brother to Abraham Goad and husband to Margaret Chiles, actually moved to Sullivan County in upper East Tennessee in the 1780s. He was granted 33 acres there by North Carolina in 1782, and signed a petition in 1787 requesting statehood for Franklin (as East Tennessee was then known). One of his children, Agnes, and two of his grandchildren were killed in an Indian massacre in Sullivan County in 1790.

There’s nothing to disprove that John Goad didn’t move to Buffalo in the last years of his life, but there’s nothing to suggest he did, either.

Complicating matters is that Tennessee was not granted statehood until 1796. In 1795, when John Goad died, the area that would become Tennessee was still referred to as the Southwest Territory. And with the exception of counties within the Provisional State of Franklin to the east, and Davidson, Sumner and Tennessee counties around Nashville to the west, no counties had been formed. The area of the northern Cumberland Plateau was still Indian territory, belonging to the Cherokee. However, this area would have almost certainly not been referred to — even mistakenly — in any records as “Sullivan County,” because Hawkins and Greene counties had already been formed west of Sullivan County.

Still, because there is no documented grave location for John Goad (1729-1795), there’s no way to conclusively prove that he wasn’t buried at Laxton Cemetery.

Ties to the Laxton family

Clearly, the answer in determining who the Goads of Buffalo truly were lies in determining the ancestry of Elizabeth Goad (1800-1881), wife of Thomas Laxton (1795-1862), since she and John, and the rest of the Goads of Buffalo, would have certainly been from the same family.

In her book, County Scott and Its Mountain Folk, historian Esther Sharp Sanderson describes Thomas Laxton’s move to Scott County thusly:

“Thomas Laxton, with all his worldly possessions on his back, trudged on foot carrying two hound pups and some fruit trees to Smoky, from North Carolina. He later moved to Buffalo, where he married and reared a large family…”

Assuming Sanderson was correct, and Laxton married after he moved to Buffalo, that would substantiate the idea that the Goads predated the Laxtons at Buffalo. The marriage of Thomas and Elizabeth is usually placed in 1820, in Campbell County. Buffalo was part of Campbell County at that time (Scott County was not created until 1849).

Elizabeth Goad is usually listed in genealogical records as the daughter of William Goad (1754-1843) and Betsy Morrison (1757-1820). This only adds intrigue to the story, because William Goad was the son of John Goad (1729-1795) and Margaret Chiles — the very man purported by some websites to have been buried at Buffalo in 1795.

However, William Goad does not appear to have moved to present-day Scott County — not prior to 1800, nor at any other time in his life. He appears on a Sullivan County tax list in 1796, was still living in Sullivan County when the last census of his life was taken in 1840, and applied for a Revolutionary War pension in Sullivan County in 1831.

The search is complicated by the fact that the marriage record for Thomas Laxton and Elizabeth Goad does not exist — at least not in the public domain — and so it is impossible to determine whether they were actually married in Campbell County or somewhere else.

Thomas Laxton’s parents are sometimes listed as Thomas Laxton IV (1764-1830) and Ruth Greer (1774-1850). Latter census records, in 1850 and 1860, state that he was born in South Carolina.

The only Thomas Laxton found in the 1820 census is listed in Grayson, Va. There were three people in the household under the age of 10, two people between the ages of 10 and 15, and two people between the ages of 26 and 44. This does not match Scott County’s Thomas Laxton (who wasn’t old enough to have teenage children) or his father (who was older than age 44).

Thomas Laxton is found in the 1840 census for Campbell County, and the 1850 and 1860 censuses for Scott County.

Clearly, there are too many holes in the genealogical record to draw any conclusions.

The Goad graves

Perhaps the other Goad graves at Laxton Cemetery hold a clue. The other graves marked by uninscribed field stones and later marked with a funeral home marker include: Arlena Goad, Berry Goad, Cindy Goad, Emily Goad, Flora Goad, Mary Goad, Tilmon Goad, Virginia Goad, and Wilma Goad. The only one who has dates recorded by any online source is Berry Goad, who was purportedly born in 1833 and died in 1901.

There is also a Sarah Goad at the cemetery who has a commercial stone. Her dates are listed as 1827-1905. Her stone is inscribed “Grandmother.”

The Berry Goad dates that are reported on the FindAGrave website (1833-1901) appear to be a mistake. A Little Berry Goad lived in Scott County, born 1833 and died 1901. However, he is buried at the Goad Cemetery in West Robbins. Whoever the Berry Goad is buried at Laxton Cemetery, he does not appear to have been born and died in 1833 and 1901.

Sorting through the records

There was a Tilmon Goad who lived in Scott County when the 1850 census was taken, and this is where concrete evidence finally begins to appear for the Goad graves at Laxton Cemetery. Tilmon was four years old when that 1850 census was taken, and living in the home of Sary Goad, along with 8-year-old William J. Goad, 7-year-old Pheby Goad, and 1-year-old N.J. Goad. When the 1860 census was taken 10 years later, Sarah Goad was listed with a 17-year-old Jonston Goad, a Phebe Goad, 12-year-old Tilmon Goad, and 5-year-old John F. Goad.

Based on these records, Sarah Goad appears to be the Sarah Goad who has a commercial headstone at Laxton Cemetery, and Johnson Goad was her oldest son, who died in the Civil War in April 1865 and was buried in Knoxville. He served in Co. H of the 9th Tennessee Cavalry, a Union regiment, and died of inflammation of the kidneys.

When the 1870 census was taken, only Tilmon, age 22, lived with Sarah. When the 1880 census was taken, Sarah was living with 40-year-old Thomas Laxton and his children, and was identified as his mother-in-law. She lived with 33-year-old Lewis Laxton in 1900, and was identified as his grandmother.

When Johnson Goad died, a pension request declared that his mother, Sarah, who had never married, was “nearly destitute.” It makes sense, then, that she could not afford commercial headstones when her children died. Tilmon Goad appears to have been buried at Laxton Cemetery with a fieldstone to mark his grave sometime between 1870 and 1880. If Tilmon was buried with a simple fieldstone to mark his grave, it makes sense that the John Goad who is found at Laxton Cemetery was not a John Goad who died in 1795, but John Goad, son of Sarah and brother of Tilmon, who died sometime between when the 1860 was taken and when the 1870 census was taken. He was five years old in 1860, and does not appear in subsequent census records.

This does not answer the question of who the other stones at the cemetery belong to: Arlena Goad, Berry Goad, Cindy Goad, Emily Goad, Flora Goad, Mary Goad, Virginia Goad, and Wilma Goad. Perhaps some of them are Sarah Goad’s children who died very young, between census records. Or, perhaps, they were other people entirely.

And who were Sarah Goad’s parents? What relation was she to Elizabeth Goad Laxton? These are questions that don’t have readily apparent answers. Some sources suggest that Sarah was the daughter of Joshua Goad and Sallie Smiddy, the granddaughter of Abraham Goad. (There was a second Sarah Goad who lived in Scott County when the 1900 census was taken. She was the widow of Aaron Goad, son of Joshua and Sallie Smiddy Goad. Her maiden name was either Hicks or Newport.)

Joshua and Sallie Smiddy Goad had a daughter named Elizabeth, but she was not born until 1827, and she married Benjamin S. Newport. Joshua also had a sister named Elizabeth, but she was born in 1767, and married William Hughett. They never moved from Virginia to Tennessee.

Sadly, there are way more questions than answers, and that’s the way it sometimes goes with genealogy. Chances are, someone in Scott County who is descended from the Laxtons and the Goads has the answers that would complete this story. In the meantime, the best guesses — and they’re only that, guesses — is that Sarah Goad was related to Elizabeth Goad Laxton, and both were tied to Abraham Goad in some way … but John Goad who is buried at Laxton Cemetery was not the brother of Abraham Goad who died in 1795, but the son of Sarah Goad who died sometime in the 1860s.

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America's mega-popular Poll-Parrot shoes and their ties to Oneida

Ben Garrett — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 11:31:22 GMT

Poll-Parrot shoes were extremely popular … and tied to Scott County

Today, kids in America beg their parents for shoes made by the likes of Nike and marketed by major basketball stars.

But there was a time when shoes called Poll-Parrots were all the rage.

Poll-Parrots were manufactured in St. Louis, Mo. — as were most other popular shoes in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Drawn by cheap immigrant labor (particularly from Germany), the nation’s top shoemakers set up shop in St. Louis. By 1905, St. Louis was producing one-sixth of all shoes made in the United States.

One of the names making it big in the shoemaking industry was Paul Parrott, who owned a shoe shop in Knoxville and played on his own name by keeping a parrot in the shop.

Eventually, Paul Parrott made began making his own brand of children’s shoes. He called them Poll-Parrots. By the late 1920s, Poll-Parrots were just as big as Air Jordans are today. The International Shoe Co. — which was that era’s equivalent of Nike — purchased the brand in 1928 and added it to its Roberts, Johnson & Rand shoe line that also manufactured the popular kids’ shoes called Star Brand.

By 1929, Poll-Parrot shoes were being advertised in newspapers throughout the country. One such advertisement, featuring the trademark brightly-colored parrot, boasted that “Properly fitted Poll-Parrot shoes will keep youngsters on their toes with pep every minute. Easily cleaned or polished, well made of fine leather and plenty flexible for growing little bones and muscles.”

In acquiring the Poll-Parrot brand, ISC was copying the marketing strategy of another shoemaking giant, Brown Shoe Co., which used a cartoon character (Buster Brown) as a mascot for its own children’s shoes. Other manufacturers were doing the same thing. Giesecke-D’Oench-Hays Shoe co. had Red Goose. Peters Shoe Co. had Weatherbird. And now, ISC had Poll Parrot.

In 1933, ISC began using Poll-Parrot Shoe Money, blanketing small towns across the country with currency-like coupons. They were targeting now just the adults who paid for the shoes, but the children who wore them. The concept was simple: Get free “money” with the purchase of Pol-Parrot shoes, and trade it in for prizes, like a baseball glove, roller skates, a pocketknife, or a watch.

For the next 25 years, Poll-Parrot Shoe Money was a marketing strategy throughout the United States. Kids were encouraged to save their vouchers and encourage others to save theirs, too. A kid could trade in $35 worth of scrip, for example, and get a baseball glove.

The marketing efforts didn’t stop there. Pol-Parrot began its own syndicated radio show — “The Cruise of the Poll Parrot” — which can still be found today on YouTube. And, in the 1950s, Poll-Parrot reached its greatest level of fame by sponsoring The Howdy Doody Show on NBC — the mega-popular series featuring the freckle-faced Howdy Doody and host Buffalo Bob Smith in the Western-themed town of Doodyville.

In time, the Poll-Parrot Shoe Money faded from the scene, but Poll-Parrot shoes remained throughout the 1960s, 1970s and even into the 1980s.

By now, you may be wondering what this story has to do with Scott County, Tenn.

Well, you remember Paul Parrott, who opened a shoe store in St. Louis and developed the Poll-Parrot line of shoes that became immensely popular among kids throughout the nation?

Paul’s father, William Nelson Parrott, owned Oneida’s first motel — The Oneida House, a three-story building that also housed Oneida’s first restaurant. And it was there, in The Oneida House, that Paul Parrott, the famous shoe store owner, was born in 1898.

William Nelson Parrott died in 1901, at the age of just 35. When he did, The Oneida House was purchased by Eli Cooper — father of Oneida’s hugely successful early businessman, H.F. Cooper, the man who built downtown Oneida. Eli moved from McCreary County to Oneida — along with 13-year-old H.F. — to purchase the motel, which he changed the name of to City Hotel.

William Parrott was buried at Marcum Cemetery, just outside of town. He had a baby girl, Pauline Parrott, who had been buried there in 1897.

Paul’s mother — William’s wife — was Lucy Katherine “Cassie” Byrd, a native Scott Countian. Born about 1878, she was the daughter of Milton Asbury Byrd and Nancy Chitwood of Helenwood. She and William were married in Roane County in 1896, and made their home in Oneida. Following William’s death, she remarried to William B. Flenniken in 1903 and moved to Knoxville. She lived until 1961, when she died of a heart attack.

As for Paul Parrott, he lived until 1986, when he died and was buried at Knoxville’s Woodlawn Cemetery, where his wife (Neel Reynolds), mother, stepfather, and other members of his family are also buried.

And that’s the story of how one of the 1900s’ most popular brands of shoes were literally born in Scott County, Tennessee.

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The rise and fall of Old Glenmary

Ben Garrett — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:47:24 GMT

The old coke ovens at Glenmary.

Glenmary is an unincorporated community in southern Scott County, the southernmost community along the U.S. Highway 27 corridor in Scott County. It was once a bustling coal-mining town along the Southern Railroad in the late 19th century and early 20th century. In fact, it was once Scott County’s largest town.

Geography

Glenmary is located along Davis Creek in southern Scott County, near where it empties into Black Wolf Creek. The name “Glenmary” was used to describe the entire settlement south of Elgin along Black Wolf Creek and its tributaries, including the Coal Hill and Campground areas.

The hills to the east of the U.S. Highway 27 corridor were once rich with seams of coal, which led to the fledgling coal and coke industry here in the late 1800s. This is what led to the area being known as “Coal Hill.” To the west of the U.S. 27 corridor, the fertile bottomlands around Black Wolf Creek (today, Nydeck Road) were highly-desired farmlands.

Today, Glenmary is an unincorporated community that is little more than a nameplace on maps, and is considered part of the larger, unincorporated community of Robbins.

Commerce and Business

There are no businesses in the Glenmary community today.

Historically, business activities at Glenmary centered around the coal and coke industry, as well as the timber industry. This began in the 1880s, after the construction of the Cincinnati & Southern Railroad opened Scott County’s natural resources reserves to outside exploration.

The Crooke Coal Company began in 1880. The Glenmary Coal & Coke Company was established in 1884, and the first lumber mill was the Tennessee Coal & Lumber Company. It was used to process poplar, pine, and hemlock.

In 1906, the lumber mill was transformed into a hardwood flooring mill.

At the peak of business activity in Glenmary, a new railroad was proposed that would connect the Southern Railroad to the city of Jamestown west of Glenmary. The route would have roughly followed present-day Nydeck Road. The railroad was never constructed. The lumber company eventually moved to Verdun near Hazel Valley, outside Oneida, and the Oneida & Western Railroadwas instead constructed.

At the peak of the coal and lumber era in Glenmary, there were 400 people living in the town, and many more living at Coal Hill, where the mining industry was centered. The lumber company built workers’ houses on what became known as Red Hill, just west of U.S. Highway 27. There was a separate housing project located on Nydeck Road.

As for the town, an assortment of stores, saloons and boarding houses were located along Davis Creek, near the Glenmary railroad depot.

Post Offices

The first post office at Glenmary opened in 1875 and was called Black Wolf. It was located to the north of where the town would eventually be located, between Glenmary and Elgin. The first postmaster was Newell H. Goff.

In June 1878, the Redmond (Redman) Post Office opened at Glenmary. It was named for its first postmaster, James R.T. Redman. The name changed to Glenmary in May 1880. The post office continued in operation until February 1972, when it closed and moved to Robbins. The last postmaster was Bobby Lee Burton.

The Black Wolf Post Office closed in 1898. The last postmaster was James C. Hamby.

Schools

Old Glenmary School Park.

According to Maggie Barger’s history of Glenmary, which was published by the FNB Chronicle in 1989, the first school at Glenmary was also used by the community’s Baptist church. Later, a secondary academy was chartered at Glenmary in the early 1880s. A “colored school” was open from 1894 to 1908.

After the Glenmary Presbyterian Church was built in 1907, it founded a private school. That same year, a school was built at Halfway, which was located between Glenmary and Coal Hill.

In 1922, the town’s last school was built on the hill to the west of U.S. 27, adjacent to Red Hill. It was a four-room school that was used until the 1960s, when it was consolidated with Robbins. The area where the school once stood is a privately-maintained park known as the Glenmary School Park.

Origins

In its earliest days, before it was known as Glenmary, this community was part of Morgan County. It was not until 1849 that Scott County was established by the Tennessee General Assembly, and the areas of Glenmary, Coal Hill, and Campground became part of Scott County.

By that time, several families lived in the greater Glenmary area, such as the Lewallen family that included Scott County’s first sheriff, John Lewallen.

Glenmary’s real growth came with the construction of the Southern Railroad, which opened for business in 1880. The first coal mine at Coal Hill opened in 1878, founded by Jabe Crooke of Ohio and an immigrant from Great Britain named John Heaps.

When the railroad was completed in 1880, a side track was built to the tipple at Glenmary. Four years later, in 1884, Crook sold his business interests in the mine to a group of businessmen from Lexington, Ky., and the Glenmary Coal & Coke Company was born. Coal production continued until 1904.

According to Barger, Glenmary got its name from a railroad official who had two daughters, Glenman and Mary.

Many of the early residents of Glenmary proper were immigrants from Europe who were working in the fledgling coal and coke industry. Their headstones can be found at the Coal Hill Cemetery.

First Families

The first families at Black Wolf Creek — before the area was known as Glenmary or Coal Hill — were the Lewallens, Davises, Hambys, Youngs, Pembertons and Peaks. The Redmans, McCartts and Webbs came later.

The first permanent settler of the area may have been Anderson Grant Lewallen (1764-1829). He was the son of Daniel Alexander Lewallen (1742-1785) and Mary Burkes (1743-1785) from Virginia. He married Lydia “Lucy” Rice (1766-1832) in 1784. They moved to present-day Glenmary sometime after that, settling along the headwaters of Black Wolf Creek, near the Campground community. They had a total of 16 children.

One of those children was John Columbus Lewallen (1812-1896), who served as Scott County’s first sheriff.

Anderson Lewallen and his wife are buried at the Old Lewallen Cemetery.

The Hamby family came to the region in the early 1800s, with John Hamby (~1775-1852) and his wife, Edy Webb (~1785-1860), who were from North Carolina. They were married in North Carolina in 1803 and moved to the area sometime after that.

Some of John Hamby’s siblings also made the move to the area, including Reuben Hamby (1779-1872) and Henry Hamby (~1785-1848).

The Peak family included Revolutionary War veteran Abel Peak (1756-1852) of Virginia, who moved to the Glenmary area and was one of more than a dozen Revolutionary War veterans to move to present-day Scott County. In an 1853 application for a widow’s pension, Peak’s wife, Lydia Jones, said that she had 17 children.

Abel Peak’s brother, Jacob Peak, married Lydia Jones’ sister, Polly. Jacob and Polly, along with Polly’s and Lydia’s parents, moved to present-day Oak Ridge, settling at Gamble Valley. Abel and Lydia may have initially lived there, as well. In her 1853 pension application, Lydia stated that she had lived in Anderson County for six years before moving to Morgan County. However, in his 1832 pension application, Abel Peak stated that he lived in Anderson County for six years before being “cut off” into Morgan County. Morgan County was created in 1817 from part of Anderson County.

Peak’s son, Lewis Peak, married Matilda Griffith, the granddaughter of Revolutionary War veteran Joseph Griffith.

Matthew Young (1815-1893) moved from Roane County to the Glenmary area and became one of the community’s most prominent residents. He married Elizabeth Lewallen, a granddaughter of Anderson Grant Lewallen. When she died, he married her sister, Rhoda Ann Lewallen.

The Young family actually came to the area in Matthew’s childhood. His parents, John Young (1779-1826) and Mary “Polly” Smith (1782-1820) made the move to present-day Fentress County, settling in Poplar Cove, about 1808. They had 12 children, and later moved to the Black Wolf Creek area.

George Washington Pemberton (1824-1895) moved to the area from Wayne County, Ky. However, this may not have happened until late in life. His first wife, Selva Pheobe Gregory, died in 1854 and is believed to be buried in Wayne County. Pemberton then married Mary Jane Davis in 1848. Among their children were several well-known residents of the community, including Churchwell Pemberton(1860-1940), Gatewood Pemberton (1863-1959) and Heywood Kingston Pemberton (1870-1954). Heywood Pemberton was a Scott County school superintendent in the 1890s.

George W. Pemberton’s second wife, Mary Jane Davis, was part of the Davis family that lived at Glenmary, and it was for this family that Davis Creek was named. Her parents were Matthew P. Davis and Sarah Bowman. Less is known about this family.

The Redman family originally owned the farm along Nydeck Road that is now owned by the Kline family. The family dates back to Hinchea Gillum Redman (1809-1891) and his wife, Caroline Minor Fields (1829-1903). H.G. Redman was originally from North Carolina. His first marriage, to Lucinda Sallee, occurred in Wayne County, Ky. He then married Caroline Fields of the Burrville community in 1858.

According to Barger, the land the Glenmary Presbyterian Church was built on was donated by Lindsey Redman, a descendant of H.G. Redman.

The first postmaster at the Redman Post Office, which became the Glenmary Post Office, was James Rowsey Thomas Redman (1854-1937), one of the sons of H.G. Redman.

The McCartt family came to Glenmary with Pleasant McCartt (1822-1863). He was the only son of Elizabeth McCartt (1800-1880) and married Adaline Elizabeth Hamby (born 1823), the daughter of Henry Hamby and Sarah Cross. Elizabeth McCartt was originally from Kentucky, but her family moved to the Emory River area near Wartburg in the early 1800s. She was blind and never married. It was her son, Pleasant, who moved to the Glenmary area sometime after his marriage to Adaline Hamby. They had eight children. One of them, daughter Lydia Clementine, married into the Pemberton family.

Alice Cooper, the rock-n-roll legend, is descended from Glenmary’s McCartt family. Samuel Wesley McCartt (1885-1968), a lifelong resident of Scott County, is Cooper’s grandfather. Ella McCartt, who was born in Glenmary, was Alice Cooper’s mother. Sam W. McCartt was a grandson of Pleasant McCartt, making Pleasant McCartt Alice Cooper’s second-great-grandfather.

Finally, the Webb family dates back to Willis W. Webb (1819-1890). His parents, John Webb (1785-1848) and Nancy Hall (1787-1857), moved from North Carolina to the Emory River near Wartburg in the early 1800s. From there, Willis Webb married Margarette Ann Stewart (1828-1912) in 1841 and moved to present-day Scott County. They had 12 children.

Decline

The coal played out at Coal Hill in 1904. The virgin timber had mostly been cut by the same time, and the lumber mill was transformed into a hardwood flooring mill. However, the Hagemeyer brothers who ran the mill later sold the operation and moved to the Verdun area outside Oneida, where they were instrumental in the building of the O&W Railroad.

The lumber mill was destroyed by fire in 1927. It was not rebuilt. Two years later, the great flood of 1929 destroyed some of the remaining buildings along Davis Creek, along with the pond that had been created by damming Davis Creek to provide water for coke production. The stock market crash occurred soon thereafter, leading to the Great Depression. Glenmary never recovered.

Long after other businesses at Glenmary had faded, Glenmary remained a watering hole for the steam engines traveling the rails of the Southern Railroad. However, those steam engines were replaced by the diesel engines in 1953, and the water tank was torn down after that.

Mariston Chapman’s The Happy Mountain, published in 1928, described Glenmary like this:

“Sunk between Craig (Coal Hill) and Red Hill, Glen Hazard (Glenmary) had the look of being dropped in the hollow by four winds. The General Store, The Company Store, the Hotel and two or three sagging warehouses made up the town, but it seemed crowded owing to the stacked lumber surrounding it on all sides and bounding its black cinder streets. The trains had but just room to get through it and the Hardwood Lumber Mill, belching smoke and steam beyond the depot and covering the town with grime almost equal to a city’s blocked the low valley to the north. The bridge over the creek narrowed down traffic to the company store and the four legs of the water tank took up some space. The townsmen lived in box huts hung up on the sides of the two big hills that shut in the town from east and west; while on the south, where the railroad tracks snaked through the gap to the outland places, the deserted trestles and dumps of a worked-out coal mine spread their black skeletons. By the time saddle horses had been hitched in the town’s center and wagon teams slung to trees up the slopes, there was no more than free walking space in Glen Hazard.”

Glenmary Today

The Watts building, built in 1931. (Photo: Christopher Todd Stephens, realtor)

The Presbyterian Church, built in 1907.

Glenmary home built in 1915. (Photo: Google Maps Streetview)

Most of original Glenmary is gone. The area north of town that was known as Todd’s Bottom — where a great spectacle was created when a plane landed there in the 1920s — is still cleared farmland, though much of it has been purchased by the State of Tennessee and will be used for wetland mitigation. The old Kline farm on Nydeck, which was originally owned by the Redmans and then the Pembertons, is still cleared farmland, as well.

Two church buildings still stand at the base of Red Hill — the Glenmary Baptist Church along the highway, and the old congregational church on the hill behind it. The former was built in the 1930s on property purchased from Gatewood Pemberton, where the lumber company barn once stood. The latter was built in 1907 as the Presbyterian church, on property donated by Lindsey Redman. It became the congregational church in 1929.

At the top of the hill, the former Glenmary School site is today the Glenmary School Park, a well-maintained picnic area owned by Roger Russell and Dale Webb.

The old side rail along Davis Creek to Coal Hill can still be traced. A short section of it is Coal Hill Road near the old Glenmary depot, then the remainder of it is Goose Creek Private Run, a private drive. The old coke ovens are still there, as well.

Besides the two churches, the only remaining buildings from old Glenmary are the homes in the immediate vicinity of the churches. One is the two-story, white home along U.S. Highway 27 that was built in 1905. Across the road are homes built in 1900 and 1915. Finally, is the two-story brick structure on the highway at the Coal Hill Road intersection that was built in 1931.

The brick structure was built in 1931 by George Watts. This building housed a general store and the Glenmary Post Office on the first floor, while the second floor provided living quarters for the Watts family.

George Renaugh Watts (1882-1958) was the son of Daniel “Renaugh” Watts and Cynthia Freeland. The Watts family moved to Morgan County from Georgia with George’s grandfather, Joseph Watts (1805-1871), after the Civil War. Renaugh, the youngest of eight children, and his wife, Cynthia, purchased 170 acres in the Glenmary area in 1887 and moved there. They had seven children, the youngest of whom was George Renaugh Watts. He married Florence Walker, the daughter of Joe Walker and Almira Robbins of Glenmary, and their only surviving son was Wilbur Watts, the longtime Plateau Electric Cooperative board member who died last year. Wilbur’s children were educators Garry Watts and Janet Shoemaker, who own the nearby homes that were built in 1900, 1905, and 1915.

Together, these buildings and the churches beside them are all that remains of old Glenmary.

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Thirty-two people have served as Scott County School Superintendent

Ben Garrett — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:31:04 GMT

The history of Scott County’s school superintendents

H.K. Pemberton was an early superintendent of schools in Scott County.

At its monthly work session on Tuesday, the Scott County Board of Education is expected to begin the process of determining how it will choose its next director of schools from the six men who have applied for the position. The board will have the option of interviewing each of the six, or narrowing the list to a group of finalists who will be interviewed.

The six applicants include Fairview School Principal Scott Cash, Campbell County school principal Kenny Chadwell, Texas director of schools Jerry Gibson, Campbell County school principal Daniel Sexton, Scott High School Principal Marc Taylor, and Morgan County Career & Technical Center Director Keith Shannon. The person ultimately chosen by the school board will become the 34th school superintendent in Scott County’s history — and the 33rd person to serve in that position (one served on two separate occasions).

Here are a few facts about this position through the years:

• Prior to the organization of the Scott County School System in 1867, there were actually several different individual school systems in Scott County, with each electing three commissioners who were responsible for hiring the teachers to serve in their schools.

• From 1867 to 1924, the superintendent of schools was appointed by the Scott County Quarterly Court (a precursor to what we know today as Scott County Commission) to serve two-year terms. Beginning in 1924, the position was elected by the voters in a general election. Beginning in 2000, state law required the position to be appointed by the board of education.

• Scott County’s first school superintendent was John C. Parker, an attorney from Helenwood who would later serve as county judge and in the state legislature. He served from 1867 to 1869.

• The first elected school superintendent was Ovia Cross, an educator who organized the first four-year high schools in Scott County (at Huntsville, Norma, and Robbins) and also coached the first basketball team at Oneida High School.

• Cross was also the only person to serve as school superintendent on two separate occasions. He served from 1924 to 1926 and again from 1928 to 1931.

• The first woman to serve as school superintendent was Ora Shoemaker Robbins, who was elected in 1952 and served until 1956. While Robbins was the only woman elected to the position, Sharon Wilson later became the first woman appointed to the role by the board of education, serving from 2006 to 2011.

• John Lee West and Bill Hall are the longest-tenured school superintendents, with West serving from 1933 to 1948 and Hall from 2011 to 2026.

• Jerry Willard Thompson was the last elected school superintendent, serving until 2000.

• James “Mike” Davis was the first school superintendent appointed by the board of education, serving from 2000 to 2006.

Here is the complete list of Scott County school superintendents through the years. There are a number of interesting stories among them, from Parker, whose son, Sam, was one of the best athletes in University of Tennessee history; Dr. Lafayette Sproule, who married the sister of Civil War heroine Julia Marcum; and Laban Riseden, whose daughter, Maude Riseden Hughett, served as the first woman school superintendent in Morgan County, was the first woman in the South to graduate law school and the first admitted to the Tennessee Bar, and the first Southern woman admitted to practice law in federal court.

J.C. Parker, 1867-1869
Lafayette Sproule, 1869-1871
Laban Riseden, 1871-1873
Alvin Parker, 1873-1875
Jasper Q. Cross, 1875-1879
Jasper Hughett, 1879-1883
James H. Jeffers, 1883-1887
W.F. Lee, 1887-1889
J.J. Newport, 1889-1891
C.C. Cross, 1891-1893
H.K. Pemberton, 1893-1895
Dr. Horace M. Robbins, 1895-1897
George W. Cross, 1897-1901
S. Marion Foster, 1901-1909
M.L. McDonald, 1909-1917
Willard W. Walker, 1917-1919
W.J. Jeffers, 1919-1924
Ovia Cross, 1924-1926
O.E. Jeffers, 1926-1928
Ovia Cross, 1928-1931
O. Earl Byrd, 1931-1933
John Lee West, 1933-1948
A.V. Ellis, 1948-1952
Ora S. Robbins, 1952-1956
Malvin C. Sexton, 1956-1964
Raymond Jeffers, 1968-1972
Bailey B. Cross, 1972-1980
Eddie C. Culver, 1980-1988
Amon L. Lay, 1988-1995
Jerry W. Thompson, 1995-2000
James Mike Davis, 2000-2006
Sharon Wilson, 2006-2011
Billy M. Hall, 2011-Present

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