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The Artist’s
Almanac
August 2008
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Now entertain conjecture of a time
When creeping murmur and the poring dark
Fills the wide vessel of the universe
- Shakespeare, Henry V
Walking clears my head. If wit is
quick conception followed by easy delivery, a good way to begin
the courtship is with an old-fashioned walk.
Even in August. My imagination
climbs the towering clouds, while distant thunder excites the
still afternoon. The corn waves to a passing breeze asking if she
knows of rain. The thrum of insects rises to a cadence now as
summer sags toward September. The earth teems with harvest and
yields surprises to those who explore her bountiful body.
Time, they say, runs only
downstream. Yet this does not deter those who try to ascend the
current – artists, writers, historians, genealogists,
preservationists, archivists, reenactors, movie producers, and
those willing to stand aside for a time from the insistence of
daily news, sports and tattle to let the past roll over them in a
mighty tide of remembrance.
Walker Percy in Lancelot
evokes a hole in time. As a hurricane passes overhead a plantation
owner sees in the calm of its eye his ancestor fighting a duel
with a rival for his wife. They are on an island in the river,
between Louisiana and Mississippi, outside either’s jurisdiction,
fixed in time and place, as the river, time, and the hurricane
swirl around them. In the eerie light of the storm’s vacuum a
woman in a diaphanous dress pirouettes slowly as his ancestor lets
his rival’s blood with a close knife thrust. Later, having
captured in the eerie light of his home video his own wife’s
infidelity with a movie producer, he severs the offender’s
jugular.
TV and the media saturate us with
violence. We turn for calm to nature, but it, too, can be violent,
with floods and tornadoes, howling coyotes and things that prowl
the night. Our very society here along the Cumberland was born in
violence – a time when one in three was killed or wounded, another
third fled, and only the immortal four hundred hung on, barely. In
today’s nights with ambient lights it is hard to imagine the
blackness of frontier nights, lit only by a candle, surrounded by
prowling bands of Indians.
Governor William Hall, an old man in
1856, wrote a first person recollection of the death of his
brothers and father in 1787. Only a few weeks prior to their
death, as he and his brother had gone up to a neighbor’s field to
catch their horses, they were ambushed by fifteen Indians, who
tomahawked little James. William, being a fleet thirteen at the
time, dashed through the band into the nearby cane and managed to
escape to his house.
He continues …The word was
immediately given out, the fort being only about a mile distant,
and five men under Maj. Jas. Lynn instantly went in pursuit of the
Indians. The latter had taken a buffalo trace from Bledsoe’s Lick
to Dickson’s Lick being an old Indian fighter told his men that
they would not pursue directly after them, for fear of an ambush;
but as they (the whites) were the fewest , they would take another
trace that ran parallel with the one the Indians were on, which
led on, and to Goose Creek ahead, and where the trace crossed,
they could there find out whether the gang had passed. Pursuing
this plan, they came upon the Indians right in the creek, and
firing upon them, they fled, two of them being wounded, leaving
their knapsacks, tomahawks, and so forth, behind them. The whites
brought back my poor brother’s scalp which had been tied to a
pack, and likewise one of the tomahawks with which he had been
killed, the blood still upon it.1
Now, in killer mode, Nature has
opened a hole in time for us. The eye of the storm that passed
over Castalian Springs last February destroying the
two-hundred-year-old structure at Wynnewood cut a deadly swath up
Lick Creek over the scene of the Hall tragedy, killing seven
people there. A mile above Hall’s Station it slammed into an old
frame-clad structure and stripped away the siding to discover a
two story log structure. My partners Jack Masters, Doug Drake and
I believe this may the very fort mentioned in Hall’s Narrative,
older than Wynnewood, and one of the oldest log structures in
Middle Tennessee. By a curious irony this tornado may have pointed
a straight line back through history to an undiscovered treasure.
The Treaty of Peace in 1783 put a
formal end to the American Revolution, but the War had only just
begun on the western frontiers where it was to last for another
twelve years. The Indians, supplied and encouraged by the British
and Spanish continued to escalate their war against the
outnumbered and isolated settlers in the Cumberland Valley.
Finally, in 1787, North Carolina
sent eighty-eight militia under the command of Capt. William
Martin to relieve the settlements. These men marched north into
Kentucky, then down along a route paralleling today’s Highways 31E
and 231 until they reached Lick Creek, where they hastily erected
a log structure one mile northeast of Hall’s Station. This strong
point came to be known as Martin’s Blockhouse. The plan was to
furnish a mobile force that could march to relieve stations under
attack. But the response time of infantry was too slow and these
men were dispersed in small groups to the isolated stations so as
be on hand to prevent attacks.
Soon settlers began clearing a way
directly across the Cumberland Mountains towards Knoxville and the
Holston country. In 1788 the first group of settlers, including
Andrew Jackson, came along this new road, which intersected the
old road from Kentucky directly in front of Martin’s Blockhouse.
Even a casual observer will grasp
the strategic advantages of this place. It sits a hill with
uninterrupted fields of fire on four sides. To the settlers coming
down out of the mountains to the east or north, it offers the
first view of the fertile level lands of the Cumberland. It
overlooks the broad valley of Bledsoe creek and beyond, and from
the high hill to the northeast the towers of modern Nashville are
visible on a clear day. From a restaurant atop SunTrust Bank
Building I can look east to see the blue hills above Martin’s on
the horizon. thirty-four miles away.
In an inspection this week Jack
discovered that the top log is spaced six inches from the one
below it, offering a gun port to the occupants. From here
defenders might fire down upon attackers, but through it a shot
from below would pass harmlessly out through the roof and not into
the cabin.
A good spring down the hill near
Lick Creek would water the garrison. The house is 1.1 mile from
Hall’s Station with a clear and unbroken line of sight. This was
the tornado’s exact path. We have located the road leading down
from Kentucky all the way from today’s Westmoreland to the
intersection in front of the house.
Its location fits perfectly the map
in Hall’s Narrative and the description there as being about a
mile distant and between the Hall’s and Harrison’s grant, which
was at today’s intersection of Highways 25 and 231. Below it we
have located the old buffalo path the fleeing Indians followed to
the east. The parallel road Major Lynn and his men followed runs
directly in front of the house and was to become The Holston Road.
We are working with others to preserve the structure and donate it
as an historic to Bledsoe Lick Historic Association, so that
schoolchildren may learn history from it.
Last year, as we were walking this
history-haunted area looking for earliest grants and oldest roads,
Jack found one by inquiring of a landowner after a marker spring.
The man was puzzled: Why are you doing all this? he asked.
After being told we were publishing a book, he was still not
satisfied. Well, what difference does any of this make?
What indeed? Apart from the thrill
of discovery, the beauty of the area, the rambles through
unspoiled countryside and the pleasure of talk with companions who
share a love of our heritage, the question still hangs – what
difference does our history make today?
History does not repeat, but it
rhymes. We must ever count the cost our ancestors paid for the
freedom we enjoy today and knowing it, be prepared to pay it over
and over again. Our freedom, our institutions, and our liberty are
under constant attack today from those who would rob us of it,
force us into durance vile, and mold us into a people we
are not.
Hail noble parents: you won our
liberty in violence with your blood. May we never waste it.
1 Excerpts from Early
History of the South-West, by General William Hall, pp 6,
13-14, published in 1852 by The South-Western Monthly, reprinted
in 1968 by the Edward Ward Carmack Sumner County Library and
Nathan Harsh
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