Charles H. Dickinson – Nashville Historical Newsletter

The Duelists: Jackson and Dickinson

by Kathy B. Lauder.

Charles Henry Dickinson was born around 1780, the year Andrew Jackson, a scrappy 13-year-old, ran off to fight in the American Revolution. The two youngsters could hardly have been more different. Dickinson was born into wealth and privilege on a Maryland plantation; Jackson’s parents were immigrant Irish pioneers. When young Dickinson arrived in Nashville in 1801, he carried a letter of introduction from Chief Justice John Marshall. By late spring 1806 he owned a thriving law practice; had married Jane Erwin, the daughter of a prosperous Nashville family; and was the proud father of a two-month-old son. Jackson, 39, a self-taught lawyer married to the former Rachel Donelson (who had come to Nashville in 1780 with the town’s founding families), had already become a key figure in regional politics: he had been a judge and district attorney in the Mero District; had taken part in the state constitutional convention; had served in the U.S. House and Senate; was Major General of the State Militia; and had spent six years on the Tennessee Supreme Court. He also raised cotton on his plantation, The Hermitage, and bred racehorses. It was apparently a conflict over a horse race that led to Jackson’s fatal duel with Dickinson on May 30, 1806.

The details of the argument vary with the storyteller, but it seems that Jackson took offense at an insult (directed at his wife, his horse, or his integrity) uttered by Joseph Erwin, the father of Dickinson’s wife. Dickinson, who some think may have tipped the balance with a cruel comment aimed at Rachel, took up the challenge in Erwin’s stead. Jackson himself later told a friend, “I had no unkind feeling against Mr. Dickinson . . . My quarrel had been with his father-in-law, Col. Erwin.” Since dueling was illegal in Tennessee, the two men and their companions set out on horseback to Logan County, Kentucky, near the Red River. Afterward Jackson admitted to being “badly frightened” – “I knew Dickinson to be the best shot with the pistol I ever saw. I therefore went upon the ground expecting to be killed.”

Dickinson would shoot first. To alter his profile, Jackson, who was six feet tall but weighed only 145 pounds, wore a large, bulky coat with a rolled collar, and apparently turned his thin frame sideways. Dickinson aimed and shot. When Jackson did not fall or cry out, Dickinson, startled, believed he had missed. Then, very steadily, Jackson took aim and fired. Later someone would claim that the gun had misfired and that Jackson broke the rules by re-cocking and firing again, but, in fact, the seconds reportedly accepted the second shot. Jackson himself was quoted as saying, “Under the impression that I was, perhaps, mortally wounded, and upon the impulse of the moment, I fired, and my antagonist fell.” The future president had indeed been shot as well. Surgeons were never able to remove the bullet, which was lodged near his heart. It would cause him intense discomfort for the rest of his life. (Several scholars have suggested that Jackson may finally have died, 39 years later, of lead poisoning from that bullet, so Dickinson’s shot may have been responsible for his death, after all!) Young Dickinson lingered for several hours in excruciating pain before his own eventual death. Jackson would always feel deep remorse over the outcome: in his last years he confessed to his old friend General William G. Harding that he regretted nothing in his life so much as this duel.

*Although dueling was illegal in much of the country, it was nonetheless a popular subject for artists.*

Dickinson’s companions carried his body back to Nashville, where he was buried on Joseph Erwin’s estate, six miles west of Nashville, on June 1, 1806. For many years the site was marked by a large box tomb, but around 1926, as the land was being developed for housing construction, the tomb’s marble slabs disappeared, as did, gradually, local memory of the exact site of the grave. Meanwhile, Maryland historians insisted that a faithful slave had carried Dickinson’s body back to Caroline County and buried it in a lead coffin there. Decades later, when a metal casket was discovered on family property, the remains were examined by experts at the Smithsonian, who declared they were likely those of a female.

Tennessee historians, meanwhile, were convinced that Dickinson was still in Nashville. On May 23, 2006, almost exactly 200 years after the duel, State Archaeologist Nick Fielder conducted a high-tech probe of a West End property and determined there was a “50-50 chance” that the grave was there, but no digging occurred at that time. The obliging new property owners, Mr. and Mrs. James Bowen, sought Chancery Court approval for the archaeological investigation and exhumation of any remains discovered on their land, asking permission, in so many words, for their front yard no longer to be a burial ground! On a cold December 15, 2007, neighbors and historians huddled in the sleet, watching as an archaeology team dug in several promising spots, but with no success. In a subsequent dig, in August 2009, archaeologist Dan Allen, guided by historical documents, located the angular outline of a coffin, a number of rusty coffin nails, a screw, and two small bone fragments, probably finger bones. Dickinson had been found!

A crowd gathers at the site of the first Dickinson dig, December 15, 2007.

Researchers knew that Dickinson’s in-laws, Colonel Andrew Hynes and his wife Ann, had been buried at City Cemetery. (Ann Erwin Hynes was Jane Dickinson’s sister.) On Friday, June 25, 2010, in the presence of more than 300 witnesses, Charles Henry Dickinson’s remains were laid to rest in the Hynes plot at the Nashville City Cemetery. The funeral eulogy was delivered by the Reverend Kenneth Locke, Downtown Presbyterian Church. And great-great-great grandsons of both duelists attended the dedication: Dickinson’s descendant Charles Henry Miller, along with Andrew Jackson VI and his daughter Rebekah. (2010)

The Jackson quotations are taken from “Gen. Jackson as a Duelist,” The Daily American (Nashville), February 18, 1877.

For another look at this story, you may enjoy Betsy Phillips’s delightful article from the August 1, 2022, edition of the Nashville Scene: “On the Hunt for the Jackson-Dickinson Dueling Site.”

My gratitude to Dr. Wayne Moore, Jim Hoobler, Fletch Coke, Mike Slate, Carol Kaplan, and James Castro for their input.

Previously published in Monuments & Milestones, the Nashville City Cemetery Newsletter.

A Pioneer History of Stone’s River near the Clover Bottoms

by Amelia Whitsitt Edwards.

One of the most popular features of the Donelson area is a paved greenway trail system along the banks of Stone’s River from the Percy Priest Dam to the Cumberland River. The trail winds through the Clover Bottoms, an area of prime importance to the early settlers in the Nashville area.

*Scene on the greenway trail (from NHN collection)*

The pioneer story began in 1766 with the exploration of the Long Hunters. The river was named in honor of one of their group, Uriah Stone. These adventurers carried the story of this bountiful, uninhabited land with them when they returned to Virginia and North Carolina. It was fourteen years, however, before the first settlers arrived.

In the spring of 1780, John Donelson, having led the flotilla of settlers to Nashborough, recognized the need to plant a corn crop immediately. He again boarded the good ship Adventure with his family, poled up the Cumberland around the great bend until he found the mouth of Stone’s River. He was looking for alluvial fields that were as fertile as the Valley of the Nile and which needed no clearing in order to plant.

*The Donelson Party arrived on flatboats*

A short distance from the confluence of the two rivers he found what he was looking for on the west bank of Stone’s River*, an area forever after known as the Clover Bottoms. Here he docked his boat and built half-faced shelters to house his family on the opposite bluff. This was fifteen-year-old Rachel Donelson’s first home in Tennessee.

That July heavy rains inundated the corn crop. This unhappy event, plus constant harassment from the native Indians, forced the family to move to Mansker’s Fort for protection.

By fall, word reached the settlers at Mansker’s that the flood waters had subsided and that the corn had eared. John Donelson sent a request to the men at Fort Nashborough to meet him at the Clover Bottoms to help harvest the corn. Approximately ten men from each fort built wooden sleds to drag the corn from the field to the boats moored in Stone’s River. Several days were required to load the boats.

As they left the shore, the boat from Fort Nashborough was attacked by Indians; only three settlers escaped with their lives. The Donelson party was on the north bank, harvesting the cotton planted there. They abandoned their boat loaded with corn and managed to get away on foot through the woods. Donelson’s heroic slave, Somerset, swam the Cumberland River and brought help from Mansker’s Fort to the stranded group.

Meanwhile, the boat from Fort Nashborough floated downstream, eventually reaching the bluffs with its tragic cargo of corn and slain men. The settlers there rescued the corn and buried their dead.

Some years later Andrew Jackson, who had married Rachel Donelson, operated several businesses along the Stone’s River corridor. He first opened a general store near the Clover Bottoms. In order to stock his store, he went to Philadelphia and traded land preemptions for flour, sugar, piece goods, and pocket knives. The store was a two-story building near today’s Downeymead Drive. C. Lawrence Winn, a descendant of Jackson’s adopted son, built a house on the property in 1960.

In 1805 Jackson, with two partners, formed the Clover Bottom Jockey Club. A race track and tavern were built by the river. The story of Jackson’s duel with Charles Dickinson is well known. The unfortunate quarrel that sparked the duel started at this race track.

A story that is not so well known is that of Jackson’s boat yard on Stone’s River, near its mouth. Here he constructed five flat boats and one keel boat for former Vice President Aaron Burr who was leading a group of colonists to lands he had acquired in Louisiana. In 1812 Andrew Jackson became a military officer and began his lengthy pursuit of both a military and a political career. Thereafter his business interests on Stone’s River faded away.

*A Donelson creek (from NHN photo collection*)

The large tract of land known as Clover Bottom Plantation came to be owned by Dr. James Hoggatt, who built the ante-bellum mansion on the property. The property was sold to Mr. Andrew Price in the late 19th century, and then to A.F. and R.D. Stanford in the early 20th century. After World War II it was sold to the State of Tennessee.

Although the last several years have brought considerable business development to the Clover Bottoms, much of the river bank remains untouched by man. The Greenway Project is a promise to maintain the natural beauty of this historic site and preserve it for our future generations. (2000)

* Historians surmise that John Donelson’s cornfield was located just west of the Stone’s River bridge, in the general area of today’s Jackson Downs (Target) shopping center, which was named, incidentally, for the racetrack Andrew Jackson later built slightly northeast of that location.

The Historic Mud Tavern Community

by Richard R. Neil.

The Mud Tavern community grew out of two events in the early settlement of Middle Tennessee. First, sometime before 1784, Major John Buchanan built a “station,” or fortified home, on the east bank of Mill Creek just downstream from where Elm Hill Pike today crosses the creek. This is thought to be the first permanent dwelling in the Mud Tavern area. Buchanan lived in his “station” house until his death in 1832.

Buchanan’s Station became famous in early Middle Tennessee history when, during the Chickamauga Wars, it was attacked on the evening of September 30, 1792, by a large party of Cherokee, Shawnee, and Muskogee warriors. The attack was successfully repelled by the small band of men and women who had gathered for safety at the station amid signs that the Chickamauga group was in the area. More important for this article is that the station’s defenders included James Mulherrin and Sampson Williams – two men who had migrated with Buchanan in 1780 from South Carolina to Tennessee – as well as James Todd, Samuel McMurray, and others who had received land grants in the immediate vicinity. The presence of so many neighboring settlers suggests that Buchanan station was already the civic center for a developing community of people that would come to be known as Mud Tavern.

The second founding event is as legendary as it is historic. Sometime near the beginning of the 19^th century a tavern opened on Elm Hill Pike near what is today the intersection of the Elm Hill and McGavock Pikes. It was said to have been built of mud and cedar, hence the name “Mud Tavern.” There are no records to show who first owned the inn, but Richard Smith purchased property at this site in 1810, and court decisions in 1816 in 1832 seem to suggest that it was indeed Smith who operated a tavern there. Although there are no ruins to mark its location or documents to prove its existence, stories of the old tavern persist. It is said that Andrew Jackson often stopped there on his way to and from Nashville and that he stayed there for two nights as he prepared for his fateful 1806 duel with Charles Dickinson. In the end, however, the best proof of the inn’s existence and its significance is that the surrounding community chose to call itself Mud Tavern, and so it appears on Davidson County maps into the 21^st century.

In 1821 the Rev. Richard Dabbs came from Charlotte County, Virginia, to become founding pastor of the First Baptist Church of Nashville. He purchased 347 acres in the Mud Tavern community and built his home on hills overlooking the Mill Creek Valley. Rev. Dabbs died just two years after assuming leadership of First Baptist Church, but by that time his family had become well established in the area. In the years just before the Civil War, his grandsons expanded the original purchase to more than six hundred acres. The war and its aftermath reduced the fortunes of the Dabbs family, but they continued to play a role in the Mud Tavern community and beyond. John W. T. Dabbs, M.D., was a beloved physician in the Nashville area during the early part of the 20th century. His son, John W.T. Dabbs Jr., Ph. D, gained an international reputation for his work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory on the nuclear ramifications of extremely low temperatures. Descendants of the Rev. Richard Dabbs were still living on his Mud Tavern farm in 1955, when the airport authority purchased the land in order to extend runways to accommodate jet air traffic.

The expansion of southern railroads after the Civil War played a major role in the area’s recovery. The community appeared on the map in 1869 when the Tennessee and Pacific Railroad established a route called the Lebanon Junction and showed Mud Tavern as one of several flag-stop stations along the way. An 1871 Davidson County map – “from actual surveys made by order of the county court” – clearly marks Mud Tavern as a separate and distinct community with the railroad running through it.

The railroad station had a two-fold and somewhat ironic effect on Mud Tavern residents. It provided their community with a geographic center of activity: within a fairly short time the area around the station had acquired a post office, a school, and a general store run for many years by Wallace Gleaves. The railroad also gave local citizens access to jobs, schools, and services beyond the immediate community. In 1877 the T&P was purchased by the Nashville, Chattanooga, and Saint Louis Railway, to open up travel an even larger world. Sometime in the 1920s, however, the general store acquired gasoline pumps to service the automobiles and trucks that were beginning to displace the railroads. By 1934 passenger traffic on the Lebanon Junction had declined precipitously, and the NC&SL petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission to abandon it. The last train stopped at Mud Tavern in 1935. Among those who boarded was longtime resident Will Page, who later told an interviewer, “I took the last trip on the train about two years ago on the thirteenth of July.” It was the end of an era.

From the earliest days, Mud Tavern was primarily a rural, farming community within six or seven miles of downtown Nashville. Farmers took their produce to market by wagon, train, and truck until well into the 1950s. Some of the community’s most enduring institutions supported and influenced its agricultural way of life. Early in the 20^th century, Peabody College established Knapp School of Country Life on acreage that included the old Buchanan Station. Along with other practices, the school introduced alfalfa as a hay crop among local farmers. The present-day Purity Dairies had its origins in Mud Tavern on the Miles Ezell farm. For many years Oscar L. Farris, agent for the University of Tennessee Agricultural Extension Service, lived on a hill overlooking the site of the old Mud Tavern inn. Farris and his wife Mary helped farm families of the community adapt as agricultural technology began to change rapidly during the 20^th century.

In 1911 the community acquired an institution that would become emblematic of its way of life. The Davidson County Board of Education deeded to Jacob Young the old Mud Tavern school, which sat a few yards west of the crossroads where the Mud Tavern inn had been located. Young in turn gave the clapboarded building and one acre of land to the Mud Tavern community to be used for “the good of the community,” and it was received by H. S. Allen, D. W. Thompson, James Hite, Leopold Strasser, Thomas Whitworth, and Thomas Page, who were elected trustees. That one-room school became the meeting place of the Elm Hill Community Club. Over the years it was the site of many ice cream socials, community fairs, a free circulation library, worship services, baseball games, 4-H club and Home Demonstration meetings . . . in short, all of the activities associated with a lively rural society.

After 1935 the urban ethos of Nashville, which was never far away, slowly but inevitably encroached upon Mud Tavern’s bucolic existence with its siren call of more lucrative jobs and public demands for new roads, commercial development, and residential subdivisions. The airport expanded in 1955, and by the early 1960s Briley Parkway and Interstate 40 had been built through the area, obliterating many of the old farms. Still, as late as 1990 the Elm Hill Community Club building could still be seen hidden in a bramble patch and surrounded by taller commercial buildings, a symbol of an earlier way of life that was gone but not forgotten. Today a group of former Mud Tavern residents meets twice a year to share stories and memories of the area.

In one of Wendell Berry’s short stories, an old man reminisces about his life on his family’s farm: “He is thinking of the membership of the fields that he has belonged to all his life, and will belong to while he breathes, and afterward. He is thinking of the living ones of that membership – at work today in the fields that the dead were at work in before them. ‘I am blessed,’ he thinks. ‘I am blessed.’” Those whose families lived in the Mud Tavern community count themselves blessed to belong to its membership.

This article was originally published in the January 2010 edition of The Nashville Retrospect. We thank publisher Allen Forkum for his permission to republish it here. Photograph of Mud Tavern historical marker from NHN collection.

Touring Elm Hill Pike

by Susan Douglas Wilson.

Elm Hill Pike is one of the most historic roads in Nashville. Few thoroughfares in our city contain so much history packed into so few miles. The road, which probably began as a buffalo or Indian trail, has been mentioned in several accounts of early Nashville history. Andrew Jackson was reported to be a frequent traveler on Elm Hill Pike on his journeys from downtown Nashville to the Hermitage. Mapmakers and old-timers have also referred to this road as “the chicken pike” and the Stones River Road.

As you turn off of Murfreesboro Pike onto Elm Hill Pike, the first historic site encountered is Mt. Ararat Cemetery on the north. Mount Ararat was founded in 1869 by local black leaders and became a burial ground for many of Nashville’s black pioneers. Over the years, the cemetery became a dumping ground and a target for vandals. In 1982 the management of Mt. Ararat was taken over by the Greenwood Cemetery’s board of directors, which voted to change the name from Mt. Ararat to Greenwood Cemetery West and to begin a comprehensive restoration project.

About a mile east of Mt. Ararat Cemetery is Greenwood Cemetery, established on thirty-seven acres in 1888 by Preston Taylor. Taylor, born a slave in Louisiana in 1849, was an influential black preacher, undertaker, and business leader. In addition to Taylor, illustrious Nashville citizens buried at Greenwood Cemetery include Z. Alexander Looby, the Rev. Kelly Miller Smith, Sr., DeFord Bailey, John Merritt, and J. C. Napier.

*The gates of Mt. Ararat Cemetery (photograph from NHN Collection)*

In 1906 Preston Taylor opened Greenwood Park on approximately forty acres adjoining Greenwood Cemetery. The park was established to serve the black community and included a baseball stadium, skating rink, swimming pool, theater, merry-go-round, bandstand, zoo, and many other attractions. A state-wide fair and a Boy Scout summer camp were also held at Greenwood Park. The admission to the park was ten cents on regular days and twenty-five cents on holidays. The Fairfield-Green streetcar stop was nearby and horse-drawn wagons would pick up patrons and deliver them to the park’s entrance at Lebanon Road and Spence Lane. Preston Taylor died in 1931 and his wife managed the park until its closing in 1949.

Buchanan’s Station was located about another mile east where Mill Creek crosses Elm Hill Pike. The station was established by John Buchanan in 1780. Twelve years later, an oft-recounted Indian battle ensued. On a moonlit night in 1792, a band of three hundred Creek and Cherokee, under the leadership of Chiachattalla, raided the station. The twenty-one settlers fought bravely and defeated their attackers, killing Chiachattalla. Major Buchanan lived at the station until his death in 1832. He is buried, along with his wife and other settlers, in the station’s cemetery.

John and Sally Buchanan’s gravestones in Buchanan Station Cemetery. (from NHN Collection)

Peabody College established the Seaman A. Knapp School of Rural Life in 1915 on one hundred fifty acres on Elm Hill Pike. More acreage, including the site of Buchanan’s Station, was acquired in 1922. The farm was the first institution in the United States devoted to the study of the problems of rural life. Peabody College officials believed that teachers should become acquainted with agricultural life since so many of them would be teaching in rural areas. The experimental farm became a showplace with award-winning dairy and beef cattle herds. Innovative techniques in irrigation, pasturage and field equipment were tested at the farm; and many crops were raised including a certified corn station and a contoured, 25-acre orchard. Knapp Farm provided Peabody College with all its meat, vegetables, and fruit until World War II. The importance of the farm declined after the 1920s because of state-supported agricultural research. Expensive to maintain, Knapp Farm was sold in 1965 to a contractor who developed it into an industrial park.

Though the exact location of Mud Tavern is disputed, most old-timers agree that it was near the intersection of Elm Hill Pike and McGavock Pike. The tavern, built during Nashville’s youth, was made of cedar logs with a mud and stick chimney. Andrew Jackson was a frequent patron and it is reported that he spent two days there planning strategy in his duel with the ill-fated Charles Dickinson. Years later a community named Mud Tavern grew up in the area and contained a railroad station, school, post office, and grocery store. The Mud Tavern school building was used for many years as a clubhouse by the Elm Hill Community Club.

On the far side of Donelson Pike, at the corner of Elm Hill Pike and Hurt Drive, is the James Buchanan house. This two-story log house was built circa 1809. James Buchanan and his wife are buried in the family graveyard near the house, which is now under the care of the Association for Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities.

At the present time, Elm Hill Pike ends at Bell Road. The eastern-most part of the road has been re-engineered several times. The course of the road itself may change, but the history of Elm Hill Pike will always remain as a significant part of Nashville’s heritage. (2000)