There’s lots to love about living in Nashville, but the thing I love most is that there’s all this rich history all around. On my way home from work, for instance, I can see the window Harry Burn climbed out of at the state capitol after he cast the vote that gave us women the right to vote and his fellow legislators turned on him (or so the story goes).
I drive by a Civil War hospital, a chapel where Civil Rights strategies were developed, and the fields where Frank James farmed when he was hiding here.
The first white male settler in the area was Timothy Demonbreun. He was a fur trader of French descent who was the lieutenant governor of Illinois. He had a wife in Illinois, but when he was in this area, he lived with a woman, Elizabeth Bennett, in times in a cave along the Cumberland just across from what is now Shelby park. Demonbreun has a fancy statue and a street named after him.
He’s interesting in that “I was a white guy who went some place and there were some folks there and I lived among them and traded with them,” which is a slightly different story than the “I was a white guy who went some place and there were some folks there so I killed them when I could and stole their land when I could.” One wonders how different American history would have been if the prevailing White Guy model had been Demonbreun’s and not that of later settlers.
It’s not old Tim’s fault, but nothing about his life story particularly inspires me.
But Elizabeth Bennett (later Durard)?
I really feel like, if I could understand her, I could really understand something about what life was like in early Nashville.
I was doing some research on the Melungeon community here in Davidson county. The Melungeon are a tri-racial isolate group that lives mostly in the Appalachian Mountains near the Cumberland gap (making the community here one of the farthest west communities). It seems some families on the mid 1800s came out to Bell’s Bend, a nice isolated spot about six miles west of town (at the time) and farmed and ran the ferry and probably did some moonshining.
It makes sense, I think, geographically. Coming from the mountains, they would have been very rural folks, and I imagine the isolation of the bend and the difficulty getting into it and out of it by any other means than the ferry they controlled would have been appealing. But Nashville had a sizable population of free blacks and this gave the Melungeon–who were considered free people of color at the time–businesses to frequent easily.
I was in the Barnes Cemetery out in the bend when I noticed homemade headstones with marbles set in concrete spelling out the names of various Demonbreuns. Then, later, I was in a cemetery in the next hollow north of Old Hickory Boulevard (which stretches into the bend) and there were more Demonbreuns.
All this time, I was emailing my friend Bridgett, who is an early American historian, who has done a ton of research on French settlements in the old Northwest Territory and thus knows about as much about Demonbreun as a person could hope to. And Bridgett starts to tell me about the woman Demonbreun lived with.
Bennett, it seems, was probably a Creek woman, though she came from North Carolina (which would usually indicate that she was Cherokee). She lived with Demonbreun in his cave and gave birth to at least one child he fathered in that cave. She was brought up on charges of having an illegitimate child (she never married Demonbreun, in part, I’m sure, because he was already married). She was kicked out of church once, maybe twice, for immoral behavior (and this was in her middle age, after she’d married and become Mrs. Durard). She ran a tavern which might also have been a whorehouse and settled on a farm the next holler up from where I’d found the last batch of Demonbreun graves.
I found her gravesite. In a cemetery full of more Demonbreuns. Her kids had had a bunch of kids, many of whom had stayed close to Elizabeth. And there she was, marked by a grave stone her son had put up.
And part of it is Bridgett’s skill at being able to tell a story, but part of it was that here was a woman who seemed to really be alive, even echoing through time, you get a sense of her vibrancy. And it’s hard not to feel a little cheated that Demonbreun gets a statue and a street because he was a white dude and Elizabeth kind of fades from history even though you’d learn more about Nashville history from hearing about Elizabeth’s life and the lives of her neighbors than you’d learn from Tim’s.
So, I wrote about that, in a kind of snarky way, over at The Nashville Scene‘s blog.
Check out the comments.
I think there are two things going on. One is, of course, the sexism. How can we write about history if we don’t check in with the male historians who are here? We might come to different conclusions. We might put our emphases on what’s important in the wrong places. But the other is that this is, somehow, not my or Bridgett’s history, because we’re not from here.
Now, I’ll take my knocks on not being from here. But Bridgett is a Southerner. Not that anyone asked.
And not that Timothy or Elizabeth were from here either.
I don’t know. I just find it curious how the boundaries of what stories get passed along and what gets to be history gets codified.
In this situation, you have a woman writing about a woman relying on the expertise of another woman and somehow it’s all suspect, even though you’ll see the concerned man admits that the facts are right, it’s just the method of acquiring them is somehow wrong.
(Here’s a little bit more I wrote about the Melungeons in the Bend, if you’re curious. Later, I accidentally had a chance to talk to two of the Barneses who still live in the Bend and it turns out that I was wrong about my guess that the Barnes cemetery was the African American cemetery. That’s down the hill from the Barnes cemetery. Also, I suspect that the reason that Elizabeth Bennett and her family were not removed during the 1830s is that they owned their own land. Not that land-ownership was a sure-fire protection from being removed, but my understanding is that the U.S. government was more interested in removing Indians from communally held land. Anyone who can clarify, it’d be much appreciated.)