ALHENRY-L Archives
Archiver > ALHENRY > 2002-12 > 1041213241
From:
Subject: [ALHENRY] The Jackson Brothers: Henry County's First Road Builders 1821
Date: 29 Dec 2002 18:54:01 -0700
This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list.
Surnames: Jackson
Classification: Query
Message Board URL:
http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/YS.2ADI/2358.3
Message Board Post:
According to the research and writings of the official historian of Henry County, the honorable T. Larry Smith of Tumbleton, he has shared in his weekly column of "Henry County Siftings" and in his printed volumes by the same name, that the Jackson Brothers were the first road builders in Henry County, Alabama in 1821.
Existing trails, forest paths, left by the Ancient Ones, the Native Americans of Southeast Alabama were improved many times to create roads well used and worn by the European descendant pioneers upon their arrival to the old Mississippi Territory and later the Alabama Territory and the State of Alabama on December 14, 1819. Henry County was cut from the large Conecuh County on December 13, 1819 as the Territorial Commissioners met in Huntsville, Alabama in the two story building of a woodworker. Henry was created on the 13th of December 1819 and the State of Alabama on the 14th of December 1819, making Henry County, "A County Older than the State," a fact much publicized by the late Henry County Historian William Wayne Nordan with a metal historic Marker of the same title on the ground of Henry's seat of justice in Abbeville, Alabama.
One such old trial that became a well-traveled road was the Old River Road that after the creation of Franklin, Henry County, Alabama across the Chattahoochee River from the old Indian stockade, Fort Gaines, Clay County, Georgia, the path traveled about one mile west of the Chattahoochee River from Eufaula to Franklin. Then it was the “Franklin to Columbia Road” to the port city and second county seat of Henry County 1826-1833. From Columbia it went south on the west side of the Chattahoochee to Open Pond/Woodville/Gordon and then further south to Neal’s Landing in Florida and intersecting the St. Augustine to Pensacola Trail that was used by Spanish Catholic missionaries out of St. Augustine in the 17th Century.
>From Old Columbia was a trading route of the Native Americans that went through the present town of Abbeville where it intersected a trail from old Franklin to Abbeville and westward. These roads were improved by the Jackson Brothers, Daniel and Matthew in the years of 1821-1823. They built the first white man’s dwelling at the Native American crossroads where Abbeville stands today in 1823—a hut or shack made of skint pine logs. Yatta Abba, the name of the Creek that transverses the county on the east side means in Creek language, “grove of dogwood”. The white’s called the Yatta Abba the Abbie Creek and named the town Abbeville after the creek, not after Abbeville, France as is the case for Abbeville, Georgia and Abbeville, Mississippi. The improved north and south road was called the Columbia to Abbeville Road and now is County Road 53 or ‘The Old Columbia to Abbeville Road.”
The town of Columbia received its name when the Henry County Commissioners were charged by the Governor of Alabama to select and name a new seat of justice when Dale County was created in 1824 and the Henry County courthouse town of “Richmond” at Wiggins Church fell into the boundaries of Dale County. The first county commission in the “Act of Creation of Henry County” was made up of William C. Watson, John Fannin, Joel T. McClendon, Johnson Wright and Capt. Sion Smith. This is according to page 2 of Mrs. Marvin (Clyde Stovall) Scott’s HISTORY OF HENRY COUNTY, 1961. This commission failed to act. Another commission was formed and made up of William Beauchamp, Robert Irvin, his brother William Irvin, Stephen Matthews and James Rabb. On page 3 of Mrs. Scott’s history she writes, “They acted.” At the site of today’s Columbia were the ruins of an Emmassee Indian Village that in 1820 had 20 adult men above t!
he age of 21. A group of white Georgians crossed the river to supercede the Indians and killed them all, even throwing the babies into the cold waters of the Ommussee Creek and the swift Chattahoochee River—then the third swiftest river in the world. Nearby was the trading post of H. M. Attaway and an inn that is written in a book about the “outlaw years” in the state where members of a gang stayed in the inn at Attaway’s. The first population in the county was down the Franklin to Columbia Road and across the northern tier of the hilly and craggy lands that held the settlements of Otho on the Chattahoochee, Judson Church Community, Hilliardsville, Scottsboro, Lawrenceville, County Line Primitive Baptist Church Community, Edwin, Wright’s and Wright’s Chapel in the northwestern corner of the county. The commissioners selected the site around the old Emmassee Village and Attaway’s Trading Post and declared that it shal!
l be called COLUMBIA!! This was the state capital of South Carolina where Mrs. Scott writes that 80% of the population of the county came from even though that may have stopped in Georgia in their trek to Alabama.
When the Land Office was opened in Sparta, Conecuh County, Alabama on August 1, 1822, it was immediately a need for a road from Franklin, “The Gateway to the West” and a connector road to the land office in Sparta. So the Jackson Brothers began on the road in 1821 beginning at Franklin and clearing a road that followed for a time the Indian Boundary Line of the Creeks to the north as set forth in the Treaty of Fort Jackson in August of 1814. Near the Texasville, Lodi, and Bakerhill area of Barbour County, just south of the old post office of Ray. Alabama, the Sparta Road crossed the Pensacola Road creating the first crossroads in the Wiregrass Area of Alabama called Richard’s Crossroads. These roads have not been improved, remain dirt today, and the original crossroads is still in tact. The Jackson Brothers had the road completed by the time the land office opened in August of 1822. All the settlers of Henry County had up until this time been !
squatters” on their lands with no deed from the government land office for they had migrated into the Alabama Territory before the land could be surveyed by the United States Government. At the end of the Creek Wars of 1814, a war inside the War of 1812, the cessions of lands by the Creek Nation or Confederacy in its defeat by General Andrew Jackson had opened up 40,000 square miles of the finest farmland in the Southwest Frontier.
The Eastern Seaboard was stricken with “Alabama Fever.” According to historian Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton, in ALABAMA, A HISTORY, it created the greatest folk migration of Americans that was not challenged until the flocking of the “Forty-Niners” to the California Gold Rush in 1849 with the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill. Travelers on the trails of the Federal Road of Georgia recorded seeing 1,200 different wagons, ox carts, and folk afoot headed south to the Alabama lands (still in the Mississippi Territory). The territory that was to be Alabama had picked up the name by industrious men who sought to create a state from the Mississippi Territory. Mississippi was created in 1817 after several counties were formed in the southwestern corner of the Territory due to the influx of people to New Orleans further south on the Mississippi River. An English geographer noted that the great movement of the people was much like that of!
the Exodus of the Bible “except for the decided cursing and swearing of the menfolk.” This influx of people into what would be Henry County was due to the new lands to be had cheaply in the new American Southwestern Frontier, the “wild west” of 1814. It also made necessary the building of Fort Gaines to protect the settlers in 1816.
In 1816, Fort Gaines, Georgia was established as an Indian fort on a high bluff of the Chattahoochee River, then the third swiftest river in the world that overlooked what is now called “The Plains of Franklin” in the present County of Henry. This is a beautiful plain with sod farms on it with a towering hill that the early settlers had to circumvent to go further into the territory. It is now, or was known commonly in the 18th century as “Devil’s Leap.” There is also a hill that does the same thing on a plain of the Yatta Abba (Abbie) Creek northeast of Haleburg near the historic Hall’s Iron Bridge that has the same vernacular name. Devil’s Leap overlooking the Plains of Franklin to the east and also toward the river is today known as “McRae’s Mill Creek Hill,” named for the creek at the bottom of the steep grade that was a challenge for mule drays and regular mule and wagons to traverse. G!
oing down the grade, a driver had to stop, go to the rear of the wagon and there take a chain that was already installed for this purpose, and wrap it around the wagon wheel, or wheels, to create an “emergency brake” on the back wheels so that the wagon would not overrun the mule(s) going down hill.
In 1817, the Creeks left along the streams such as the Yatta Abba, which the Old Settler of 1873 declared that the streams were of the “densest of canebrakes,” went on the warpath and killed a gentleman named James Keith in his sick bed on lands that would become the General William Irwin “Empire” (plantation). Irwin received land warrants for military service that gave him nearly all the land between Franklin and today’s Eufaula. In fact, Eufaula was first named “Irwinton” in the General’s honor. According to the Henry County Historian Mrs. Marvin (Clyde Stovall) Scott, there was less than 100 settlers on the west banks of the Chattahoochee at this time.
According to P. C. King, Jr. in Fort Gaines and Environs, 1976, the settlers completely “depopulated” the western banks of the Chattahoochee River and the Mississippi Territory for refuge in the stockade and around the walls of Fort Gaines for protection. King also says that the settlers were on “government rations” during the duration of their stay at the fort. Elijah “Lidge” Glover, Esquire, State Legislator, and Superintendent of Henry County Schools, on the centennial of the building of Fort Gaines in 1916 wrote A Brief History of Henry County. Glover wrote of the warpath of the Creeks and the response of the settlers that had fled back across the rapid flowing Chattahoochee River. It was decided among the menfolk that before the settlers would cross over into the old Creek Confederacy & Nation again, there would be 300 households represented. This order did not take long to fill with the steady stream of settlers flo!
wing into Fort Gaines awaiting the flatboat of Anthony McCullough to take them across to what would become the first Henry County town of Franklin, Alabama named for the philosopher of the American Revolution, Squire Benjamin Franklin. McCullough not only would operate the ferry between old Fort Gaines and new Franklin, “The Gateway to the West,” but would also be one of the land speculators that bought and sold lots in the town that as I have mentioned was across from a bluff and on a plain—a flood plain, a perfect earth science textbook example for a “mature stream” that was possibly millions of years old. So the Chattahoochee had come “Out of the Hills of Habersham and through the Valleys of Hall” for eons as wrote the Alabama Poet Laurette Sidney Lanier (1880’s) in his poem, “The Song of the Chattahoochee (1884).” Habersham and Hall are the first two Georgia counties that the river flows thro!
ugh as mentioned earlier. This placed the “Gateway to the West” in the line of the wrath of the fleet river named “painted rocks” in the time of spring “freshets.” Indeed, by 1900, Franklin had flooded so many times that it was abandoned. Today it is under the dirt abutment of the Walter F. George Lock and Dam, one of the highest raises between a river and backwater in the world. Locally it is known simply as “the Fort Gaines Dam.”
So as usual, I have rambled off into more history than needed. The old Sparta Road was built by Daniel and Matthew Jackson who both lived to be over 100, one 103 and the other 107. A third brother is reputed to have lived to be 114. These were Henry County’s first road builders and improvers of the Native American forest paths wide enough for the wagons to meet and be able to get around one another. There was a plank road or a corduroy road from the “Williams Settlement” south of Camp Springs and Haleburg that reached to the present Alabama Highway 134. Logs were laid diagonally across the wetlands to cover the black, dank, and damp soil. Then plank ruts were nailed down running north and south on the road for the easy passage of wagons on this section of road. The plank road was thought in its time to be the apex of road building.
Very Henry Countily Yours,
Steve Elliott
This thread: