Henry M Rutldge (1775-1844) - a celebrated citizen of Nashville

Henry M Rutledge was the only son of Edward Rutledge (1749-1800), who signed the American Declaration of Independence, and the grandson of Dr John Rutledge (1713-1750), who emigrated from county Tyrone to America about the year 1735.  The Rutledges were one of the reiver clans on the border between Scotland and England in the 16^th century and many of them came to Ulster in the 17^th century.

Dr John Rutledge married Sarah Hext and they were the parents of Edward Rutledge, who was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on 23 November 1749.

He was educated in law at Oxford University and was admitted to the bar in England.  Edward became a lawyer and was a delegate to the Continental Congress from South Carolina in July 1774.  He signed the Declaration of Independence and then left Congress in November 1776 to join in the defence of his colony.  He was a member of the Charleston battalion of artillery and attained the rank of captain.  He returned to Congress in 1779 but left again in 1780 when the British invaded South Carolina.  Edward Rutledge was a militia officer during the Revolutionary War and he fought in the defence of Charleston. 

Edward Rutledge served in the South Carolina legislature from 1782 to 1798 and was then governor of South Carolina for two years from 1798 to 1800.  However his health was declining and he died on 23 January 1800.  He was buried in the family plot in St Philip’s churchyard, Charleston.

On 1 March 1774 Edward Rutledge married Henrietta Middleton (1750-1792), a daughter of Henry Middleton (1717-1784), who had signed the Declaration of Independence.  They had three children of whom the eldest was a son Henry Middleton Rutledge (1775-1844), who was born on 5 April 1775.

Henry Rutledge studied law and then after an extensive tour of America he sailed for England, where he hoped to complete his legal education.

Back in America he became a successful lawyer and on 15 October 1799 he married his cousin Septima Sexta Middleton (1783-1865), a daughter of Arthur Middleton of South Carolina, another signatory of the Declaration of Independence.  Septima Sexta is Latin for seventy-six and her father named her for the year 1776 in which the American Declaration of Independence was made.  Shortly before their marriage Septima's mother presented the couple with Jenys, a 942-acre plantation adjacent to Cedar Grove.

Rutledge was a respected figure in Charleston and on 4 July 1804 he delivered an oration in St Philip’s Church, Charleston, in commemoration of American independence.  The event was organised by the American Revolution Society of which he was a member.

Henry Rutledge and his wife moved from Charleston to Nashville and in 1814 they built a house called Rose Hill, on College Hill.  Much of the original house was burned during the Civil War but it was restored and extended.  Today the house, at the corner of Rutledge and Lea, is used by the law firm of Blackburn & McCune.

As a lawyer and a planter, Henry was a prominent citizen in the city and he was one of the four vice-presidents at a civic dinner when General Lafayette visited Nashville on 4, 5 May 1825.

Henry M Rutledge died on 20 January 1844 and was buried in Nashville City Cemetery.


Genon Hickerson Neblett & Mary Bray Wheeler, Chosen Exile: The Life and Times of Septima Sexta Middleton Rutledge, american Cultural Pioneer:  1982

General Robert Armstrong (1792-1854) - postmaster of Nashville

Robert Armstrong was born in Abingdon, Virginia, on 28 September 1792 of Ulster-Scots ancestry.  The Armstrongs were one of the reiver clans of the Scottish Borders and they were extremely powerful but after the Union of the crowns of Scotland and England in 1603, King James I moved to pacify the Borders and many Armstrongs were moved to Ulster.  Later various members of Armstrong families crossed the Atlantic to America during the Ulster-Scots migration of the 18th century.

Early in the 19th century, the Armstrong family moved from Virginia to Knox County, Tennessee.  This was named after Henry Knox (1750-1806), a revolutionary general and secretary of war, who was born in Boston of Ulster-Scots parents.

Robert Armstrong was educated in Abingdon but at the age of 20 he returned to Tennessee and was made lieutenant of a company of volunteer artillery.  He served under Andrew Jackson in the Creek War of 1813-14 and displayed considerable courage at the Battle of Enotochapko on 24 January 1814.  He was seriously wounded but recovered and also distinguished himself at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815.

On 9 June 1814 he married Margaret Dysart Nichol (1798-1834), a daughter of Josiah and Eleanor Nichol, and she too was of Ulster-Scots descent.  The marriage took place against the wishes of her parents and the ceremony was held in Andrew Jackson's living room at The Hermitage in Nashville.  Margaret's father Josiah Nichol (1770-1833), a prominent Nashville merchant, was born in Fahan, county Donegal, and emigrated from Ulster to America about 1788,

Robert Armstrong was postmaster at Nashville from 1829 to 1845.  During that period, in 1836, as brigadier general, he commanded the Tennessee Mounted Volunteers in the campaign against the Seminole Indians in Florida.  This culminated in the Battle of Waterloo Swamp, in which the Indians were defeated.

Armstrong was a supporter and friend of Andrew Jackson and he ran unsuccessfully for governor of Tennessee in 1837.

When James K Polk became president of the United States of America in 1845, Armstrong was sent as United States consul to Liverpool.  This was one of the most important positions in the foreign service.  Polk was also from Tennessee and of Ulster-Scots descent.

Before Armstrong left for Europe in the spring of 1845 and a few months before the death of Andrew Jackson, the former president bequeathed his sword to Armstrong.  This was a token of his personal friendship and his estimation of Armstrong's military service.  In 1855, after Armstrong's death, his family presented the sword to the United States government.

In 1851 Robert Armstrong and Andrew J Donelson (1799-1871), who also had Ulster-Scots ancestry, became the joint proprietors of the Washington Union, a Democratic newspaper.  Soon afterwards Donelson was forced out by several factions in the Democratic Party and Armstrong became the sole proprietor.  In this capacity he was appointed printer for the House of Representatives.

Robert Armstrong died in Washington DC on 23 February 1854 and his funeral was attended by President Pierce and his cabinet, with a corps of pall-bearers from the Senate and House of Representatives.  In January 1855 his body was moved to Nashville and finally reinterred in the city cemetery.

Robert Ewing, 'Portrait of General Robert Armstrong', Tennessee Historical Magazine, July 1919

Meharry Medical College and its Scotch-Irish benefactors

Meharry Medical College in Nashville was established in 1876 as the first medical school in the South for African-Americans and its first benefactors were a family of Scotch-Irish Methodists.

Central Tennessee College was chartered in 1867 by northern missionaries of the Methodist Episcopal Church as a college for freedmen.  It provided education for African-Americans at a time when segregation made that necessary.  The college was renamed Walden University in 1900, in honour of a Methodist bishop, but it closed in 1925 and later the site was leased to Trevecca Nazarene University.

The medical department of Central Tennessee College was founded in 1876 and received generous support from Samuel Meharry and his four brothers, Alexander, Hugh, Jesse and David.  It received a separate charter in 1915, becoming Meharry Medical College, and today it is a graduate and profesisonal institution affiliated to the United Methodist Church.  Its mission is to educate healthcare professionals and scientists.

Alexander Meharry (1763-1813) and his wife Jane, the parents of the five Meharry brothers, were born at Ballyjamesduff in county Cavan of Scottish ancestry.  An earlier Alexander Meharry had fled from the district of Ayr to Ulster in the reign of Mary Queen of Scots.

Alexander and Jane was married in 1794 and then emigrated from Ulster to Pennsylvania.  They settled for a time at Connellsville, where their first son was born, but in 1798 they moved west to Manchester in Adams County, Ohio, and they had six more sons and a daughter. 

Samuel Meharry was born there on 7 December 1810 but tragedy hit the home on 20 June 1813 when his father, Alexander Meharry, died as a result of an accident.  He was hit by a falling tree when he was returning from a camp-meeting.  At that time his wife was expecting another child and when that child was born on 17 October 1813 he was named Alexander after his father.

The three oldest brothers, Hugh, Thomas and James, moved to Indiana in 1827 and the following year they settled on land in Montgomery County.

Samuel Meharry was raised in Adams County, Ohio, and as a young man he became a salt trader.  This business took him far and wide and on one occasion he was travelling through the rough terrain of Tennessee when his wagon slipped off the road and fell into a swamp.  He was helped by a family of freedmen, whose names are unknown, and they gave him food and shelter for the night.  The next morning they helped him recover his wagon and he is reported to have told the former slave family, 'I have no money but when I can I shall do something for your race.'  Samuel had a keen interest in the condition of African-Americans and he was a staunch abolitionist.

His younger brother Alexander Meharry joined the Ohio Methodist Conference in September1841 as an itinerant preacher and served in various places in Ohio and Kentucky.  Alexander informed Dr John Braden, president of the Central Tennessee College, that Samuel had an interest in the welfare of African-Americans and when Braden approached Samuel Meharry he gave a donation of $100 towards the building of a medical college in Nashville.  After that he gave further donations and his brothers gave even more.  Their total support was around $15,000.

It was therefore appropriate that the college in Nashville was named after the Scotch-Irish family who were such generous benefactors.

Biographical Record and Portrait Album of Tippecanoe County, Indiana:  Chicago, 1888

Meharry History Committee, History of the Meharry family in America: descendants of Alexander Meharry I, who fled during the reign of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, on account of religious persecution, from near Ayr, Scotland, to Ballyjamesduff, Cavan County, Ireland; and whose descendant Alexander Meharry III emigrated to America in 1794: Lafayette 1925
Charles V Roman, Meharry Medical College, A History: 1934

First Presbyterian Church, Nashville

Rev Thomas B Craighead (1750-1825), a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian minister, arrived in Nashville in 1785 and established the first congregation in the area with a minister.  He was therefore the founding father of Presbyterianism in Nashville.

The next Presbyterian minister to come to the area was Rev William Hume (1770-1833), who was a Scot.  He was installed on 2 December 1801 and did more than any other to sustain the early Presbyterian witness.

In 1814 Rev Gideon Blackburn (1772-1838), another Scotch-Irish minister, with a committee of six women and one man, went to the county court house to formally charter the Presbyterian congregation, which had already been in existence for 28 years.  In that year the First Presbyterian Church was built at the corner of Fifth Street and Church Street and ever since there has been a Presbyterian church on that site.

The original First Presbyterian Church

In 1815, after the Battle of New Orleans, the state of Tennessee presented General Andrew Jackson with a ceremonial sword on the front steps of the church.  Rev Allan Dirchfield Campbell joined the faculty of Cumberland College as a professor in 1820 and that same year First Presbyterian Church called him to be their minister.

The original church building was destroyed in a fire in 1832 but a second building was then erected on the same site.  It hosted the inauguration of James Knox Polk, a Scotch-Irish politican and future president, as governor of Tennessee but it burned down in 1848.

The congregation then hired the Philadelphia architect William Strickland, who was in Tennessee to design and supervise the construction of the Tennessee State Capitol, to design the present building.  The construction work started in 1849 and ended in 1851.

When it was built the church had only 350 members but they erected a building with space for 1,000 and so they ran out of money to finish it.

During the Civil War the building was seized by the United States government and used as a hospital.  After the war the congregation received reparations and they began the process of finishing the interior and exterior of the church.  The columns were put in place in 1871, the interior was reconfigured in 1880 and the organ was enlarged in 1914.

First Presbyterian Church, the third and current building, around 1920

By 1954 the First Presbyterian congregation was considering a move out of the city to the suburbs and they voted to do so.  However through the encouragement of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and local efforts, they were persuaded not to demolish the building.  Instead they sold it to those members of the congregation who did not want to move and so in 1955 the Downtown Presbyterian Church was formed.  It has continued to worship and minister to the needs of the city from the same location, where Presbyterians have worshipped for almost two hundred years. 

The Old First Presbyterian Church in Nashville was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1993.

David Campbell Kelley - Confederate soldier and Methodist minister

Dr David Campbell Kelley was one of the most widely known ministers of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.  He was born in a log cabin in Leeville, Wilson County, Tennessee, of Ulster-Scots ancestry on 25 December 1833.

His father, Rev John Kelley (1801-1864) was a son of Dennis Kelley, a soldier in the American Revolution, and his paternal grandmother was Elizabeth Thompson.  Dr Kelley's great-grandfather had emigrated from Ireland to America.

 Kelley family log cabin in Leeville

His mother was Margaret Lavinia Campbell (1805-1877), daughter of Colonel David Campbell (1753-1832) of Knox County, Tennessee, and Jane Montgomery, daughter of Colonel Hugh Montgomery of Salisbury, North Carolina.  Colonel David Campbell was the son of 'Black David' Campbell, who was born in county Londonderry in 1710 and emigrated from Ulster to America, where he died in Augusta County, Virginia, in November 1753.

John Kelley and Margaret Campbell were married on 27 January 1833 and David Campbell Kelley was their first child.  He graduated from Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee, in 1851 and then joined the Tennessee Methodist Conference as an itinerant preacher in 1852.  Later that year he was sent to China as a missionary and worked there for four years.  Kelley retained a lifelong interest in missions and he was secretary and treasurer of the board of missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

In the summer of 1861, with the start of the Civil War, he organised a cavalry company as Kelley's Troopers or Kelley's Rangers, to serve in the Confederate States Army.  This was the first cavalry company from Madison County and it was made up of men from the New Market and Maysville area.  The company travelled by rail to join Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest's battalion at Memphis and Kelley was soon promoted to major.

Battle of Shiloh

Kelley so distinguished himself by his coolness in action and bravery in the face of danger that he was rapidly promoted and made major of battalion.  Kelley was elected lieutenant colonel of Forrest's regiment the day before the Battle of Shiloh and he also fought at the Battle of Murfreesboro.  Afterwards he commanded a regiment and then a brigade, winning a brilliant reputation as 'Forrest's fighting preacher'.  In late 1862 the company was transferred to Colonel A A Russell's 4th Alabama Cavalry, serving with that regiment for the remainder of the war.  It surrendered with Forrest at Gainesville, Alabama, in May 1865.

After the war Kelley served as a pastor of several of the largest Methodist churches in Tennessee - Gallatin (1888-1890), Springfield (1891-1892), Elm Street, Nashville (1892-1894), Bellbuckle (1894-1896) and Columbia (1896-1898).  From 1898 to 1901 he was presiding elder of Nashville District.

He was instrumental in the formation of Vanderbilt University in 1873 and subsequently served as a trustee.  Kelley also secured the funds for the building of the Nashville College for Young Ladies, a Methodist institution which opened in 1880, and he served as its president.

Dr Kelley was strongly opposed to the drink trade and in 1890 he stood as a candidate for governor of Tennessee on the prohibition ticket.  His canvass of the state doubled the prohibitionist vote but he was unsuccessful.

On 30 May 1901 he presided at the dedication ceremony for the General N B Forrest memorial statue in Forrest Park in Memphis.  Kelley had been both a friend and chaplain to General Forrest and he was one of the surviving members of the general's staff.  The ceremony took place during a Confederate Veterans reunion and Kelley was associated with the Confederate Veteranx movement.  He was also elected president of the Tennessee Society of the Sons of the American Revolution in 1888.

Dr Kelley died in Nashville on 19 May 1909 after nearly sixty years as a Methodist minister.  His last words were, 'My work is done,' and what a work!  He had been a Methodist missionary, a Methodist minister, an educationalist and a Confederate colonel, a truly remarkable man.

Dr Kelley was very interested in his Ulster-Scots roots and he was a member of the Scotch-Irish Society of America.  At the First Scotch-Irish Congress in 1889 he gave an addresss on The Scotch-Irish in Tennessee, at the second he spoke about General Sam Houston and at the third he gave an address on Andrew Jackson.

The name of Dr Kelley is still associated with the site in west Nashville known as Kelley's Point Battlefield.  According to Bob Henderson, president of the Battle of Nashville Preservation Society, 'Kelley's Point illustrates that Nashville had the most extensive line of battle during the Civil War.  From Kelley's Point the Confederate line arched over 14 miles across the county from west to east Nashville.  The actions at Kelley's Point were also the largest sustained battle between the Confederate cavalry and the Union navy.  For two weeks prior to the battle four artillery pieces under the command of Kelley's Confederate cavalry effectively blockaded the Cumberland River against seven heavily armed Union gunboats.  Confederate cavalry and Federal gunboats clashed in six separate engagements.  Part of the site has been preserved from developers and is now Brookmeade Park at Kelley's Point Battlefield, with interpretive signage to explain its historical significance.

Dr Kelley's wife, Mary Owen Campbell Kelley (1836-1890) was an author of children's books.

• Nashville Christian Advocate 21 May 1909
• Confederate Veteran August 1909
• Nashville Christian Advocate 11 February 1910
• Proceedings of the Second Scotch-Irish Congress p 288

Mary McConnell White and the historic Travellers Rest

Travellers Rest, Nashville

Mary McConnell White (1782-1862) was the daughter of General James White (1747-1821), the founder of Knoxville, and he was the grandson of Moses White, who moved from Scotland to county Londonderry with his wife Mary Campbell in the latter part of the 17th century.

Moses and Mary White had seven children and one of them, Moses White II, left Ulster for America in 1741.  He settled in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and married Mary McConnell.  They moved from there to Iredell (Rowan) County in North Carolina and James White was the fourth of their six children.

James White married Mary Lawson (1742-1819) from North Carolina and they had threee sons and four daughters.  Mary McConnell White was one of those daughters and she was born on 11 November 1782.

James White's fort in Knoxville

James White was a captain in the North Carolina militia in the Revolutionary War and afterwards received a grant of land on the banks of the Holston River, now the Tennessee River, which flows through Knoxville.  The family moved to the Holston River basin in 1785 and White laid out the settlement known as Knoxville in October 1791.  This was named in honour of General Henry Knox, the American Secretary of War, whose family were from Ulster.

Mary McConnell White married Dr Francis May and they had five children but Dr May died and on 28 July 1820 she married Judge John Overton (1766-1833).  Overton had moved to Nashville in 1789 and during his first year lodged with another young lawyer, Andrew Jackson.  They remained close friends and Overton was Andrew Jackson's 'campaign manager'.  Historians largely attribute Jackson's rise to the presidency to Judge Overton.

In 1796 Overton purchase an estate of 320 acres from the heirs of David Maxwell.  The estate was six miles south of Nashville and work on a house started in 1799, just three years fater Tennessee had become a state.  Overton gave his home the biblical name Golgotha, 'the place of the skull', because of the large number of Native American skulls that were unearthed when the cellar was dug but by 1804 the name was changed to Travellers Rest.

Travellers Rest in Nashville

Three of the children from her first marriage came with Mary to her new home and she had three more children between 1821 and 1826.  Judge Overton died on 12 April 1833 but Mary survived him by almost thirty years.

At the start of the Civil War the house was occupied by Mary, her son John and his wife Harriet and their children.  At that time the farm covered 1,050 acres and was worked by eighty slaves.  When Union soldiers occupied Nashville in February 1862, John Overton fled his home to avoid arrest and imprisonment and went south, where he financed a Confederate regiment and became a militia officer.  Mary was then 80 years of age and she died on 12 December 1862.

General John Bell Hood of the Confederate States Army arrived from Franklin on 2 December 1864 and made Travellers Rest his headquarters.  From there he directed the building of a five-mile defensive wall south of Nashville and in the house he met with other prominent Confederate soldiers.

During the Battle of Nashville the women and children hid in the cellar awaiting the outcome and on 16 December 1864 Union General W L Elliott slept in the same bedroom previously occupied by General Hood.

The family retained ownership of the house until 1946.  It was acquired in 1954 by the National Society of Colonial Dames of America in Tennessee and became the house museum of the state society.  It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and every year, in early September, the Civil War Encampment at Travellers Rest re-enacts the Confederate occupation preceding the 1864 Battle of Nashville.

Mary's brother Hugh Lawson White (1773-1840) was a United States senator, soldier, lawyer and judge, as well as a nominee for the American presidency in 1836.

James M Cowan - the Scotch-Irish donor of the Cowan colection

Nashville was known as the 'Athens of the South' and a full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Athens was built in Nashville in 1897 as part of Tennessee's Centenial Exposition.  Originally built of plaster, wood and brick, it was rebuilt in the 1920s with concrete and in 1927 it became home to a magnificent collection of sixty-three paintings known as the Cowan Collection.

This collection of paintings was provided through the generosity of James Montgomery Cowan, a Scotch-Irish philanthropist, who was born in 1858 in Hernandez, Mississippi.  At the age of thirteen, he moved with his family to Tullahoma in Tennessee and remained there until he was in his twenties.  Several of his immediate relatives were buried in Tullahoma and he considered the state of Tennessee to be his ancestral home.

Cowan moved to Cincinnati and became a successful insurance executive in Aurora, Illinois.  while he was in his thirties he began collecting art and this was his real passion in life.  By the time of his death in 1930 he had amassed some seven hundred works of art.

In 1897 Cowan was invited to the Centennial Exposition in Nashville, held at the future site of what is today Centennial Park, and this further strengthened his affection and admiration for Tennessee.

He decided to donate a collection of paintings to Nashville and in April 1927 twenty-one crates arrived in the city from the Grand Central Galleries in New York City.  These were the first of three shipments of paintings and at that point the donor was anonymous.  It was not until his death in 1930 that the identity of the donor became known.

The collection spans the years 1765 to 1923 and Cowan was very specific in the choices for his collection.  His selection emphasises the landscape and seascape more than any other subject matter and all the artists were American.  Most of them were also members of the National Academy.

There were several Cowans in the Tennessee Scotch-Irish Society - John W Cowan, Robert Cowan and Samuel Cowan in Nashville and J D Cowan in Knoxville - and it seems that James M Cowan was also of Ulster-Scots ancestry.  As regards the Cowans of Tullahoma we have the evidence of a letter written on 28 March 1895 by his father Dr James Benjamin Cowan (1831-1909), who was chief surgeon to the famous Confederate soldier Nathan Bedford Forrest:

My father was Samuel Montgomery Cowan.  Before the late war between the states we had a family tree but it was lost and I will have to write from memory.  My great-great-grandfather was Samuel Cowan.  His sons were John, James, Samuel, William and Robert.  I don't know that I have given them in order of age ... Samuel Cowan had several daughters.  One of them, Elizabeth, married Samuel McCroskey, and their daughter Elizabeth wed Samuel Houston.  Samuel and his brother William Houston have often been at my father's home, and they called each other cousin. ... I have known many members of these families and they all trace back to the same place, to Samuel Cowan or his brothers.

My great-grandfather was Major John Cowan ... My grandfather [Captain James Cowan] was an elder in the Presbyterian Church and all of his family, as far back as I know them or their history, were Presbyterians.

Samuel Cowan's family came at quite an early date.  He came from Londonderry, Ireland, and our family came from Scotland to Ireland.

Cowan's grandfather Samuel Montgomery Cowan (1801-1881) was a minister in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.