FIRST GRIST MILL BUILT IN WASHINGTON COUNTY, TENNESSEE.
Erected by Michael Bacon, on Little Limestone Creek, six miles southwest of Jonesboro, in the year 1779.
Among the wealthiest the wheaten cake appeared only at the Sabbath breakfast. Milk and spring water were their only drinks at meals. The red deer flitted through the voiceless solitudes, and bruin roamed the jungles at will. The fruits of the chase and the fishing-rod, together with pounded maize, supplied the wholesome comforts of the hospitable board. Quilting bees, log rollings, house raisings, corn shuckings, flax pullings, maple sugar boilings and the innocent abandon of the dance, enlivened with brimming gourds of nectared dew and the high fun and mirth of backwoods “social functions,” gave variety and zest to the monotony of frontier life.
Maid and matron were clad in fabrics of their own handiwork, each a Joan of Arc in moral and physical prowess and power, and a Venus in rounded symmetry and development, with all the unaffected graces of natural and unspoiled womanhood, “the red wine of lusty life mantling and blushing in the alabaster face”; the men garbed in skins or the coarsest textures of the loom, athletic of limb and fleet of foot as the roe, more than a match for all the cunning stratagems of Indian warfare, “lion-hearted to dare and win, and yet with gentleness and generosity to melt the soul.”
The log structure rose in the wilderness, with puncheon floor, slab benches, port-hole windows and rifle-rack, in whose cribbed and darkened shrine alternated the thunderous vociferations of the fire-and-brimstone preacher and the cries of the truant urchin under the savage birch of the pitiless schoolmaster.
These people were without any local form of civil government, without executive, military, civil or peace officers; but they had among them John Sevier, Isaac Shelby, James Robertson and others, who kept the good of the community at heart. It will be remembered that there has been much controversy, at times in the not very distant past, as to when, where and by whom the first declaration of a free and independent government was made and entered into on this continent—some claiming that Mecklenburg, North Carolina, was the place, its citizens the people, and May, 1775, the date; others asserting that the association formed for Kentucky, “under the great elm tree outside the fort at Boonsboro”—this also in 1775—was the first. I propose to show that neither one of these associations, declarations or formations of government was the first “free and independent government” established on this continent; but that this honor belongs to the settlers on the Watauga. Haywood, in his history of Tennessee (page 41), says: “In 1772 (May), the settlement on the Watauga, being without government, formed a written association and articles for their conduct. They appointed five commissioners, a majority of whom was to decide all matters of controversy, and to govern and direct for the common good in other respects”; and again (page 46): “This committee settled all private controversies, and had a clerk, Felix Walker, now or lately a member of Congress from North Carolina. They had also a sheriff. This committee had stated and regular times for holding their sessions, and took the laws of Virginia for the standard of decision.” Haywood further says that they were living under this government in November, 1775.
Some four years after this local, self, independent government had been entered into by the settlers of Watauga, John Sevier, in a memorial to the North Carolina legislature explaining it, says: “Finding ourselves on the frontiers, and being apprehensive that, for want of a proper legislature, we might become a shelter for such as endeavor to defraud their creditors; considering also the necessity of recording deeds, wills, and doing other public business, we, by consent of the people, formed a court for the purposes above mentioned, taking, by desire of our constituents, the Virginia laws for our guide, so near as the situation of affairs would permit. This was intended for ourselves, and was done by consent of every individual.”
I rather suspect that some inquiry was made by the authorities of North Carolina, as to what kind of a government this was which had been set up within their jurisdiction, and which established courts that took the laws of Virginia as their guide.
The “written association and articles for their conduct,” entered into by the settlers on the Watauga, in May, 1772, formed the first “free and independent government” established and put into practical administration on this continent.
The five commissioners or committeemen first appointed were John Sevier, James Robertson, Charles Roberson, Zachariah Isbell and John Carter. This was an independent government, because they did not ask permission of any power on earth to enter into it, and they did not recognize any authority as superior to that which they had voluntarily vested in the five commissioners chosen by them. It was not a compact or league with any other power, but, as Sevier says, “was intended for ourselves.” It was a free government, because it was voluntarily entered into by the whole people, “by consent of every individual.”
The settlers lived, prospered and were happy, under the government of the five commissioners, for about six years. These commissioners settled all questions of debt, determined all rights of property, took the probate of wills and the acknowledgment of deeds, recorded the same, issued marriage licenses and hanged horse thieves, with much zest and great expedition—the arraignment, trial, conviction, condemnation and execution of a horse thief all occurring within an hour or so after he was arrested, inasmuch as they had no jail in which to imprison him overnight, and believed strongly in the idea that a man who was bad enough to be put in jail deserved to be hanged on the spot.