Visit to Elliott's Station and Pollard Cemetery, January 12, 2008

By Jim Long
(published in Cumberland Lore, June 10, 2008)

The following met on Saturday, January 12, 2008 to visit the historic area of Elliott’s Station and the Reuben Pollard home place and cemetery, Montgomery County:  Wayne Long (Pollard descendant, Treasurer, TNSSAR), Linda Long, Jim Long (Pollard descendant), Ann Long Thaxton (Pollard descendant), Reber Kennedy (president-elect, Montgomery Co. Historical Society), Jill Hastings (Montgomery County Archivist), Rick Hollis (Secretary, TNSSAR), David Britton (Conservation Worker, Port Royal State Historic Park), Mark and Reba Swann, David Schuff, Jim Marshall and Don Horton (president-elect, Valentine Sevier Chapter, SAR) and his dog Jacks.
 
The January weather couldn’t have been more hospitable:  sunny, with temperatures in the low 50’s and no wind.
 
The idea for the visit had come a few weeks earlier, as my parents and I were driving along 101st Parkway, returning from a visit to another family cemetery – a winter custom for us.  It had been 20 years since I had visited the Pollard Cemetery, and my parents had never been there.  I thought that this trip was going to be just another cemetery visit, plus some historical information, provided by David Britton, about the history of Elliott’s Station, known to be in the immediate area.  How wrong I was!
 
The group met at noon at the parking lot of the St. Bethlehem Kroger, and proceeded to a farm off Needmore Road (with some folks taking longer routes than others to get there, despite being given directions!).  The landowner met us and escorted us through pastures and down to the Pollard Cemetery, overlooking the Big West Fork of Red River.  The pasture roads were in good shape and we were able to drive right up to the cemetery.
 
The Pollard Cemetery was begun in 1840, the first burial being that of Louisa (Pollard) Allen, daughter of Reuben and Margaret (Elliott) Pollard.  The 168-year-old cemetery was in very good shape, with most of the headstones still upright.  The chain-link fence that was installed about 1987, to keep cattle out, was in perfect condition.  No trees were down in the cemetery, but we did remove a few, small fallen branches.  We lopped off most of the saplings inside the fence.
 
We began by cleaning and flouring the headstones.  (Rubbing flour into the engraving on a headstone makes for a great photograph – but in my family, we only use plain flour – being too afraid to use self-rising flour on a grave).  Jill Hastings photographed the headstones, and made note of a few mistakes in the information that had been published years ago in the Montgomery Co. Cemeteries book.  Two headstones were uncovered that had not been included in the book, those of Ruben Chesterfield Pollard (1845-1868) and Byard Ross Pollard (1859-1863).  These headstones were down and buried, and had to be re-discovered using probes, and some good old-fashioned elbow grease.
 
Several of the visitors picked up the slab of Reuben Pollard’s crypt, which was lying on the ground, and put it back atop the crypt.  It must have weighed several hundred pounds, but had been no match for cattle at some point in the past.  Underneath the slab was part of the headstone of Mary (Killebrew) Whitfield (1829-1851).  Several people noted how beautiful some of the headstones in the cemetery are.  The crypts of Reuben and Margaret Pollard, and their daughter Louisa, were still mostly legible, although they showed obvious signs of wear, being the oldest graves in the cemetery (1843, 1847 and 1840, respectively).  At the end of our visit to the cemetery, we moved the large (and heavy) obelisk headstone of Nannie Jones Pollard and John Elliott Pollard back onto its concrete base.
 
Reuben Pollard, head of the family that lived here, was born in 1762 in Virginia, and therefore of an age to have fought in the Revolutionary War.  He lived long enough (1843) to have applied for a pension, but there is no record of such an application, or of any military service.  He first appears in Montgomery County records in 1797, when he purchased his 124-acre homestead, on which we were standing, from James McCarroll.  Reuben Pollard appeared on the 1798-1801 Montgomery County tax lists, owning this tract of land and paying a poll tax (indicating that he was between the ages of 21 and 50).
 
Reuben Pollard was a large landowner and slave-holder:  at the time of his death, he owned as much as 1,200 acres along the Big West Fork.  The 1916 book “Making the American Thoroughbred, Especially in Tennessee, 1800-1845,” by James Douglas Anderson, mentions that Reuben was a Judge at the Clarksville Jockey Club in 1837.  Reuben and his wife Margaret were the parents of eleven children:  two of them moved to Caldwell County, Kentucky, and four to Panola County, Mississippi.  The remaining five children stayed in Montgomery County and are buried at the Pollard Cemetery.  The death of Reuben Pollard (November 4, 1843) was mentioned in a letter written the day after by Cave Johnson, Postmaster General and Clarksvillian, to Lyman Draper of Pontotoc, Mississippi, who included the letter in his ‘Draper Manuscripts’.
 
We were standing on a piece of land mentioned in land records as early as 1788:  John Elliott had obtained a 640-acre grant in 1788 from the State of North Carolina (grant number 236), for land that was, at that time, in Davidson County, North Carolina.  The land had been surveyed for Elliott in 1785, pursuant to a 1784 warrant (number 518) which Elliott had purchased from Thomas Thompson.  The actual warrant does not survive, so it is unclear how Thompson had obtained the rights to this tract of land.
 
After we had cleaned the cemetery, David Britton shared with us a history of the land we were standing on.  He told that the Draper Manuscripts referred to an “Elliott’s Station” being along this part of the Big West Fork in 1786 and 1787 – a station being a group of houses or a small settlement.  He explained that both Red River and the Big West Fork had stations about every 2 miles.  Many in our group were familiar with Sevier’s Station, Renfroe’s Station and Neville’s Station on Red River, but few of us knew much about Elliott’s Station.  Elliott’s Station was said to be at a ford across the Big West Fork, at or near a place that was in later years known as Pollard’s Ford.  Early Davidson County court records indicate that John Elliott was assigned to head a road crew in marking a road from the mouth of Red River to his Station, then to the ‘Nashville road,’ possibly near Port Royal.
 
John Elliott was killed in 1789, en route to East Tennessee, leaving his widow, Zilpah (Sims) Elliott, and two very young children.  John Elliott’s house is mentioned in a 1790 deed, in which part of Elliott’s original 640-acre grant, mostly on the west side of the creek, was sold off to James Harris.  From the description of the land, it is unclear whether Elliott’s house was on the west side or the east side of Big West Fork.  Regardless, we were very close to its location on the day of our visit.
 
Elliott’s Station was later resettled by Elliott’s widow, who had remarried about 1792 to James McCarroll.  In 1792, George Neville, special guardian to the young Elliott children, auctioned John Elliott’s 640-acre tract, with James McCarroll being the highest and best bidder.  In 1797, McCarroll sold three 124-acre tracts of Elliott’s land to Reuben Pollard, William Reasons and William Lowther, the tracts being that part of Elliott’s 640-acre grant on the east side of the Big West Fork.  These land sales were disputed in 1816 Circuit Court at Charlotte by George Sims Elliott, son of John Elliott, who asserted that his stepfather McCarroll had no legal right to sell the land.  However, the Court ultimately ruled in favor of defendants Pollard and Reasons, who were allowed to keep their land.
 
Leaving the cemetery, we drove down the pasture a short distance to the Pollard home site, which was called “Sugar Tree Hill” because of the sugar maple trees that once surrounded the home site.  The house had been torn down some years ago, but many traces of it were still visible.  Part of the house had a root cellar dug out, with an irregular, dry-stack foundation.  David Britton assessed this to be the oldest part of the house, and I shared that Pollard family tradition was that the house was built in 1795.  It’s possible that the house sat on the foundations of part of Elliott’s Station, or was an expansion of it – remember that a Station was a group of houses, not a single structure.  Chimney bricks were plentiful at this end of the house.  Another section of the house, apparently on the other side of a dog-trot, was of newer construction.  It had no cellar dug out, the foundation stones lying at ground level.  There was a sill plate with studs attached by nails, not mortise-and-tenon joints.  The chimney bricks and mortar at this end of the house were obviously post-Civil War.  A few dozen yards away from the house, towards the river, was another pile of rough limestone rocks, but it was unclear what structure they may have supported.
 
David Britton and Rick Hollis led the group towards the river and to the southeast of the home site, along a tree line adjoining a pasture, looking for additional signs of Elliott’s Station and of its ford across the river.  About 100 yards southeast of the house, they saw a tree which appeared to have been tied down horizontally years earlier – an old technique by Shawnee Indians for marking paths – though this tree was no more than 100 years old.  Immediately next to this tree they spotted an old wagon path, winding down the hill towards the river.  There were 3 or 4 wagon ruts, suggesting a 2-lane path.  The path descended the hill gradually to the southeast, and then took a sharp turn back to the west, ending at the bank of the river, at a point which seemed a very likely place for a river crossing.  The far bank of the river at this point showed obvious signs of long-term erosion, not caused by water but by human traffic.  It was agreed that this spot could very well have been the location of the ford at Elliott’s Station.
 
We proceeded back up the hill to the pasture via the old wagon path, and crossed the pasture in a northeasterly direction to a line of trees along a draw, looking for the site of a spring that could have supplied water for the station residents.  There was no running water or sign of a recent spring – where did the residents obtain their water?
 
We returned briefly to the house site, and then gathered around our vehicles nearby, preparing to make our departure from what had already been an afternoon of great discovery.  Looking to the northwest in the general direction of the cemetery, someone noticed what appeared to be another old road bed through the trees, skirting and descending the hill below the cemetery.  The group walked over to find a deep gully below the cemetery, and saw cut limestone blocks down in the gully.  At the head of the gully was a steep drop-off from the cemetery hill above, with signs that a spring may have flowed there in the past.  Along the watercourse of the gully were limestone blocks arranged in rows across the gully, suggesting that flowing water had once been dammed.  David descended the gully and found large pieces of black slag, and the use of this area became immediately clear:  this was a forge site.  Rick explained that some of the lesser-quality by-products of Palmyra Furnace would have been brought to the site, possibly by flatboat and using the roadbed leading up to the gully from the river.  The pieces would have been re-heated, melted and hammered to recover additional iron.  Could this forge have been used to make horseshoes for the Clarksville Jockey Club in the 1830’s?
 
The group took one last opportunity to revel in the discoveries made that day.  This was way more than a cemetery visit:  we were standing in the shadows of Elliott’s Station.