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Part I Before There Was an Appalachia, 1750–1880 Ancestors of my two grandmothers were among the earliest permanent European settlers in what is now East Tennessee. As pioneers in the late 1700s, my forebears were among the most celebrated and triumphant players in a powerful myth that Americans cherish. Yet, over the course of two generations, members from both family lines—along with countless other early East Tennesseans and Appalachians—experienced setbacks and tragedies that are missing in most conventional accounts of the American saga. When prominent, early-twentiethcentury commentator William G. Frost described residents of our region collectively as “our contemporary ancestors,” he evoked another powerful, enduring myth of my homeland and presumably about this latter group of my own ancestors , the diminished offspring of pioneers. The word “myth” has many connotations. Here I use myth, as I do in my history classes, to convey ideals that hold deep cultural significance for those who embrace them and that are rooted in fact. Because they are constructed upon more than a germ of truth, pioneer and Appalachian myths are credible— even when they overlook or obscure evidence running contrary to their message . Myths are inherently neutral, but we humans often use them in constructive or destructive ways. Witness the long-term benefits of our nation’s founding emphases on liberty and freedom; on the other hand, consider how those same ideals often resulted in tragedy for the native peoples of this land. The admittedly limited information I have about my own ancestors’ experiences in East Tennessee during the two generations between settlement and the industrial era contain all of these hallmarks of myths. But, these family stories offer a human face to little-known developments that from around 1790 to 1880 saw East Tennessee and greater Appalachia move from our nation’s mainstream to its margins. My maternal grandmother, Nelle Bly (Brumit) Thomas (1895– 1972), proudly traced her maternal lineage to Edward Morris, who in 1653 migrated from England to Virginia. In 1771, his grandson, Drury Morris, received Part I 18 a four-hundred-acre grant along the Watauga River. His status as a delegate in the Watauga Association suggests Drury attained some political as well as economic prominence. By the end of the American Revolution, several of his sons acquired vast tracts of land along the Holston River. I recall Nanny Thomas proudly proclaiming their prominent role in founding the settlement that became Morristown. Over the course of the next several generations, my grandmother’s direct Morris descendants left the town bearing their name. Her great-grandfather relocated to more remote Carter County, where he became a barrel maker. According to the only record I have found, his son Thomas Jefferson Morris, my grandmother’s grandfather, moved to the even more remote upland community of Valley Forge, where he worked as farmhand until his death in 1915. Nanny Thomas’s paternal (Brumit) lineage roughly paralleled that of her mother’s. Genealogical records suggest they hailed from Yorkshire, England, although there is no indication of when they came to the American colonies, nor of where they first settled. Records reveal that in the early 1790s Samuel Brumit moved from Greenville, South Carolina, to Washington County, Tennessee, where he acquired a farm that his family held for three generations. My grandmother ’s father, David E. Brumit, was born in 1851. As an adult, he became a merchant in Elizabethton, most likely proof that the third Brumit generation had, indeed, lost their land. But David Brumit fared better than his father-inlaw , Thomas Jefferson Morris. A listing in Who’s Who in Tennessee in 1913 (the year of David’s death) reveals that my great-grandfather had a “common school education,” served in several political posts, and was active in church and community affairs. This brief account of my Morris/Brumit forebears reveals some of the frustrations conventional historians have with genealogy. Fortunately several recent scholarly accounts of life in preindustrial Appalachia offer insights into the obviously declining fortunes of my ancestors. Short of the surfacing of a firsthand explanation, one may surmise that over the course of several generations my Morris/Brumit ancestors subdivided their property equally among all male heirs, much like many other antebellum Appalachian families. This practice , known as partible inheritance, caused no major problems for the first or second generations, when family landholdings were relatively large. However, by the third (and subsequent) generations, this practice—coupled with the traditional agrarian practice of having large families—sowed...

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