Ramsey's Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century (1853)

281

PROGRESS OF IMPROVEMENT.

Big and Little Pigeon. A few adventurers were also on Boyd’s Creek, south of French Broad. North of

1784

Holston they were extending their improvements, within a few miles of the present Rogersville. Heretofore, none but men of little or no fortune had crossed the mountain. A packhorse carried all

the effects of an emigrating family. The country could now be reached, not as at first, only by a trace, but by wagon roads. This invited men of larger property, and society began to put on the aspect of permanence and respectability. Forts and stations had served as places for private and public instruction in learning and religion, as well as for the administration of justice. Now, in the oldest part of the settlements, might occasionally be seen the back-wood’s school-house, without floors or windows, and at still greater intervals an equally unpretending building set apart for public worship. At Jonesboro’, in Washington county, the first court-house in Tennessee had been erected. It was built of round logs, fresh from the adjacent forest—was covered in the fashion of cabins of the pioneers, with clap-boards.

Improvement was the order of the day, and “The court recommend that there be a court-house built in the following manner, viz: 24 feet square, diamond corners, and hewn down after it is built up; 9 feet high between the two floors; body of the house 4 feet above upper floor; floors neatly laid with plank; shingles of roof to be hung with pegs. A justice’s bench and clerk’s bar; also, a sheriff’s box to sit in.”*

But improvement and progress and change had dawned upon its future fortunes, and Jonesboro’, already distinguished as the oldest town established in the present Tennessee, the centre of much of the intelligence and political influence in the new country, and the seat of its courts, was now to become the scene of exciting events—the theatre on which, at first, the master spirits of the frontier should co-operate and harmonize upon their political organization, and the arena where afterwards they became factionists and partizans, for and against the State of Franklin. The history of that ancient commonwealth will be given in the next chapter.