Being an account of Nolichucky Jack's last expedition

by Jack Neely

In a cotton field near the Tallapoosa River deep in Alabama was a lone gravestone enclosed with a low wrought-iron fence. The stone had been there for decades, marking a grave which was even older. Months, sometimes years passed without anyone visiting the grave.

The June morning in 1889 when a large delegation arrived in carriages, cotton pickers in this remote field must have watched curiously. Dozens of well-dressed men stood around the grave and posed for a photograph.

One was Alabama's Gov. Seay. One was Dr. John Mason Boyd, perhaps the most esteemed physician in Knoxville, especially known for gynecological surgery. Another was a professor from Auburn. The one with the jauntiest pose, leaning, feet crossed, something like Teddy Roosevelt with a bagged caribou, was the flamboyant young governor of Tennessee, Bob Taylor.

Then Richard DeArmond, the custodian of the Courthouse back in Knoxville, picked up a shovel, shoved it into the earth in front of the gravestone, and began to dig.

Hardly more than two feet down, the clay crumbled and fell into an oblong cavity. Not exactly rectangular, the cavity was an irregular hexagon, long and symmetrical, shaped exactly like an old-fashioned coffin: the kind of coffin that had gone out of style years ago, before the war, wider at the shoulders than at the feet. But within the hole there was no actual coffin. And, they noted with some disappointment, no skull. At first, it appeared there was nothing in the hole at all. But stirring around in the coffin-shaped cavity, they found two bones, one six inches, one eight inches long. The doctors agreed they must be thigh bones. Then they found several teeth, small white particles, and traces of a substance the doctors called "disintegrated animal matter." And exactly 12 hand-made nails. They scooped it all up and put it in a casket and drove back to Montgomery. They handled it with care because what they had in the casket was all that was left of John Sevier.

He'd died near that spot 74 years earlier, on a surveying expedition just after the War of 1812. A rampant fever that had already killed several younger soldiers did the old man in. Survivors buried him hastily, marking his grave only with a charred log from the campfire.

The grave was nearly forgotten; back in Tennessee, we often regretted that our first governor's burial site was unknown. But there was always at least one person who knew where it was; for decades, that person was an Alabama neighbor named Littleberry Strange.

See, in the summer of 1834, Strange encountered a man named John Harbison who said he'd helped bury Sevier. He recalled the spot, told Strange he'd marked it with that partially burned oak log. Along with Capt. William Walker, a Sevier protégé, they poked around until they found it, a two-and-a-half-foot fragment of the oak marker that hadn't rotted away in 19 years. Capt. Walker marked it again with a "light-wood knot," intending to return and build a grand monument to his hero. But Capt. Walker was mortal, too; he died three years later, as did the younger Harbison. Perhaps oppressed with the weight of being the only mortal who knew about the unmarked grave of a hero, Strange replaced the knot with a modest marble tombstone.

Through the decades, Strange quietly tended John Sevier's grave, installing a little wrought-iron fence around it.

It wasn't until years after the Civil War that rumors about the grave made the rounds in Nashville. During Taylor's administration in the late 1880s, it was determined that the hero of Tennessee should be exhumed and reburied in his home state. And what better spot than the lawn of the new courthouse in Knoxville?

The exhumation party placed all that was left of John Sevier—the Sacred Dust, they called it—inside a modern metallic rosewood-trimmed, silver-handled coffin, hand-made in Cincinnati and lined with "the most expensive French satin." Loaded on a train—an invention Sevier never saw in his lifetime—it made the 300-mile trip to Knoxville. A huge military parade carried the coffin all the way down Gay Street from the train station to the courthouse. Marching alongside the coffin were companies of Union and Confederate veterans, Catholic Knights, the German and Irish immigrants' fraternities, the Oddfellows, marching bands—the marshal of each company in black coats, black leggings, black slouch hats, and a red sash.

Massed around the three-year-old courthouse in every direction on that afternoon of June 19 was a crowd of 20,000, but they say only 10,000 were standing close enough to hear the eulogies. Among them were several distinguished visitors: Gov. Seay of Alabama; Adolph Ochs, the maverick young editor from Chattanooga, returning to his childhood home for this remarkable occasion. The official orators were Governor Taylor, perhaps the most popular speaker in the South in 1889; Thomas Humes, the Episcopal rector and elderly former president of UT; Col. William Harrison, the railroad lawyer; Captain J.R. McCallum, the poet; and Presbyterian Rev. James Park. These stalwarts spoke about Gov. Sevier for over three hours into the cool of the June evening. None of them knew John Sevier, of course. His body had been buried in Alabama longer than he had been alive.

They'd exhume the governor again, four years later, to build a large obelisk in his memory. They'd store his casket in the courthouse, and regret that it had already suffered water damage.

Today the 20,000 who witnessed John Sevier's reburial are buried, too. Still, we're pretty sure that that is, indeed, his true grave, beneath the great monument on the lawn. Though there may not be much of him left but the silver handles of his second casket and, perhaps, a few nails.