| H'haid's Corner: A river city in Rutherford County? |
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By: MIKE WEST, Managing Editor
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Posted: Monday, July 21, 2008 2:39 pm
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Stones River, the "highway" to Nashville.
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Back in the day, early (and I do mean early) Rutherford County farmers depended on riverboats to carry their products to market.
And because of that, Rutherford’s original county seat was a river city named Jefferson, in honor of Thomas Jefferson.
Wait a minute; it’s difficult to visualize a river city in Rutherford County.
But Jefferson was such a place, located on a knoll between the East and West Fork of Stones River and overlooking the main channel of the river. Visit what’s left of the place now and you will see Percy Priest Lake.
That main channel, which connected to the Cumberland River, was the only “highway” to Nashville, a main river port and principal city of Tennessee. It connected to the Cumberland at what was called “The great bend.”
The river was named around 1766 after longhunter Uriah Stone, who with his compatriots carried the story about the beautiful, uninhabited land of back to North Carolina.
In the spring of 1780, John Donelson, who lead boatloads of settlers to what was named Fort Nashborough, found the perfect place to plant a crop in the fertile bottom land near the mouth of Stones River.
He landed his boats and built shelters for his family on the river bluff, a spot soon named Clover Bottom.
In later years, Andrew Jackson had several business ventures (and adventures) in the Clover Bottom area. He opened a general store and built a boat yard and along with two partners built a tavern and horse race track.
At the boat yard, Jackson’s workers built a keelboat and five flat boats and one for former Vice President Aaron Burr who was conspiring to found a new county on land seized from the Louisiana Purchase. You may remember Burr’s name from the famous duel in which he killed Alexander Hamilton.
And you might, if you are old enough, remember keel boats from the Disney “Davy Crockett” TV show which occasionally featured the exploits of Mike Fink, the king of the keelboat. Davy described him as "half horse and half alligator." Fink wore a red feather in his cap to proclaim his defeat of every strong man up and down the river.
Keelboats and flat boats were the chief form of transportation on Stones River. The keel boats looked more like a traditional boat because they had a keel. Flat boats were little more than a large raft with some kind of primitive shelter.
Jefferson wasn’t much of a river town. It was a thrown together assemblage of shacks with a brick courthouse and ramshackle log jail.
But it had that riverfront location....
Until, two of the major springs supplying the main channel of Stones River dried up and made some of the river unnavigable during summer.
The river hit its peak in 1824 when the first, and apparently only, steamboat was built in Jefferson.
The town had already lost its designation as county seat to Murfreesborough.
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