| WHITTLE: Devout spiritualism, strong spirits, feuding blood have flowed from ‘The Mountain’ |
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By: DAN WHITTLE, Post Columnist
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Posted: Sunday, February 6, 2011 5:34 am
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Dating back to the early 1800s, Short Mountain has cast a long line of historic moments.
For parts of three centuries, some of the “finest Tennessee moonshine” is credited with being manufactured and transported off the Mountain that overlooks the trails of life down below in Cannon and DeKalb counties.
Amounts of whiskey past cannot be estimated, but a number of rural stores are reported to have bumper sales of sugar, according to one present-day elected official.
Now into the 21st Century, many of Short Mountain’s legendary early moon shiners are likely tossing and fretting in their graves as mankind has finally made it legal to produce a bottled and bonded alcoholic “snort on Short.”
As Middle Tennessee’s highest elevation point, mystical Short Mountain has produced a feeling of awed mysticism for mere mortals privileged to live and pass through the mountains’ long shadow.
Short Mountain’s significant history includes not only “strong drink,” but “strong spiritual matters” too.
The man who once owned most of the mountain was impressed with the “mountains’ spiritual majesty.”
“The mountain is something special! God has given it to me for some purpose,” diagnosed Dr. J.F. Adams, the late patriarch of the present-day Adams Family who founded National Health Care in Murfreesboro. “I can think of no better use of it than a Christian camp for young people,” that dates back to 1952 and remains a source of divine inspiration today for youth from throughout the region.
Modern-day Church of Christ (retired) clergy Herb Alsup of Woodbury once described the mountains’ “spiritual” impact.
“Dr. J.F. Adams was a man who could envision things, and then make it happen, whether it was laying the ground work for Woodbury’s first hospital, the old Good Samaritan Hospital, or making grounds available up on Short Mountain that has served thousands of youngsters from throughout Middle Tennessee down through the past decades…”
More about “ministry” on the mountain:
“Last summer (2002), the camp served 1,459 children,” clergy Alsup accounted in an interview. “We’ve had a lot of young people ‘saved’ up there on the Short Mountain Camp site.”
Dr. J.F. Adams first trek “off the mountain” was as a “barefoot boy,” legendary retired banker Bill Smith deposited a historic moment for safe keeping in Cannon County’s history vault.
“It took the barefooted boy all day to walk the distance down off the mountain all the way into Woodbury for the first time,” accounted Smith, now in his 90s. “Dr. Adams’ shared with me…it was his first time to come down off the mountain, and he walked it barefooted, to and fro.”
There’s been more than spiritualism and “moon shine” flowing down from the mountain.
We’re talking “blood shed” that flowed from Short Mountain’s historic veins of life.
Cannon County resident Shawn Gunter’s family roots go deep in Short Mountain life, lore and legend, including being a descendant of Hiram Taylor Kersey, who joined the Confederate Army as a 13-year-old boy. Only your more dedicated historians will recognize the name Hiram Taylor Kersey. But the mere mention of “Pomp” Kersey’s name 150-plus years later brings instant recognition amongst folks in and around the mountain today.
“We’re descendants of ‘Pomp’ Kersey, and have a few historic documents about his life and days on Short Mountain,” Gunter said in an earlier interview given to the Cannon Courier. “He’s buried in Melton Cemetery near the spot where me and my family make molasses each fall up on the mountain…”
“Pomp” may lay quietly in his mountain side grade in wake of the Civil War, but his legend lives on.
According to DeKalb County historian Thomas Gray Webb, “Pomp” Kersey was the “best known of the Civil War guerrillas in DeKalb and Cannon counties.” Kersey lived on the Cannon County side of the mountain.
Webb goes on to report Kersey “and his older brother” both served “honorably” in the terrible Civil War battles of Perryville and Murfreesboro, where one of his cousins died in battle.”
That was before Pomp Kersey became a regionally-infamous Confederate guerrilla fighter.
Historian Webb described how it happened.
“When he (Pomp) came home (from the military), he found that the Short Mountain section was being subjected to repeated raids by a band of Union Army guerrillas. They had plundered the home of his mother (Margrett Kersey) and had killed neighbor Bob Jones,” Webb recorded. “Unfortunately, some of those actions of Pomp Kersey’s guerrillas became as outrageous as those of the Union guerrillas.
“They were particularly disliked at Liberty (DeKalb County) where they robbed several Union sympathizers, among them William Vick and James Fuston,” Webb continued.
The Vick and Fuston names remain well-known today throughout DeKalb and Cannon counties.
This action ultimately led, Webb described, to Kersey’s demise when he and his band of guerrilla fighters were killed in an ambush, that included the deaths of “two Arnold brothers from Murfreesboro.”
But this heinous history didn’t stop with the mortal wounds of the Kersey fighters. The bodies of Kersey and his raiders were later put on public display.
“Stripping all clothing from the seven bodies, they (Union guerrillas) piled them on an ox cart, and started through Mechanicsville (a community on Short Mountain in that era),” Webb noted. “Saddest of all, the mothers and sisters of the boys were following the cart, begging for the bodies of their loved ones.”
Short Mountain has showered a rich, varied, even folkloric and spirit-filled history from up high as Middle Tennessee’s highest geographic elevation point….Amen!! MP |
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