For people who persist in the nostalgia of something called the "Old South" and who imagine it to have reached it zenith in the decades before 1860, the actual patterns of life in the up-country South would be un-romantic and disturbing. The story is given in one way in the decennial census reports. When the good men of Tennessee counted themselves and petitioned Congress in 1795 to recognized their newly created state of Tennessee there were 75,000 people to be found from Bristol to Memphis. By 1830 more than 600,000 people lived in Tennessee; by 1850 the number would be more than a million. Over this period, the annual increases ranged from about 11,000 per year to nearly 26,000 per year in the 1820-30 decade. By 1860, much of the growth in population would be from births; up to 1840 most of the growth was from migration. The prospect that would have greeted the store keeper in 1830 would have been rising sales and many wagon loads of people passing by on their way to make new farms. This half century, from 1800 to 1850 would see the most important transformation of the land in the history of Tennessee. Although many changes would follow, this is the period in which Tennessee was transformed from heavily used wilderness to a settled agricultural land.
This half century is also a period of intensive religious experience across America. The frontier form of this experience in the Tennessee-Kentucky region is sometimes called the Great Revival. It is sometimes also called the Great "Camp Meeting" Revival. The "camp meeting" designation refers to the mode of gathering that occurred during the revivals. It would be announced that on a certain date "preaching" would be held at a particular spot. Sometimes the location was an already existing church; sometimes it was a conveniently chosen landmark such as the fork of a river or a prominent grove of trees. In the cases where there was not a church already built, the revival goers would gather and make camp around their wagons. While encamped, they listened to preaching and exhortations and spent part of their time constructing a new church on the site. As a camp meeting progressed, perhaps a half-dozen or more ministers would lead the services and hundreds and then thousands of participants would gather. Clearing the forest around the new church was a common and expected activity. Preaching was often conducted from the stumps of the large trees that were felled and the trunks of those trees often made rude frontier pews. A camp meeting might continue for a week or more.
The scene of a camp meeting revival would appear to us today to be much more analogous to a state fair or even a camp site in a national park rather than a church meeting. The sounds of axes and mauls would offer counter point to the prayers and sermons; the bellowing of oxen and barking of dogs would sometimes rival the sighs and shrieks of the converted. The visual scene of a camp meeting during the first couple of years was not attractive by current standards of rural scenes. There would have been stumps at every turn. Great piles of lop and top would have been between the stumps. It would have been somewhat like having a revival in a logging cut. Added to the by-products of clearing the forest would have been the sight and scent of the presence of hundreds of people and their domestic animals--dogs, sheep, oxen, horses, mules, swine, turkeys, chickens. Now add to this scene the ordinary and necessary day-to-day business of cooking, washing clothes, caring for children. The scene would have been rich but unsettling for comfortable church goers.
Beyond the sites of the camp meetings the settlers in the Middle Tennessee region were thinly scattered, but they were set about the same work--building cabins and barns and clearing the land. Their livestock was turned into the forests to feed on the great mast crops of the mature hardwood trees that surrounded their little clearings. When they plowed and sowed, they steered the mules between and around the stumps. It would finally be decades before the stumps were removed. The indigenous Amerindians were another story. At the beginning of the century, federal troops had been used to patrol the boundaries of Indian lands to keep settlers out. By 1820, the flood of migrants was so great and the routes of entry so diversified that a severe but declining competition developed between the migrant whites and the local Indians. By 1830 Congress acted to reverse the original treaties and to agree that it was in the best interests of the Indians that they be moved onto government land across the Mississippi. Between 1830 and 1838 most of the remaining Amerindians had been removed from the area. Although a few who had inter-married with whites remained behind, most of the Amerindians were deported in 1838. The final removal is remembered as the "Trail of Tears."
In the previous half-century an enormous change had worked itself out across Franklin and nearby counties in Middle Tennessee. The land here had been cleared and settled. The flat valley land became prime farm land for the growing of both cotton and corn. In the steep hill country of the broken river and stream valleys of the Elk a lucrative trade in mules, hogs, and sheep had developed. The hill sides could not easily be farmed for corn, but the grasses they held were excellent for sheep. To this day, this cleared land of the hill country is reminiscent of the sheep country of England, Scotland, and Wales. Great concentrations of sheep, mules, and swine began to cluster in lower Middle Tennessee, and drives of herds of these animals were conducted from New York to New Orleans. This lucrative--but nearly invisible--husbandry was paired with a corn-wheat agriculture. As the mules and swine were driven along, their drovers stopped for the night at the many inns and lodges along the drive routes. There the drovers found food and lodging while the corn of the local farmers was sold for food for the herds. Such driving lasted from around 1790 to about 1840. Increasingly after 1840 the railroads quickly began to displace the arduous work of the drovers. Livestock pens at rail yards became more important and displaced the pens once located around the Tennessee "caravanseries".
By 1855 a traveler like Frederick Olmstead would encounter many widely scattered small farms across Tennessee. There were few bridges but many mills along the streams and rivers. Log houses had mostly given way to houses constructed of finished lumber and by 1820 one or two brick houses had been built around Franklin County. Small towns and hamlets dotted the countryside and were connected by unimproved dirt roads. These hamlets might be only a couple of miles distant from each other, but the residents saw themselves as living in separated communities. Decherd and Winchester were separate small towns separated by five miles of countryside, not the contiguous irregular political units they are today. In 1855 Sewanee did not exist. A stage road ran through the Sewanee area reaching up from Decherd through Greenhaw. This road rose directly up the slope of the plateau and entered the plateau at the tip of Land's End Ridge. On Sewanee mountain and Keith Springs mountain, the forest was mostly uncut. A few widely scattered squatters lived in cabins and subsisted by hunting. Others lived in the coves along the level benches of the plateau.