West to the Wilds of Tennessee: Joseph and Polly Reed

lindaandersonsmith

Apr 2, 20222 min read

Updated: Apr 3, 2022

The story of my ancestors Joseph and Mary Polly Reed reminds me of the courage and commitment needed when making a leap of faith. You may not be able to see all the turns in the road ahead, but that is part of the adventure.

In 1817 Mary Polly Leverett Reed and her husband John Reed were living what at least one historian describes as a "comfortable" life in Georgia. In the early fall, John took his sons Jack, age11, and William, age 6, and journeyed hundreds of miles on foot and by canoe along the Tennessee River into the forests of Tennessee in an area beyond the settlements of westward expansion at the time. There they struck up a friendship with some Chickasaw Indians and located a desirable place to build a new home.

In the late fall, John left his sons with his new friends and headed back to Georgia to fetch the rest of the family. Imagine the trust he must have had in these people he had not known very long. Talk about a leap of faith! I'm sure those boys never forgot that winter away from their family, living in a way that would have been unfamiliar to them. It was a cold winter. They covered their feet with animal skins and soaked them in local springs to fight off frostbite. I like to think that Jack and William had some fun too. They were likely already familiar with the biblical story of Noah and the Ark, and I wonder if they heard the Chickasaw story of the great flood. Perhaps they watched the men play games like chunkey or stickball.

The following spring John returned with his wife Polly, their other children, an unknown number of slaves, and a horse-drawn wagon loaded with belongings. They cut timber nearby and built a solid cabin that remained standing for over 150 years. They became the first white settlers of what is now Henderson County, Tennessee.

I still have a lot of questions about this story. What was their real financial and social situation in Georgia? Why did they decide to start over in the wilderness? What were their feelings about slavery and the enslaved people they counted as part of their household? Could they read, especially Mary? Did they feel any tension about the status of the land? This was a time of conflict when millions of acres of land were being transferred from Native peoples into the hands of the expanding states and white settlers. John didn't get a legal deed to the land where he settled until 1821, as some of these larger land transfers were occurring.