7. Lucinda Green was born 10 September 1801 in Pendleton District, South Carolina, and died 13 March 1821, probably in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. These dates are inscribed on her tombstone in Tannehill Historical Park, whose inscription reads,[1]
Sacred to the memory of Lucinda Green daughter of John & Jane Green who was born September 10th 1801 and departed this life March 13th 1821 aged 20 years and 3 days.
The original stone (see the digital image at the head of the posting) is broken and was lying on the ground when I photographed it in March 2011; Lucinda’s age at death was on the portion of the stone that is now broken away. A more recent tombstone has also been placed on Lucinda’s grave, reproducing the inscription found on the original broken stone.
The information stated on the tombstone is all the information I have for this child of John Green and Jane Kerr. As a previous posting indicates, the Green family was living in Tuscaloosa County in 1821, but in September and December of that year, John Green bought federal land in Bibb County and he moved his family there between April 1824 and 1830. I think it’s likely that Lucinda died in Tuscaloosa County, though my understanding is that the Green graves now found in Tannehill Historical State Park were moved there from a family cemetery in Bibb County, so it’s possible Lucinda was buried initially in the family cemetery in Bibb County. And that would mean that the family perhaps already had a pied à terre in Bibb County by the time of Lucinda’s death, and John Green was already farming land he’d later receive a certificate for….
8. John Ewing Green was born 6 November 1804 in Pendleton District, South Carolina, and died in Bibb County, Alabama, on 3 March 1843. These dates are inscribed on his tombstone at Tannehill Historical State Park in Tuscaloosa County, which reads,[2]
Sacred to the memory of John E. Green, Esq., Son of John & Jane Green who was born November 6th 1803 and departed this life March 3rd 1843 aged 39 years 3 months & 27 days.
As with the tombstone of his sister Lucinda, John’s tombstone (see the digital image at the head of the posting) was broken and lying on the ground when I visited the Green graves at Tannehill Historical State Park and photographed them in March 2011. And as with Lucinda’s tombstone and the tombstones of other family members at the Tannehill site, John’s grave is also marked with a newer tombstone reproducing the inscription on the original and partly broken stone.
John E. was not among the sons of John Green who began buying land in Bibb County along with their father in the early 1820s. As the fifth son in the family, John was eight years younger than his brother Benjamin, who was the brother initially buying Bibb County land near his father’s land in the early 1820s. In fact, I find John E. Green obtaining a tract of federal land in Bibb County only on 10 November 1840, when he had a certificate for 40 acres in section 14, township 21 south, range 6 west at the Tuscaloosa land office.[3] A previous posting shows the location of this tract in connection to other Green family landholdings in Bibb County purchased from the federal government with digital images of plat maps published in Gregory A. Boyd’s Family Maps of Bibb County, Alabama (Norman, Oklahoma: Arphax, 2007).
As the posting I’ve just linked explains, when John Green died in Bibb County on 18 March 1837, he died holding some 480 acres, according to his estate records, landholdings that his estate records suggest were augmented by tracts purchased by John E. Green’s older brothers Benjamin and Joscelin. These landholdings of John Green appear to have been farmed in a single family farming operation that also included land bought by John E. Green and his brother James Hamilton Green, and various records suggest that John E. and James H. farmed this family land in collaboration with John Green’s widow Jane Kerr Green up to her death on 2 November 1855. As the linked posting also notes it’s clear from documents in the loose-papers estate file of John Ewing Green that by the time of his death on 3 March 1843, the family plantation operation had shifted strongly to cotton-growing following the death of John Green in 1837.
The posting linked above notes that the 1830 federal census indicates that John E. Green was living with his parents in Bibb County when that census was taken.[4] John continued living with his parents up to John Green’s death in March 1837, and then with his widowed mother up to the point of John E. Green’s death in 1843. As the linked posting also states, pointing to a manuscript written by John Morgan Green, a grandson of James Hamilton Green, the house John Green built in Bibb County, which is still standing, was built by him and son John Ewing Green between 1830 and 1834, and John and Jane Kerr Green moved into the house in the spring of 1834. Following John Green’s death in 1837, the 1840 census lists John E. Green as head of his family’s household in Bibb County.[5]
As the posting I’ve linked several times previously in this one shows, John Ewing Green was administrator of his father’s estate in Bibb County. On 24 April 1837, he applied for and was granted estate administration, giving bond with James Hill Sr. and with his brother Joscelin B. Green in the amount of $30,000 for the estate administration. The linked posting provides citations for this and the other estate actions I’ll mention now.
On 5 June 1837, John E. Green returned the appraisement of John Green’s estate to court and it was recorded. On 13 November 1837, the court issued an order for John E. Green to sell the personal property of the estate. The sale was held on 1 January 1838 with John E. Green reporting the sale account to court on 6 February 1838. At the estate sale, John E. Green bought enslaved persons Viney and Edenborough, a horse, twenty head of sheep and twenty-four head of cattle, farm tools, and household furniture.
When John E. Green returned the sale bill for his father’s estate to Bibb court on 6 February 1838, he petitioned for partition of the real estate, naming the estate’s heirs and the tracts of land as he made his petition. On 2 July 1838, John E. Green returned to court a report that the commissioners handling the estate’s real property compiled in June regarding the division of the estate’s real property. On 5 November 1838, the court ordered John E. Green to present his final account of the estate, and on 7 May 1839, John E. Green filed his final account.
As a previous posting indicates, Goodspeed’s Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Pulaski, Jefferson, Lonoke, Faulkner, Grant, Saline, Perry, Garland and Hot Spring Counties, Arkansas reports that in the summer of 1837, a hundred families settled in Saline township in Saline County, Arkansas, in a colony led from Bibb and Tuscaloosa Counties, Alabama, by Thomas Keesee, Robert Calvert, Berryman McDaniel, George Cobb, John Green, Joab Pratt, Nathan Pumphrey, and Jacob Leach.[6] This passage has made me wonder if John E. Green went temporarily with his brothers Benjamin S. Green and George Sidney Green from Bibb County, Alabama, to Saline County, Arkansas, when Benjamin and George Sidney are known to have moved to Arkansas.
I think it’s unlikely, however, that John E. Green took part in this migration in the summer of 1837, since John Green’s estate records show John E. Green continuously in Bibb County from the time his father died in March 1837 up to the point when the estate was settled in May 1839. I think Goodspeed’s account has likely garbled Green names on the list of migrants from Alabama which included two sons of John Green, Benjamin S. and George Sidney.
As a previous posting states, in her history of Bibb County’s early days, historian Rhoda Ellison transcribes a letter that John Ewing Green wrote on 18 April 1840 from McMaths in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, to his brother Benjamin in Benton, Saline County, Arkansas, speaking of the economic hardships in Alabama that were spurring relocation to central Arkansas and, soon, to Texas.[7] Ellison’s transcription of this letter is at the linked posting. The letter recounts in some detail the difficult economic conditions that were spurring migration out of Bibb County to Arkansas and Texas.
In this 1840 letter to his brother Benjamin, John E. Green also mentions that he had experienced “several set-backs with dropsy.” Given his death three years after he wrote this letter, in March 1843, I’m inclined to think that John e. Green died as a young unmarried man not yet forty years old due to congestive heart failure, then commonly called dropsy.
As I noted previously, the 1840 federal census shows John E. Green heading the Green family household in Bibb County in that year.[8] In the household were a male 30-39, a male 20-29, and a female 70-79, as well as 21 enslaved persons. The older male is John E. Green, the younger is his brother James Hamilton Green, who would marry in 1841, and the elderly female is their mother Jane Kerr Green. The fact that John E. Green is listed as household head confirms, it seems to me, that following his father’s death in 1837 and up to his own death in 1843, John E. Green managed the family’s large farming operation with his brother James as his partner. After John died, James and his wife Sarah Echols Randolph Green would continue living in the Green household with James’s mother Jane Kerr Green up to her death, and then would raise their family there, with James now assuming operation of the family farming operation.
John E. Green was the oldest son living at home when John Green died in 1837. His older brothers Samuel and Ezekiel had long since gone to Louisiana (in Samuel’s case) and Kentucky (in Ezekiel’s case), his older brother Benjamin had left for Arkansas taking along the youngest son in the family, George Sidney, and the brother immediately older than John E. Green, Joscelin, had married and was raising his family in Tuscaloosa and then Bibb County. It’s understandable that the family relied on John E. Green, as the oldest son living at home, to step in and oversee the Green family plantation when John Green died in 1837.
As noted above, John E. Green’s tombstone states that he died 3 March 1843, aged 39 years, 3 months, and 27 days. On 20 March 1843, John’s brother James Hamilton Green petitioned Bibb County court for administration of his brother’s estate and gave bond with his brother Joscelin B. Green and Robert Oldham in the amount of $8,000. The original bond is in John E. Green’s loose-papers estate file in Bibb County, which has 73 pages of documents.[9]
On 24 March 1843, Robert Oldham, Drury Allen, and William Barnett appraised John E. Green’s estate.[10] The original appraisement is in the loose-papers estate file. It lists the following enslaved persons belonging to John E. Green: Edinborough, Dolly and child Jenny, Milly, Moses, Alford, and Vina. As a previous posting has noted, John E. Green bought Edinborough/Edenborough and Vina/Viny at the sale of his father John Green’s estate on 1 January 1838.[11]
John E. Green’s estate also included cattle, sheep, hogs, and household furniture of various sorts (a looking glass is listed, for instance). Among the notes held by John E. Green at the time of his death was a note on his brother Samuel K. Green for $50 that had come due 1 January 1839 and evidently had not been paid by that date, since it remained among John’s notes when he died. A separate appraisement bill notes that it’s an appraisal of the joint estate held by John with his brother James as “company property,” yet another indicator that the two were farming their family’s land together while living at home with their mother. This appraisement included enslaved persons Enoch, Abram, Winny and child, Patsy, Sena, Lucy, Ben, Liza, Nancy, Bob, Ephraim, and Sam, as well as 47 bales of cotton, 600 bushels corn, 2,000 bundles fodder, a gin and bands, and a fan and thrasher. Note that Jane Kerr Green had bought Abram and Winny and their children Patsy, Sina/Sena, Lucy, and Ben(?) at the sale of her husband’s estate on 1 January 1838. James H. Green submitted the appraisement bill to Bibb County court on 3 April 1843 and appealed for permission to sell the cotton owned jointly by John E. Green’s estate and James H. Green that was still on hand when John died.
On 7 and 18 April 1843, the cotton belonging jointly to the two brothers was sold in two lots, both going to L.B. Neal. James H. Green reported this to court 8 January 1844.[12]
On 7 November 1843, James H. Green filed an appeal for division of the enslaved persons belonging to the estate and petitioned for the sale of the estate’s personal property.[13] On 25 November, Robert Hill and Henry Strickland divided the property jointly held by John E. Green and James H. Green in co-partnership and identified as belonging to John’s estate Abram, Winny, Sena (called Sabra here) and child, Patsey, Lucy, Liza, Nancy, and the cotton gin. On 27 November 1843 James H. Green presented the division document to court.[14]
On 1 January 1844, the personal estate of John E. Green was sold.[15] The primary buyers were John’s mother Jane and brother James. The sale netted $4,975.98. James H. Green returned the sale bill to court 8 January.
On 6 January 1844, James applied to sell the cotton crop that had been grown in 1843.[16] On 9 September, James returned the bill of sale of the cotton to court.[17] The same day, he petitioned for a division of some of John E. Green’s land between the heirs of the estate.[18] On 18 November, the commissioners appointed to make the land division, Robert Oldham, Henry Strickland, and William Barnett, reported their division of the land.[19] The loose papers estate file also has a land division produced by these commissioners on 14 December 1844, when they met to divide John E. Green’s land and James H. Green’s land. On 18 January 1845, the commissioners met at James’s house to finalize the division of John’s land from James’s, allocating 219.18 acres to John’s estate and 240.20½ acres to James.[20]
On 14 April 1845, a sale of some of the land belonging to the estate was held.[21] On 9 June 1845, James returned a report of the sale of real estate to court.[22] On 5 December 1845, James filed an account current and petitioned for the final settlement of the estate.[23] On 2 March 1846, James filed a final settlement of the estate, listing its heirs as Samuel K. Green, Benjamin S. Green, Ezekiel C. Green, Joscelin B. Green, George S. Green, James H. Green, Elizabeth Thompson, wife of James H. Thompson, Jane C. Keesee, wife of Thomas Keesee, and Elizabeth W. Woods, Jane R. Woods, and James L. Woods, children of Mary C. Woods, late wife of Robert W. Woods[24]
The loose-papers estate file contains a number of accounts from local stores which show clearly that John and his brother James were partners in a family farming business. A number of interesting documents in the estate file including letters and notes show that the Green brothers in Bibb County maintained close ties with their brothers who had moved to other places. For instance, in the estate file is a 19 April 1843 note from John E. Green’s brother George S. Green written from Benton, Arkansas, asking that $70 of funds owing to him be appropriated to the use of William Wharton. And a 10 July 1843 receipt shows Berryman McDaniel receiving $200 from James H. Green for George S. Green of Saline County, Arkansas. Berryman McDaniel and William Wharton were discussed in a previous posting.
There is also in the file a 1 November 1843 note from James H. Green saying he had paid $45 to Lewis Millner of Arkansas, it being part of $990 that John E. Green had collected for Millner which remained in John E. Green’s hands. And on 16 June 1845, George S. Green wrote a receipt to James H. Green for $50 paid to George from John E. Green’s estate. This note was written from Union County, Arkansas, to which George moved from Saline County with his Keesee relatives in the 1840s.
The note John E. Green held against his brother Samuel K. Green for $50, which Samuel had promised to pay by 1 January 1839, which had evidently not been paid, brings to mind the promissory note Samuel made to another brother, their brother Ezekiel C. Green, in Smithland, Kentucky, on 19 March 1837 for $150 that Samuel borrowed from Ezekiel. This debt, too, had not been repaid by 6 April 1851 when Ezekiel died. It seems entirely understandable that the evident close ties between Benjamin, Ezekiel, Joscelin, John, James, and George are less apparent in the case of their brother Samuel, if he had a habit of borrowing money from his brothers, promising to repay it, then not paying his debt back.
Another interesting note in the estate file shows Robert Oldham on 12 November 1844 certifying that James H. Green had sent Ezekiel C. Green of Smithland in Livingston County, Kentucky, the right half of five Treasury notes, each in the amount of $50, the left half of the same notes having been sent to Ezekiel on 14 October 1844. The certificate states the serial numbers and letters on the Treasury notes. The certificate also specifies who had paid each Treasury note to James and evidently to John as his business partner, and when the payment had been made.
The estate file also contains a number of notes and receipts written by John E. Green and signed by him. These include a receipt to Lewis Millner/Milner for a note on Ninian Tannehill in the amount of $920.75 due 1 March 1842, a 10 August 1842 promissory note for $5,000 to James Hamilton Green, and an April 1840 bond on which John and his brother James went security for Andrew Herring for $148.80 Herring owed the bank of Alabama. Lewis Millner is mentioned above. On Ninian Tannehill, see this previous posting. On Andrew Herring, see this previous posting.
As we’ve seen, Jane Kerr Green, mother of John E. Green, had an uncle John Ewing Colhoun (1749-1802) whose upcountry plantation Keowee Heights in Pendleton District, South Carolina, John Green and wife Jane Kerr Green managed following their marriage. It seems evident to me that John and Jane named their son John Ewing Green after Jane’s uncle John Ewing Colhoun. John Ewing Colhoun, in turn, bore the Ewing name because it was the surname of his mother Jane or Jean Ewing, wife of Ezekiel Calhoun.
[1] See Find a Grave memorial page of Lucinda Green, Tannehill Historical State Park, Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, created by Kathy, with tombstone photos by wdlindsy, SButler2017, and J R MORRIS-AKA-FRANK DOCKERY.
[2] See Find a Grave memorial page of John E. Green, Tannehill Historical State Park, Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, created by Kathy, with tombstone photos by wdlindsy, SButler2017, and J R MORRIS-AKA-FRANK DOCKERY.
[3] Alabama State Volume Patent Bk. 2680, p. 127, #23337.
[4] 1830 federal census, Bibb County, Alabama, p. 150.
[5] 1840 federal census, Bibb County, Alabama, p. 107.
[6] Goodspeed’s Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Pulaski, Jefferson, Lonoke, Faulkner, Grant, Saline, Perry, Garland and Hot Spring Counties, Arkansas: Comprising a Condensed History of the State, etc. (Chicago: Goodspeed, 1889), p. 234.
[7] Rhoda Ellison, Bibb County, Alabama: The First Hundred Years, 1818-1918 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984), p. 95
[8] See supra, n. 5.
[9] Bibb County, Alabama, Administrators Records Bk. E, 334; Bibb County, Alabama, Probate Minutes Bk. C, pp. 125-6; and Bibb County, Alabama, loose-papers estate file of John E. Green, available digitally at FamilySearch.
[10] Bibb County, Alabama, Administrators Records Bk. E, pp. 337-8; Bibb County, Alabama, Probate Minutes Bk. C, pp. 128-9; and Bibb County, Alabama, loose-papers estate file of John E. Green.
[11] Bibb County, Alabama, Administrators Records Bk. E, pp. 1-3; and Bibb County, Alabama, Probate Minutes Bk. A, pp. 195-7.
[12] Bibb County, Alabama, Administrators Records Bk. E, pp. 411-412; and Bibb County, Alabama, loose-papers estate file of John E. Green.
[13] Bibb County, Alabama, Probate Minutes Bk. C, p. 170.
[14] Bibb County, Alabama, Administrators Records Bk. E, p. 397. The division document is in Bibb County, Alabama, loose-papers estate file of John E. Green.
[15] Bibb County, Alabama, Administrators Records Bk. E, pp. 411-2; and Bibb County, Alabama, loose-papers estate file of John E. Green.
[16] Bibb County, Alabama, Probate Minutes Bk. C, p. 184.
[17] Ibid., p. 233; and Bibb County, Alabama, Administrators Records Bk. E, p. 468.
[18] Bibb County, Alabama, Probate Minutes Bk. C, p. 234.
[19] Ibid., pp. 274-5.
[20] Bibb County, Alabama, Administrators Records Bk. E, pp. 507-9; and Bibb County, Alabama, loose-papers estate file of John E. Green.
[21] Bibb County, Alabama, Administrators Records Bk. E, p. 541.
[22] Bibb County, Alabama, Probate Minutes Bk. C, p. 304.
[23] Ibid., p. 363.
[24] Ibid., pp. 383-4; and Bibb County, Alabama, Administrators Records Bk. E, pp. 600-1.
Begats and Bequeathals 
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