Samuel Kerr Green (1790-1860): Arkansas Territory Records, 1821-1833, and Brief Sojourn in Arkansas, 1821-2

Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Eastern Arkansas (Chicago, Nashville, St. Louis: Goodspeed, 1890), pp. 646-7

Or, Subtitled: “Civilization had at last come to Arkansas. So overjoyed were the inhabitants that the community celebrated the first publication of the Arkansas Gazette with a barrel of whiskey”

As I ended the previous posting, I told you that, having brought the story of Samuel Kerr Green up to 1830, when he ended his employment as an overseer at the Magnolia plantation of George Bradish and William Martin Johnson in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, I’d provide information about indicators that at some point between 1825 and 1829, Samuel may have been in Arkansas Territory. As I’ve told his story in the posting I’ve just linked and in the posting preceding that, Samuel arrived in south Louisiana by 1822 and began working as an overseer on the Pointe Celeste plantation of Joseph Biddle and Catherine Andrews Wilkinson in Plaquemines Parish. I’ve also told pieces of this s story in several previous other postings (see here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Samuel Kerr Green (1790-1860) — The Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, Years

Magnolia plantation house, Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, photograph by Howard “Cole” Coleman in Tulane University Library’s Thelma Hecht Coleman Memorial Collection

Or, Subtitled: “The great sugar-house was a wilderness of tubs and tanks and vats and filters, pumps, pipes, and machinery”

In the previous posting, I surveyed the life of Samuel Kerr Green from his birth in 1790 to John Green and Jane Kerr in Pendleton District, South Carolina, up to the point at which he left Nashville, Tennessee, in 1821 or 1822 and went to south Louisiana. As the posting shows, by 1816, he had left South Carolina for Nashville, where he and Nashville resident John Young formed a company to provide flat and keel boats for the Nashville-New Orleans trade. Young and Green then bought a share of Nashville’s first steamboat, the General Jackson, which sank at Harpeth Shoals on the Cumberland River on 30 May 1821. Before the boat sank, ship registration records in New Orleans show Samuel piloting the General Jackson as it was registered in New Orleans in 1820.

Ezekiel Samuel Green (1824/5 – 1900/1910) (1)

Opening Page of Complaint of Ezekiel S. Green in Ezekiel S. Green vs. Samuel K. Green, Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, 9th District Court, file #1525

Or, Subtitled: “The motion came with ill grace from the one presumed to be the father”

In a number of previous postings, I’ve sketched some parts of the life of Ezekiel Samuel Green (1824/5 – after 1900), father of Mary Ann Green Lindsey (1861-1942) and son of Samuel Kerr Green (1790-1860) and Eliza Jane Smith (1790/1800 – 1843). In this posting, I’ll begin creating a more systematic account of Ezekiel’s life than I’ve previously provided, and will point to previous discussions of portions of his life that I’ve already discussed in detail.