Tag: William Martin Johnson

Samuel Kerr Green (1790-1860): The Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, Years, 1835-1848 (2)

William D. Lindsey3 Comments
Promissory note of Samuel K. Green to Ezekiel C. Green, James K. Huey vs. Samuel K. Green, Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, 9th District Court case #932

Or, Subtitled: “Maj. Samuel K. Green, an old veteran in the cause gave a splendid ball in the evening”

So with the previous posting, we’ve gotten Samuel Kerr Green from New Orleans to Natchitoches Parish in northwest Louisiana by October 1835, when he bought 640 acres there from Dr. John Sibley. As the conveyance record for that land sale states, Samuel was already living in Natchitoches Parish by 1 October 1835 when he purchased the land.[1] I do not have precise information for the exact time frame in which Samuel worked at his last overseeing job in south Louisiana on James Hopkins’ plantation, but Hopkins’ testimony in the Ezekiel S. Green vs. Samuel K. Green case Samuel’s son Ezekiel filed in Pointe Coupee Parish against his father in March 1856 suggests it was in the early 1830s.[2] And the testimony of Joseph Biddle Wilkinson and his wife Catherine Andrews Wilkinson in the same case states that Samuel worked in 1829-1830 for George Bradish and William Martin Johnson in Plaquemines Parish. So Samuel’s work for Hopkins in New Orleans occurred in the first part of the 1830s and at some point before October 1835, he left New Orleans for Natchitoches Parish.

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Samuel Kerr Green (1790-1860): The Years Working on James Hopkins’ Plantation in New Orleans, Early 1830s

William D. Lindsey2 Comments
Oval portrait of James Hopkins, 1809, at Randolph Byrd’s “Randolph Byrd’s Ancestors” tree at Ancestry
Oil portrait of James Hopkins, courtesy of Stanhope Hopkins of Pass Christian Mississippi, at “Randolph Byrd Ancestors” at Ancestry

Two postings in the past, I brought the story of Samuel Kerr Green up to 1830, as I tracked Samuel after he left Nashville and his Nashville-New Orleans trading firm Young, Green and Co. in 1820 or 1821 and went to south Louisiana. When I wrote that posting, I had thought that Samuel went directly from Nashville to south Louisiana. But as the last posting indicates, I was wrong in thinking this. As I discovered when I began delving into a number of references I had found to Samuel K. Green in records of Arkansas Territory in the 1820s, Samuel first went to Arkansas Territory when he left Nashville in 1820 or 1821, settling in Arkansas County along the Arkansas River not far upriver from the oldest settlement in Arkansas, Arkansas Post, which was the territorial capital up to 1821 and had been experiencing an economic and demographic boom right before Samuel went there.

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

William D. Lindsey2 Comments
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).

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

William D. Lindsey4 Comments
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.

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