Elizabeth Day was born in the Springdale section of Claiborne County in 1838. She was the youngest child of John Ransom Day, Jr., who went by “John Day,” and Nancy Hurst. The children were: Ransom, Ollie, Eliza, Sarah, Nancy, Lucinda, John D., and Elizabeth.
Shared by Joe Payne.
Elizabeth’s father, John, like almost all their neighbors, was a subsistence farmer who was able to keep his family comfortably housed and fed. He was an active member of the Big Springs Primitive Baptist Church in Springdale, and was a respected citizen of the county. When Elizabeth was only four, however, John was killed. He was murdered somewhere along the road between Lone Mountain in Springdale, and then his body was hidden in a cave along Ball Creek. The murder was never solved, but the rumor was that he was killed by “the Dunn Boys” and one of his Day cousins.
Elizabeth’s family would have been the equivalent of middle class today, but her father’s death changed everything for them. John Day was only forty-eight years old when he was killed and, as was typical for men who died young and unexpectedly, he left no will. By the time his estate was settled and all his outstanding debts were paid, he was declared insolvent. The court gave the family enough provisions and cash to support them for one year, leaving the widowed Nancy Day to run her 100 acre farm on her own.
Throughout the remainder of the decade the older Day siblings were reaching adulthood and marrying. Elizabeth’s oldest brother, Ransom, married in 1843, exactly one year after their father’s death , and he brought his new wife, Catherine, home to live with the family. In 1844, they presented six-year-old Elizabeth with a nephew, James Knox Polk Day, named after the Tennessee dark-horse candidate who was then running for US President. (He won) When James K.P. was only two, his father, Ransom left home to fight in the Mexican War. Ransom served his full twelve months and was mustered out of the army, but he fell ill and died of dysentery in a New Orleans hospital in 1847. His body was not returned to Tennessee, but his wife placed a beautiful marker to his memory at the Big Springs Primitive Baptist Church.
The eldest four of Elizabeth’s sisters, Ollie, Eliza, Sarah and Nancy all married within that decade as well. Sarah, unfortunately, died in 1848 after only one year of marriage. By the time the Claiborne County Census was taken in 1850, only the three youngest Day children, Lucinda, John D.,and Elizabeth, were still living in the Day Family home with their mother and six-year-old James K.P. Day. In 1855 John D. married Martha Bartlett and brought her into the Day family home. In 1856 Lucinda married Levi Hurst and moved out of the house. Elizabeth, the baby of the family, was the only one of the Day children who remained unmarried.
Mixed blessings came to the Day household during the remainder of 1856. Ransom L. Day, son of John D. and Martha, was born. He was the apple of his grandmother, Nancy’s eye. But, talk of Missouri was in the air.
In the 1850s there were two underlying forces that were impacting the lives of many Claiborne County residents – westward migration and the threat of a Civil War. Massive westward migration into Claiborne County had been going on since the early 1800s. There had been a tremendous influx of migrants from the north and east from 1800-183o, when land in Claiborne County was cheap. But, as the county grew and became an organized civil society, land values went up, encouraging some families to sell their land at a big profit and move further west where, again, frontiers were opening up, and much cheaper land was available. The issue by 1850, became migration out of Tennessee. This movement west was not just for the acquisition of cheaper land, but also due to the fear of a possible war. Many families hoped (in vain) that by moving west they would avoid being caught up in a Civil War that seemed sure to come.
Arkansas, Texas, Kentucky, Illinois, Mississippi, Ohio – all were opening up plentiful and fertile cheap land far from the distant rumblings of war. More than any other state, though, Tennesseans were headed to Missouri.
It must have broken the hearts of Elizabeth and her mother in late 1856 when they learned that half their family were planning to leave for Missouri. Ollie and George Ward and their four children, and Eliza and George Evans and their five, all left to make the three-hundred-mile journey. They settled in Webster County in 1857. The next year John D. and Martha Day followed with two-year-old Ransom L. who had lived in his grandmother’s house since birth.
While all these sad family partings were taking place Elizabeth, now approaching twenty, met a newcomer to Springdale, Samuel Patton Burdine. Samuel and his brother, John, had inherited adjacent parcels of land in Springdale, and were prospering as farmers. John was already married to the beautiful, Catharine DeVault, and had one small daughter, but Samuel was single. He was courting Elizabeth in 1859 when her mother received devastating news from Missouri – her brother, and closest sibling, John D. and his wife, Martha, had both died in Webster County. They had either died the same day or so close in time that they were buried together under the same marker.
Upon hearing the sad news, sixty-two-year-old Nancy Day decided she was going to walk to Missouri and get her orphaned grandson, Ransom L. Day. Shortly before Nancy left, Elizabeth Day and Samuel Burdine were married. It wasn’t long before they were expecting their first child.
Elizabeth still had two sisters living in Lone Mountain, Nancy Evans, and Lucinda Hurst. As they spent most of 1860 waiting for the birth of Elizabeth’s baby, they must have wondered if they would ever see their mother again. Imagine their happiness when sixty-three-year-old Nancy arrived back home with four-year-old Ransom L. in late summer! They arrived in plenty time to welcome Elizabeth and Samuel’s baby daughter, Martha Jane, in October.
For the Sam Burdines, these wonderful months stretched into a couple of years. Their second daughter, Ellon, was born in 1862, and their farm continued to prosper. For the John Burdines, however, it was a different story. His young wife, Catherine, died in 1861, leaving their small daughter motherless. Both brothers had live-in servants to help with their homes, farms, and children. They were also slaveholders – Samuel had one slave, and John had two.
Emotions over the slavery question in the United States were coming to a head all over the country, though, and Tennessee was split on the question. After South Carolina seceded from the Union, other states followed. There were not nearly as many slaves in East Tennessee as there were in the western part of the state, so many more of its residents held Union sympathies. When Tennessee became the last state to join the Confederacy, Claiborne County was a hotbed of division within neighborhoods and within families.
When Elizabeth’s brother-in-law, Levi Hurst, got his conscription notice, he went to Knoxville to join the Confederate Army, mustering in on September 15, 1862. Samuel and John Burdine received notices from the Confederate army as well. The brothers immediately took their families to stay with their parents, Henry and Betsy Burdine, in Willow Springs, Russell County, Virginia. Then they returned to Tennessee where John married Matilda Bunch just before the brothers left to enlist in the Union Army in Knoxville.
It is interesting to note that Levi, who had no slaves, fought for the South, and the Burdine brothers, who had three slaves between them, fought for the North.
Just before Samuel and John left to muster-in at Knoxville in October of 1863, they got the news that Levi Hurst had been killed in action in the Battle of Chickamauga in Georgia.
It was a sad, sad, business, the Civil War, and the worst lay ahead. Before ever seeing action, Samuel Burdine fell ill. As his condition worsened he was transferred from a field hospital to Union Hospital #19 in Nashville, but to no avail. Samuel died in that hospital in February of 1864 of dysentery, leaving Elizabeth a widow with two baby daughters. It was the same illness that had taken Elizabeth’s older brother Ransom in the Mexican War.
Back in Claiborne County, as was common among cavalry soldiers who were serving fairly close to home, John Burdine stopped in occasionally to check on his and Samuel’s farms, as well as on his new wife, Matilda. On one such visit in January of 1865, just three months before the war ended, a neighbor saw John and reported him to Confederate officers camped near Tazewell. They picked him up and hanged him as a Union spy.
With both of their sons dead, and their household now including three granddaughters and their widowed daughter-in-law, Elizabeth, Henry and Betsy Burdine heard about a young man whose father had recently been killed and who needed a job. They took him into their home as a farm laborer.
His name was Enoch Payne, younger brother of Anderson Payne who lived in the next county and was recuperating from a shotgun blast to his knee, sustained in the same incident that took the life of their father.
Thus it was, that twenty-seven-year-old Elizabeth and seventeen-year-old Anderson had the occasion to meet. She, one of thousands of Civil-War widows with scant hopes of finding a new husband, and he, crippled for life and ten years her junior. They married in 1866, to the great good fortune of their many descendants, including myself.
Anderson called his new wife, “Bettie.”
~Amy Payne Potts
This story is told with the help of information gathered over many years by Joe Payne, Ann Marchio Hill, and Nell Marchio Quesenberry, together with military records from the National Archives, US Census Records, and Claiborne County and Russell County Tax Lists. Also, the Claiborne Progress. It also drew heavily from the letters of Leland Tate Burdine to Dick Yoakum, both descendants of Martha Jane Burdine Yoakum. Those letters were acquired by Nell Quesenberry and shared on Ancestry.com after her death by her sister, Ann Hill.