Sheehans and Shanes of our family are part of a larger historical tribal grouping called the Eóghanachta. These are agnatic (that is, male line-descended) relatives of the noble line of the ancient Irish king of Munster, Conall Corc. According to Nigel McCarthy, the eminent Irish genealogical researcher of this and many allied south Irish families, “From Ailill Ólom’s son Eoghan Mór descend most of the most powerful kings in Munster for the next 1,000 years, although it is only at least five generations later, following the kingship of Conall Corc, son of Lughaidh and grandson of Ailill Flann Bec, that branches of this family come to be labelled Eóghanacht.” I would direct you first and foremost to Mr. McCarthy’s groundbreaking paper on the topic, available for free at this website:
https://mccarthydna.files.wordpress.com/2021/04/ailill-olom-progeny-alignment-2021-04-14.pdf.
At the above link you will find the raw data and analysis that supports the conclusions I’m going to present below.
Conall Corc established a kingship at the Rock of Cashel, in County Tipperary. From there many of his descendants spread across the province of Munster, including a grouping that would come to be called the Eóghanacht Raithlinn, with origins near Bandon, County Cork. This is the tribal grouping that the Shane Sept descends from according to double-confirmed genetic testing on the Y-chromosome (the part of a man’s DNA that is passed down with very little change over thousands of years from father to son and is therefore an excellent way to research the origins of surnames).
Further genetic testing has revealed that we are a sept (meaning a smaller division of a larger clan) of the Kissane/Cashman clan, which is subordinate to the King of South Munster, the McCarthy Mor. The Kissane name comes from the Irish for “rent driver”: in ancient times, Kissane men were bigger and taller than most others, and so the king enlisted them to “collect the rent” (i.e., drive the cattle) of tribute from the subordinate clans and deliver it to the McCarthy overlord. The Kissanes for nearly a thousand years have dwelt in western County Cork, near the sea (in places like Ballykissane and the Black Valley).
Besides the Kissanes, other great Irish clans have sprung forth from this genetic stem over the centuries, including the Mahonys, the Leahys, and the O’Reillys. Even more closely related than these families to us Shanes though are the O’Donoghues and the Moriartys. The O’Donoghues are one of the few Gaelic clans with a recognized “Chief-of-the-Name” (recognized by the Irish state, that is), and are one of the most illustrious Irish families. Their website is found here: https://www.odonoghue.co.uk/.
History
So much for some of the deep genealogical origins of the Shane Sept. In the future I’m going to add much more information to the above: our ancestors kept impeccable records because birth, family, and heritage were so important to them. We have genealogical records, therefore, stretching all the way back to Adam and misty prehistory. But in the meantime I will recount to you what I have learned of our history in the modern era. Record of our lineage ceases soon after the life of Áedh Osraigheach’s son Donn Creigheach, likely because this line did not assume the kingship of the Eóghanacht Raithlinn ever again. Some information, recounted above, is known about the Kissanes of nearly a thousand years ago, but the specific line that produced the Shane family remained in obscurity until the mid 1700s, when a Michael Sheehan enters the historical record.
Kerry Landscape (credit: Shutterstock)
Part I: From Old Ireland to the Old Dominion
The story of the Shane family begins in these later days in the town of Tralee, on the northern side of the neck of the Dingle Peninsula, an area famed for its lively Celtic culture and the widespread use of the Irish language even today. The town was a focal point for the area, containing roughly 9,000 souls and 1,300 houses, with much commerce. Here a Michael Sheehan was born, about 1745, though he was not a Sheehan by blood—no, this man was of the line of the Eoghanacht Raithlinn, cousin to the princely O’Donoghues and Moriartys, all descendants of the great Conall Corc of legend. His wife Ellen was of the Higgins family, and they were blessed with five children, all of which were baptized at the parish church of Tralee, St. John the Baptist. The church that now stands was built over a half century after our period, but elements of the original chapel are extant to this day: the holy water font, the statue of Our Lady of Wayside, and the gables, now housed in the transept of the present church. The church is on Castle Street, in the Cloon Beg area.
Tralee, County Kerry, Ireland (credit: Google)
Our William, the second eldest after Catherine (1772), was born in 1774. He received the waters of baptism April 24th of that year, at the hands of Father Daniel Mahony, with godparents Daniel Egan and Catherine Kierwick attending. Soon followed Ellen (1780), Thomas (1783), and finally Michael (1785). Michael, the elder, and his family kept close relations with other pious families in their neighborhood, including the Egans, Roches, Fehans, Gallavans, Coffeys, Moriartys, and Leahys, and the other Sheehans and Higginses (one of whom, Father Jacob Sheehan, baptized little Ellen).
In this milieu, near Brogue Maker’s Lane in Tralee, William was formed. At that time all of Ireland was under the dominion of the British monarch, a Protestant, and Roman Catholics in Ireland had no rights. Much ancestral land had been stripped from the Gaelic clans and given to Protestant English gentry in the preceding centuries. Our family, after all these depredations, evinced nothing of its former grandeur. However, liberal sentiments were on the rise, inspired by the violent revolutions taking place in America and France, and by the early 1790s, some of the restrictions on the Catholic Irish (the notorious Penal Laws) began to be relaxed. One of those relaxations concerned the matter of emigration from Ireland.
To the Waves
Emigration, to our wise Irish ancestors, was not a desirable thing, as it was for the religious and economic migrants of England, Scotland, and Germany during this time period. The Irish valued, above all, home and hearth, kith and kin, and all these were located, not across the ocean and over the horizon, but here, in Ireland, where generation after generation had enjoyed the bounty and charm of the emerald isle, content to live as their fathers had. This settled form of living, this lack of striving, is truly the good life, and something that we, as Americans, can faintly remember as having been the way of our fathers as well. But like so many in those days, William—an aggressive and virile young man—could not be prevailed upon to stay put. He was likely possessed of a trade or skill that enabled him to leave—the days of swarms of Irish poor crossing the sea in desperation to escape starvation were not yet. William left because he wanted to.
William undertook the three-month-long treacherous journey to British North America, bringing with him a thick Irish brogue—his native Irish Gaelic, the ancient tongue of the island and of the Celtic race, was useless in the land to which he was sailing. As a relative latecomer to the shores of North America, William was forced to seek his fortune and fame in the wild backcountry of Virginia. Many of the lands farther inland had been long settled by this time, and it was only away yonder, in the fingers and hollers of the mighty Appalachians, that promise still beckoned. It isn’t clear what exactly drew him to Frederick County, or which route he took—did he arrive in the bustling metropolis of Philadelphia and then funnel down the Great Valley to his destination, or did he wash up in Baltimore Bay, and therefrom cross the great Blue Ridge? These details remain unknown.
The Pennsylvania Dutch Go South
Upon the drains of Back Creek, just north of Gainesboro, also in Frederick County, Virginia, lay the 214 verdant acres belonging to Frederick Light, originally of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Of German stock, Frederick had struck out from Pennsylvania on the Great Wagon Road heading south some years earlier, having found the eastern seabord too crowded. The Lights, or Liechtis in the original German, originated in the Emmental, canton of Bern, Switzerland, and were pioneers of the Mennonite faith. With their coreligionists, they had been harried by vicious persecution at the hands of the Calvinists from amidst the towering Alps of their homeland to the Palatinate region to the north, a religiously tolerant realm also populated by the Teutonic race. But there they were not to stay either, and when those in authority turned against them yet again, they finally made for William Penn’s colony in British North America, where it was said that the governing authorities had no creed, and where these peaceful folk could practice their peculiar beliefs unmolested. There Frederick was raised, in Pennsylvania “Dutch” country.
The Emmental Valley (credit: Roland Zumbühl via Wikipedia)
Having been born in the colonies, though, Frederick himself was less concerned with the purity of his doctrine than with the size of his holdings, and so betook himself south, where the folk differed and common cause would have to be made with those not professing the Anabaptist faith. He and his wife Catherine loaded up their Conestogo wagon, hitched a team, and took the Great Wagon Road, that funnel of west- and south-ward migration for the land-hungry, which traced the path of an ancient Indian trail as old as the land itself. Frederick received a land grant from Lord Fairfax near Back Creek in 1780, and he and his brother Peter settled there among the medley of English, Scotch, and German wilderness pioneers that were intent on carving out an existence in western Frederick County.
The Fateful Marriage
Frederick had a daughter named Hannah, born to him about the year he settled his newfound holdings, who, growing up with and befriending the strange, alien neighbors they had settled amongst, set less store by the old ways—even less than her father had. Therefore it was no surprise to anyone when she began to entertain the attentions of that strangest alien of all, the newcomer William when he came calling. William likely made her acquaintance by way of the plow—Mr. Light was not above marrying his daughters out to the hired help, so long as they evinced a sufficient work ethic to the stern old German. The cultural barriers between the maid and the Irish lad proved little enduring, and they were wed with Frederick’s permission in the fall of the year 1800.
A few miles north of his father-in-law’s considerable lands, amid the folds and wrinkles of the Ridge and Valley region of the Appalachian Mountains, just off the north-leading road at a place called Cross Junction, was where William and his new bride settled, next door to his brother-in-law (and probable work mate) Bingley Mason, who was married to his new bride’s sister. The Masons, with origins in Scotland, had settled about them, as had the Neils, Clarks, and Wrights, on land owned by the wealthy Babb and handsomely rich Baker. The farms were criss-crossed by Isaac’s Creek, a tributary of Back, and the area was famed for its many mills: the grist mills and saw mills of the Adamses, Babbses, Clarks, Wrights, and Neils. From this land of slowly churning waterwheels and babbling brooks, the Shanes of the line of William of Tralee issued forth, and truly they
Frederick Light’s Land Grant from Lord Fairfax
Frederick Light’s original 214-acre land grant and nearby landowners, north of Back Creek (GIS credit: fcva.us)
Landowners and renters near Cross Junction, 1810 (based on the US Census and deed records) (GIS credit: fcva.us)
were to cover this great continent from sea to shining sea before a century and a half had elapsed.
The Original Branches
William and Hannah wasted little time in fulfilling the divine mandate, having by some counts thirteen children in as many years. Those who did not die in infancy included the following:
Elizabeth Sheehan (1801-1864), who married Abednego Page in 1817.
Hannah Shane (1802-1820), who possibly married John Smith Hollingshead before her death.
John Shane (1803-1864), who married his cousin Catherine Eliza Mason in 1821, the daughter of Andrew Mason and Mary Light (his aunt).
Nancy Shane (1805-1860), who apparently never married.
Mary Shane (1806-1860), who married Amos Burton in 1827 and finished her life in Gibson County, Indiana.
Samuel Shane (1807-1882), who married Mary Hutton and was the first to go west.
Josiah Shane (1809-), who married an Emily, and went west to Illinois.
Margaret Shane (1810-1837), who married Andrew Mason, Jr., son of Bingley and Barbara Mason, in 1829, and also went west to Gibson County in later life.
Andrew William Shane (1811-1878), who married Rebecca Dehaven on October 1, 1833, the daughter of Job and Sarah Dehaven, and also went west to Illinois.
Catherine Shane (1813-), who married William Cool.
As evidence from the marriages cited above, the family developed close ties with the Masons in those years living just to the north. Bingley Mason was a veteran of the Revolutionary War, and his wife was from Holland. Back Creek Valley settlers hailed from distinct backgrounds and distant lands, but the relatively poor soil and stark landscape bound them into a people, with an original cuisine, dialect, and musical style. What formed between those fingers of the Appalachians was a distinct mountain culture that many would call the heart and soul of America. In many ways this new Appalachian civilization was akin to the Gaelic one William had left—a likeness observers are swift to acknowledge in this day and age of increased cross-cultural contact.
War Comes to William
However, the peace of that early backcountry republic was shattered with the onset of the War of 1812, or what some call the Second War of American Independence, for in truth our mother country had never gotten over the loss of her thirteen colonies and was yet desirous of reclaiming them. Since the beginning of the war the British had blockaded American ports, severely handicapping the young country’s economy. In August of 1814, the Royal Navy smashed through United States Navy defenses and landed in Virginia, the home of William and family. Proceeding north to the state of Maryland, on August 24th, around noon, a British force of army regulars and Royal Marines totally routed a much larger force of US Army soldiers and state militiamen at the Battle of Blandensburg, the Americans having been haphazardly placed in their defenses. This blow to the struggling republic was what to this day has been called “the greatest disgrace ever dealt to American arms.” Within a few hours, however, this national embarrassment would be eclipsed by an even greater national tragedy: that night, our capitol Washington burned. Alexandria, downriver of the ruined city, was captured and plundered as American fighting men retreated back into the wilderness. Feeling their advantage, the British turned their attentions north, to Baltimore.
Our William, though now nigh forty years old and already the father of a multitude, received news of these happenings, not but 85 miles from little Back Creek valley. That old fire in his belly had been dormant for several years now, but the rampage of the redcoats across Virginia proved enough to reignite it. William had seen the fortunes of his family destroyed by the Crown back in Erin; he would not stand idly by and let them again usurp him, in Virginia.
The men of the county streamed to the banners of Lieutenant Colonel Griffin Taylor, a magistrate from Winchester and member of the Established Church, who was appointed by General Winder of the 10th Military District. Upon volunteering, William found himself assigned to Captain James Anderson’s Company of Infantry. Colonel Taylor proceeded with his hardscrabble recruits in haste across Northern Virginia towards Baltimore at the order of General Winder. There was not a second to lose.
Baltimore
Colonel Taylor was ordered to defend the Ferry Branch, a mile and a half west of Fort McHenry, which defended the entrance to Baltimore. The preparations began immediately, and the crippling physical toll that battle takes on even young men was felt by William at once. Barricades had to be erected, supplies hauled up and distributed, and trenches dug. And the unceasing rounds of watch, demanding inhuman levels of vigilance, wracked him with a weariness unlike any he had known before. When the reports came rolling in of the British assaults at Hampstead Hill, just to the east of the city and far away from Taylor’s Regiment, the mood soured. Men in these situations, after all, come to desire battle, strange as that may sound, when they have spent themselves in preparation for it. But their disappointment would not last.
The anxious impatience slowly morphed into a sickening dread as the horizon became punctuated with billowing sails. The rocket vessel HMS Erebus, along with five bomb ships, steadily grew larger in aspect to the men of Taylor’s Regiment until the cries and screams of “Fire!” from among their officers rose up like the waves of the Patapsco River itself. The countering rockets and mortars from the British warships came crashing down along the Maryland coastline, spreading fire and dirt and rocks in every direction. The forts occupied by the men from Frederick County were not the main target, however. The prize was Fort McHenry, which commanded the entrance to Baltimore Harbor. After the initial destructive pass, the ships turned and maneuvered themselves outside the range of the defenders’ cannons. Once safe, they anchored and trained their guns on Fort McHenry, unleashing hell’s fury on the proud fort on the pointe. The bombardment would continue for 25 hours and include some 1,800 cannonballs. William could only watch as fire rained down from heaven on his countrymen inside the fort.
The Battle of Ferry Branch
Darkness fell, and the red glare of the rockets did not cease. At 3:00 o’clock in the morning Colonel Arthur Brooke, having ascertained the difficulty of a frontal land assault from the east by way of Hampstead Hill, was ordered with his regulars back to their ships. Vice Admiral Alexander Cochrane, Commander of North America and the West Indies, desirous of diverting American strength away from the east, ordered a beach landing at the Ferry Branch, which as stated was west of Fort McHenry. All that stood between Cochrane and his goal was Taylor’s Regiment, the Virginians.
In the dead of night the small landing vessels glided over the glassy black harbor, towards Maryland soil. But those backwoods eyes that had so often spied the minute movements of a squirrel or a deer amidst the thick and tangled upcountry underbrush did not miss the approach of the enemy, even in darkness. The call went swiftly and silently up to the officers, and the orders were made ready: on signal, fire. The entire regiment stirred and waited with bated breath. All at once the calm, still banks the landers were approaching erupted in orange fire. Bullets sailed and whizzed in a hail down on the small ships, tearing wood, sail, and flesh. William hastily reloaded as smoke choked the air and obscured the field of fire. Whoops and hollers rang out through the night air as the excitement burst forth with each volley. When the smoke cleared, the boats were no more—capsized or routed and rowing furiously in the opposite direction. A great cheer rang out along the Ferry Branch.
The landing party deflected at the Ferry Branch (credit: Stuart Butler)
But during all this, Fort McHenry had been given no rest. Explosions still rocked its thick, solid walls even as the sun was peering over the Atlantic. A man sent from Washington to negotiate the release of an American prisoner of war was observer to all this, watching it with William but from the other side of the bay aboard a truce ship. They both saw what happened next, both wide awake though sleep deprived and weary beyond thought: a giant American flag being hoisted high above dogged Fort McHenry as the dawn’s early light gleamed across the waters of the Patapsco. Indeed, the flag was still there. McHenry stood. Francis Scott Key, aboard that truce ship, began jotting down verses at that moment on a scrap of paper—he had witnessed the rebirth of a nation.
Colonel Brooke knew what this meant. He had been ordered only to continue with the assault if he could be certain there were less than 2,000 American fighting men defending the coast. The flag proved that he had failed. The lumbering British warships heaved, and departed.
What rapture of relief and jubilation burst forth when once it became clear to the men along the banks of the Ferry Branch that the ships were actually retreating. Their excitement was swiftly contained by their superiors, however; discipline had to be maintained: there were numerous repairs to be made and new fortifications to be erected—no one knew at that time that the ships had indeed gone for good.
The Pestilence that Lays Waste
In the midst of all this cautious joy, William found himself feeling over the next two weeks as if something in his strength had been taken from him that he couldn’t quite get back. His countenance darkened, and his movements slowed. He began to think pensively of Hannah and the children. So many children, and so young—not one even fourteen years of age yet. What was it that afflicted our protagonist? Was he injured in the Battle of Baltimore? Not likely—there is no record of him being a casualty, and in that event he would’ve left his post earlier. More probable is the ever-present danger of sickness and infection, which in those days killed more soldiers than any ordnance of the enemy.
Finally, on September 29th, with worsening symptoms, he began to suspect the worst and made up his mind. The next morning, September 30th, 1814, the company clerk of Anderson’s Infantry marked William Sheehan absent, with the explanatory note, “Desertion.” With the feverish defensive preparations and relief work going on, no one paid the occurrence much mind. After all, men of the militia frequently came and went for various reasons, with a “desertion” later becoming “leave” when the man returned from whatever good and proper business he had attended to back home. But William would not be one of these.
With strained gait and aching body, William returned across northern Virginia, by foot, horse, and wagon. Sheer determination spurred him on, with only the thought of his dear wife’s face, and those of the children, driving his death errand. Seven days he journeyed, barely sleeping, variously hot and cold, nearly delirious. His gaunt figure appeared at Cross Junction on October 5th. Someone uttered a cry, and everyone within earshot rushed out down the path toward the staggering figure. He collapsed into their arms.
The nine days that followed were the most difficult Hannah Sheehan had ever lived through. She tended to her husband day and night, variously ordering this or that child to draw a pale of water, or crush some herbs, or pull soup off the fire. William came in and out, speaking wildly, but having bouts of grave coherence that seemed to punctuate the madness unexpectedly. The neighbors in and about the neighborhood trickled in, offering help (which Hannah desperately needed) and expressing their grief at seeing the great patriarch in such a state. As each day dragged on, the outcome became more certain. The doctor could do nothing but encourage Hannah to keep him comfortable. Finally, on October 14th, one month after the Battle of Baltimore, with his family, friends, and relations gathered round his bed, William departed this life.
Birth of a Name
Down the pike a few miles, in Gainesboro, was an old Quaker cemetery established by some of the earliest settlers of Back Creek. The Quakers themselves were a shrinking sect, and the plot of land had plenty of room, so it was decided that William should be laid to rest there, with many of the other early settlers, Quaker and non. When the tombstone was etched, Hannah demanded that the words “Gone but not forgotten” be inscribed beneath the death date. Surely, a man does not suddenly leave a young wife and a brood of hungry children alone in this world without leaving a scar.
They also decided, as a family, to spell the name as “Shane” rather than Sheehan, so that “Wm Shane” was how the name appeared on the stone. This marks the first public usage of the family name Shane, an Anglicized (and Americanized) spelling of the more Gaelic-sounding Sheehan (Ó Síodhacháin). This unique moniker has ever since been our standard upon these shores. It is fitting that our branch, which transformed and was transformed by this wild new continent, should receive a title unique to its existence here. And yet even in its new form, the name retains some hint of its Irish origin.
The Mason Protectorate
Our mother Hannah did not remarry for four years, even with all those children. Old man Frederick, still in possession of his original land grant, looked after his daughter and grandchildren as much as he could. His earthly course also ended on the 14th day of the month, September, 1816. That fellow Rezin, relation of Bingley and Andrew who lived one house down, was himself now a widower and eventually came calling. He and his wife had bought land down the hill from the Shanes just before her death, and so Rezin and Hannah both found themselves without spouse and in the same neighborhood, with many mouths to feed on both sides. Rezin wed Hannah, and the Shane clan came under his protection. The eldest son, John (born 1803), with his stepdaddy now a Mason, found even more reasons to place himself in the company of his cousin Miss Catherine Eliza Mason, daughter of Andrew Mason next door. They wed September 20th, 1821. (In remote districts such as this during that time, taboos around cousin marriages were, let’s say, much more relaxed).
The decades that followed saw peaceful community life take root and flourish in western Frederick County. It was not only nationally but locally the “Era of Good Feelings,” albeit one without a lot in the way of material goods for us and ours. William’s departure had left the family in sore economic straits despite Rezin’s best efforts. That lack, and the promise of greener pastures elsewhere, caused the first defection from the ancestral home: Samuel Shane, second eldest son, struck out to the land beyond Virginia’s western bounds, on the other side of the mighty Ohio River. Samuel made it as far as Jefferson County, in the upper valley of the Ohio, by 1830. These Shanes became famous as the owners of a prominent hotel there in the village of Springfield. Much more remains to be written about their journeys.
The Shane Hotel in Springfield, Ohio (credit: cbcolombo)
John Shane of Gainesborough
Back home, John took up leadership of the family as he came of age, which became all the more necessary when old man Rezin died and Rezin Jr. whisked their common mother Hannah and sisters Mary and Margaret (with husbands Amos Burton and Andrew Mason, respectively) away west to the Indiana country in 1836. John kept some cows, as most tradesmen did, and slowly acquired the tools necessary to the trade he had picked up in his father’s absence. Reared a carpenter and a miller, John used these tools and his hard-won skills to make a name for himself in the community, skillfully organizing his affairs and making wise business deals, and plying his craft at the various mills thereabout. He, Catherine, and their six children soon moved across the county, to a job and home to which a Mr. Francis Silver had enticed him. He signed a lease for five years for a house and garden adjoining the small village of White Hall, where he was to pay Mr. Silver $20 a year and to work for the man on his nearby farm, with the customary wages to be paid him. It was an idyllic setting astride Apple Pie Ridge, several ridges east from the Cross Junction area. Orchards and wheat farms blanketed the gently cascading hills as they leveled out eastward into the Great Valley. Peaceful though it was, it was only temporary—John soon came to resent being at the beck and call of Francis Silver.
Nearby White Hall Grocery Store (credit: Grayghost01 via Wikipedia)
That brings us to John’s other younger brother, Andrew William (named partially for the late patriarch). He was “hiring out,” as they say, to make ends meet, and had relocated down the North Frederick Turnpike, past his grandfather Light’s old farm, to the hamlet of Gainesborough, formerly Pughtown (laid out by that old Quaker, Job Pugh, in 1796).
Original plat of Pughtown (later Gainesborough, then Gainesboro)
Andrew probably convinced John to move to Gainesborough, but John didn’t just move there: he bought a platted lot there, Lot 2 south of Washington Street on the western side of the turnpike (called Adams Street within Gainesborough). Almost certainly this was the first buying of a piece of ground in centuries by a Shane. Remember that the Gaels had been dispossessed for some time back in Ireland. As such, few owned the ground they tilled. You’d have to reach back to remote times, before the English conquest and our fall into obscurity, to find our fortunes so bright as they had now become then in the ‘40s in that Golden Age in America: John with his house and lot (valued at $500), Andrew renting next door, and cousins all a-flutter, racing about the humble village, up and down the hillside under which their forebears rested (for the old Quaker cemetery, where everyone in our family was being buried, lay on the west-facing slope just beyond Turkey Lane alley to the east).
This was as John liked it—close to the buzzing communal life of the little hamlet, in the thick of things. Folks around a village need carpenters, and so he put his new hand plane, auger, and handsaw to good use. He could talk politics at the store down the road and drum up a little business in the process. And he had land enough for a garden, a red milch cow in the yard, and a field full of hay (or could
John’s lot in Gainesborough bought in the early ‘40s; a Murphy, and then a Triplett, lived to the north; Andrew William rented to the south; and various Browns lived south of that. The dotted line represents part of a duplex owned by Maria Wood in later years, probably subdivided off by John (GIS credit: fcva.us)
rent space for planting as needed). John and Catherine were blessed with these children:
Barbara Ann Shane (1822-1899), who married into the nearby Adams family (to William, a local farmer) and finished out her days there in Gainesborough.
William Shane (1824-1896), also a carpenter, who would be rightly termed “the ambitious”: his tale will be told directly.
Benjamin Franklin Shane (1826-1861), also known as the gunsmith of Cold Stream, Hampshire County, married Catherine Gill and moved a few ridges over into what would become West Virginia after the War. He was the master smith who handcrafted maple, brass, and iron into exquisite muzzle loading long rifles, signing them “B.F.S” on the barrel. He established a shop along the Capon & North Branch Turnpike, a strategic location where this vernacular style of gun making flourished in those days. Settlers moving west had to pass through the area, and so in a real sense B.F. and his fellow gunsmiths were the artisans who made possible the taming of the frontier. B.F. was a raucous fellow who bought whiskey by the gallon. Whether this had anything to do with his death by a falling anvil in his shop in 1861 is unknown.
Benjamin Franklin Shane-made rifle from the 1850s (credit: Mark Smith). Note his signature “B.F.S.” (bottom left) and the acorn finial found on many percussion rifles from this part of Virginia in this era (bottom right)—this emblem was incorporated into the Shane family arms
Martha Jane Shane (1828-1903), who married James Triplett (whose family lived next door), did like her sister Barbara and lived a full life.
Benjamin Franklin Shane’s home in West Virginia
Andrew Jackson Shane (1831-1905), who settled on Timber Ridge.
Nancy Maria Shane (1832-1893), who married a Triplett from next door.
Hannah Elizabeth Shane (1837-1919), who married into the Dunlap family.
John Francis Shane (1840-1915), who would carry the family name forward in Gainesborough.
The Junior Line of Andrew William
Next door, John’s brother Andrew William grew wheat, corn, and raised hogs and milch cows on his rented lot. He had a bay mare for riding about the country and all the farming implements he needed. He was a serious-minded fellow, more interested in theology than current events. He married in 1833 the daughter of Revolutionary War hero Job Dehaven. Rebecca (Dehaven) Shane was his bride, she having been raised up the valley in an area that would come to be called De Haven (from the fact that the Dehaven clan covered the hills as thick as thieves in that district). She bore him three sons and two daughters, but died tragically in 1845. Their children were:
Job DeHaven Shane (1834-1908), a Norton County, Kansas, pioneer.
Job Dehaven Shane and wife Margaret (Hinckle) Shane
Sarah Jane Shane (1836-1886), an Olathe County, Kansas pioneer with her husband Mahlon W. Whitacre.
Isaac Shane (1839-1916), a one-time Kansas pioneer who ended up founding the Tennessee branch.
Margaret Esther Shane (1842-1884), who married a Job DeHaven Clark. She stayed on in Frederick County.
John William Shane (1844-1906), who married Frances L. Willey and founded the Springfield, Missouri, branch.
He wasted no time in remarrying Sarah “Laney” Adams the following year. The Adams were an equally prolific family throughout the Gainesborough area, with English and Quaker origins, though by this time nearly all of them had fallen away from the demanding faith of their ancestors. Those born of this union were:
James Franklin Shane (1848-1924), who married a Hinckle and finished out his days in Palmyra, Illinois.
Peter Morgan Shane (1850-1924), who married Susan Hart and moved a few counties over to Effingham County, Illinois.
Rebecca Ann Shane (1853-1930), who married Curtis Brown in 1875 and moved north to Peoria County.
Silas Dean Shane (1854-1941), who had a son that opened the C.M. Shane Funeral Home in Girard, Illinois.
George Shane (1861-1864), who died young.
Social Matters
Concerning religion, the people of Gainesborough had lately become quite attached to the faith of the Methodist Episcopal Church, with many former Quakers, Mennonites, and Calvinists settling on this more moderate brand of religion within a generation or two of settlement. John and Catherine had embraced the Methodism of the circuit riders shortly after their marriage, and the rest of the family soon followed suit. (It helped that a Methodist church was constructed a few years later right down the street. Andrew, however, never felt satisfied with Methodism—he seems to have inherited the more rigorous spirit of his Mennonite and Calvinist ancestors.) Politically, like most Southerners, they found common cause with the Democratic Party and took no notice of the agitation coming from New England about abolitionism. While not owning slaves themselves, they knew several people who did, and it’s likely that they didn’t care much about the issue either way.
On that subject, it’s important to understand sociologically that slavery wasn’t very common in that part of Frederick County. Being situated on the edge of the Shenandoah Valley, the values of the Valley were also those of Back Creek: small, industrious farms; independence and self-reliance; and strong community institutions. The area embodied the Jeffersonian ideal of a nation of productive yeomanry. This at a time when the fields to the east, across the Blue Ridge Mountains, were falling into ruin from soil exhaustion. Nevertheless, many both in old eastern Virginia and western were finding property ownership unattainable. Into this category fell our Andrew.
Like so many Virginians of that time, the insatiable appetite for land overcame the filial attachment to home and kin, propelling them across the mountains and into the Old Northwest. With that similar restlessness and desire for glory that had compelled his father across the Atlantic Ocean half a century prior, Andrew William (like his brother Samuel before him) decided to go West. Even some of John’s sons, seeing their inheritance being divided amongst them, decided their fortunes were brighter elsewhere.
Legal Troubles for William the Younger
Among these most notably was William, John’s eldest son (born 1824), who in April of 1853 acquired two land grants, one a lot in town next door to Doctor Brown and one a 31-acre farm up the hill to the east, adjacent to David Adams and Henry Fout. William was a shrewd speculator and a risk taker—he financed his purchase of this grant with a loan from the Bank of the Valley and used his father’s house and lot as collateral, along with a good many of his worldly goods—his black mare, his carpenter’s tools; even his bed. All would have gone according to plan, had he not misjudged his farm’s property lines and cut down Mr. Adams’s timber in addition to his own. He was summoned to court in June after a suit was filed by Adams but didn’t show. The court gave Adams permission to recover his losses.
The survey of William’s land grant next to Adams
William now had his mortgage and his damages owed to David Adams to pay, and he was coming up short. A month later, with payments on his land now in arrears, he was hauled to court again. William’s insolvency being manifest to all present, the court ordered a fifty-dollar judgment on him and his property sold at auction. There was enough before the sale to keep his father’s lot, but after such a blow, everything else had to go. His lot in Gainesborough was auctioned off by Sheriff Gilkeson in September, John’s neighbor David Brown being the highest bidder.
After such an ordeal and the ensuing embarrassment and hard feelings, is it any wonder that William became the latest Shane to strike out west? Still unmarried and having already tasted financial ruin at the age of 29, he bid his dear parents goodbye forever and drove his wagon out west to the plains of northwest Ohio, where he finally got land, wife, and a new start, founding an illustrious branch of the family that endures to this day.
The Westward Trek of Andrew William Shane
Andrew William, his uncle, having watched the westward stream of friends and relations, decided to try his own hand at pioneering. He had a son Isaac, brown-haired, blue-eyed, and dark complected, born in 1839 to his first wife and so a Dehaven by blood. He had been sent off at the age of eleven to live with his cousins, Barak Dehaven and family, who owned a large farm just northeast of Gainesborough, towards De Haven. It was there Isaac learned what it meant to hire oneself out for wages, and so he understood his father’s desire for independence when it was announced they would be heading west (though, he marked, he would surely miss his cousin John Francis, who was about the same age and lived next door).
Andrew, children, and young wife Sarah thereafter hitched their covered wagon and all their worldly belongings to a team of well-disciplined oxen and set out for the unknown. Andrew set his sights on the Illinois country, having heard tell of its rich corn-growing soil. Thus began the great Westward wandering, which would not end for young Isaac for some thirty years.
Andrew William Shane
They went due west, as straight as they could down the winding, furrowed roads between the mountains, coming finally, months later, to Macoupin County, Illinois. They stopped near a clustering of other pioneer families, in a vast expanse of nothingness—nothing but prairie, woods, and the occasional rude shack erected by similar strivers. It wouldn’t be until 1865 that the town was finally laid out by neighbor James Steidley, and named Barr, after the Barr family that had set up a trading post there. Barr’s store had become the focal point of communal life, and a two-story frame building was built. Equal parts bazaar, meeting lodge, and polling place, the front porch frequently was host to lively discussions among the menfolk while wives shopped inside.
Andrew’s financial position got better out here, and in 1860 he was sitting on $500 worth of land. Feeling ambitious, in 1863 he constructed with a Mr. Henderson a steam flouring mill in the small hamlet, drawing on the knowledge of millwork he had imbibed from his youth amid the many mills of Isaac’s Creek near Cross Junction. Technology as it was in those days, grinding even a few sacks of corn or wheat took hours. Many times Andrew noticed the consternation of folks lined up out the door, awaiting their turn to grind. The conditions inside the mill were hot and dusty, but farmers would sometimes wait a day or two for their turn.
The Brother War: Federals and Confederates
During this time calamity struck the young nation once again, only this time from within. The Southern states, including the Shanes’ native Virginia, withdrew from the Union in 1861. When Fort Sumter was fired on, the call went out for volunteers bring the South back into the fold. Isaac, living in Illinois and being of age, enlisted later in the year after getting his affairs in order. He had inherited that old fire that William had, and whether it was right or wrong, he craved a fight and an adventure. An excellent equestrian, he saddled and rode down to the recruitment office, intent on using his prowess to join the cavalry. Impressed by the boy and his steed, they granted it, and signed him up for a one-year enlistment. Isaac became a member of the U.S. Army, 10th Illinois Cavalry, Company E, on November 25th, 1861.
Isaac’s first duty station was Camp Butler, the second largest military training camp in the state. Here he was mustered in and put through the crucible of basic training, finding his earlier cocksureness a little embarrassing. He endured, however, and in December the freshly minted cavalrymen were removed to Quincy, Illinois. They continued their drills (and merrymaking), practiced their horse- and marksmanship, and built a good comradery. In April they were ordered to Springfield, Missouri, riding for weeks until they came down into the Ozark country. From here, being attached to the District of Southwest Missouri, the regiment was used to make forays into Confederate Arkansas.
Isaac’s enlistment came up October 14th of 1862, however, before Echo Company had seen any action. He decided, as jolly a time as it had been, drinking and shooting and riding and sleeping out under the stars with the men, that he hadn’t much stomach for this war. He returned, honorably discharged, back to Macoupin County, with fond memories but, more importantly, a conscience unscathed.
When he returned he noticed that young Martha Hulse, daughter of Mr. Thomas Hulse, a Tennessean who lived nextdoor to Isaac’s father Andrew, had grown up quite a bit. As the conquering hero returning home from war (nevermind the absence of any conquering), Martha fell prey to his charms, and they were married in July of 1863, near Barr’s store. It may have been from her and hers that he was told about the Tennessee country, which would have consequences in later years.
Back in Back Creek Valley, the recent unpleasantness was wreaking much greater havoc upon the longsuffering Shanes that had stayed planted on Virginia soil. The tactical mastermind, General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, was giving the Federals hell up and down the Shenandoah Valley, outsmarting their much larger and better equipped forces in battle after battle. The people of Frederick County stood by helplessly as their towns, homes, and farms changed hands between the two sides a dizzying number of times. The depredations and heavy handedness of the Union forces (plus the cultural disaffinity between North and South) imbued many folks in and around Back Creek Valley with Southern sympathies.
John made no secret of these feelings. After the first foray of Southern forces into the north ended in the pyrrhic victory of Sharpsburg, September 17, 1862, Stonewall and Longstreet limped back across the Potomac and spent the Indian Summer in Winchester and the surrounding countryside. The people of Gainesborough cheered to see the Gray again in their valley. Gifts and tokens of support were proffered up by one and all, young and old.
But the ragged army had needs as well. Captain John W. Suttive, 9th Georgia Volunteers, dismounted on the Gainesborough Road on October 13th outside the home of John and Catherine. John’s fields behind the house were glistening in the afternoon sun. The horses of Longstreet’s Corps were malnourished, and the Army desperately needed hay. As John emerged from the modest cottage, Captain Suttive removed his hat and explained the need. The government in Richmond would pay, he explained: three dollars per hundred pounds, the market rate. John shook his head, smiled, and calmly told him the price would only be a single dollar per hundred, and only to defray his costs. The two men shook over it.
Regardless of the Shane family’s sympathies, they nevertheless kept their decency: whenever John and Catherine were forced to turn their Gainesborough home into a hospital after large battles, they turned no one away, regardless of uniform color. John departed this life not after after the strife was o’er, in December of 1865, leaving Catherine to struggle on without him (though her several children nearby rendered aid when possible).
One of those children, the most daring (and the boyhood companion of our Isaac), wore the gray, but it is unclear in which unit. It is likely that he was in the Engineer Battalion, and that he was captured near Prince George County, Maryland. Whatever the truth is about his service record, the men of that district surely fought as if they had nothing to lose. And in truth, there was little left—the ancestral home of the Shanes, and all of Virginia and the South, lay desolate when finally the rifles fell silent.
John Shane’s receipt from the Confederate Government
(On the other hand, other Shanes, such as those of the line of Samuel, rendered up even greater service to the cause of the Union, and their stories remain to be told in future editions.)
Founding of Shane Lane
The end of the war saw a new beginning for the Shane heartland, however. With the death of the great John, the eldest of William of Tralee, John’s youngest son, the soldier John Francis, was able to purchase a new homestead for the family, just east of Gainesborough. On March 25, 1867, he purchased approximately 98 acres from James Pangle adjoining Patrick Howard, Frederick Grofs, and Joseph Davis. The rolling hills of his new farm bordered Siler Road and Back Creek and had all the blessings of a well-situated holding for those days. It is from the subdivision of this very farm that Shane Lane sprang many years later, which remains a lasting memorial to the Shane role in the establishment of the Gainesboro community.
The J.F. Shane Farm, namesake of the current Shane Lane, which traverses a portion of it (GIS cred: fcva.us)
John Francis Shane, C.S.A.
Part II: Isaac, Stem of the Tennessee Branch
To the North Country
Oblivious of the fate of his aunts and uncles and cousins back home, Isaac was afflicted by a tragedy of his own: the health of his dear wife Martha. They had remained childless these years, and she finally succumbed to illness in 1871. Isaac awoke from this long trial to find himself a widower, with no heirs, and no land. His brother Job Dehaven Shane had bought property a few towns over in Palmyra and was doing well as a merchant there. His younger sister Margaret Esther had stayed back in Virginia, and his older sister Sarah lived over in Carlinville with her husband, Malan Whittaker. His brother John William had gone west to Missouri.
That old restlessness awakened again in Isaac, and prone as he was to rashness, he announced his intention to move, of all places, to Minnesota. He had concluded that to really succeed in this world, he would have to get a leg up on the competition—and that meant going where others would not. He had heard that some cousins of his, Lights by surname (kin to the first matron of the family, his grandmother Hannah) had pioneered the frozen wilderness back years ago. Benjamin Franklin Light, the patriarch of those cousins, was now rumored to be one of the most prominent men in that district (which was quite true; he would go on to serve in the Minnesota State House of Representatives). Surely, with all his land and connections, and recognizing in Isaac a Virginia cousin with “Pennsylvania Dutch” roots like himself, old Mr. Light would see to it that the young striver was taken care of.
Benjamin Franklin Light, Minnesota pioneer
For decades the Minnesota Territory had been virtually sealed off to mass settlement by its dark, impenetrable forests. The few hardy folk that had survived their first winter there came by steamboat up the mighty Mississippi. That all changed in 1849 when a rough trail was finally opened up along the east bank of the Mississippi, connecting the territory with civilization to the south in Wisconsin. It was only navigable in winter, and homes being so few and far between in those days, surviving the trip during that harsh season was no mean feat. It was along this treacherous path that Benjamin Franklin Light led his family in 1856. They finally stopped in Carver County, east of the small trading post of Watertown (along today’s County Road 20, north of Oak Lake). Watertown lay on the South Fork Crow River, which, flowing as it did north to the Mississippi, provided access to trade and a market for goods. Industrious and diligent, in 1861 he supplanted the log cabin he had initially built with a fine frame house, one of the first in the district.
Benjamin Light’s lands, east of Watertown (credit: Google)
The War, economic collapse, and the 1862 rampage of the Sioux Indians all served to slow and nearly stop the conquest of Minnesota by the white man. Nevertheless, by the 1870s, swarms of Scandinavians, Germans, and Irish were journeying to Minnesota, as well as a torrent of Americans from the Midwestern states. Isaac Shane was one of them, and in 1872 he left Illinois for Carver County.
Tenacious as he was, Isaac’s plan worked, and even better than he had hoped: he found himself marrying Mr. Light’s daughter, Hester Ann, on March 18, 1873. Hester was born in Indiana in 1854 (therefore making her fifteen years Isaac’s junior) during her family’s migration across the Old Northwest. She had been born pioneering and neither knew nor desired any other life. Isaac found in her a willing participant in his visions of grandeur. This union of a Shane and a Light, the second in as many generations, recalled the great cultural traditions (Gaelic Irish and Swiss German) of our founding on this continent. The line of Isaac recapitulates these origins and makes them the foundation of the great branch of the Shane family he would go on to found.
This union would prove fecund, and the very next year, Rose May Shane was born, in the dead of winter. Becoming a father did not calm Isaac’s ambitions; on the contrary, it enflamed them. Now more than ever he redoubled his efforts at acquiring property. He slowly decided, though, over the next few years of laboring in that wintry wilderness, that he may’ve missed the mark: perhaps not north, but west lay his fortune. Using his earnings, he decided on an even bolder plan. But he would need help.
The Western Prairie
The Shanes journeyed south, back to Illinois. There in Macoupin County, Isaac tried to convince his father and his brother, Job Dehaven, to homestead out in Kansas. Congress had passed in 1862 the Homestead Act, which, Isaac emphasized, practically gave the land away out west. Andrew, a tired man, had sold off his interest in the mill and bought 30 acres in Bird Township, to the east, where the Hulses had also moved. He was busy with his second wife and Isaac’s half-siblings. He was done with all these schemes, having conspired
Isaac Shane
in his fair share of them. Job was hesitant. He owned land, and was doing quite well, there in Palmyra where he lived. Isaac’s sister Sarah Whittaker and husband Malan also balked. No matter; he, Hester, an’ little Rose May were going West.
Hester Ann (Light) Shane
Isaac and his stalwart wife loaded up their few household goods and drove their covered wagon west across the corn fields. They crossed the mighty Mississippi River on a ferry at Alton, Illinois, and set about traversing the entire breadth of the state of Missouri. Here they were frequently gripped with thirst for lack of water, which was scarce in that country. The Missourians capitalized on this scarcity by selling it 10 cents a jug to the westward wanderers, and on many occasions they were forced to pay this price.
Upon entering Kansas they were in what seemed like a deserted, alien land, with gently waving hills of prairie spreading out in all directions. The only trees were clustered around watercourses, which were plenteous enough. Coming finally into Elk County, in the vicinity of Union Center, the first order of business was to finish a dugout before winter. As the new residents toiled in those early weeks, living in their travelling tent, songbirds sang a welcome to them, and whether it be the “Right-here, right-here: here, right-here” of the redbird or the “Laz-i-ness will kill you” of the yellow breasted meadow lark, the messages came through loud and clear to Isaac and Hester.
Hester was soon with child again, and Isaac was left doing much of the work himself. Mercifully, little Martha Bell Shane was born healthy on March 6th, 1877, out on the Kansas prairie. She was the only one of her siblings to boast the honor of a Kansas homestead birth.
Indian attacks were not unheard of out here in the west; just south were lands that officially belonged to the Osage tribe but that had been inundated by settlers in recent years, much to the consternation of the tribe. Buffalo bones still lay scattered across the prairie, relics of their famed hunting expeditions on the high plains. News of an attack that killed some settlers made the rounds that year and disturbed Hester greatly.
All this while Isaac set about enticing his brothers and sisters to follow him, probably by furiously writing letters to his kin back in Illinois, extolling the glories of Kansas and pioneer life. Job, his more cautious brother, read these with great interest. The scoffing of the others soon ceased. It wasn’t before too long that Job found himself on that same westward march, even going farther, to Graham County. But not, however, before they had laid old Andrew William to rest. Dying on July 28th, 1878, he left all to his wife Sarah and youngest son Silas. He was interred at Charity Baptist Cemetery, in Carlinville (not far from his home in Bird), of which church he had been a member (he had found the simple piety and services of the Baptist faith a surer foundation in a changing world than the ceremonials of the Methodists). As initiator and leader of the exodus west, which his children would finish, he was a man of action, though not rash: he had succeeded in his task, and bequeathed as much of the bounty of this new continent to his heirs as he could. The grieving continued into the fall, at which point those with westward designs began their journeys.
Once Job had really left Palmyra, the Whittakers were not far behind, bringing younger half-brother Peter Shane and family in their wake. Less determined than Job and his dutiful wife Margaret Catherine, who continued along the Oregon Trail to claims farther west, Malan and Sarah Whittaker, along with Peter and Susan Shane, forked south to Elk County, where they hoped to reap the benefits of Isaac’s now-extensive experience. They would have him for a time.
Back and Forth
After acting as a witness for a Mr. James Emerson’s claim in October of 1879 and having assisted his relations with their initial homesteading conundrums, Isaac began to feel that gnawing sense of restlessness well up in him again. Perhaps, with the money gained from this pioneering enterprise, he could really come into his own by investing it back east. It was here that an idea, previously inchoate but very deep in him, began to take hold: why could he not buy and sell his way into wealth? Yes, it would be hell for his family. He looked at Hester. He knew of her desire for a place to call home, though little did any of her pain show through her stoic demeanor. He promised her that, as soon as he made the big trade, or if they found a place they just couldn’t leave, he would stop, and they would settle down. Uneasily, she agreed, and hoped for the best.
Isaac, Hester, and the two girls retraced their footsteps across the prairie all the way to the fields of Macoupin County. There, back in Barr Township, near his father’s old place, the third daughter, Minnie, was born in 1880, and the first son, Truman Eugene, in 1882. But Isaac’s eyes were ever shifting, always on the lookout for a deal. In two years he dragged the family back up to Minnesota. Hester was delighted to be near her parents and siblings again but was becoming somewhat exhausted by the pace of all this. Still, she accepted the logic: enough deals well executed, and poverty would be a distant memory. They lived in Delano, the next town up along the South Fork Crow River from Watertown, where her father’s estate was. In 1884, Edgar Milo was born at their home in Delano, the farthest north a Shane was ever born.
Surveying the real estate situation in Wright County, Minnesota, Isaac surmised that he would be better off taking his earnings somewhere land was cheaper, thus exploiting the price disparities between markets: arbitrage, if you will. And that meant going south, but not just south to Illinois—no, away down south, back across the Mason-Dixon line, whence he had not been in one score and ten. Some of the old Union soldiers he knew had been to parts of the South besides Virginia (because he surely couldn’t go back there, with his tail between his legs), and he got the notion that of all these places, Tennessee must be the fairest.
Hester was taken aback by the idea. Who did they know in Tennessee? On the other hand, it wasn’t a frontier, like Kansas, and there were no Indians. And she would suffer herself removed from these blistering northern winters with nary a complaint. And after all, she could see that look in his eye—she could trust that. It had seen them through thousands of miles of wandering, years of desolate homesteading, and not a few subzero winters. She agreed. And she and Isaac, along with Rosie, Mattie, Minnie, Gene, and Eddie, loaded up the wagon one last time and headed south.
The Tennessee Country
It was easy going until they got down into the Ohio River valley; there the hills started, and the roads got worse. Crossing into Kaintuck, Isaac began to hear a familiar sound—the lilt of the Southern accent, and he noticed himself slipping back into it. The manners of the people were more surprising to Hester, but comforting still—she commented continually on how they reminded her of mother and daddy.
Isaac knew of a city called Nashville that was mostly spared during the late War, and he had heard of its burgeoning commercial and industrial economy. He himself was a farmer by day and had no interest in the new mechanisms of production, beyond what could increase his yield. But he had an intuition that farming near such a place would be advantageous: after all, these bankers and captains of industry would need to eat.
He drove the train on, across the picturesque pennyroyal plateau of southern Kentucky, finally crossing into the state of Tennessee. Here the plateau (known as the Highland Rim), as it veered down into the Nashville Basin, rumpled into dark ridges and valleys. Breathtaking vistas stretched out before the traveller upon cresting one of these hills, and the feeling of enchantment and hiddenness was palpable when winding along a creekbed. Isaac knew better than to search for land down in the Nashville Basin. This county had been settled for a century before he stepped foot in it, and all the good bottomlands would certainly be too expensive for him as of yet. However, with the fruit of his earlier labors and wise dealings in hand, he was able to swiftly accomplish the first part of his plan: the purchase of some well-situated land on the Highland Rim.
Isaac’s first 79 acres on Whites Creek Pike, the mouth of Bear Hollow
Looking north on Whites Creek Pike; everything on the left side of the road was Isaac’s (credit both: Google)
October 15, 1885, marks the day Isaac became a landholder in Tennessee, buying up 79 acres on the west side of the Whites Creek Turnpike, just south of the Devil’s Elbow. He owned the mouth of Bear Hollow, but much of this was pristine forest, and little was good for agriculture. Farming in this portion of the Highland Rim consisted of skirting the edges of the great wooded hills and planting in the flatter spaces between. Most of the muddy and impassable roads ran along these hollers and creekbeds. Yet these lands couldn’t be matched for beauty. Verdant forests of black oak, white oak, hickory, ash, sugar maple, poplar, and dogwood covered Isaac’s acres like a blanket. The light brownish-gray Clarksville stony loam he found was most suited to pasture or hayland, but Isaac could get corn, grains, and sorghum out of the better patches.
Subdivide and Conquer
Not two years later did Isaac employ that most effective tactic of subdivision to increase the value of his holdings, selling 45 acres of his land to John W. Fulton, who paid a much-inflated price to Isaac for these 45 acres relative to Isaac’s original purchase price for the whole 79. When Isaac showed Hester the difference, she was dumbfounded. Their real estate had multiplied faster than their rabbits!
Isaac sold the rest of his land that same year to a man named Wyatt Johns. With profit in hand from the two sales, he went north, up to where the Rim leveled out, and bought a better 23-acre tract on what was called by locals Paradise Ridge, so lovely it was. This was more productive land and easier to access because of the more suitable terrain.
Here they stayed for some time (long enough that in later years the property was known as “Old Isaac Shane Tract of Land”), partly because of the agreeableness of the land and community, but also because of an economic downturn that struck a few years later. Here the first Shane was born on Tennessee soil, Oscar Burton, December 22, 1888.
They lived in relative tranquility up on the plateau, though Isaac’s chronic bowel issues, which he’d had since his service in the cavalry, grew worse. His consternation over his ailment was softened by the pension he drew. Isaac grew in stature in the eyes of the community, voting and involving himself in political matters. His youngest was born, dear Nellie Myrtle, March 10th, 1896, just as the real estate market was beginning to take off again.
Isaac’s 23 acres on Whites Creek Pike in Paradise Ridge (credit: Google)
Isaac next moved into uncharted territory. He and Hester negotiated deals with real estate brokers in Nashville in August of 1896, buying and selling lots in North Nashville on Carol Street and Scoville Street, coupling them with their 23 acres out in Paradise Ridge, to negotiate the acquisition of what Isaac had been after for nearly fifteen years: land in the Nashville Basin.
Planting of the Branch: Dickerson Pike
Located in what was then the 19th Civil District of Davidson County, on the east side of Dickerson Turnpike, about eight miles from downtown Nashville, was a 50-acre tract Isaac purchased from Mr. and Mrs. Webster, at the conclusion of his trading.
Isaac’s prime 50 acres on Dickerson Pike (credit: Google)
Finally, he’d acquired it: prime agricultural land, relatively flat, covered in yellowish-brown Hagerstown loam: descendant of the ancient limestone, now finely ground into a rich and productive soil. In bygone eras it was likely a cedar glade, judging by the nearness of the bedrock to the surface. Here he could grow whatever he liked, cotton, corn, fruit, or anything. And to think, with direct access along the turnpike to the center of a bustling metropolis, now containing over 80,000 souls! Nearly sixty years old, Isaac had at last accomplished for himself what his father and he dreamed of all those years ago when they had left Back Creek Valley. His wanderings, he felt, were finally over.
Here we can say is where Isaac planted the Tennessee Shane branch, though he wasn’t to stay on this plot of land for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, the Dickerson Pike corridor and Northeastern Davidson County more generally would be the seat of the Tennessee Shane family once and for all. Though they would fan out to other areas of Nashville and Middle Tennessee, this section would remain their historic seat and, at the very least, an important place of memory for all the minor branches.
With such a surfeit of good land, however, Isaac felt he could stand to part with some of it, especially if the magic of subdivision would work for him again. He sold off for $30 the southwest corner acre of his land to the Holiness Band Church in 1899, who were looking to build a new house of worship. Isaac, having inherited the practice of the Baptist faith from his father, was sympathetic to such evangelical groups. A church still stands there to this day, though since its founding it has passed through many hands and changed denominational allegiances many times.
The church which sits on Isaac’s land (credit: Google)
Rose May and Clark Graves
Our pioneer children Rose May and Martha Bell had grown up by this time. Rosie found herself whisked away by her husband, Mr. Clark Graves, back to his roots in Vermont, where she was to live her entire life. They had wed when she was 19 in Tennessee, and she had borne their first child, Claude, here in 1892, while they lived in a home with a dirt floor. She lived after her husband’s passing (in 1948) with her daughter Maude and her husband Harvey in Burlington and passed her days in quiet housekeeping—baking, sewing, and gardening (including roasting the peanuts she would harvest). She showed that old Shane exactitude and ironed everything she wore. Her husband was quite the opposite; in fact, he’d even spit tobacco juice down the heating register in the living room, which disgusted his clean and orderly wife to no end. She joined the King’s Daughters charitable organization and lived out her great faith by donating her time and treasure to those in need.
Myrtle during a trip up to visit her sister and niece, posing by the Civil war Memorial in Fair Haven, Vermont (left to right: Maude Graves, Myrtle (Shane) Green, and Rose May (Shane) Graves)
The Holzapfel Partnership
Martha B. married a fellow, Louis, with the last name of Holzapfel (German, meaning forest or crab apple). His father lived nearby and had had dealings with Isaac, whereby the two young ones met. They
Left to right: Rose May (Shane) Graves gardening; Clark Graves posing for a picture
Left to right: Maude (Graves) and husband Harvey; Rose May with grandchildren Roy and Emily
had moved off into town, renting a house down on Spruce Street (now Franklin Pike).
Jacob Holzapfel and Isaac got along well, and it wasn’t long before they were looking to go in together on a deal. In 1902, the perfect opportunity presented itself. The County Clerk was selling off land that directly adjoined Isaac’s holdings on Dickerson Pike, where Jacob also lived. Part of the old Parham tract, it was 29 and a half acres, with frontage also along Dickerson. They bought it jointly, and the next year they split the property right down the middle with quitclaim deeds, Jacob getting the western half and Isaac the eastern. Isaac was now sitting on over 63 acres.
Land bought jointly with Jacob Holzapfel (credit: Google)
It was here, out on Dickerson Pike, that our family came into its own. Life went by quickly now, on account of its comfortability, with Isaac and Hester watching their children grow and marry. Oscar, the tall, blond and gray-eyed youngest son, was desirous of getting out from under his father’s watchful eye, so he moved out and married young to a girl named Hattie May Stovall, from an old Goodlettsville family farther out Dickerson, in 1906. Oscar labored on the farm of F.B. Cartwright out that way, and they rented a home on Mudd Street not far from where he worked. Truman Eugene, who had no such quibbles with the old patriarch, married Ethel Lowe in 1908, and they with their firstborn James rented out a little house between Isaac’s land and Louis and Mattie’s, who had bought a farm just up the pike. Truman employed a young man from McMinnville who also boarded with them named Frank Green, who at times could be caught eying Isaac’s youngest Nellie Myrtle when she came around. She, for her part, didn’t seem to mind his attentions. There on Dickerson (and on Mudd Street, not far away) the clan spread and enjoyed the fruits of Isaac’s wanderings and dealings. They became regular fixtures of the Public Market down on the square, in the shadow of the imposing county courthouse, hocking their produce (mostly fruit) to all and sundry.
Frank and Myrtle (Shane) Green near his homeplace in Warren County
Town Life: Eddie and Minnie
Edgar Milo and Minnie, however, had decided the way of the future was not in farming. Eddie had learned the plumbing trade, and he rented a place down on Church Street. Minnie, tall and thin, had moved into town to study nursing and before long took an
apprenticeship with Dr. William Wilford in Waterbury, Vermont. Two of Isaac’s daughters, then, ended up in Vermont, far away. Minnie’s life would be difficult one; she married widower and father of two Julius V. Sturtevant in 1913 but became a widow herself in 1932, with no children of her own. She didn’t lose her sense of humor, though; for instance, she had a cat named “Poop a Dingdong,” and when she would call for it she’d just yell “POOP!” which didn’t thrill the neighbors, especially in the dead of night.
Minnie in later years
Minnie’s Victorian home in Burlington, 40 Lafayette Place (credit: Google)
Edgar Milo was a confident and gregarious fellow, and he found no trouble inserting himself into respectable Nashville social circles. He and his running buddy Flynn Tucker would make the rounds of parties and socials, chatting up the ladies and having their fill of food and drink. In this milieu he met Miss Cora Fountain Rucker, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John F. Rucker, and an intense romance ensued. On the day of their wedding, April 29th, 1910, which was held at the lavish home of Cora’s parents at 1926 State Street in Midtown, thirty-five guests watched the exchange of vows before a grandiose altar formed of palms, ferns, and snowballs, and lit with tall candles in brass holders. The bride’s gown was draped in white satin roses, and an ice course and Italian orchestra were featured during the reception. They took home a plethora of gifts, and the union was the talk of the town amongst a certain set. It was a fairy tale beginning to their life together, but their rejoicing would not last.
Site of the Shane-Rucker Wedding, then and now (now part of St. Thomas Midtown Hospital) (credit: Metro GIS)
Twilight Years
In November of 1910, old Isaac’s age began to show when he tried to deed his interest in part of his estate on Dickerson Pike to Hester but inadvertently described the wrong property. The deed was in error, and it took several years for the subsequent owners, and Isaac himself, to realize his mistake. They all headed downtown one day in December of 1914 to set things straight. After hours of pouring over the details of the erroneous documents and establishing who thought they sold what to who, the matter was finally settled, and everyone walked away glad to have the ordeal behind them.
Isaac offered to help out the young couple Edgar and Cora by selling them a lot he had had his eye on, in Edgefield on North Second Street. The deed was signed, and a payment plan was arranged in December of 1911, but by May the arrangement fell through and Isaac took the lot back. There was probably simmering tension over this debacle, but Edgar and Cora were far enough removed from the rest of the bunch up the pike that things cooled off after a while.
Despite what you would expect, Isaac and Hester did not cease all their wheeling and dealing as they entered their twilight years; on the contrary, they redoubled their efforts. Nashville was booming, the streetcar was opening up vast new territories for residential construction, and Isaac and Hester were sitting on enough capital that they could indulge in a little old-fashioned speculation. And sadly, Isaac never overcame his wanderlust, his belief in the promise that lay just over the next hill: to wit: in 1911, he suddenly decided to sell off his great farm and look for land back up in the hills! At the end of year, he did just that, selling to the Ellis Bros., and he and Hester had to live with their children for several months before he could close the next land deal. Meanwhile, they bought and sold lots in East Nashville, trying at each juncture to skim a little appreciation off each transaction. Finally, in June, he bought from Mr. M.E. Link 23 acres out in the 10th District, on Brick Church Pike, in a setting that combined the natural beauty of his original purchases with the agricultural productivity of his Dickerson Pike farm. He completed his new estate with an adjoining 33-acre tract (the Roland Tract) bought from J.J. Bowers on October 11, 1915: 57.25 acres in all. He relished retiring to his hilly fastness after a day in town and enjoyed taking part in the rural communal life centered around Union Hill. Increasingly, Hester was having to do more of the leg- and paperwork for their trading.
And slowly, then, the rest of the clan began to disperse from that stretch of Dickerson Pike where they’d been located. Louis and Mattie moved to town again with their little family, to 533 North First Street (which now lies under an interstate). Frank, the hired hand who lived with Truman and family, had courted and married young Nellie Myrtle, and they up and moved off to Florida (but would return). And Truman himself moved his family up more towards Goodlettsville, to Travis Street, to live near his wife Ethel’s folks. Oscar was living there as a hired hand with his family in the home of his wife Hattie’s grandfather David Burklin and his wife Sallie, just off Dickerson Pike. Old man Burklin had been a substantial landowner in that district since the 1870s as had Ethel Shane’s father, Mr. Lowe. Oscar and Hattie helped out with the farm and the chores to earn their keep. Truman, Ethel, and their three children located two houses down. During the day, Oscar was still working down the road on the farm of Mr. Cartwright.
Isaac’s Retreat: 57.25 acres on Brick Church Pike (credit: Metro GIS)
Isaac and Hester spent their days riding about the district, looking for lots, scurrying down to the real estate office to negotiate with an interested party. Isaac probably had an increasingly difficult time climbing in and out of the wagon, but he refused to curtail his trips. Edgar and Cora did a little dealing of their own in 1913 and finally purchased Lot 2 of the David D. Maney addition to East Nashville Subdivision (615 Stockell Street) in Cleveland Park, Northeast Nashville, just a few blocks from Dickerson. Cora had given birth to a boy, who they named Leslie Sharber Shane, and they decided it was time to make a home for their young family. At fourteen months old, however, baby Leslie died, after a lingering stomach illness of three months. The devastated parents buried the infant out in the county, at
Isaac and Hester after a lifetime of journeying
Oscar Burton Shane
the Rucker family cemetery. But this would not be the last of their troubles.
Lot at 615 Stockell, Home of Edgar Milo & Cora Shane (credit: Metro GIS)
Out in the county, Isaac was not long in his newfound country paradise before he was called from this life. When the time became imminent, Hester sent for the children, and those that were local made the trip up Union Hill. On October 15, 1916, at 6 o’clock in the evening, he breathed his last, at home with his devoted wife and several of the children. Edgar informed the authorities, and the funeral was held the next day at the house. He left what remained of his land holdings to Hester, which made for a comfortable inheritance.
The founder of our branch was laid to rest in the churchyard of Union Hill Baptist, in the same county he had first set foot in some thirty-one years earlier. Farmer, cavalryman, homesteader, and real estate investor, there was little in his 77 years he did not do. His descendants are indebted to his courage, resolve, resourcefulness, and tenacity, for without these (and the support of his indefatigable wife), we would not have been planted in such a fine country as Middle Tennessee. He exhibited those classic Shane traits, it is true: wanderlust and restlessness, but he channeled these into a worthy inheritance for his descendants that endures to this day.
Expert Repairing: Edgar Milo Shane
Meanwhile, Edgar and Cora struggled on, and to fill the house with something besides their sadness, they took on boarders, including Cora’s brother Forrest. Edgar was a skilled plumber, making a good living, and the other international boarders they took on (from the likes of England and Scotland) were steamfitters and engineers, who paid well.
E.M. Shane Classified Ad in The Tennessean
Edgar also joined the Junior Order United American Mechanics (JR. O.U.A.M.), a mutual aid fraternal organization akin to the Free Masons that advocated against Catholic immigration to the country and provided support and insurance programs for members and their families. He was a member of Guiding Star Council No. 7, corner of 2nd Street and Foster, which was only a few blocks from their house on Stockell.
Location of Guiding Star Council, 2nd and Foster (credit: Google)
The support of his brother mechanics and the boarders’ presence within their home was instrumental in providing a sense of security to Cora when, in 1918, Edgar was recruited by the Mason and Hangar Company for the building of the Dupont Smokeless Powder Plant, the largest in the world, and the adjoining town of Jacksonville, in the Hadley’s Bend of the Cumberland River. The might of American industrial power was about to be showcased. In what amounted to a deployment of sorts, E.M. Shane made the long commute—by train, by pontoon boat, and by truck—every day out to the isolated peninsula on the Cumberland with thousands of other men from East Nashville and all over the South. There he was assigned a unit and a mission. Not only did the plant itself need building—indeed, an entire town was to be stood up virtually overnight to house, feed, clothe, and entertain the laboring industrial army. This town was initially named Jacksonville in honor of Tennessee statesman and squire Andrew Jackson, whose Hermitage lay just a few miles south. (The name would later be changed to Old Hickory, still a nod to the same man.) Edgar and his crew found themselves swept up in the feverish work, measuring, cutting, fitting, installing, and maintaining the plumbing of the burgeoning village throughout that pivotal year. When the dust cleared and the Armistice was signed in the fall, he and the rest of the industrial brigades of Mason and Hangar had to show for their heroic activities a plant capable of miraculous feats of production and a fully functional little city fashioned as if out of thin air.
Map of Old Hickory, Tennessee, a few months after Edgar left
A few years after Edgar’s industrial adventure, however, Cora confided to him that she just couldn’t bear to live in the house any longer, what with the magnitude of the tragedy that had occurred there draping over everything as it seemed to. So they moved further out, to new lots being platted outside the city limits along the ever-expanding streetcar routes. In November of 1921, they bought a place on Meridian Street, near the intersection of Gatewood Avenue. They hoped that, perhaps here, their hearts could heal. Edgar had started his own business down on Broadway, across from where the hockey stadium now stands, and business had never been better.
Materially, they had everything they needed. Widow Hester even decided to move down the street, closer to Douglas Avenue, with her daughter Myrtle Green tending to her, so that she wouldn’t be so isolated out in the country. It seemed a new family neighborhood was forming in the Highland Heights district of Northeast Nashville, a few blocks off Dickerson Pike.
Double lot purchased by Edgar and Cora on Meridian Street in 1921
Location downtown where Edgar was proprietor of a shop at “516 Broad Street” in 1923; today the site of the 5th and Broad entertainment district, just about where Hattie B’s Hot Chicken is (credit both: Metro GIS)
The Greens and Widow Hester lived on one of these two lots north of Douglas Avenue on Meridian Street in the ‘20s, a few blocks down from Edgar and Cora (credit: Metro GIS)
But tragedy stalked the lives of Edgar and Cora like a specter. The night of Sunday, September 23, 1923, around 11:00 p.m., Edgar, annoyed at the wild dogs barking outside their window, grabbed up his semi-automatic 45-calibre pistol and went outside. This was not unusual: Edgar had a bit of a temper, and he frequently shot at barking dogs near or around his home. Cora, a bit annoyed at his rashness, thought nothing else of it. She decided to get up this time, however. She followed him to the door and then turned to tend to something on the counter. A shot rang out, and she stiffened as she heard a loud thud, as if something large had fallen onto the porch floor. She called her husband’s name and then ran to the door. She let out a bloodcurdling scream when the sight of Edgar Milo, his body crumpled just steps from the door, with blood splashed about the porch supports and pooling quickly around his motionless corpse, came into her view. Neighbors rushed over to ascertain the cause of the disturbance and were greeted with the grisly scene. Cora was frantically splashing water on her face and hyperventilating. When the Deputy Sheriffs showed up, they puzzled to find that there were no powder burns on either temple. The 45-calibre round had entered through the left temple and exited out the right, but the absence of burn marks suggested that the weapon had not been aimed at point blank range. To this day the exact circumstances of his death remain a mystery.
Cora had to be sent to a physician. When not sobbing, her gaze lengthened and she remained quiet. The family gathered round to support this poor young widow, who had endured two brutal tragedies in the space of ten years. Mattie was a great help during this time, as she lived down on First Street, not far away. Hester was beside herself with grief, still lonesome from the loss of her husband, and now forced to endure the untimely and disturbing death of her dear Eddie. It was decided to bury Edgar Milo out in the Rucker cemetery, nine miles out on Granny White Pike, where he could rest next to his little son, Leslie. For the next few years, Cora took to renting out rooms in their home at 1414 Meridian to boarders to make ends meet.
Cora’s ad in the paper for boarders
Hitt Lane Shanes
In December of that year, a milestone was marked for the family, however. Truman Eugene and his wife Ethel bought a 35-acre piece of land out in the county on Hitt Lane from W.B. Cook and T.J. Lowery which bordered the Lowe family lands. It had originally belonged to some Hitts, as most of the land in that section did at one time (if it didn’t belong to Peays, that is). Ethel and the Lowes were kin to the Peays. In this way the Shanes became an Old Goodlettsville family—there was the Shane-Lowe-Peay connection, and the aforementioned Shane-Burklin connection—these other families being landholders of some antiquity.
Approximate early 20th century Hitt Lane land ownership (credit: Metro GIS)
Since Isaac’s passing and Edgar’s untimely death, the family had lost its center. Truman took up the mantle on his newly acquired land and developed a successful fruit and hay farm, thus reestablishing the family’s standing and confidence. The farm perdures to this day and is a Tennessee Century Farm.
The clan gradually shifted back up the Pike to the vicinity of Truman’s farm. Frank Green and Nellie Myrtle moved to a place on Hitt Lane, where they kept charge of dear old Hester, who lived with them. Dear Hester Ann, the mother of all Tennessee Shanes, departed this world March 7th, 1935. Dying nearly twenty years after her husband, she insisted on being laid to rest with him out on Union Hill. She displayed indomitable courage and strength in all her trials, bequeathing a great legacy to all her sons and daughters worthy of cherishing.
By 1930, Oscar was working on farms out Goodlettsville way, including for Nick Peay, and he still rented a place on Hitt Lane on land formerly owned by his grandfather-in-law, a few homes down from the Greens. He acted as a type of overseer for Mr. Peay, and kept things running relatively smoothly. He’d plow fields, harvest vegetables, and cart fresh produce downtown to sell, as did most farmers in that section. Oscar had two sons, John Burton and Willard May, and a daughter Gladys, who attended some school. Truman, next door, had boys James Harold and Truman Fentress, and daughter Annie Louise. The Great Depression, destroying as it did the national and local economies, brought the family closer together. They all lived nearby so as to make lending a helping hand easier when necessary. The Roaring ‘20s had brought prosperity and new adventures of city living, but also tragedy and heartbreak. Gene’s farm helped get them through this new challenge of scarcity and belt-tightening.
John Burton, Oscar’s eldest, was in the habit of working for his uncle Truman during the long hot summers, and in the last few years a poor family of Lamberts from Jackson County, Tennessee, had begun renting a place next door to the Shane Farm. John Lambert and his wife, Euna (Carter) Lambert (the Carters of both June Carter Cash fame and Virginia Tidewater lore) had, among other children, a daughter named Hattie Ann, who had made the journey with them to Davidson County. John Burton noticed the young girl immediately, and suddenly he was clamoring to work for his uncle at every opportunity. The elders thought at first the boy had been stricken with the fire of ambition, but they were unsurprised to find out later on it was the fire of passion.
By 1940, James Harold had rented a place next door to the Shane Farm, but he and Truman F. continued working for their father, being given what they needed to survive, mostly. Frank Green, down the road, on the eve of World War II, was only working ten hours a week.
John Burton Shane, circa 1911 (photo by J. Frank West, whose business was located in the Arcade
John Burton Shane and Hattie Ann Lambert out on Hitt Lane
John Burton, once he had convinced Hattie Ann to marry him, up and moved out to Stevens Lane, off Buena Vista Pike, due north of town. He had taken a job as a clerk in a fruit and vegetable store, making $546 a year (the equivalent of about $10,000 today), which was chickenscratch, but it was keeping his family fed for the time being. By 1940, however, things had gotten bad enough that they had to pack up and move to the new government-built public housing projects on the East Bank of the Cumberland, a feature of Mr. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The lived at 290 James A. Cayce Homes, which still stand today.
Wild Willard Shane
By 1940, John’s father Oscar, mother Hattie, and brother Willard (with young wife Elizabeth, from Cheatham County), had moved over to Campbell Lane, near Dry Creek Road. Oscar had taught himself carpentry and was doing repair work. There was more money in it than farm labor. Willard, on the other hand, had gotten a job as an electric welder with a steel company, McCann Steel. Willard had married once before, but his first wife contracted tuberculosis. She would not abide her treatment (which required her to be quarantined at a TB hospital) and would come home unauthorized, missed she so her husband. The lack of a congenial environment for her disease caused her demise. Willard, heartbroken at his poor wife’s misguided sacrifice, eventually remarried. Willard and second wife Elizabeth moved to 209 Boscobel Street in East Nashville, which was closer to where he worked, down at 107 Main Street. Oscar soon took a job as a nightwatchman downtown at the American National Bank, on Broadway.
Willard, five-foot-nine, brown-haired and gray-eyed, with scars from boyhood accidents on his chin and left ear, had caught that Shane irascibility that has afflicted certain members of our line. Of age for being drafted into the Second World War, he was initially passed over because his welding skills were crucial on the homefront for supplying the war effort. However, as the push in 1944 to finally bring the Nazi regime to its knees intensified, Willard was declared eligible. He shipped off to US Army basic training (like his grandfather before him all those years ago), this time in Georgia, and was soon sent to the front in Europe. Because of his technical skills,
American National Bank Building, Broadway (credit: Lesa Fine, HDR Street Photography)
he was assigned to the 235th Engineer Combat Battalion, which was slogging its way up the Italian peninsula with the Fifth Army across ruined and collapsed bridges, booby-trapped roads, and machine gun ambushes at every turn. Our boys doggedly pursued the German army across the ancient and majestic Italian landscape. Willard saw intense combat, including driving armored bulldozers under heavy fire to build a bypass around a blown bridge east of Terracina on the west coast, and constructing a 950-foot span across the Po River in the North of Italy under artillery bombardment. 33 of his battalion were killed in action, with Purple Hearts being awarded for 197 wounds sustained in combat. He remained in the service until April 1946 and was discharged with the rank of Sergeant. He returned home to great acclaim by family and friends, including his long-suffering wife. But everyone could see he was a changed man. There was a different look in his eye.
Willard and Elizabeth moved over to South Fifth Street, and problems started almost immediately. Always hot-tempered, it seemed now Willard could fly into a violent rage at the least provoking. Elizabeth, fearing for her safety, filed for divorce. She took little Julia Marie Shane, their four-year-old, born not long before Willard had been drafted, and moved in with her mother, Mrs. Mary Cleveland Raymer, out Eaton’s Creek Road in Joelton, up in the hills. As passion defeated passion, however, the two reconciled and remarried, though the problems did not cease.
Misfortune compounded misery in January of 1947, when, not eight months after he had returned home from service, Willard was fired from his job. Unemployed and angry as he could get, Elizabeth soon retreated to her mother’s house again, fearing what the man would do. He came looking for her a few weeks later, the 31st of May, 1947, and after enticing her to the front yard, where a heated argument ensued, he began cursing and beating her. She fled into the house crying, and he pursued her. Old Mrs. Raymer, by this time, had seen quite enough. Willard resumed the blows in a front room, hollering that he would shoot everyone in the house. Mrs. Raymer tried to separate the two and was knocked to the ground. Desperate, she ran into the kitchen and found the butcher knife. Returning to the scene of the violence, she plunged the knife into Willard’s abdomen. Elizabeth ran out of the room. Willard, clutching his bleeding stomach, ran out of the room and continued to chase and curse her until they came to the road in front of the house, where he finally collapsed. He was rushed to General Hospital, where, finding that the knife had penetrated his liver, physicians saw little chance for his recovery. No charges were filed against Mrs. Raymer.
But die Willard did not. Miraculously, he recovered, though his relationship with the Raymers and his wife Elizabeth did not. He eventually remarried, however, having learned a few lessons about behaviors to avoid in marriage. Ruby Irene Hadley was her name, and he met her in the projects where his brother J.B. lived. She would bear him a son, William Eugene.
Julia Marie, Mrs. Raymer, Willard, and Elizabeth
Bound and Determined: William Eugene Shane
William Eugene Shane, Sr.
Ruby doing laundry in the projects, June 1963
Willard would die when William Eugene was only 11. He had few memories with his father: fishing trips were the brightest ones, but at other times William unjustly suffered the man’s wrath. Eventually they had made it out of the projects, but little improved in their lives: they had so little, that his mother Ruby often had to burn trash and other household items just to keep her family warm during the winter. Eventually they moved back into the projects, where at least there was heat and air. Ruby had children from a previous marriage that provided William companionship as he grew up.
William was hired on at the Nashville Bridge Company right out of high school, one of the greatest bridge building firms in the history of
Young W.E. Shane and two of his half-brothers
our country. Around the time he joined, the company had shifted toward more marine-centered work; chiefly, the building of inland barges for riverine commerce. He married a longtime girlfriend at this time, who bore him a set of twins (Jim and Chris) and a son William Jr.
William E. Shane, Jr. and bride Charlene Walker
That relationship ended, and in 1980 he married Connie, and they were blessed with a daughter Cynthia Susan and a son, Michael Anthony. They owned a house at 1708 Forrest Avenue that tragically burned down, and they sold the property in 1995. They reestablished the family in Hermitage, Tennessee, to the east, at 382 Bonnavale Drive. Around the year 2000, he changed roles and employment and became a security guard for the AVCO plant (now Triumph Aerostructures), reaching the rank of Lieutenant. Security was crucial at this highly secured site adjacent the Nashville International Airport—workers at the site have produced empennages and wings for a number of combat aircraft in the service of the armed forces. These secrets had to be highly guarded. After his time at AVCO, William worked the deli counter at the nearby Publix supermarket, enjoying a quieter lifestyle and the connections he made with his local community. William was a Ford man and his prized possession was a 1950 model that he never quite got around to restoring. He died in 2012, leaving four sons, a daughter, and wife Connie, who resides in Old Hickory. They remember their father chiefly as a family man of the first order.
Nellie Myrtle’s Heartbreak
So goes the history of those Shanes that had migrated down Dickerson into Nashville. But backtracking in time a bit, we find that the great farms in the countryside were still in operation for many years. James Harold, son of the new Patriarch Truman Eugene, had two girls (Shila Ann and Shirley) and a boy, Sharon Earsel, by his wife Martha Olean Claiborne, also of Goodlettsville (though her people hailed from Lafeyette in Macon County—economic migrants like the Lamberts above mentioned; many people in those days made their way to Nashville and Davidson County, such that the Capitol City and its hinterland became a great melting pot of Middle Tennessee families). There were three of the line of T.E. Shane: James Harold, Annie Louise, and Truman Fentress. Besides T.E. and family, the only other original Shane remaining in those parts by the 1940s was Nellie Myrtle (Shane) Green, the youngest of the bunch.
Nashville Bridge Company campus astride the Shelby Street Bridge, circa 1957
Approximate modern-day location of Nashville Bridge Company (Google)
She lived on the original trace (since abandoned) of Hitt Lane with her husband Frank and children, which home her sisters had given them the money to buy. Work had been scarce for Frank, and despite their protests, the family came together to keep everyone housed and fed!
Frank and Myrtle’s lot, which lay on the original Hitt Lane but today is east of it (credit: Metro GIS)
And wouldn’t she need it—Frank lost his life in a car accident early one morning, 1948. He had been coming home from the farmer’s market downtown and had just crossed the river, heading east on Jefferson Street, when in the misty twilight, he misjudged the speed of oncoming traffic and attempted to turn left onto 1st Street. A massive Suburban Bus Company vehicle struck the right-front of Frank’s pickup, spinning it around and completely demolishing it. The bus then swerved off the road and rammed into a parked truck at a service station. Frank was rushed to General Hospital but was dead on arrival. He was laid to rest in the churchyard of New Bethel Baptist Church on the old Dickerson Pike. Myrtle, the most cheerful, positive, and fun-loving of all the Shanes, now had to live with a deep sorrow.
Spot of the fatal accident of Frank G. Green (credit: Google)
Frank G. Green
Myrtle (Shane) Green
Tried and True: The Line of Truman Eugene
Truman Eugene Shane
Of all those heirs of Isaac, perhaps the truest to his legacy was, fittingly, Truman Eugene. The Shane clan under his direction were regular fixtures down at the Nashville and Davidson County Farmer’s Market. In olden times it happened right down on the square, which was the bustling center of Nashville. Going to market was a weekly event of great significance to the family, every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, but rarely on Sunday. Folks would line up to the little stalls each seller would occupy. And what a bounty they had to offer! There was a lima bean farm between Truman Eugene’s house and the house where Oscar and Hattie lived, on the west side of the property. At the top of the big hill was a tomato farm, and just to the east on the slopes was a great big red raspberry farm. Grandaddy Shane, as TE was known, would receive sandwiches and cold ice water in an aluminum pitcher from little Shila when he was working that tomato patch. Son Uncle Buddy (as Truman Fentress was known to some) was out there with him, and daughter Aunt Louise would be inside boxing up raspberries. Everyone got down and helped during harvesttime picking raspberries. And everyone helped carry them uptown to market, wondering at the bright lights of the big city. Son James Harold took bushel baskets full of tomatoes to the same market every summer, and they sold well. Hay was grown in the fields too. The children would help shock hay with an old pitchfork. Uncle Buddy would fire up the baler and bale hay for Grandaddy. The baler was a bit more useful than the old blind mule, who T.E. also kept around.
Farm life was simple for the clan. The old Shane manor, the white house, sat just to the north of and closer to Hitt Lane than where the current brick home sits. Hitt Lane in that far back time was a winding gravel road with the boughs of great gnarled trees growing over top of it shading its meanderings. The home adjacent this lane was framed by two great big Maple trees—a fine Southern farmhouse in the old style, with a wide front porch perfectly suited to listless shaded swinging on a languid summer’s day.[1] Grandmother Ethel Shane would instruct the young girls in butterbean-shelling and buttermilk-churning as they rocked back and forth in the big hanging swing. At night all would gather round the radio to listen to the programming of the day, but the sunny hours were spent in helpful work and imaginative play. Everyone lived so close, right in that nook of a valley along Hitt Road, that the ties of affection were strong.
On the Hitt Lane farm by the old fence (left to right): Sharon Earsel, Shirley, and Shila Shane. This is looking down the driveway toward Hitt Lane basically; the fence is on the western side of the driveway and home.
Grandaddy Shane had an old truck with a crank on the front, probably a Model A, that would carry them to and fro’ across the rolling Middle Tennessee hills.
Jack of all Trades: James Harold Shane
About 1940, the James Harold family had moved a few hills over, to a farm on Campbell Road owned by a man named Connell. He was a prominent Goodlettsville citizen and a superintendent over a department at Vanderbilt. James sharecropped that plot for several
June, 1956, at Uncle Earl Watts’ house up on Watts Lane (left to right, back row): Ruby Jewell (Thomas) Shane, Sharon Earsel Shane (son of J.H. Shane), Uncle Buddy (Truman Fentress Shane, son of Truman Eugene Shane), Sharon’s wife Dorothy Jean (Elrod) Shane, Uncle Earl Watts (husband of Aunt May (Lowe) Watts), Shirley Shane (daughter of J.H. Shane), Martha Olean (Claiborne) Shane (wife of J.H. Shane), Daisy (Day) Harris (granddaughter of T.E. Shane), James Harold Shane, Shila Ann Shane (daughter of J.H. Shane), James Herschel Day (Daisy’s father and Louise’s husband), Daisy’s brother’s wife Linda Rae Chidester, Aunt Annie Louise (Shane) Day (T.E. Shane’s daughter); (L to R, front row): William Truman Shane (son of T.F. Shane), Truman Eugene Shane (called “Pawnee” or Grandaddy Shane), Grandmother Ethel I. (Lowe) Shane, James Eugene Day’s first baby James Day, and Daisy’s brother James Eugene (J.E.) Day.
years before getting hired on at the Dupont Rayon Plant a few miles away in Old Hickory. James’s uncle Edgar Milo, of happy memory, had been the first Shane to set foot over there in Hadley’s Bend. His work in establishing Old Hickory Village and Plant had very nearly come to naught at the close of the Great War. The Dupont Plant had abandoned the massive, sprawling facility when the need for gunpowder dried up, and the village adjacent had become a ghost town, with few prospects. The town and plant were truly of one destiny and depended upon one another. But Dupont had returned at the behest of the Nashville Industrial Corporation (which had bought the abandoned plant and city). Since 1925, the storied company had been producing rayon, an artificial fiber created through complex chemical processes, and cellophane, a thin, transparent sheet perfect for storing and wrapping. The Dupont company had pioneered the production of such substances from cellulose and was mass producing them at their plant in Old Hickory, near the grounds of the old Powder Plant. Business was booming, and the jobs were highly skilled, highly paid, and highly coveted. James Harold secured a position in 1952 and kept it for life. He and Carl Nickson, who lived up the road, would carpool together most days to the plant in the Bend. (Martha Olean even worked there for a little while but found care of three children incompatible with shift work.) Throughout his time of service with Dupont, James Harold would go on to work in “all crafts of” the Dupont Construction Company.
James Harold Shane and his 1948 Studebaker M5 Half-Ton Pickup
Old Hickory plants, circa 1950s: Rayon, Cellophane, Corfam, Dacron, DMT, and the powerhouse (credit: Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington)
A Goodly Portion: Division of Clan Lands
All that high-tech work at Dupont left little time for serious farming, so James and family packed up and moved back over to the ancestral lands along Hitt Lane. Their portion of the inheritance would be the land lying east of Grandaddy Shane’s original purchase. These were “the Lands of Lowe,” the dowry land of Grandmother Shane that had come to her and her sisters through the Lowe family. The thirteen and a half acres south of Hitt Lane fell to Ethel and T.E. before being deeded to James Harold and Martha Olean in 1965. Truman Fentress had an old house at the eastern extent of the estate. North of the lane fell to Aunt Mai and husband W.E. Watts (wherefrom Watts Road, on the eastern edge, takes its name) and Aunt Emma and her husband J.M. Brooks. Also north of the lane and to the west settled the Days, inheriting that northern half of T.E.’s original 1923 purchase. Louise Shane, sister of James and Truman Fentress, had married James Herschel Day. So holy matrimony had knit together many separate families along Hitt Lane: Peays, Burklins, Shanes, Days, Watts, Brooks (and probably a few others).
Greatest extent of Shane Lands in the Goodlettsville hinterland (northeastern Davidson County), circa 1981 (Myrtle Green home is northernmost property; southern conglomeration is made up of T.E. Shane heirs—those of Annie Louise north of Hitt Lane; those of James Harold south and to the east; those of Truman Fentress west, south, and southeast (credit: Metro GIS)
The young Shanes all attended school in the surrounding hills; Shila, Shirley, Daisy, and Sharon Herschel all went to the Old Center School on Dickerson, just up the pike from the original Shane Farm their great-grandfather had planted. Carl and W.T., Truman Fentress’s sons, went to Union Hill Elementary (near where that same great-grandfather was buried) or to Goodlettsville Elementary. Everyone ended up at Goodlettsville High School in later life, however, on the Main Street of that nearby hamlet.
Things began changing in the 1950s—the government tore down the old square and saw fit to reorganize the city’s physical plant based on new ideas about poverty and cleanliness and the need for automobiles to be everywhere all the time. The advent of the supermarket killed off the farmers’ market. As the old generation went to their rest and farming became more the province of the Midwestern factory farm than the Southern small landowner, the various branches progressively found other ways to make a living, as Edgar and then Oscar and his sons had done some years before. The industrial revolution was finally finishing off old Hitt Lane.
The Unbroken Tradition: Truman Fentress and Heirs
James’s brother, Truman Fentress Shane, the most colorful of the bunch, was hired on as a deputy sheriff with the county in 1960. When the governments of the City of Nashville and Davidson County merged in 1963 to become Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County, he was billed a patrolman in the new consolidated force. He tragically passed in 1981 after a stroke, and his wife Ruby Jewell and sons William Truman and Carl David inherited the bulk of the Shane Lands. W.T. found a way to keep the many verdant green acres profitable via cattle farming, which he took up in earnest.[2] Carl David founded a trucking company, Shane Trucking, headquartered on Elm Hill Pike. Despite the changes on the Shane Farm, if you look closely, you may still spy a wild raspberry here or there poking up through the clovers.
Truman Fentress and Ruby Jewell (Thomas) Shane, on the original T.E. Shane farmhouse land
Tradition and Change: Sharon, Shirley, Shila
Sharon Herschel, only son of James Harold, came to great grief in this life: a divorce from his wife Glenda Ann (whose family ran a motel out on Dickerson Road) and two sons who died young. Sharon looked a Shane: tall, fair, blue-eyed. He was laid to rest in Goodlettsville soil, with many of his kinsfolk.
This was in great contrast to the life led by his sister Shirley. On a balmy Fourth of July afternoon in 1956 by the shores of Old Hickory Lake, Shirley met the love of her life, a fellow named Wayne Brown. She didn’t know it at the time though—it wasn’t until, after asking through mutual friends, that he got her phone number. Three years later he would be asking her to marry him. Wayne was no ordinary guy—he was on track for not just a college degree from Vanderbilt, but a Master’s degree, and then a PhD! Sure enough. And to top it all off, he was in a band, playing guitar on the side. Their life would be anything but conventional. Jobs at IBM, Vanderbilt—and even NASA. After many years at the high-tech hub of Huntsville, Alabama, though, they would thankfully return to Davidson County.
Wayne and Shirley (Shane) Brown
Sharon’s other sister, Shila, followed a different path—followed in her daddy’s footsteps, that is, and got hired on at the Dupont Plant in Old Hickory in 1971. She would stay with the company through the Fiberweb buyout and avail herself of an early retirement offer in 2002 (capping off fifty years of continuous Shane service in Old Hickory from the time of James Harold’s hiring-on in 1952). Under Dupont, she worked in the Typar area (a synthetic house wrap) and on the main line for a while. Then she went to the finishing area where she wrapped rolls for the finished Typar that was then sent to the warehouse. She mostly worked nights until the last several years of Dupont ownership, during which she worked days in the lab. She continued day work in the lab under Fiberweb. Next she worked in an office by herself in a warehouse where the labels for product were stored, keeping all the records straight so that the computer inventory system stayed accurate. It was here she met her future husband Paul Holloway, who disappointed many of the other fellows at the plant by going to church with her one Sunday. They would marry and raise two sons, Mike and Bryan (and afterwards welcome grand- and even great-grandchildren into this world). After Paul left Dupont and started on with the Fire Department, he would still carry his wife from the farm across the great bridge to Old Hickory when it was bad weather.
Old Hickory Bridge, built 1927-28 (credit: Old Hickory History)
There was a credit union (Old Hickory Credit Union) for employees that Shila and Paul joined in the ‘60s—everything they bought and financed was through them. Later OHCU opened membership to the wider community, and many Shanes have since become members.
Shila Ann (Shane) Holloway
Original OHCU location in the shadow of the plant—the current location is at Old Hickory Boulevard and Montchanin Road (credit: Anthony Nguyen)
Most all the men in Goodlettsville, Old Hickory, Hermitage—all that part of the County generally—worked for the Dupont Company. The Plant was the golden calf of those parts, a source of milk, honey, and security to the sons of former farmers who were now part of the vast industrial army of the United States of America. And Dupont took this trust seriously, because these were good jobs, jobs with generous pay and benefits, and generally secure (if you were a hard worker). When Shila retired in 2002, Old Hickory was the largest spunlacing facility in the world. In these latter days, the operations have seriously diminished out on Hadley’s Bend—another casualty of the deindustrialization of our once self-sufficient country. The Dupont power plant is gone, the old guard shack was torn down, and the warehouse Shila worked in was demolished. The experimental lab building where she worked is still there, though.
The smokestacks on the factories can still be seen smoking: three companies now stand in place of the original one: Berry, producing Typar (a nonwoven breathable weather membrane used in construction) in the southern portion of the complex; Sontara (owned by the Jacob Holm Group), producing a strong, nonwoven textile sheet fabric created by DuPont in the west-central area; and 3M, producing ACT: Advanced Composite Technology (nonwoven materials for Filtrete filters and surgical drapes), in the far west. Dupont’s once mighty presence has been reduced to a small water processing role with only a handful of employees. But the spirit of Dupont lives on in the community—in the hearts and minds of the proud men and women who plied their craft in this industrial powerhouse on the Cumberland.
Old Hickory Industrial Complex, showing sites worked by J.H. (1952-1971) and Shila Shane (1971-2002). Current ownership is in the hands of Berry, Sontara (Jacob Holm Group), and 3M. Dupont maintains a small water processing service. (credit: Google)
Baptist Tradition
Religiously speaking, the Shanes of the great farms stayed loyal to the Baptist faith introduced into the family a hundred years prior by Andrew William Shane. They worshipped at New Bethel Baptist Church, 1080 Old Dickerson Pike; a little one-room church south of Dry Creek. Aunt Mai would get the young ones up earlier on Sunday mornings and carry them over to church for Sunday School, since she was their teacher. The rest of the family would be along later for the service.
Aunt May (Lowe) Watts and her Sunday school class.
Current building of the New Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, Old Dickerson Pike: longtime spiritual home of the heirs of T.E. Shane (credit: Google)
City Nights: Oscar Burton and Heirs
An exception to this religious pattern was Oscar, T.E.’s younger brother. As said earlier, Oscar and Hattie lived at 416 Davidson Street, in the shadow of the Southern/Tennessee Beer Company warehouse belonging to Mr. John W. Little down by the river on Davidson Street, located just about where the Interstate now crosses that area. His daughter Gladys married a man named John J. Williams, a machinist, and they moved just east of that to be close to her aging parents. There was a house (since demolished) attached to the warehouse that went with the nightwatchman position Oscar had taken with the company. His daughter-in-law’s sister Gladys worked for the Tennessee Beer Company for a while, as did her husband Jimmy. Other businesses, like the Tennessee Oak Flooring Company and a cotton-storing company, also used the warehouse for storage, and at the far end there was a scrapyard that crushed down old automobiles.
When darkness fell, Oscar was in charge of guarding all of this. His rounds were hourly. With a big iron on his hip, he’d roam the deserted corridors and dark basement passageways of the great warehouse, sweeping his flashlight beam across the silent stockpile and towards any suspicious noise. He had a series of stations he had to reach, each with a switch to turn that kept an alarm signal from being sent downtown to the police. If he missed one, in about 20 minutes, flashing lights and sirens would be heard outside. Rarely did he miss a signal. Uncle Jimmy and even his grandson Harlan would accompany him at times, cautiously keeping a few steps back. The chief intruders were rats, rats so big that they’d chase the cats Oscar would set loose after them, much to his chagrin. Oscar would take aim with his pistol at the beasts, and Harlan thrilled to see the muzzle flash and hear the boom of the gun’s report as it echoed through the cavernous chambers. Oscar was a hard man, and though he never got in a gunfight with any burglar, he did fire warning shots at would-be illegal beer guzzlers who managed to break in—there were a lot of thirsty fellows in the nearby projects, and such a large cache of booze was just too irresistible for some of them. Oscar continued patrolling well into old age and retired only a few years before his death.
Warehouse property floorplan in 1957, a few years after Oscar’s service there
Warehouse property in the present-day, where Oscar lived and guarded, owned by John W. Little of the Tennessee Beer Co. (credit: Metro GIS)
Oscar’s son John Burton, wife Hattie Ann (Lambert), son Harlan, and daughters Syretha Dean and Joyce all lived down the street at the James A. Cayce Housing Projects since ’41. Young Joyce contracted whooping cough not long after they moved in. Nurses would come through the projects in those days to try and head off epidemics spreading through the cramped quarters. This was before vaccines, and so if someone got chickenpox, measles, mumps, anything like that, they’d immediately quarantine the subject and place quarantine signs on all the windows. The convulsions got bad enough, though, that Joyce had to be transported to the General Hospital across the River. Located atop Rolling Mill Hill, the Art Deco-styled structure loomed ominously over the East Bank, a monument to man’s ancient battle with pestilence.
The old Metro General Hospital on Rolling Mill Hill (credit: Nashvillegeneral.org)
The Adventures of Harlan Fenton
Then in the late ‘40s, John Burton finally purchased property a few neighborhoods over, in Highland Heights, on practically the same block where Edgar Milo, Frank and Myrtle Green, and dear old Hester had lived some twenty years prior. Hattie had been agitating for this ever since she grew afraid that the rambunctious young Harlan had gotten in with the wrong crowd there in the projects. Harlan thought it was all in good fun, though: playing ball in the neighborhood, rambling around all down below Shelby Park, getting into the occasional rock-throwing fight with the rest of the boys (on one occasion, after being warned against it, Harlan had participated in one of these rock wars that pitted the white boys against the black. He suffered a fairly serious head wound and had to run home to get help. Upon entering the house, and John Burton realizing what he’d been up to, he was promptly yanked up from where he stood and whipped in midair, the blood still streaming down his face. “You’ll kill him!” his mother hollered to J.B., and Harlan thought he really might!)
The projects at Sixth and Shelby (from left to right): Harlan Shane, Hattie Ann (Lambert) Shane, Syretha Dean Shane, John Burton Shane, and Joyce (Shane) Sadler
Sometimes the pack of boys would walk clear from 6th and Shelby Street through town and out to Percy Warner or Edwin Warner Park, in Bellevue. They’d pack a sack lunch and take a bus if they could. They explored every inch of that park, which at that time was still wild country and very primitive, with just a few sheds for picnics. They’d stay in a cabin overnight out there sometimes, build a fire, and sit up and talk all night, the light of the flames dancing on their faces as they tried to spook one another with ghost stories. Sometimes as many as twelve would be in the party, and when drowsiness finally did overtake them, they’d throw down blankets and sleep on the rough-hewn cabin floors. One time in the middle of the night, a boy got homesick and left the camp, and to justify his unexpected return home to his parents, he lied and said the other boys were out there carrying on and fighting. Hattie Ann got wind of this and had J.B. and her brother-in-law Erby drive all the way out to the park at 1:30 or 2:00 in the morning. The men had the homesick boy guide them to the encampment. Harlan was awakened from his sleep by a familiar voice: “Heyyy, Ha’ (Harlan’s nickname)! Yo’ daddy’s out here huntin’ you! So get ready and get the HELL down here cause you’re leavin’!” Sullenly he complied, and that was the end of his adventures in the Warner Parks. Hattie got a little more peace of mind after that, but if she’d known half of what he’d done, she might’ve fainted.
From his last year of junior high until his senior year of high school at Hume-Fogg, Harlan helped J.B. build a concrete block house at 131 Marie Street with his own two hands. The house was further out, but still close enough in. Dean and Joyce would catch a bus and go downtown to watch a movie at one of the many theaters: Lowes, Paramount, the Tennessean: going downtown was always a treat because everything was down there. That house at Marie burned many years later, but the shed they built behind it still stands. J.B. and Hattie Ann lived in that home for over fifty years.
As have many Shanes down through the centuries, John Burton loved strong drink, and he battled that demon his entire life. At times Hattie, Harlan, Dean, and Joyce wouldn’t hear from him for a week. Hattie had to go work to provide food for the family, and Harlan worked down on North 1st Street at the Grand Central Food Market in high school to help with the bills. Sometimes J.B. would have to hitchhike back to town, having ended up on some of his sprees as far afield as California! Luckily, Harlan was taken under the wings of his uncles Jimmy and Erby (who made good wine) on his mother’s side. They taught him to fish and hunt, and what it means to be a man. With the permission of local farmers, Jimmy, Erby, sometimes Uncle Willard and in later years Harlan’s brother-in-law Richard—six o’clock in the morning, they’d trek out to the cedar glades of Lebanon and hunt squirrels and rabbits, which were as thick as flies in those parts. Sometimes so many would spring into view at one time, you didn’t know which one to shoot! “Shoot him, Ha’!” “Which one?” he’d cry. “You missed ‘im,” Uncle Erby’d say. “Naw, he outran my bullets!” They just about depopulated Lebanon and Wilson County of rabbits. His uncles also introduced him to the forested peaks and mystical coves of the Great Smoky Mountains, beginning his long love affair with that National Park to the east.
Joyce and Dean Shane, busy in Downtown Nashville
House built by J.B. and Harlan, 131 Marie Street (Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall is pink building to the east)
Shed still existing on the property, 131 Marie Street (credit: Google)
Grand Central Food Market, 1948 (now 921 Dickerson Pike) (photo credit: Jim Webb via nashvillehistory.blogspot.com)
The Jehovah’s Witnesses
Grandmother Hattie, Oscar’s wife, died November 12, 1950. Previously to her death Hattie had become associated with the activities of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a denomination with roots in the Third Great Awakening of the late nineteenth century. Hattie Ann’s sister Bertha Lambert had also joined the religion through her connection to Witnesses up north and her association with Frank Lampley, a Witness “Pioneer.” Lampley would come down into the projects and study with J.B. and his family. Oscar and the rest of them joined and were known to the other branches of the family to be something like street preachers. Though he had attended Baptist services at South 7th and Russell Streets in his youth, Harlan decided he didn’t believe that and studied the Watchtower and became a Witness in his teenage years. The house they built wasn’t but 200 feet down Marie Street from the original Jehovah’s Witness meeting house (called a “Kingdom Hall”) in Nashville, built in 1946, located at Marie and Meridian, there in Highland Heights. In later years it was known as the “East Unit Kingdom Hall,” and Harlan even helped paint the inside of it once or twice. It was where he and his future bride Betty Christine Huffman would wed in 1954. (In his younger days, Harlan didn’t care much for religious services, be they Witness or otherwise. Dreading the long bus ride and knowing his father’s tendencies and that even the old man wouldn’t show up to the house of God tight, he’d encourage him to drink so that the family would miss services!)
Wedding Announcement for Harlan Fenton Shane and Betty Christine Huffman
“East Unit” Kingdom Hall, Meridian Street (credit: Google)
Harlan Fenton Shane
Oscar died soon after his wife, on April 19th, 1957, but not before remarrying a Miss Lennie Taylor, of Big Rock, Tennessee. They lived on 607a South Seventh Street. He had suffered for three years from heart disease before succumbing to the ailment.
To be continued…
[1] The old barn in the back built by T.E. Shane still stands.
[2] In recent years, even this has ceased, with only one cow and a donkey remaining.