Walking TALL

I forgot.  Yesterday in my desire to get the SHILOH battlefield blog out I forgot that we briefly visited the home of one of America’s most iconic law enforcement heroes of the 1960’s.  And in the 1970’s several songs, books, and movies were made about him.

He and his deputies fought local organized crime as sheriff of his county in every legal way he could, and as a result was wounded severely several times in assassination attempts, while his second wife, Pauline, was killed by his side in a squad car in one of them. Two years later his personal car wrecked and he was killed, and to this day local citizens of Adamsville, the McNairy County Seat, our home county at this time, believe he was murdered.

Buford Pusser's home, now a museum

Who is this unmasked man?  None other than Buford Pusser. The hero of the Walking Tall franchise. He carried a big, heavy stick to avoid using his gun if at all possible.  However he is credited with killing, again  legally, several in self defense.  And after his wife died, he was accused, though never charged, with having several of his known opponents in the local crime ring killed.

SIDENOTE: We have a very slow internet connection here in southwest Tennessee and our photo loading time is IMMENSE.  So, I will be loading, as always, all of our pics on Facebook under my account.  Please go there to see pictures which will describe our day best.  TY.  Ken

I spoke with a museum docent in nearby Savannah, Tennessee today and she told me she knew his and Pauline’s only child, Dwana Pusser.  She said Dwana had run a very successful restaurant in Adamsville until recently when an illness she has forced her to close.

I asked the docent if the people who Buford was after all those years, who killed his wife and possibly him, were ever caught.  She just shook her head, “No.” So I said, “They could be running their crime syndicates right now then?”  “Sure,” she replied, “just like everywhere else, crime often does pay.”

I had to wonder if some of those very same criminals helped to pay for the town park named in Buford’s honor after his death.

We began today’s travels after I lost another relaxing game of Scrabble, but I don’t feel like talking about that because I just lost another relaxing game of Scrabble this evening. Relaxing for who?  Mona, of course!

We went north to view the amazing documentary film now showing at the Shiloh Battlefield Visitor Center again. The Center is only 6 miles north of us here at Lebanon, UMC.

The movie was made two years ago and is called FIERY TRIAL.  It is, hands down, the finest war documentary I have ever seen, and I would place its battle scenes, using Civil War re-enactors, not professional actors, up there with the ‘point of view’ scenes on D-Day in the fantastic SAVING PRIVATE RYAN movie. And the personal stories, told in vignettes throughout the bigger story, are tremendously engaging.

On the way we stopped again at Larry DeBerry’s museum. He was outside setting up a new display by the parking lot.  He was just getting ready to set up his wife’s ELVIS collection in a new display case inside as well.  Elvis in a Civil War museum?  Hey, this is Tennessee, and we are only 120 miles from Memphis.  ‘Nough said.

Then on north we drove several miles to Savannah, Tennessee.  Savannah was, and is,  the largest city on the Tennessee River’s east bank in southwest Tennessee. It had been mostly pro-Union when the state seceded and when Grant’s 80 plus steamers and gunboats ran down from up north in 1862 after destroying the Rebel forts Donelson and Henry. He was moving south to set the army up to invade Mississippi at Pittsburg landing, just a couple of miles below Savannah but on the west bank. Savannah became U S Grant’s personal headquarters.

He stayed at the pro-Union family Cherry mansion right by Savannah’s main landing and river ferry site.  It was here that he rushed south from when he heard Johnston’s Rebels were charging into his southwest flank camps on the morning of Sunday April 6th.

On a side note this is the home that Alex Haley’s paternal grandparents worked in before the Civil War.  His grandpa Alex ran a ferryboat for Mr. Cherry and his grandma Queen worked in the house.  Alex wrote a historical novel about his grandmother called Queen, and they are buried just a couple of blocks north of the house in the city cemetery.

The main reason for our visit to Savannah was the Tennessee River Museum.  Located in the former town post office it is a well laid out collection of several key facets of this area of the Tennessee River Valley.

First are some of the most important Mississippian Indian artifacts from the mound community on the Shiloh Battlefield.  But Savannah was actually built on top of an even larger mound city, which, before they were built over or flattened by new construction in town, had 14 large mounds.  The Cherry home was actually built on the largest, or chief’s mound.

Then there is the Trail of Tears section.  Traveling across the middle US from Oklahoma to Georgia and the Carolina’s you cannot miss the heartaches of the now well marked Trail of Tears Highways.  HighwayS because there were more than one trail as different Indian groups, all ironically called the ‘civilized’ nations,  were forced west by the Andrew Jackson Indian Removal Bill of 1830.  The Cherokee especially tried to stall the process, and they did for several years, but by 1838 all attempts had been made, and they moved because they could not fight the US Army.

600 Cherokee came through Savannah and crossed the river at the Cherry Ferry, though in the 1830’s it was called Rudd’s Ferry. Thousands died altogether on the way west.  They had few supplies given to them for the journey, and they never received near the value they should have from selling their eastern homes so could not purchase more. Oh, and they were marched west in winter.

The Shiloh Battlefield  displays include several interesting and unique items, including bullets found on the battlefield mashed into each other; a cannon round stuck inside a fence post; and a collection of Civil War bullets that, for the military historian, is a precious and valuable comparative tool.

Some pictures and artifacts from Civil War veteran reunions at Shiloh over the decades following the battle are interesting for the reconciliation shown by them.  At least some reconciliation. As I have said before, the south still has a few Confederates as citizens.

But this is called the Tennessee River Museum for a reason, and it is the Civil War US gunboat and later steamboat eras that are most celebrated here. Steamboats on all of America’s navigable rivers were important freight and passenger machines, but by the time the 20^th century came about and efficient and fast railroads, then cars and trucks began to dominate, the old steamers on the Tennessee joined their cousins on the Ohio and Mississippi, and elsewhere rotting on river banks or chopped up for firewood.

My dad photoed my brother and I in the 1950’s on rotting steam dredges that kept the Susquehanna’s waterways clear not for steamboats, but for small craft to run north and south, and to scrape coal off the river bottom. That was actually profitable for several decades in Pennsylvania.

We left Savannah in the afternoon and drove down the east bank of the Tennessee on the dirt and gravel Pittsburg Landing Road.  No, it doesn’t cross a bridge at Pittsburg Landing to the battlefield site.  The ferry site on this side of the river is long gone.  But it is an interesting low country look at 21^st century farming where once pioneers worked 60-300 acre homesteads before the Civil War.

Our route south ended at the Pickwick Landing Dam.  One of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s large dams built in the 1930’s to create jobs, electricity, and later, recreation opportunities. The river flows south to north in central Tennessee so Pickwick Lake, created by the dam, backs up the water for miles south into Mississippi all the way to Florence and Muscle Shoals.

A short drive north again on the west bank of the Tennessee brought us home to FROG and like I began with, a RELAXING game of Scrabble, for Mona.

Tomorrow is Sunday and we are joining our new friends at Lebanon UMC, next door to our cemetery plot (ok. Lot) at 10:00 am.  Then Sunday School at 11:00.  Pastor Jim has two other churches to preach at, one before and one after ours.  We United Methodists do love to CONNECT ourselves to one another.  Keeps our churches small, and our pastors poor, but at least they have tenured jobs. Few others other than Roman Catholic Priests do. But that's a story for a whole other sermon.

You will find many more pictures at my Facebook Page.  Just friend me to get them regularly. I don't use Facebook for alot of other posts.

-Ken