What Wasn't Cherokee Indians, Was Part (Cherokee)

Following are excerpts from stories written by my Great-Grandmother, Annie Biggs Adcock as they were written to her daughter Clara.  They were compiled in a book entitled No More The Wild Country by my cousin John R. Coles.   He graciously gave me permission to use these in hopes that future generations of our family will know a little bit of our history.  

"In the year 1901, in March, we moved to Sycamore Creek, five miles North of what is now Joelton.   Then it was just an ordinary settlement.   There was five of us children, one boy and four girls.  I was next to the oldest girl.  I was born in March, 1892.   I was nine years old when we moved from Cheatham county, near Big Marrowbone Creek and near a Baptist Church called Mount Pleasant.   Very few people lived in the community and they were mostly Adcocks.   What wasn't Cherokee Indians, was part.   They was hard to get acquainted with.   Once you got to know them, you liked them.   We got a big laugh out of them Cherokees.   If they met you out away from the house, they would get behind a big tree, and turn as you got nearer.   You hardly ever got to speak to one of them.   After awhile we got used them and they quit hiding from us.   

It was heavy timbered area at that time, very little cleared land, just enough for some corn and a garden.   The livestock all run out in the woods.   Each person had a certain mark he cut on the ear of his animal so he would know them.   It was dangerous to get out in the woods, so you had to stay near the house.   

We moved tin an old house facing the creek, called the Seats House.   Old man Seats, was a drunkard, and he would beat his wife every time he got drunk.   They didn't have no children.   One evening he came home drunk and beat his wife up, and sat down in a chair and went to sleep.   His wife took a notion she had taken enough of those beatings.   So, she got the chopping axe, which they said must have been sharp, slipped up where he had thrown his head back across the chair back.   She come down on him with this sharp axe and chopped off his head.   There was blood all over the top of the room where he jumped up and hit the top of the room.   Well, they had to bury him in a wooden box.   That was before funeral homes or cars of any kind was invented.   So, they carried him out of this old road on a slide pulled by oxen to what they called the Old Liberty Graveyard.   The so-called law at that time give the old woman ten days to leave the county.   And she did, and was never seen again by anybody in this area.  

We was always wondering, us children that is, if we would see or hear Old Seats, since we moved in the old house.   But, I never heard nothing.   The old house is not there, but the tale of Old Seats getting his head chopped off is still told, and the old Seats Road is still visible."