Life is a Journey

In the late summer of 2008 I had the chance to get over to Spring Place. It was a brief, overnight trip and unfortunately the Whitfield-Murray Historical Society offices were closed by the time I got there. Nevertheless I got to look around the area, and gradually a rough outline of the settlement began to emerge in my mind.
   My goal was to try to learn more about the history of my anscestor John Beall (JSB). Spring Place formed around the home of James and Joseph Vann, and their Cherokee nation’s history overlaps with JSB’s, so I visited the Chief Vann House site. The lives of Vann and his children, lived out with one foot in the Cherokee culture and one in the European at the frontier of their organized nation and the one forming newly around them, are eye-opening.
   As I left the site I picked up a copy of Murray County Heritage, compiled over ten years by the Whitfield-Murray Historical Society. In the parking lot at closing time I skimmed through the index for Bealls, but only found references to source material of which I was already aware. It was getting dark and I still had a couple of hours’ drive back to Huntsville, so I tossed the book in my bag and forgot about it for a while.
   A couple of weeks ago, as part of unpacking in our new home, I rediscovered the book (truly a tome, nearly three inches thick) and started to read the first section over the Christmas break. Wonderful! The Murray County historians have done a beautiful job bringing to life the history and amazing events of this place, from Vann’s role as an important planter and merchant whom President Monroe saw fit to visit, to the role and impact of his guests, the sturdy Moravian missionaries who founded and developed Spring Place for three decades, to the lawless and deadly era of landgrabbing and dirty politics following the Indian’s disenfranchisement and eventual ouster by the State of Georgia. That’s as far as I’ve read, but it recounts a breathtaking series of events over a very short period of time (about thirty years.) I would highly recommend this book into anyone interested in the frontier formation of our nation.
   I also discovered an interesting nugget - John S. Bell was named as one of the original commissioners of the town which, though a long-standing settlement, was formally chartered as the county seat by the state assembly in 1834 as part of the act that supported the landgrab from the Cherokees. So that places him here much earlier than I’d suspected. That also sets him up as a candidate to have been one of the nasty land-grabbers…but also maybe not. Time to go back and look at those land records again….

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