On October 19, 1818,
the United States Congress ratified the treaty with the Chickasaw Nation ceding West Tennessee to the United States. What followed was the creation of Shelby County in 1819 and, to its north, the creation of Tipton County in 1823. Settlers quickly followed. Along the border of Shelby and Tipton counties small communities developed around churches, schools, and country stores. This is the story of the people who have lived there. Over the last 180 years most of the schools and some of the towns of Northeast Shelby County and South Central Tipton County have disappeared. The churches and cemeteries remain and the land is still farmed.
This illustrated history attempts to capture the stories of those people and the places where they lived. Through a series of articles and interviews, maps, photographs, diaries, and letters, you can experience the people who lived on the farms and worked in the towns of Salem, Portersville, Idaville, Kerrville, Armourtown, Bethel, Tipton, Mudville, Macedonia, Gratitude, Barretville, and Rosemark, Tennessee.
While the purpose of this book is to preserve the history of the people who lived in a particular area, the messages found are often universal. There is the struggle to survive in hard times, the call to serve their country, and their stories of service from the Second Seminole War to the Korean Conflict. In this book you can find the tragedy of infant death before the advent of antibiotics and the loss of life in the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918-19. You can walk the paths of the early ministers as they tended their congregations and you can feel the experience of the country doctors making their rounds. Within these pages you can find the stories of economic hardship, of the effect of the institution of the gold standard in 1873 and the hardship imposed by fluctuating cotton prices.
This book is to be perused like a good magazine. The reader should turn its pages and examine its Table of Contents for the little pieces of recollection that tell the true story of the history of a people. Within these pages you can learn the history of transportation, the expansion of the railroads, the changing of agriculture. If you look carefully, you will learn something about the remarkable resiliency and mobility of people who aspire to education, industry, and religion. These are stories of the American people.
Rosemark History Book