D. L. Williams: Killed by Rebels

Even though Tennessee seceded during the not-so-Civil War, many of Sevier County's men chose to fight instead for the Union. Lots of those families descended from frontiersmen who had fought alongside John Sevier and others in Revolutionary War battles like that at King's Mountain to establish the union and independence of the states.

The mountainous farms of East Tennessee were not heavily populated with slaveholders, and most ET men who fought for the Confederacy were conscripted or had hopes of rising in the social strata because of the trade and commerce that had grown with the deeper South within the 1850s development of railroad systems in the area. Many fought for the South because they deeply believed in the rights of states to make their individual decisions about slavery and other issues. (Two very insightful books about East Tennessee's conflicted role in the War Between the States are O.P. Temple's 1899 East Tennessee and the Civil War and W. Todd Groce's 1999 Mountain Rebels.)

Alternating occupation of Confederate and Union forces in the region wreaked havoc between neighbors and families, and Sevier County was greatly impoverished. Deserters and outlaws roamed the mountains, killing innocent citizens and pillaging farms for food and personal gain. Rebel soldiers came to my great-great-great grandfather Dillard (D.L.) Williams' home off Jones Cove Road above Bethany Baptist Church, and when he went out to face them, they put him on a horse and kept watch over him while they stole from the smokehouse and the corn crib before burning them. After that, they took D.L. up the road and shot him. His wife Julia Ann (Bryant) Williams survived and lived until January 19, 1898. D.L. and Julia Ann Williams were the parents of Mary Jane Williams, who married Perry Webb.