Perry Webb: Always serving others

My grandmother Josie (Oakley) Loveday's grandfather was Perry Webb, a man who served his country, church, and community.

Perry was born on May 22, 1840, in Sevier County, and on March 24, 1858, he married D.L. and Julia Ann (Bryant) Williams' daughter Mary Jane.

As a Civil War soldier for the Union, Perry enlisted from Cocke County on September 26, 1863, as a private in Company K of the 9th Tennessee Cavalry and was promoted to Regiment Sargent of Company A. He participated in the battles of Greeneville, Wautauga, Bulls Gap, Morristown (2), Russellville, Blue Springs, Salt Works, and Wytheville, as well as the siege of Knoxville. For three months in 1864, he was on special duty guarding the Drake Creek railroad bridge. He was honorably discharged at Knoxville on September 11, 1865. His brothers Abraham and Milas were soldiers as well.

Perry served as deacon and trustee of Bethany Baptist Church (Jones Cove Road), and unfortunately, the church records were lost when his house burned. His faith was very important to him, and he would sometimes sing "the old camp songs" in his sleep.

He and Mary had twelve children, among them my great grandmother Sarah Catherine. They had a peach orchard on their land, and their large log home consisted of two cabin rooms with a fireplace between them and a frame kitchen to one side. In their front yard, they had an open well and beneath the apple trees a few bee hives, which Perry loved to sit and watch in the years after Mary's death on February 16, 1904. Perry died September 15, 1915.

*Some information obtained from a March 21, 1900 article in the Vindicator, shown in the Sevier Bicentennial book, 976.87 of the McClung Collection.

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.