THE LOST HISTORY OF AN ALLRED FAMILY OF NORTH GEORGIA

Reported photo of Elias Allred

My late grandfather John Richards Davis, in speaking about his ancestry, said that he knew little of the Allreds except that their lineage had been traced many times. He was correct although, with such a big and far flung family, much remains unknown about its many branches. Some of what is in print is incorrect. One of the more colorful of the Allred lines, those of Hall and Pickens counties in Georgia, is one of the least well-known.

My grandfather Davis and my grandfather John Garland Holbert, for example were cousins through these Allreds although they never met or even knew of each other. Such a situation is not at all uncommon among the Georgia Allreds, a family that seems always more interested in the present than in keeping the past. The Allred family counts many prominent Americans among their number including President Barack Obama.

The Allred story can be found, however. One of the few collections of private papers relating to the Allreds are the genealogical files in the papers of Texas Governor James V. Allred in the University of Houston. Among the items found preserved therein is the story (untrue) that the Allreds took their name from covering themselves in the blood of dead British soldiers during the American Revolution. Genealogies such as Rulon C. Allred's The Allred Family in America have traced the Allred family and their name to the 1500s. Genealogical information below, except when cited otherwise, comes from Rulon Allred's book.

Roland J. Deziel, Jr. has sought the Allreds even earlier. His research has so far found an Allred who ruled one of England's seven Eighth Century kingdoms. Allreds appear in the Doomsday Books before and after William the Conqueror. He has also found much more including a Captain Allred fighting pirates off the coast of North Carolina in 1699.

The North Georgia Allreds descend from Elias Allred (b. 1758 or 1768 in Orange, later Randolph, County, North Carolina, d. 1844-1845 Hall County, Georgia) a North Carolina Revolutionary War veteran who later drew a Federal pension.[1] His descendants would learn of a Rigby estate in a book list of alleged American claims to English estates. It was prepared by London lawyer Robert Gun who hoped to draw clients this way.[2]

In a probably unsuccessful attempt to claim the Rigby estate, Elias' daughter Margaret Allred (b. 1791 Randolph County, North Carolina) made a deposition on 12 August 1875 about her mother's family. The deposition is among the loose superior court papers on microfilm at the Pickens County Library.

Margaret testified that her grandfather John Rigby was the son of William Rigby who died in England. She attended to John when he died at her father's house in North Carolina. John Rigby had two daughters, Polly who married Elias Allred, and Sallie who married John Sitton. Elias served as a substitute for John Sitton in the Revolution, according to his pension deposition. The Sittons, like the Allreds, also moved to North Georgia.

This Allred family subsequently moved to Pendleton District, South Carolina in 1815 and to Hall County, Georgia in 1827. According to the record of the 1840 census, the Allreds worked in agriculture and mining. From Hall County, Elias won a land lot in the Georgia Cherokee land lot lotteries as a Revolutionary War veteran and he successfully applied for a federal veteran’s pension on June 7, 1833.[3] He continued to receive quarterly pension payments through September 3, 1844, and presumably died In Hall County in the six months afterwards.[4] 

Census records show that Elias and Polly Rigby Allred had several children, although most of them have not been identified. Their son Elias (b. 1789 Randolph County, North Carolina, d. 1870 Pickens County, Georgia) served in the militia from Pendleton District, South Carolina, during the War of 1812 for which his widow later drew a Federal pension. She was Mary Harrison (b. 1789, d. 1882 Pickens County, Georgia). In her pension claim, she described him as about five feet four inches tall, with dark eyes, black hair, and a dark complexion. They were married in Pendleton District, South Carolina on February 15, 1807.[5]

Mary Harrison’s place of birth in the 1880 Federal census of Pickens County is given as England, although in other Federal censuses, her birthplace is stated as South Carolina. The claim of English birth most likely comes from some garbled account of the above-mentioned Allred claim to the Rigby estate. Earl Harrison, Jr. believes that she was the sister of Reuben Harrison (b. 1786 in Wilkes County, Georgia, d. Hall County, Georgia, January 7, 1857). Reuben’s parents were reportedly Vincent Walker Harrison (b. Richmond County, Virginia, July 12, 1747, d.  Cherokee County, Georgia 1835) and Ann Wilkinson.

By 1850, Elias Jr. and Mary Harrison Allred moved to the part of Cherokee County, Georgia which on December 5, 1853, became Pickens County. Atlanta’s press would report that the Pickens County Allreds owned a madstone that treated more than 100 cases of rabies and various poisonings. It was found by Elias Allred Jr. in 1824 in the “pouch” of a buck he had killed and in 1884 went on display at the New Orleans Exposition. By the time of his death in 1870, he owned some 180 acres, mostly in lot 84 in the 13th District, and that included a grist mill. Near the Petit Post Office in the Salem District, southwest of Jasper, this area has a history of the supernatural, see "Pickens County Mysteries: A Place Called Alice," North Georgia Journal 6 (4) (1989): 39-43.

Elias and Mary Harrison Allred are buried in the old section of Cool Springs Cemetery in Tate.[6] Among their children was Martha "Patsy" Benice Allred (b. 1808 Pendleton District, South Carolina, d. 1891 Hall County, Georgia) who married Benjamin Faulkner (pronounced "Fortner") of Hall County. My grandfather John R. Davis was their great great-great-grandson. Another daughter of Elias and Mary was Elizabeth Allred (b. 1800 Pendleton District, South Carolina, d. in the Pickens County cyclone of 1884), who married John Nicholson Jr. of Pickens County, the son of Revolutionary War pensioner John Nicholson. (My grandfather John Garland Holbert was the great-great grandson of John Jr. and Elizabeth.)

 John Nicholson Sr.'s role in the great border dispute between Georgia and North Carolina, "the Walton War," has been published. He had the dubious distinction of being the only man to ever represent a county in the Georgia state senate that proved to be in another state.[7]

Other daughters of Elias and Mary Harrison Allred were Margaret (Mrs. William Peoples),[8] Mary "Polly" (Mrs. Alfred Robinson), Nancy (Mrs. Jacob Robinson), Ferray or Terracy (Mrs. John C. Jones Jr.), and Rebecca (Mrs. Isaiah Robbins).[9]

The more interesting of the children of Elias and Mary Harrison Allred were their three sons. They played impor­tant although very complicated parts in the history of Pickens County. Their careers will be summarized below--as clearly as now possible.

Lemuel James (?) Allred (b. 1814 Pendleton District, South Carolina, d. 1892 Pickens County, Georgia) was likely named for a local politician and grew up to be a career politician himself, holding several elected and appointed positions. Locally he helped Democrat Governor Joseph E. Brown, a former Pickens County judge, in battling the secretive and xenophobic "Know Nothing" or American Party. On behalf of “bare-footed Democracy,” he helped to defeat a bill in 1851 to give slave owners special tax breaks based on number of slaves owned. In 1852, he represented Cherokee County in the state Constitutional Union Convention. As a Georgia house member from Cherokee County, Lemuel succeeded in getting passed, with the help of a prominent lobbyist named Fields from White Path in Gilmer County, the bill that created Pickens County from the counties of Cherokee and Gilmer. Fields named the new county Pickens and Lemuel named the county seat Jasper, both names coming from South Carolina heroes of the American Revolution.[10]

Allred and his brother-in-law Robert B. McCutchen would take credit for raising a Union flag in front of the Pickens County courthouse in protest to Georgia seceding from the Union in 1860. During the Civil War, Lemuel served as deputy sheriff of Pickens County, as a second lieutenant in the Georgia state Confederate forces in Savannah, and as an alcohol purchasing officer for the Confederate hospitals in Atlanta, however. His letters as the latter are today in the William L. Clements Library of the University of Michigan.

When the Republicans ruled Georgia immediately after the war, Lemuel became a well rewarded supporter of the "carpet-bagger" governor Rufus Bullock. However, Lemuel also published newspaper articles and later a pamphlet denouncing a Pickens County meeting in support of Congressional Reconstruction as an effort by ex-Confederate opportunists to pose as Unionists calling for the disenfranchisement of ex-Confederates while giving the vote to former slaves. Sion A. Darnell, a principal with Lemuel Allred's brothers at the meeting, defended the participants at the 1867 meeting and accused Lemuel of riding with the Confederate home guard in raids of violence and robbery during the war. Lemuel produced his own witnesses, including his brothers, to testify to the contrary.

Lemuel also unsuccessfully filed a claim as a Southern Unionist whose property had been taken or destroyed during the war by Federal forces. The claim was rejected, hardly surprising as the claims agent was Darnell. Lemuel eventually had to appeal to Congress for a pardon from his Confederate past, for him to have his citizenship restored.

When the Democrats came to power, Lemuel changed sides and by 1876 had become an active member of the county party. He served as a state senator and had passed a resolution calling for an investigation of the actions of the army in suppressing moonshining in North Georgia. When the railroad was formally dedicated in Jasper in 1882, he was one of the masters of ceremony. He served as doorkeeper of the Georgia state senate for many years and as such, in 1894, lent his name to a patent medicine that he claimed treated “indigestion, constipation, and biliousness” from which he had suffered for fifty years.[11] His tombstone in the Jasper city cemetery reads: "He was for his Country first, last and all the time. . . He never wavered in principles. He was all his life a true DEMOCRAT." Lemuel J. Allred married Nancy Agnus McCutchen, sister of prominent local politician Robert McCutchen. Their eight children today have many descendants.

Elias Walter Allred (b. 1824 Hall County, Georgia, d. 1910 Pickens County, Georgia), the second son of Elias Jr. and Mary Harrison Allred, had a complicated career too, made all the more confusing by the many times he has been misidentified with other Elias Allreds. This "black Elias," for example, has been confused with his cousin Elias Earl (?) Allred (b. 1816 South Carolina), "red Elias," who married Harriet Hyde and had several children. (These two Eliases and the Elias of the War of 1812, all appear on pages one and two of the 1870 Federal census of Pickens County. Betty Loper has located a federal census record in which Elias Earl Allred has in his household his "mother" Margaret Allred, b. 1791 see above, the aunt of the Reverend Elias Walter Allred.)

The Reverend Elias Walter Allred, Lemuel's brother, benefited from the creation of Pickens County to serve as the first tax collector, a job he did so zealously that the state of Georgia would refund to him an overpayment. A tanner by trade, he married Martha "Patsy" Arthur (daughter of Barnabas Arthur?) in Cherokee County on January 11, 1848. They had no issue. In the 1849 tax digest, he appears as owning no taxable property. By 1860, however, he had acquired a great deal of land along with a reputation as a good but retired businessman.

Elias W. Allred was also known as a powerful Baptist minister. Dallas Byess (born 1894) remembered hearing Elias preach until his “biscuit and gravy had given out.” Elias ministered to at the least Macedonia (Cherokee County), Four Mile (Pickens County), New Harmony (Dawson County), Goshen (Dawson County), Cool Springs (Pickens County), Dawsonville (Dawson County), Providence (Fulton County), Sharp Mountain (Cherokee), Bethesda (Cherokee County), Mt. Zion (Cherokee), Corinth (Pickens County), Sardis (Cherokee), and High Tower (Cherokee County). At age sixty-three he would become pastor for one year at Mt. Tabor in Forsyth County. A letter involving some of his land speculations can be found in the manuscript collections of the Georgia Historical Society. When the Civil War began, he operated a hotel in Jasper that catered to lawyers during the term of court.

  Like, or perhaps because of, his brother Lemuel, Elias also had an extensive political career,

  inspiring him as a character in one historical novel and likely to be the subject of another by

  Robert Hewson.[12] In November 1855, he was elected as doorkeeper to the state senate on the

  seventh ballot. William H. Brown made silhouettes of many members of Georgia's state

  government of that year, including a full portrait of Elias, although not of Lemuel. The book of

  these silhouettes is today in the Georgia Archives. Elias went on to serve as a member of the

  Georgia House of Representatives and the State Senate. When elected to his fourth term in the

  Georgia House in 1888, Elias had not served in the legislature in twenty-seven years. He

  succeeded in passing a bill, still technically in effect, that makes playing the game of Crack-a-

  loo illegal in Pickens County.[13]

In July of 1864, federal General William T. Sherman sent federal cavalry to Jasper, the county seat of Pickens County, to end the raids on the federally held railroad by Captain Benjamin F. Jordan’s local Confederate home guard. While on this campaign, the troopers also rescued the supporters of the Union in Pickens County from persecution. Elias was one of a five-man delegation that met the Union soldiers and helped them to organize a 128-man local defense force to protect the Pickens County families from further depredations. The delegation was brought back to the federal army headquarters to plead, probably successfully, for arms. The Confederate press reported that Elias was the prime mover in the pro-Union home guards and the local militia, and that he had been responsible for rescuing ten Yankees held by the Confederates. Elias was, however, at the same time, also serving in a Georgia state Confederate cavalry unit and had been elected to the Georgia Confederate legislature. [14]

The federal chief of spies in Georgia, James George Brown, began rumors in the fall of 1864 that he had been appointed governor of the new state of North Georgia, with Elias Allred as its congressman. The story was false but Elias was arrested and his property was looted by the Confederates, anyway. He resigned from the Georgia legislature rather than suffer impeachment. Elias was also arrested in early March 1865 and was briefly imprisoned at the barracks in Macon before reportedly being released through the influence of his brother Lemuel with Confederate Governor Brown. Lemuel had been Brown's executive secretary and doorkeeper to the Georgia Confederate House of Representatives.[15]

The unit of home guards that Elias had helped to organize likely had received help from the federal army of General Sherman to defend themselves from the actions of the Confederate Conscript Bureau’s company under Captain Jordan. Elias company, however, had the legally elected sheriff as its commander and, as such could act as a posse against persons, like Jordan, of unproven and uncertain legality.[16]

The post-war career of Elias W. Allred proved no less colorful. Federal tax records show that immediately after the war he owned a grist mill and that he worked sometimes as a “ret. Dealer.” In 1873, Reverend Allred was one of the ministers at the famous revival of Sharp Mountain Baptist Church in Cherokee County. The churchgoers saw a strange light on the pulpit that emitted curious noises. This eerie event compelled them to remain in the church building for weeks. Allred helped to cut a hole in the nearby ice-covered Etowah River for a resulting mass baptism of at least seventy-three people.[17]

Among the properties that Elias owned was a pink marble quarry. He was swindled out of this asset in 1897 in an elaborate scam. The Georgia State Supreme Court eventually returned the property to Elias but the family remembers that he remained emotionally disturbed over what had been done to him to the day that he died. He sold the marble rights a few years before his death but neglected to remove it from his will, starting stories that have persisted for generations that the descendants of his brothers and sisters will someday inherit that asset.[18]

Elias Walter Allred died on March 8, 1910. His distant nephew Walter Kemsie Davis stated that this minister died at the home of his nephew (and Walter’s great grandfather) Thomas Faulkner (pronounced “Fortner”) in Hall County. Walter heard that Thomas had been a wealthy planter before the Civil War and had built a house with no windows (reasons not known although it may have had to do with Faulkner having two sons who were regularly in and out of the state mental institution). Faulkner, after the war, made brandy, according to federal direct tax records. He likely started this business with the help of a former slave who preferred working for his former owner, according to Walter, than emancipation. An account book kept by Thomas Faulkner after the war is now in the Hargrett Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of the University of Georgia. [19]

Elias W. Allred, however, is buried beside his wife Martha Patsy Arthur (d. May 17, 1904) and a Sophia Pool (October 1, 1840-July 1, 1919; reason not known) at Cool Springs Baptist Church in Tate, Georgia. His incredible life spanned the Cherokee Removal, the Civil War, and the modern era.[20]

The third Allred brother. John Marion Allred (b. 1831 Hall County, Georgia, d. 1915 Pickens County, Georgia), would also have a colorful career. Although he was a Democrat before the Civil War, he supported the Union throughout the fighting and was a Republican member of the Georgia legislature in 1871-1872. He was also a Federal Justice Department commissioner in Jasper, 12 April 1883-6 April 1886, and starting again on 23 May 1889. In 1890 a secret society of vigilante moonshiners, known as the "Honest Man's Friend & Protector," burned down the homes of the men paid to testify against moonshining. If he was also by that time one of the few licensed distillers in Pickens County, he was also putting down his competition. John M. Allred helped bring the vigilantes to justice although he also testified to the otherwise good character of these men. His role in that effort may be confused with that of his brother Elias.[21]

When the Federal court of North Georgia ran out of its appropriation to pay its bills, John Marion Allred sued the United States in the U. S. Court of Claims for monies due him. He won although the federal government unsuccessfully appealed to the United States Supreme Court.[22] Consequently, the United States has had to pay its legal obligations to employees and agents ever since.

Allred helped to bring the railroad to Pickens County and central North Georgia... He also helped to found the Piedmont Republican, Georgia's only white Republican newspaper, in Jasper in 1890. A young friend better remembered his talent for mild cursing and killing annoying cats with rocks. John Marion Allred sequentially married sisters, Martha and Sarah M. Davis. Many of his descendants still live in Pickens County.[23]

A great deal of research remains to be done on the Allred family in Georgia but hopefully the above can be a beginning.

Photograph believed to be of Elias Allred Jr. (1789-1870) and wife Mary “Polly” Harrison (1789-1882).

Elias Walter Allred (right), Georgia Archives, Morrow.

NOTES

[1] Revolutionary War pension claim of Elias Allred, NC S16307, Military Service Records, National Archives and Records Adminis­tration; and Sybil McRay, "Allreds moved to Hall From North Caro­lina," Genealogical Files, Chestatee Regional Library, Gaines­ville, Georgia. The date of Elias's death is taken from the records of payments to Revolutionary War veterans in National Archives Micropublication T718 Ledgers of Payments to Pensioners, Invalids, Widows, 1818-1878, microfilm reel 5, p. 402. Elias received a payment in September 1843 but stopped receiving pay­ments with March 1844. Payments were made twice per year; also see Craig R. Scott, The “Lost Pensions” Settled Accounts of the Act of 6 April 1838 (Lovettsville, Va., 1996), 5.

              [2] Sitton Family Letters, Microfilm Library, Georgia Department of Archives and

History. Copies of Robert Gun's published lists of American estates in Great Britain are in the Library of Con­gress. Some of these same descendents also were mislead into joining a list of 500 Richards descendants that tried to claim to a Richards-Balz estate in

Baltimore, Maryland.

[3] James F. Smith, The Cherokee Land Lottery (New York, 1838), 72; “Was Revolutionary Hero,” Gainesville News, September22, 1909 p. 1; deposition of Elias Allred, June 7, 1833, Revolutionary War pension claim of Elias Allred, NC S 16307, Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty-Land-Warrant Application Files (National Archives microfilm M804, roll 47), Record Group 15 Records of Veterans Affairs, Military Service Records, National Archives and Records Adminis­tration, Washington, DC.

[4] Ledgers of Payments to Pensioners, Invalids, Widows, 1818-1878, p. 402 (National Archives microfilm T718, roll 5) and Elias Allred, Final Revolutionary War Pension Payment Vouchers: Georgia (National Archives microfilm M1746, roll 1, copy enclosed), Records Group 217 Records of the Accounting Officers of the Department of the Treasury, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington;  also see Craig R. Scott, The “Lost Pensions” Settled Accounts of the Act of 6 April 1838 (Lovettsville, Va., 1996), 5.

[5] Deposition of Polly Harrison Allred, February 15, 1881, War of 1812 pension file for service of Elias Allred, WO-41265, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC

              [6]  “The Georgia Madstone,” Atlanta Constitution, August 20, 1884; legal notice, Weekly Atlanta Intelligencer, December 14, 1870; Robert S. Davis, "Pickens County Mysteries: A Place Called Alice," North Georgia Journal 6 (4) (1989): 39-43.

[7] Jerry A. Taylor, Hearthstones of Home: Foundations of Towns County Georgia (1983) 1: 193-94; Revolutionary War pension claim of John Nicholson, NC S 31882, Military Service Records, National Archives and Records Administration; and Robert S. Davis, A Researcher's Library of Georgia (2 vols., 1987) 1: 211-31.

[8] For biographical information on Margaret Allred (Mrs. William Peeples) see Doss Kornegay, Jr., "Allred Family of Pickens County, Georgia," Allred Family Newsletter no. 21 (October 1994).

[9] Rae Drott, 6854 Blackwood, Riverside, CA 92506 has a family story told by his ancestor Rebecca Allred Robbins to his mother of Rebecca working as a spy during the Civil War and having to eat a message before she was caught. As her husband Jacob was a Confederate soldier but her brothers were Unionists, Mr. Drott does not know for which side Rebecca worked.

              [10] Lemuel J. Allred, Name File and File II Names, Georgia Department of Archives and History; Atlanta (Georgia) Constitution, October 2, 1872, p. 1, c. 1, September 28, 1882, May 13, 1887, p. 2 c. 2; Daily Morning News (Savannah), December 22, 1851; Cherokee Georgian (Canton), July 26, 1876, p. 3, c. 2; Tad Evans, Macon, Georgia, Newspaper Clippings (Messenger), Volume VI 1852-1854 (Savannah: The Author, 1999), 49; “Georgia Switzerland,” Weekly Chronicle & Constitutionalist (Augusta, GA), July 4, 1883, 9.

[11]  Southern Unionist Claim of Samuel (sic, Lemuel) J. Allred and Robert B. McCutchen, Disallowed and Barred Southern Unionist Claims, 1871-1880, National Archives Micropublication M1407; Lemuel Allred letters, Foster Papers, James S. Schoff Collection, William L. Clements Library; Lemuel J. Allred, Address of Lemuel J. Allred (1868), Allred Family Folder, Georgia Department of Archives and History; Luke Tate, History of Pickens County (1935), 89, 223, 235, 236; I. W. Avery, The History of the State of Georgia (1881), 187-88; Carolyn McGough Rowe, Index to Individual Pardon Applications From the South 1865-1898 (1996), 163; Olin Jackson, A North Georgia Journal of History (Alpharetta: Legacy Publications, 1992), 221; The State (Columbia, S. C.), May 20, 1894; and Ellijay (Georgia) Courier, May 5, 1887, p. 3 c. 3. An account by Lemuel Allred of his early married life appears in Pickens County (Georgia) Herald (Jasper, Georgia), December 27, 1889, p. 2, c. 3.

              [12] Hugh Penley, The Jordan Gang (n. p., 2008).

[13] Elias W. Allred, Name File, Georgia Department of Archives and History; Tate, History of Pickens County, 57, 70, 83, 88, 89, 189, 216, 227, 235, 287; oral history interview with Dallas Byass, in the possession of the author; Mitchell A. and Wanda C. Collins, Stepping Out on Faith: History of Mt. Tabor Baptist Church 1833-1999 (Cumming, Ga.: The Authors, 2000) , 90; Acts Passed by the Georgia Legislature (1854), 319; “Georgia Legislature,” Daily Chronicle & Sentinel (Augusta, Ga.), November 7, 1855, p. 1, c. 2; “Hanging a Woman,” Atlanta Constitution, October 16, 1888; Elias W. Allred, Pickens County, Georgia, Credit Reports, R. G. Dun Collection, Baker Library, Harvard University; and C. Pat Cates, Soldiers Who Served in the Cherokee Legion Georgia State Guards (n.p., 1992), n.p.

[14]   John P. Cummings to E. H. Murray, 31 July 1864, and Green B. Raum to S. B. Moe, 29 July 1864, in The War of the Rebellion (128 vols., Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1898-1904), Series I, vol. 52, pt. i, p. 107, vol. 38, pt. v, p. 299; Southern Watchman (Athens, Georgia), August 17, 1864, p. 2, c. 3; New York Herald, November 26, 1864; and Augusta Constitutionalist (Georgia), February 11, 1865, p. 1, c. 2.

[15] Robert S. Davis, "The Curious Civil War Career of James George Brown, Spy," Prologue: The Quarterly of the National Ar­chives, 26 (1994): 24-5; and “Mr. Aldred of Pickens County” Daily Intelligencer (Atlanta), March 2, 1865, p. 2 c. 2.

              [16] See Robert S. Davis, “Into the Wilderness: John Kellogg’s Journey through Civil War North Georgia,” Chattanooga Regional Historical Journal 7 (December 2004): 215-32.

              [17] District 4, Monthly Lists, Sept.-Dec. 1865, and Monthly and Special Lists, 1866, Internal Revenue Assessment Lists for Georgia, 1865-1866, National Archives microfilm M762, rolls, 7 and 8; Bernice McCullar, "Tombstones Tell the Tale of Great Revival of 1873," Atlanta Journal, November 28, 1966.

              The success of this revival is documented but not McCullar's story of the circumstances. "The Bizarre History of the Sharp Mountain Baptist Church Revival of 1873," Viewpoints Georgia Baptist History 19 (2004): 7-10. This incident parallels a miracle witnessed by the first Christians and described in the Bible in the book of Acts, chapter two.

[18] Calhoun (Georgia) Times, July 6, 1882; Elizabeth Evans Kilbourne, Gordon County, Georgia, Newspaper Clippings Volume II 1878-1882 (Savannah, 1997), 364; “Georgia Marble,” Weekly Constitution (Atlanta), July 18, 1882; Elias W. Allred vs. W. B. Tate, Pickens County Superior Court, 1898, on microfilm in the Pickens County Public Library; and Mallard vs. Allred, Reports of Cases Decided in the Supreme Court of the State of Georgia at the October Term 1898 (1899), 503-8.

             [19] Interview with Walter Kimsie Davis, March 6, 1977, in the author’s possession; Internal Revenue Assessment Lists for Georgia, 1865-1866 (National Archives microfilm M762, roll 8), Monthly and Special Lists, District 4, April, August, October, November 1866; Robert S. Davis, Georgia Black Book: Morbid, Macabre, and Sometimes Disgusting Records of Genealogical Value (1982), 203, 204, 206, 207, 213.

             [20] Ted O. Brooke and Linda W. Geiger, Pickens County Georgia Cemeteries (Jasper, 2009), 86.

              [21] "The Honest Man's Friend & Protector of Pickens County, Georgia: Moonshine and Vigilantism in Northwest Georgia," Chattanooga Regional Historical Journal 2 (1999): 40-56;  and Tate, History of Pickens County, 216-17. John Marion Allred did mention paying E. W. Allred as a deputy in putting down the Honest Man's Friend & Protector. General Jurisdiction Case File #17687, United States Court of Claims for John M. Allred, Records of the Court of Claims, Record Group 123, National Archives and Records Administration. Reverend Elias may well have helped to stop the moonshining vigilantes, in person and from the pulpit.

[22] General Jurisdiction Case File #17687, United States Court of Claims for John M. Allred (see above); and J. C. Bancroft Davis, United States Reports Volume 155 Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court at October Term 1893 and October Term 1894 (New York: Banks & Brothers, 1895), 591-96.

[23]  Martha Lucille Allred Pyatte, Some Early Families of Pickens County, Georgia (1980), 7-8, 11-2; and C. H. Cowart to editor, Pickens County Progress (Jasper, Ga.), December 22, 1932, p. 1 c. 2.