Dr. H. D. Guin was born in October, 1829, in Carroll County, Tenn., and is one of two sons and one daughter, surviving members of a family of five children, born to Edward and Margaret (Bowden) Guin. The father was born in Sumner County, Tenn., in February, 1799. The mother was from North Carolina. Both moved to Carroll County when young. The mother taught school in the county before they were married, in the old primitive school building with dirt floor. They were married in 1824, and kept a hotel at the present site of Huntingdon, from 1824 to 1827, it being the first hotel of Carroll County. He was also first county court clerk of the county, holding the office a number of terms. In 1832 he located on a farm in Carroll County, and remained there until their death, the mother dying in 1873, and the father in 1874.
Dr. H. D. Guin graduated at Princeton, Ky., and then graduated in medicine at Jefferson College, Philadelphia, and practiced his profession at his father’s residence, from 1856 until the commencement of the war. He then enlisted in the Twenty-second Tennessee Infantry, and at the organization was appointed assistant surgeon, remaining in this position until the disorganization at the battle of Shiloh, when he was detailed to hospital service for six months; he was then assigned the duties of surgeon in the Thirteenth Tennessee Infantry, and was afterward surgeon of Johnson’s brigade, with which he remained until the close of the war, when he returned to his home, and in 1866 embarked in the drug trade, and resumed the practice of medicine at McKenzie, Tenn., which he still continues. He has a good stock farm of 600 acres, five miles south of McKenzie, well supplied by several good springs of freestone water; there are also Indian mounds on the place. In September, 1877, Dr. Guin married Sarah E. Bomac, by which marriage he had three sons and one daughter, all now living.
Transcribed by David Donahue
Source: History of Tennessee from the Earliest Time to the Present: Together with an Historical and a Biographical Sketch of Carroll, Henry and Benton Counties, Besides a Valuable Fund of Notes, Original Observations, Reminiscences, Etc., Etc. Easley, S.C.: Southern Historical Press, 1978.