Hon. A. M. GAMBLE is the representative from Blount County. He was born in 1838, and reared on a farm and educated at Maryville. He taught school in his younger days; then at the commencement of the war enlisted in the Sixth Tennessee Infantry (Union), being afterward given command of a company, and was then steadily promoted to major-general, which rank he held till the close. He then resumed school teaching, which he has since continued in connection with farming. He was elected county superintendent of public instruction in 1882, serving four years, and in 1886 was elected member of the House of Representatives from his native county. His residence is in the Fourteenth Civil District of Blount County, where he has a farm of eighty acres.
In 1866 he married Eudora COWAN, a native of the county, and daughter of George W. and Mary COWAN. To this marriage three sons and five daughters have been born, one son now deceased. Josias GAMBLE, the grandfather of our subject, was born in Ireland in 1747, and afterward came to America, locating near Philadelphia, where he married. During the Revolutionary War he came to Blount County, and settled the farm where our subject was afterward born. He (the grandfather) resided in this section till his death in 1812. Alexander B., the father, was born in 1784, and married Elizabeth RANSBARGER, a native of Virginia, whose parents located here in the early settlement of Blount County, the father being for thirty-six years justice of the peace. His death occurred in 1867, and the mother’s in 1866.
A. M. GAMBLE is the youngest of five sons and five daughters, and he, two brothers and two sisters are the surviving members of the family. Moses A., a brother of our subject, was in the terrible “Sultana disaster”.
Source: Goodspeed Publishing Co. History of Tennessee from the Earliest Time to the Present: Together with an Historical and a Biographical Sketch of from Twenty-Five to Thirty Counties of East Tennessee. Chicago: Goodspeed, 1887.