Tombstone Inscriptions in Historic Riverside Cemetery in Jackson Tennessee (Revised Edition)
by Jonathan Kennon Thompson Smith
Copyright, Jonathan K. T. Smith, 1998

(Page 99)

BURIAL OF COLONEL JOHN H. GIBSON

Colonel John H. Gibson was an officer in Robert H. Dyer’s Tennessee troops who fought under the command of General Andrew Jackson, against their British foes, at the Battle of New Orleans, Louisiana, December 23, 1814 and January 8, 1815. His valor was such that he was held in great esteem by the rank and file in the southern American army. Shortly after his demise the Tennessee legislature passed an act, October 21, 1823, creating Gibson County in west Tennessee and named "to perpetuate the memory" of this soldier.

Colonel Gibson moved from middle Tennessee into Madison County and with his family lived about three miles north from the court square in the village of Jackson. Maurie M. Klimcheck, Watsonville, California found the mention of his demise in the Logan County, Kentucky WEEKLY MESSENGER, June 28, 1823. "Died lately in Madison Co., Tenn., Col. John H. Gibson, formerly of Rutherford County."

Perhaps during his last illness, on May 22, 1823, Colonel Gibson appointed Paul Hurly of Logan Co., Ky. as trustee for the benefit of his wife, Ann Gibson, to dispose of several land claims to which he was entitled and to give the proceeds to this wife. (Madison County deed book 1, page 187; deed recorded January 21, 1824)

Late in 1871 the old cemetery off what is now Johnson street in Jackson was excavated and the skeletal remains of several persons were exhumed and reburied in what is now Riverside Cemetery, ostensibly in the southeast section of this cemetery. Several people presented their theories as to whose remains were among those removed and reburied. However all these postulations seemed to have been put to rest when a Jacksonian, Jesse Russell, Sr., came forward in an open letter that appeared in the WHIG and TRIBUNE, Jackson, "The Burial of Col. Gibson," May 4, 1872.

He wrote, "I will state that I moved to this place /Jackson/ the 1st of January 1823 being then twenty years of age. Col. Gibson then lived about three miles north of town and died shortly after I came here. I had no personal acquaintance with him as he seldom visited town — in fact he died, I think in the summer of 1823. When the news of his death was announced, there being several soldiers living here of the war of 1812, they determined to bury him with the honors of war. I volunteered as one to make up the company. We went out what is now Market street /Highland Avenue/ and waited until the hearse bearing his corpse arrived and we fell in behind. His horse was next to the hearse having on saddle and bridle with holsters and pistols his boots in the stirrup with spurs upon them and some kind of garment, perhaps an overcoat, tied on behind the saddle. The horse was led by some person. His remains were conveyed to a burying ground northwest of town. I think the first settlers were buried there before the town was laid off. We fired our guns over the grave. "

Russell alludes to the removals of numerous remains to the new cemetery, the nucleus of what became Riverside Cemetery and the fact that if Colonel Gibson’s remains had not been initially removed there they had been by the spring of 1872 after the excavated remains were all moved to this burial ground.

 

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