Benjamin Gilbert PATTERSON letter
History of Greenfield
The following is an excerpt from a letter dated 9 March 1936 from Benjamin Gilbert PATTERSON to one of his daughters as transcribed by Virginia Stephenson in her book, The Patterson Family.
. . . .The old Negro HORNBEAK must have moved away from Greenfield when I was very small. I don’t seem to remember him, but I remember the family to whom he belonged. I knew them mighty well. Their home is three miles northeast of Greenfield. Their place was settled about 1817. His master, in slavery time, was Alex HORNBEAK, a fine man. Their family settled there long before there was any Greenfield. My grandfather, Gilbert PATTERSON, settled one and one-half miles west of where Greenfield is located shortly afterward. There was one other family by the name of “MOSLEY” who settled two miles south-east, & they helped Grandfather build his first home. The three families were the first settlers in that section of West Tennessee.
The town of Greenfield was started the year I was born, 1872. My father, “Bunk” PATTERSON, built the first house in Greenfield. It was used for a saloon and ten-pin alley. He built several of the first houses. He was a fine carpenter. Before the Illinois Central RR was built, the folks living in that section freighted what they had to have by wagon and team from the steamboats on the Mississippi River, some forty miles away.
That country was so unsettled, at that time, that Grandfather’s family lived for the first eleven years on game killed from his doorstep, such as bear, deer, wild hogs, and wild turkey. Squirrels played on his house top and yard fence, and he didn’t waste his ammunition on game that small. He tanned his leather, and made his family boots and shoes. Grandmother made the cloth from which they made clothes. They raised a family of thirteen children. You can tell your children that they descended from grand old families . . . . My father’s folks came from North Carolina . . . . Tell the children that they must make fine men and women, and live up to the record. Submitted by Nancy Denty Breidenthal
