One of the long-standing mysteries of historical Nashville is just where the heck the final resting place of local fur-trading playboy diplomat Timothy Demonbreun is. There's a marker for him up in a cemetery in Cheatham County, just south of Little Marrowbone Road. But most people assume he ended up in the "old city cemetery." The hiccup to that theory is that the cemetery we now think of as the old city cemetery is not the oldest, old city cemetery. As we talked about when I warned that it was inevitable that there would be things of archaeological significance right where we're putting our new baseball stadium, the first city cemetery was just about where Jefferson and 4th meet, because white settlers put their dead where the people who lived here put their dead. In other words, right where the Geist Blacksmith Shop is.
The complications arise, as so many complications in Demonbreun's life did, because of women. Demonbreun had a church wife, Therese, he married back in Kaskaskia and a frontier wife, Elizabeth, he informally took up with here. He traveled between the two of them until, family lore says, his church-wife insisted on moving to Nashville in the 1790s, thus necessitating the quick legal marriage of Demonbreun's mistress to one of Demonbreun's friends in 1793. The family lore is that Therese died in 1808. I don't think there's any reason to disbelieve this. There's also some lore that her remains were sent back to Kaskaskia or possibly to Quebec. I think we have plenty of reason to discount this. Moving a body through the wilderness in 1808 either one of those distances would have been impossible—the smell alone would have been insurmountable. You were buried where you died. If Therese died here, she is buried here. If she died in 1808, she was in that first city cemetery.
Even though the current city cemetery was open by the time Timothy died in 1826 and even though there's compelling circumstantial evidence that he took back up with Elizabeth after her husband died, people in Nashville (with very rare exceptions — like John Overton's wife) were buried next to their first spouses. Timothy, I am 99% certain, would have been buried next to Theresa and, since she would have been in the first city cemetery, that's where he would have gone.
It is possible that they were disinterred at some point and moved to the current city cemetery, but we may never know, since those records have all been lost. But we have circumstantial evidence that this may not be the case. I turn your attention to Louise Davis's amazingly thorough story from the Tennessean back in 1986 (page one, page two, page three, page four) in which she finds memories of people who saw Demonbreun's grave in the Geist backyard and becomes convinced that the city decided not to move him.
She writes:
The most convincing evidence indicates that Timothy DeMonbreun was never removed from the old North Nashville cemetery where the founding fathers of the city were buried. Even in 1957, when Cate published his article in The Historical Quarterly, he concluded "with considerable conviction," that "here was his (DeMonbreun's) natural resting place near the French Lick, on familiar ground and by the side of his earliest pioneer associates.
Like I said, it's possible that Demonbreun was moved to the current city cemetery, but, if so, why did the Geists tell the Demonbreuns that Timothy was in the back yard?
But what about the Little Marrowbone grave? Could Elizabeth or one of her children moved Timothy up to Ashland City at some point? If family stories about Elizabeth being Indian are true, then we can feel fairly certain that she did not move him. She would have had strong taboos against that. But, if they aren't true, one other fact, I think, makes it unlikely that any one of the informal Demonbreuns moved his body—his legitimate children lived here. And yes, everyone knew everyone else existed and everyone was included in the will and all evidence points to the children getting along. But there's "getting along" and there's "we stood on your dead mom in order to dig up our dad." You can have one or the other, but you're probably not going to get both. Plus, we know that Demonbreuns weren't in the habit of moving remains. Timothy Demonbreun Jr. is up in a cemetery in Robertson County and his first wife, Christina, is here in Nashville. The family didn't send his body down to be put next to her or dig her up and move her up to him.
But here's the exiting part. There are still a ton of Demonbreuns around. And developers have bought the Geist land and are looking to develop it. From the Tennessean:
The owners of the historic former John Geist and Sons Blacksmith Shop in the Germantown area are targeting restaurant and retail users for the property. Work is underway on the 25,000-square-foot blacksmith shop on the property at 311 Jefferson St., including cleaning up the interior and repairing bricks and windows.
They will have to clean up the back yard. They may even need to do some digging in the course of their renovation. If they find human remains, there's a lot of family we could compare DNA to. They could find Timothy Demonbreun!
My fingers are crossed.
