Mary Overton is Not a Witch, Which, Yes, Is Kind of a Bummer

If you've been over to Travellers Rest in the past year or so, you've probably noticed that they have an awesome herb garden and a sign that says, "According to tradition, Mary Overton, wife of Judge John Overton, was a talented herbalist. All of her eight children lived to adulthood, a rare occurrence in the early 19th century considering the constant threat of disease."

"Talented herbalist." That's often the kind of language polite people use to mean "She was a witch or a hoodoo woman!" And it being October, I thought I'd go over and get you all a good true story of early Nashville weirdness for Halloween, objectively our nation's best holiday.

On Tuesday, Tonya Staggs, the education director for Travellers Rest, was kind enough to sit down and talk to me about Mary Overton who was, it turns out, not a witch. The stories that Stagg told me about Mary Overton and her relationship to her herb garden, ended up being really interesting, if not spooky. Mary Overton was less witch and more scientist.

Mrs. Overton was, originally, Mary White, the daughter of James White, the founder of Knoxville. She was born in 1782. Her father greatly valued education and, by all accounts, Mary was very well-educated for a woman at the time. She was a life-long reader.

She met her first husband, Francis May, a Nashville doctor, after he fled town and hid in Knoxville after he killed another doctor, Frank Sappington, in a duel. You'll be unsurprised to learn that May was a personal physician of Andrew Jackson and often accompanied him when he was dueling with people. Mary and Francis eventually were able to return to Nashville and the May house still stands at 631 Hill Road (and is for sale, if you have a few million dollars lying around). She was very interested in and supportive of May's medical career and I think it's likely, considering her love of learning, that she picked up a lot from him.

After May died, she married John Overton. The Overtons have had, historically, an abiding curiosity about plants (the ginko trees on the property come straight from China). The Judge liked to buy seeds and plants in order to see what might grow here in Nashville. But, since he traveled a great deal in his role as judge and, well, then he died, Mary would have been the one who actually got to observe the plants and to see what lived and what didn't.

Staggs also thought that Mary would have surely owned a copy of fellow Knoxvillian, John C. Gunn's Gunn's Domestic Medicine, Or Poor Man's Friend a guide to seemingly all known medical conditions and how to treat them, as well as "descriptions of the medical roots and herbs of the United States, and how they are to be used in the cure of diseases." For instance, if a pregnant woman "floods," you should keep her as cool as possible, "give her nothing to eat or drink of an inflammatory or heating nature; in other words, nothing that will increase the action of the blood vessels," and then "the woman should be immediately bled from the arm, freely, copiously, and rapidly, so as to produce fainting." Cutting edge science truly did involve a great deal of cutting. (Word of caution to my conservative readers—too much time reading through Gunn might trouble some of your notions about what constitutes traditional attitudes toward certain hot-button social issues.)

Staggs told me that Mary was the first option when it came to medical care in the Overton family. Family members, even as adults, asked her advice when they were unwell. Staggs wanted to be clear that often Mary's advice would have been that the should see a doctor. Mary apparently had great confidence in her skills, but she knew her limits.

It's interesting to see the kind of life Mary was able to make for herself, even with the constraints on women at the time. She was obviously very smart and incredibly curious about the world. And she had a scientific bent. Whenever you try to find out about women in this era, it's incredibly frustrating. Even a woman as prominent as Mary — with a historically significant father and two historically significant husbands — has left so little evidence of what her life was like. We know a lot about her, comparatively, and we know so very little about her. But the hints we have suggest someone really interesting.

Mary Overton died in 1862. She's buried alongside her second husband out at Mount Olivet. (If you can find that big patch of McGavocks and Dickinsons, she's behind them.)