A headstone carved by William Edmondson
On Friday, I tracked down a headstone carved by famed Nashville sculptor William Edmondson that, as far as I can tell, has never been documented.
Hmm. I guess this counts as breaking history news. Local woman finds thing that is where it always was, and is for some reason surprised! Well, it’s not glamorous, but it makes me happy. I’m not going to tell you exactly where it is, because while I like most of you, I don’t trust many of you. Suffice to say that, if the Rock City Guards had been deployed to Andy Ogles’ house like I recommended last week, I could have hitched a ride with them part of the way.
Perhaps more works by the famed Black Nashvillian are being unknowingly kept as family heirlooms
Edmondson made this headstone for one of his neighbors in Edgehill who had moved to Nashville as an adult. The headstone and her body went back to the place she was born and grew up in. We can tell from old pictures that most (if not all) of Edmondson’s headstones had some kind of stone decorations on them — most commonly birds, but also lambs and abstract doodads. There are no birds left. Except on this headstone.
The birds are in bad shape. One is gone. The other two are missing their heads. But they’re intact enough for me to learn some stuff I didn’t know — like how much the art on top of the headstone makes the whole thing look like a squat cross from a distance. And how much the darkness of the top stone contrasts with the lightness of the stone where the deceased's name is.
What a great treat to get to see this in person.
A headstone carved by William Edmondson points to a story many decades in the making
OK, so how did I find it? As I’ve been researching the people Edmondson made headstones for, I keep finding Kinnards. William made only one headstone for a Kinnard that we know of — Barbara Kinnard — but it’s one of the ones that still has its art on it. Then there was Bettie Kinnard in the background of George Young’s story. Susie Beal, recipient of an Edmondson headstone, had a daughter-in-law named Rachel Kinnard. Another person under an Edmondson headstone, Henrietta Owen, had a sister-in-law named Hannah Kinnard. Kinnard is a pretty common name down in the Lake Providence part of town, but it’s otherwise not.
Then I began to look at who was in the cemeteries where Edmondson headstones were, and most of them contained Kinnards. It’s to the point where my list of traits of a cemetery containing an Edmondson is now: 1. It’s a Black cemetery; 2. it used to be a Benevolent Society cemetery; 3. it’s on a hill; 4. there are Kinnards in there.
So, I went to Find a Grave, typed in "Kinnard" and looked for Black cemeteries with Kinnards in them. Within five minutes, I’d found a picture of this headstone, and I knew I needed to go see it for myself and confirm it was an Edmondson.
But this is bananas. Why should the last name Kinnard be such a good indicator of the presence of an Edmondson headstone when he made only one Kinnard headstone?
There’s been another thing about some of these headstones — or at least the people Edmondson made them for — that has bugged me. The majority of people he made headstones for were his neighbors in Edgehill. Then there were some people who grew up near where he grew up. And a handful of his relatives. But there are Edmondson headstones out in the country belonging to people with no obvious ties to Nashville or Edmondson. If he had no reason to go out to them, and they had no reason to come in to him, how did they even know about him?
One such headstone is down south of Triune, in what is now the country but used to be a little village known as Jordan’s Store. It's near present-day Kirkland, down in Williamson County. The headstone is for a person who was born, lived and died in Jordan’s Store. There is a Kinnard in that cemetery, though.
So, what’s going on here? I have a guess. An informed guess, but a guess.
Who was the Bernice Williams featured on a headstone by the famed Nashville sculptor?
Back in 1846, William Compton died, and in his will, he divvied up all the people he owned. His son Felix got “Jim and Charles, sons of Rhoda, and yellow Bill and his wife Rhoda and her three children by Bill, towit, Betsy, Katy and Henry.” William’s daughter Susan Abbey got Stokely, Scott, Neptune, Lucy, Black Matilda, yellow Matilda and Ann.
This is where things turn into a little bit of a logic puzzle. We know that William Edmondson’s grandfather was James Brown, and that James had a sister named Lucy Abbey who lived over near Lake Providence where her family married into the Whitlow family. Here, in 1846, we find a Lucy about to become an Abbey.
If this is James’ sister, and it seems likely she is, then James also should be in this will. And there is a Jim, going to Felix, along with his brother Charles, mother Rhoda, step-father Bill and his half-siblings Betsy, Katy and Henry.
In 1870, in the two Davidson County districts with known Edmondson relatives, there were 49 Black women with variations on the name Elizabeth. But there were only four Bettie or Betsys/Betseys. Bettie Harris (12 years old) and Bettie Owen (10) are too young to have been named in the Compton will. Betsy Lee was 32 in 1870, so she could maybe be Jim’s sister, if Jim was near the oldest and she was near the youngest. But then, there’s Betsey Kinnard, estimated to be 60 years old, from Virginia, where we know Jim was born.
Betsey Kinnard has been hard to research. I know she had at least three children — Louis Kinnard (born about 1825), James Kinnard (born about 1855) and Abe Parrish (born about 1835). I’m guessing, just based on their birth dates, that she had more children, but I think their last names give you a hint as to why we might not find them — Abe was sold away from her. That’s how his last name is Parrish, but James and Betsy Kinnard are listed as his parents on his death certificate. The Kinnards lived in the Lake Providence area and down near Mt. Pisgah, but Abe lived out at Jordan’s Store.
In other words, everywhere there are Edmondson headstones that seem too out-of-the-way for him to have known those people, Betsey Kinnard’s descendants knew them.
Y’all see what this implies?
The depravities of slavery are unlimited. Whatever evil thing you can think to do to another person, some enslaver somewhere was doing it. But one of the most common tragedies was having your family broken up and sold away. As much as I’ve marveled at how someone in Edgehill could get to Jordan’s Store in the 1930s, if you were enslaved in Davidson County and your child was sold to someone near Jordan’s Store, you weren’t going to see him again. Maybe — maybe — he was close enough that you could get word of him from time to time, but for all practical purposes, your son was gone. Your family ties did not matter. Your love for your parents and siblings and children did not matter. What enslavement taught you every day you were in it was that family carried no weight, and you could lose them, probably would lose them.
We know that William and his siblings were very close to his mother’s side of the family. After Emancipation, the Edmondsons and the Browns stuck together. They apparently remained close to the Abbeys. And they clearly had some ties to the Kinnards, whether Betsey Kinnard and Jim’s sister Betsey are the same woman.
And I think that William was repairing that old soul wound in his family. It mattered to him if you were a Kinnard or if you knew a Kinnard. If they loved you, he would do this work for you. He is reinscribing the meaning that was stripped by slavery back into those relationships. What was once a distance too far is now the measure of the spread of William’s work, of the reach of his family.
