Ahnentafel......Site Info

originally from Tennessee State Library and Archives, xerox of Civil War Photo

"The Nashville city tannery was just outside the corporation limits on Nolensville Pike east of Brown's Creek. It was the south's largest such facility prior to the war."

In 1860, she was living with her son George, listed as a tanner with a tax value of $4000 and $80,000. Her daughters Edith and Amelia also lived there. The 1870 census showed Henrietta living with her son George, a "tanner" with a taxable value of $80,000 and $20,000, and Edith.

E. Conrad wrote about Amelia Payne and her father reminiscing about "Their grandmother" sitting in front of her coal stove in a rocking chair--usually smoking a pipe!"

From Clarence Gennett (1950) "I had the pleasure when I was a boy of six or seven years old of going to their house which was on Brown's Creek in Nashville, adjacent to the site of the old tannery. Their house was of Scotch design that is where the boards run up and down and eaves have decorations under them and the roof is pointed. In the English practice this house was next to the manufacturing plant."
"My personal contact, as a small boy with great grandmother Henrietta, was when she was living in what was generally termed the factory house, to the North of the Tannery. The house was of the Scotch so called type. with the sheeting running vertically and the eaves were designed with curves under same. There were a number of large trees, one or two of which were willows around the house and a driveway also encircled this cottage type of home. My remembrance of great grandmother Henrietta was that she was a small type of woman and always wore a small lace cap. It was quite customary for her son John to walk out on Sunday morning to call on his mother and on a number of these walks, he was accompanied by some of his grandchildren.
"The family, in coming to the United States, first settled at Dayton, Ohio, and then later moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and at this period they developed a manufacturing plant, which was only spoken of as the Tannery.
"At the time of my trips out to great grandmother's, the Tannery had been destroyed by fire and I can still remember some of the old vats that were sunk into the ground and the top of the wooden portions of the vats being charred by fire.

Wooldridge (1890): "Nashville City Tannery was located on the Nolensville Pike just outside of the [Nashville] City limits. It was considered the largest tannery in the Southern States. Its proprietors were J. Lumsden & Co. It employed a capital of over $200,000 and gave steady work to a large number of men...The above is a ...list of the manufacturing establishments of Nashville at the breaking out of the war."

According to Davidson Co. Records, Henrietta died of "old age."

She married James Lumsden (81) (A100).