If your family lineage traces a long way back in Maury County history, you’d do well to study the names chiseled in rock at Haynes Cemetery, a fine old resting place high on a hill in Scribner’s Mill.
Ancient red cedars border a plush, rolling green adorned by 400 headstones and sprinkled with spontaneous patches of purple irises, the Tennessee flower. Carved into the native rock, names encountered represent Duck River valley’s earliest settlers — Haynes, Baldridge, Turner, Agnew, Pinkston, Jones, Dillehay, Freeland, Davidson, Bryant, White…
The Pinkstons, for instance, are related to just about everybody in Maury County. They trace their roots to Turner Pinkston (1797-1876) who brought his family to Bryant Station in 1820. His grandmother Polk’s bloodline and the bloodlines of his sixteen children connect kin with many who are buried at Haynes — including most all the surnames listed above.
The photograph below features some of Turner’s great-great grandchildren.
The occasion of the family portrait is a trip to Columbia to buy the boys their very first drink of a brand new beverage sensation — Coca Cola.
For the big event, they dressed in their finest Sunday attire.
By the way, the older gentleman in the photograph is Joseph Harrison Gipson (1842-1929), husband of Turner’s granddaughter, Margaret Ann Pinkston.
Joe was a veteran of Company A of the 28th Regiment, Tennessee Infantry (2nd Tennessee Mountain Volunteers). From July, 1861 through June of 1864, he saw action at Shiloh, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, and Reseca, before being wounded at the Battle of Dead Angle, in Kennesaw, Georgia, thus ending his military service.
Sam Watkins wrote an account of the fight in Company Aytch:
The battle of “Dead Angle,” was fought June 27th, on the Kennesaw line, near Marietta, Georgia. It was one of the hottest and longest days of the year, and one of the most desperate and determinedly resisted battles fought during the whole war. Our regiment was stationed on an angle, a little spur of the mountain…and was subject to the enfilading fire of forty pieces of artillery of the Federal batteries. It seemed fun for the guns of the whole Yankee army to play upon this point.
After the war, Joseph married Margaret Ann and they lived with their three children on 86 acres at Park Station.
Joseph, Margaret Ann, and five of their eight grandchildren pictured in the photograph are buried at Haynes.
