John Dabney Terrell Sr.

John Dabney Terrell Sr. (1775–1850), surveyor and planter, was born in Bedford County, Va., and died in Marion County, Ala. He is the son of Revolutionary War veteran, Captain Harry Terrell, and the grandson of Joel Terrell from Richmond, Virginia, a man of Quaker ancestry. John's father, Captain Harry of Hanover Court House, Va., served in the Continental army, worked the land as a planter and bought enslaved persons of African descent. He eventually moved with his family from Virginia into North-Carolina, and after a short stint in Lower Sauratown, an abandoned Indian village on the Dan River in northeastern Rockingham County, he moved to Pendleton District (now Pickens and Anderson Counties), South Carolina, where he settled and farmed a plot of ground along the Big Eastatoe Creek. Being a veteran of the Revolutionary War, he was entitled to land grants, but it wasn't until after Harry's death in 1798 that some of his children applied for a land bounty for his service in the Revolutionary Army. After the death of John's father, John D. Terrell uprooted thence and moved with his family into Franklin County, Georgia, and after failed business ventures there, he moved with his family in ca. 1814 into Marion County, Alabama, (then known as Tuscaloosa County) in what was then the Alabama Territory, where he built a plantation near the Military Ford along the Buttahatchee River, immediately south of present-day Hamilton, Ala. (formerly called Toll Gate), and seven miles north of Pikeville. In 1813, John Dabney Terrell Sr. had been given Power of Attorney to apply for a land warrant on behalf of himself and his siblings. In 1817, they were allotted 5,333 acres of land, twenty-three hundred of which was in the State of Ohio, and was sold by them for fifty cents per acre. It is said that after the War of 1812 Terrell accommodated the troops of General Andrew Jackson while he was constructing the military road from Natchez to Nashville and had camped at the Military Ford of the Buttahatchee River, a place along the route. This place afforded travelers with a rock and sand bottom for easy crossing. In northern Alabama, Terrell soon became one of the principal persons of the State, being sent to the Alabama Constitutional Convention in 1819 from Marion. He was a signatory to Alabama's first Constitution, and was the first Senator from the County to the State Legislature in 1819. In 1822, John served as a State Representative from Marion County. In those formative years, he acted as the first Marion Territorial judge beneath an old oak tree, and as such, he is said to have administered the sworn oath of office to all county officers at the Cotton Gin Port (a Chickasaw Indian trading post located on the east bank of the Tombigbee River), which was then a part of Marion County (now in Mississippi). He also worked as a surveyor of Chickasaw Indian lands in what are now the States of Alabama and Mississippi, as well as served as U.S. Government Chickasaw Indian Agent for that region of the State under Presidents John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Levi Colbert, head chief of the Chickasaw nation, was one of his most respected friends and had supplied John D. Terrell with his first years supply of corn when he was new to the region. It is said that he was unsuccessful in trying to convince the Chickasaw Indians to resettle in lands west of the Mississippi, until eventually, they were forced by the US government to evacuate in 1837.

John D. Terrell Sr. was a man of strong religious and political convictions. By religion he was a Baptist, later to join the "Missionary Baptist," while in politics he belonged to the Whig party. In 1795, John married Lydia Briscoe Warren of North Carolina. To this union were born four sons and five daughters. Their eldest son was Edward Garland Terrell (born ca. 1797), although the most illustrious of their children was John Dabney Terrell Jr. (1804–1885), who served as Probate Judge of Marion County for more than forty years. Both men were slaveholders until the end of the Civil War. Terrell is said to have disinherited one of his sons, William Henry Terrell, when his son became a Presbyterian and a Democrat.

Although a slaveholder, some have suggested thatTerrell may have put some of his slave property under the name of his son John Dabney Terrell Jr., in order to avoid a pending law suit against him in Tennessee, and the subsequent loss of such property. Terrell died on the 10th day of May 1850, at the age of seventy-five, whereupon his slave property fell unto his wife, Lydia. At her death in 1853, most of his registered enslaved persons came under the possession of his son Edward Garland Terrell, while John D. Terrell Jr. retained his own property in persons. During John Sr.'s lifetime, however, he had also bequeathed some of his slave property to his other children, as can be seen by legal deeds in the Alabama State Archives. At his own request, Terrell was buried in a sitting posture within a walnut coffin that was made somewhat like unto a chair replete with a box-like covering, and which coffin was let down into a grave dug deep within one of three Indian mounds located at Military Ford. He was buried while draped in a panther vest (given to him by an Indian chieftain), along with a blanket that was spread over his shoulders, as well as other accessories (e.g. a gun and a water bucket and dipper, wash pan and hand towels), as was customary amongst some Native American Indians.

The old Terrell homestead and plantation now lay in ruins, but is said to have been located just off Interstate Hwy. 22 (US 78), where it crosses the Buttahatchie River on the way into Hamilton, where the build-up for the town begins, near the Indian Mounds and the new park that was constructed there.

• History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography by Thomas M. Owen, s.v. Terrell, John (1978, ISBN 0-87152-259-4)