Sixth Generation

398. Thomas Lenoir Bryan^3,52,360,361. Birth: 16 February 1862, McMinn County, Tennessee.

Census: 1870, Bradley County, Tennessee, Thomas 8 m w TN.

Census: 1880, Bradley County, Tennessee. Thomas 18 son, male, single, white, laborer, born TN, father and mother born TN, attended school.

Death: 24 May 1928, age 66, Atlanta, Fulton County, Georgia.

Burial: after 24 May 1928, at West View Cemetery Atlanta, Fulton County, Georgia.

Thomas was an educator and taught in many small souther Colleges. A graduate of Emory and Henry College in Emory VA. He helped establish the Bryan-Hatton Business College in Atlanta.

From Elizabeth Cate Manly: Thomas L. Bryan was an educator of note. He taught in many small Southern colleges. In 1899 he was in Summerville, W. Va. He taught at Pryor Institute, Jasper, Tenn; Rhinehart College in Ga.; also in Dalton. In Dec. 1913 he was principal of the Southern Shorthand and Business University, and later helped to establish the highly successful Bryan-Hatton Business College in Atlanta. A graduate of Emory and Henry College, Emory, Va., he was scheduled to make the commencement address there the week following his death. He had a rare wit and was a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines. Mary Alice Dantzler has a copy of "Uncle Tom's Scrap Book", which he labeled "scientific and curious".

He wrote "The Story of My Life" (Thos. L. Bryan, Scrapbook, p.4). Here follows an excerpt:

The object of this personal chapter is that children may know of my love for them, and to let them know about the manners and customs of the people of my early days. I was born four miles west of Athens, Tenn. You will see that I, born 1862, fought three years in the Civil War! I won many victories, but was sometimes defeated with peachtree ammunition!

When I was about one year old, we moved to a farm about six miles north of Cleveland in Bradley County. Here I lived for twenty years. My opportunities were those of the best afforded country boys of the time. The railroad that passed through our farm was used as a highway for both armies during the Civil War. People were left in poverty, their fames grown up in briars and thistles, their credit lost, their property destroyed, their livestock taken away by the enemy, their churches and schools disbanded, many fathers and sons killed in battle or disabled for life.

I was an age of clearing new grounds, farming with home-made implements, an age of drudgery and small returns. To build houses we had to hew the framing from the trees, make boards and shingles by hand. We hauled the pines with ox wagon to the oldtime water wheel saw mill. I know how to "pale in" a garden and not use a nail. Corn was plowed with homemade plows, flails and "ground hog" threshers, all of which added to the taste of biscuits and flat cakes, and the number consumed!

Boys never wore store clothes or knee pants. They wore homemade jeans in winter and flax or copperas clothes in summer. Flax pants petrified the third year and never did wear out! Many blacked their shoes from soot from cooking vessels. Girls wore linsey with pretty stripes around the bottom of their skirts. Do you know what a loom is? warping pars? winding blades? reel and filling quills? tar kilns? ash hoppers?

I have lived through seven systems of lighting: pine knot, tallow dip, tallow candle, brass lamp, gas, and electricity. We bought our first lamp in 1872. The printed instructions were Do not fill within forty feet of the house, do not fill too full, keep in cool place, turn down, and blow out quick!

There was but one buggy in the community. At a picnic one day, my older brother got in it and made the smaller boys pull him three hundred miles up and down the road. Later on the preacher came in his buggy to our house and I had to unhitch his horse. I unbuckled every buckle I could find and got the horse loose, but the preacher had a time of it hitching the horse back.

I was with my sweetheart once, and we were riding mules. Her mule stopped in the middle of the creek to drink, the mule's back made a rainbow, and she fell off into the creek. The mule started to run off, and I had to take out after the mule. Talk about your punctured tires - for real courtship, give me the old time mule.

We were taught lessons of economy this age knows nothing about. I bought my first glass of lemonade in 1876 and could taste it till the big freeze of 1881. I took chestnuts to the store to get me a blue-back speller, and four watermelons to get a pair of striped suspenders. I took sixty bundles of fodder to town to get my Christmas money. We went to Robinson's show in the fall and talked about it until the next fall.

Each age has its superstitions: people set hens, planted corn, sowed turnips by the moon. If a turtle bit you, he wouldn't turn loose till it thundered. A horse shoe put in the churn would make more butter. The little shoots growing up from a broken mullen stalk would determine the size of one's family. Washing your face in stump water would remove freckles.

They say snow was on the ground the day I was born. There have been many snowy days since, but more sunshine. I have not tried to be great,but to be useful. I hope to live on in the lives of my students.

Returning to Elizabeth Cate Manly's text: I have always thought Uncle Tom in spite of his busy life, in Atlanta as long as I could remember, was a lonely person, who would have been happier close to his "folks". His wife was from the deep South and his children city-bred. He told once of asking for a fruit cake. Aunt Annie obliged with an elaborate one, filled with candied fruits, nuts, etc. Uncle Tom said, "This is no fruit cake". He meant a stack cake with dried apples between the layers! One Christmas he, his wife, and their twin granddaughters, Gwendolyn and Madolyn Barnes, came to see his sister Bet and her family. I was amazed when one of the girls asked who lived above us, and she was just as dumbfounded when her country cousin replied that the family occupied the whole house. Uncle Tom gave the Cate children a wonderful encyclopedia, twenty volumes published by the "University Society" for the "After School Club" in 1912. The information and illustrations are priceless, the set a collectors' item now. We are sorry to have lost contact with Uncle Tom's family since the death of Tommie Dickenson.

Some of the Bryans have been writing verse since Sir Francis Bryan himself. Two of Uncle Tom's poems follow.

MY BROTHERS

Once we were young and gay, with hope of many years;
But almost in a day or plans were met with tears.
Dear boys, I feel so sad: your stay was here so brief!
The world's in darkness clad; my soul is bent with grief.
Three sisters here do wee because you did not stay;
All ere long must sleep until the endless day.
I hear a voice ring out far up above the sky;
Some day when Christ shall shout, we'll meet and never die.

Yours forever,
THOS. L. BRYAN
Atlanta, Ga.
March 18, 1909

(This poem was written after the death of Dr. W. H. Bryan, Thos. L. Bryan's last surviving brother. He had pictures of the five Bryan brothers printed together along with the poem and gave copies to the relatives. Recently, Sam L. Bryan, his nephew and son of Daniel H. Bryan, had reprints made from the original and gave them to his nieces, nephews and cousins.)

THE 23rd PSALM

By waters pure and still and deep,
The Shepherd leads His thirsty sheep;
And then in pastures rich and green
The herds of hungry sheep are seen.

But when the sun grows warm and high,
Then they may under shade trees lie,
When all the sheep desire to rest
And all be happy and be blest.

And if through valleys rough and dark
The sheep may be required to go,
No danger any will embark,
For the Good Shepherd loves them more.

Though many foes they often meet,
Right in their midst the sheep may eat;
About the sheep the Shepherd said,
"I'll pour my oil upon their head."

And if perchance one sheep is lost,
He'll bring it back at any cost;
Then through the air will praises sound:
"My lost sheep at last is found."

We are His sheep, the Lord hath said,
And by his mercies we are led;
Though we may through darkness go
Yet we will conquer every foe.

When here no longer we may roam,
Among the bleating, earthly fold,
We'll meet in yonder Heavenly home,
And walk on streets of purest gold.

O, won't that be a joyous day
In yonder home not far away.
With our dear ones to shout and sing
Forever with our Shepherd King?

Thos. L. Bryan, from "The Scrapbook"

Thomas Lenoir Bryan and Annie Gregory Marriage: 30 December 1888, Marengo County, Alabama.³⁶¹ County marriage book from IGI: Thomas L. Bryan to Annie J. Gregory, 30 Dec 1888, Marengo County, Alabama.

Annie Gregory^3,52,360,361. Birth: April 1867, Alabama.

Death: Georgia.

Thomas Lenoir Bryan-731 and Annie Gregory-732 had the following children: