1837 Taxpayers, Anderson County, Tennessee

Tennessee tax records prior to 1837 were maintained by militia companies within counties. Generally speaking the records were kept on loose pieces of paper. Only few such records survive. To the best of my knowledge, the only early records that survive for Anderson County are for 1802, 1805, and 1806.

In 1836, the Tennessee legislature passed a law establishing civil districts in each county for the purposes of tax collections and mandating that the tax records be kept in bound books. The first year for keeping records in this fashion was 1837, and many such records survive.

The original purpose of this particular Web page was simply to summarize 1837 tax records for Anderson County for families of my ancestors and for several allied families. Recording such 1837 tax records remains as the primary purpose for this Web page, but I'm expanding this page to include transcriptions of all 1837 tax records for Anderson County whether they were for my families or not. The more complete transcriptions are further down the page.

Additionally, I'm trying to cross reference the 1837 tax records with the 1830 and 1840 census records. The early census records do not identify the civil districts in which the families resided, and indeed the civil districts did not even exist for the 1830 census. By cross referencing census and tax records I hope to establish a pretty good indication of about where each family lived.

• For the purposes of the transcriptions below, I added three additional columns to the left of the original columns. The first additional column is the individual's page number, if any, in the 1830 census for Anderson County. The second additional column is the individual's page number, if any, in the 1840 census for Anderson County. The third additional column is the line number from the 1837 tax page, just to help to manage the transcription process.
• The first column in the original data was the person's name. For the purposes of this transcription, I broke this up into a column for the surname and a column for the given name. I tried my best to transcribe the data according to the original spelling, for example Buttlar rather than the modern spelling of Butler.
• The land value was in dollars and the tax amount was in cents. The tax rate in 1837 was 5 cents per hundred dollars of land value.
• The school acres tax was a separate tax to pay for schools. I have not been able to determine how the number of school acres was determined for each individual. For example, I don't know if the school acres need to be added to the regular acres to determine the total number of acres owned by the individual, or if the school acres were included in the regular acres. And I don't know which individuals were required to pay the school acres tax. Perhaps it was only individuals who had children in school. It is interesting to note that some individuals paid taxes only on regular acres, some individuals paid taxes only on school acres, and some individuals paid taxes on both.

• District 8 was in the west end of the county and was very rural, so there were no taxes on town lots in District 8.
• Few individuals owned slaves in Anderson County. The tax rate was 5 cents per hundred dollars of value.
• A car in the context of these taxes was a carriage - in particular, a pleasure carriage. Only the wealthiest individuals owned pleasure carriages.
• A poll tax of 12.5 cents was paid by each free, white male between the ages of 21 and 50.
• The rightmost two columns in the original data were the amount of state tax and the combined amount of state and county tax. I'm assuming that the difference was the amount of county tax.
• Some items were taxed both by the state and by the county, and other items were taxed only by the county. The items that were taxed both by the state and by the county are transcribed in red. The county tax rate was 4 times the state tax rate. For example the state tax rate was 12.5 cents for each white poll, and the county tax rate was 50 cents for each white poll. Therefore for man man whose only tax was the poll tax, his total tax was 62.5 cents.
• Despite this explanation, this presentation of the tax data still seems a little strange in some ways. For example, the school tax was a tax only for the county. But to come up with the correct total state and county tax for each individual, the listed school tax was stated as if it were a state tax of 5 cents per hundred dollars of value and as if there were a county tax of 20 cents per hundred dollars of value. But the entire 25 census per hundred dollars of value was a county tax.
• A tax rate of 12.5 cents may sound strange to the modern ear. It goes back to colonial times when a coin in common circulation was a Spanish dollar, also known as a piece of eight. It was sometimes physically cut into 8 individual pieces called bits, each worth 12.5 cents. Hence a quarter was often referred to as two bits.

Dist. 8, page 1

Dist. 8, page 2

Dist. 8, page page 3

Dist. 8, page 4