An American Journey

An American Journey



“The story of the Duncan Stewart family as they travel from Scotland to North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana.”



The story for me began when my wife and I bought Holly Grove Plantation in Wilkinson County Mississippi in 2005.  We learned shortly after buying that the builder was one Duncan Stewart (1763-1820), born near Wilmington, NC, where we had spent the last 30 years.  From there he and his family moved to Clarksville, Tennessee, where my wife, Connie, was born.  Duncan Stewart had a county in Tennessee named after him, Stewart County, where Connie grew up and where her mother still lived.  And now we were with him again in southern Mississippi.



The more I looked, the more I discovered about Duncan Stewart and his family, both his ancestors in Scotland and his descendants in America.  I found it an interesting story.



Dan Brown’s recent book, The Lost Symbol, states that google is not the same as research.  These days it is a great help.  And I must admit a great deal of what is in this document in from the internet.  It was via the internet I found the booklet written by Bryan Saunders which mapped out the direction that the Stewarts took in America.  And Chuck Speed’s web site was invaluable in mapping out the genealogy of the Stewarts.  I have continued to search and read to extend the story of Duncan and his family and the places connected with them. We have traveled to Scotland looking at the beginnings and have talked with Duncan’s descendants in Louisiana.



Other major secondary sources include Lynda Crist’s 1980 master’s thesis on James Alexander Ventress (Duncan Stewart’s nephew), the abstracts of the deed books done for Charles Dudley (owner of Holly Grove in the 1950’s), the booklet on the Burning of Bowling Green by Stella and James Pitts, and several books by Anne Butler of St. Francisville, LA, a descendant of Duncan Stewart.



I have tried to footnote as much as possible the location, either primary or secondary, of the material.  There are conflicts and sometimes I note both versions.  Primary sources are certainly preferable but other sources should not be discounted until proven wrong with more credible data.  My apologies in advance for any errors.



“The history we live differs from the history we write…..Hindsight tempts historians to organize events in an intelligible—and comforting---way, a chronological sequence of cause and effect.  But history, as lived, is replete with messy details.”[1]  George Santayana (b. Madrid, 1863) was a bit more skeptical, “history is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.”[2]



The writer LP Hartley wrote “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”[3]

                               

“In the quest to recover the story of a single individual, context—the historical environment of time and place---is everything.”[4]



David McCullough, the noted historian and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, said, “You can make the argument that there’s no such thing as the past.  Nobody lived in the past.  They lived in the present.  It is their present, not our present, and they don’t know how it’s going to come out.  They weren’t just like we are because they lived in that very different time.  You can’t understand them if you don’t understand how they perceived reality.”[5] 



Landon B. Anderson III

2010

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[1] The Historic New Orleans Quarterly, Vol. XXVI, No. 4, Fall 2009, p.2.

[2] The Writer’s Almanac, Garrison Keillor, 16 Dec. 2010.

[3] VA, The U.Va. Magazine, Winter 2014, p.38.

[4] The Historic New Orleans Quarterly, Vol. XXVII, No. 4, Fall 2010, p. 2. Erin Greenwald.

[5] The Writer’s Almanac for July 7, 2010 by Garrison Keillor.