MR. WILLIAM SNELL
He said that Mr. William Snell was really a good man. When Uncle Tom
and Uncle John Pierson went off to school, their father had died. Mr.
Snell and Mr. William Claunch and Mr. Bonner looked after Grandma Pierson’s
stock all winter and didn’t charge her a thing. (Her husband was either
dead or not able to work). He said that Will Claunch, Mr. Claunch’s son,
told him that Mr. Snell really caused the killing of Patrick
Adamson, the
young lawyer, but that he didn’t ask him why he thought that. Adamson
buried in the Claunch lot in Rock
Church Cemetery, 1874. He thought Adamson had a sizeable ranch out
near Hoover’s Knobs in the west of the
county. It seems from the record that Patrick Adamson went on the Adam
Witcher peace bond.
(See paper, "The Case of Adam Witcher." There is no proof,
but it could be that as an attorney or adviser or friend, he in some way
became involved in the Adam Witcher affairs and
Mr. Snell’s causing his being shot when drawing water at Grandma Pierson’s
well, across the street from where this is being written. It may be
irrelevant but the record shows one Hughes was in the Indian battle on Vista
Mountain in 1863 with the Witcher brothers, and it was a Hughes, said
to be working on building a new courthouse, who shot him. Maybe a
friendship with Witcher. No one seemed to know the motivation).
Adamson married Fannie (or was it Nancy) Claunch, who was then a grass
widow, and who later married Jim Freeman. That most of the Claunch women
were still living, when he was telling this, but that the three boys were
dead. One was Ed. A good family. That they came here in 1869. That Mr.
William Claunch and Mr. Snell were partners for a time in the cattle
business and had a good herd, in fact drove respectable herds up the
trail, on one of which Uncle Tom Pierson went.
(Mr. William Claunch went to Jonesboro College, old stone building
still standing recently, usually in the drug business or working in a drug
store in Hamilton. A good man, and friend of the writer. In his last days
he served as justice of the peace, and it is my regret that I did not get
more of his stories of the past. The originally Mr. William Claunch was
first master of the Rock House Masonic Lodge here and from his portrait
hanging there, he appeared a genial and distinguished looking man.)
