A Brief History of the Life of William Washington Deal (1842 - 1917) and the Deal Family of Cheatham & Dickson Counties in Tennessee

William Washington Deal

The Following is A Brief History of the Deal Family of Southern 

Cheatham & Eastern Dickson Counties in Middle Tennessee

 from the Mid 19th Century to the Early-Mid 20th Century

February 15, 2025

William Washington Deal & Wife, Louisa Wynn Deal

The following historical and genealogical information that details the life of William Washington Deal (1842 - 1917) and his family, was written by one of William's own great-grandsons, Chris Hanlin.  I want to thank Chris very much for allowing me to share on this blog, all of the historical and genealogical information he has discovered over the years he has been researching his ancestors. This is information that Chris has worked very hard to find, and I have to say he has done a wonderful job. Chris, who currently lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, has made this information, concerning his Deal ancestors, available to view on the website Findagrave.com. The following link will take you to William Washington Deal's memorial page on Findagrave.com, where you can also find the link to Chris's profile -  https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/32584543/william-washington-deal#source

William Washington Deal - The Early Years

William Washington Deal was born in Tennessee on November 20, 1842. There is conflicting information about who his parents were, but by the time he was eight years old, he was living with a woman named Eliza Deal, who was probably his mother. Eliza's maiden name was Russell. She was the widow of a man named James Deal, who seems to have died sometime prior to 1850.

The Deal's and the Russell's lived on Sam's Creek in what is now Cheatham County, Tennessee. The 1850 census shows Eliza Deal, age 35, living just two doors down from her brother Joseph F. Russell. Her household included four children: William Deal (that's our William), age 8; James Deal, age 8; Mary Deal, age 6; and Delilah Russell (Eliza's niece), age 8. 

A Portion of the 1850 United States Census, showing 8-Year-Old William living in a household with 35-year-old Eliza Deal, 8-year-old brother James, 6-year-old sister Mary, and 8-year-old Dililah Russell. Notice the names of their neighbors, including Joel Harris and Joseph Russell. This was during the period the family lived near the mineral springs close to the head waters of Sam's Creek sometime around 1850.

They lived in the vicinity of the mineral springs that flowed from the ground near the head of the Creek, which was six or seven miles north of current-day Pegram, Tennessee.There once thrived a tourist resort & hotel, called "Sam's Creek Spring's Hotel".  (See photo below)

- Sam's Creek Springs Hotel -

Around a mile and a half northeast of the hollows where the headwaters and several ground springs coalesce to form Dog Creek, is the site of the old Sam's Creek Springs Hotel, another popular resort for Nashvillian's in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The springs were located somewhere in the vicinity of the dead end of what is Deerfoot Road today. Any traces or remnants of the old hotel have long been gone. What does remain are the visibly worn-down foot paths and wagon trails through the thick woods leading to the location where the resort once stood.

Eliza (Russell) Deal died at age 39, in 1854. She died without leaving a will, and her only heirs were minor children, so her property was sold at auction on September 14. The estate settlement lists her personal property in detail, but makes no mention of real estate; so it appears that she did not own the house where she lived.

The list of Eliza Deal's belongings is a biography in itself: the auction included her spinning wheel, soap trough, rocking chair, shotgun, and a full range of household goods (coffee mill, skillet, water bucket, and so on). Her furniture (for herself and four children, and in addition to the rocking chair) consisted of a table, five chairs, three beds, and a cupboard. Her stock included a cow and calf, a yoke of oxen, a mare, sixteen chickens, and twelve head of hogs. Including cash on hand, her belongings were worth $218.02.

The largest portion of Eliza's estate was purchased by her brother Joseph F. Russell, who bought her mare ($47.00), her crop of corn ($66.50), and several other items. 

After Eliza Deal's death, the children were probably cared for by their uncle Joseph Russell; and the youngest child, Mary Deal (age ten at Eliza's death), was still living with the Joseph Russell family six years later in 1860 (by which time this family had moved to Dickson County). William Washington Deal stayed in Cheatham County, but he moved a few miles west to a village named Chestnut Grove. (As seen in the Civil War era map below, with Chestnut Grove being about halfway between the town of Charlotte in Dickson County, and Nashville to the east.

(Above) Civil War era map, circa 1862, showing the country between Nashville in the east, and the town of Charlotte in Dickson County to the west, with The Charlotte Turnpike being clearly visible (Outlined in Red) connecting the two cities. The map maker has placed the location of Chestnut Grove a bit further to the north than it actually was.  Dog Creek, as well as Sam's Creek can also clearly be seen on this map.

Chestnut Grove was in roughly the same location as the town now called Shacklett. It was bordered on the west by the Harpeth River and on the south by Dog Creek, and it extended up to the Scott Cemetery, just across the Harpeth from the Indian burial grounds at Mound Bottom.

Chestnut Grove and Mound Bottom were just one bend in the river away from the Narrows of the Harpeth, where the river makes a meandering, seven-mile loop – surrounding an area called Bell’s Bend – and then comes back to within three hundred feet of itself but separated from itself by a high limestone bluff.  

The bluff provides a spectacular view of Bell’s Bend, and William W. Deal must have come up to the bluff to admire the view and to marvel at the greatest engineering feat in the state: back in the early 1820’s, industrialist Montgomery Bell – who owned iron furnaces throughout the area – had conceived the idea of digging a tunnel through the limestone bluff to connect the river to itself at the Narrows.  

View from the top of the bluff overlooking The Narrows of the Harpeth

Montgomery Bell's Tunnel, which was excavated by his slaves around 1818 at
The Narrows of the Harpeth under the supervision of William Washington Deal

 

Chestnut Grove, where William Washington Deal was living in 1860, was just about two miles from the Narrows of the Harpeth.  Chestnut Grove was not a big place – the post office served a population of around 200.  The postmaster was James H. Fulghum, who also ran a general store.  Fulghum employed William Washington Deal as a store clerk, (as indicated from the section of the 1860 US Census below) and Deal lived with the Fulghum family.

1860 United States Census showing 18 year old William living

 in the Fulghum household in Chestnut Grove, with his

 occupation listed as "Clerk in Store"

Cheatham County marriage records show that W. W. Deal married Fannie Scott on 11 May 1861, a few weeks after the Civil War broke out. Fannie was the daughter of Thomas Scott, who lived quite close to the Fulghum household.

It isn't clear what William W. Deal did during the Civil War. He was nineteen years old when the war broke out and should have been conscripted; but no service or pension file for him has turned up.  

In 1870, William Washington Deal filed for divorce from his wife Fannie Scott, claiming that she had "been guilty of adultery … with one T. S. Bryan and others." Fannie failed to appear in Court, so the divorce was granted.

On 24 September 1872, in Cheatham County, William Washington Deal married Louisa "Lou" Wynn. William was almost thirty and Lou was only sixteen. William and Louisa settled in Cheatham County District 10, near the Harpeth River. Their grandson Howard Deal remembered a story about what happened when they left Colesburg. William and Lou had loaded all their belongings into the wagons and set out for Bell's Bend, where William had made arrangements to rent a place; but the Harpeth River was in their way. 

Howard recalled:

"They had a place rented over in Bell's Bend down here and the river was up when they got down there and there was a house empty there before you cross the river, so they just put the furniture in it, and they lived there for eighteen years."

Photo of Louisa "Lou" Wynn Deal

The Deals never bought property at Bell's Bend.  They were tenants the whole time they lived there.  And they didn't live in the rich farmland enclosed by the bend in the river.  The Deals lived on the outside edge of the bend, where the land is rocky and steep.

Lou Wynn Deal with grandson L. B. Deal
 Photo courtesy Mary Alice Cathey Mart

William did make some attempt to improve the family's circumstances.  In 1873, the year after he married Lou, he paid for a license to become a "retail liquor dealer and dealer in manufactured tobacco." William's tax receipt for the license stipulates that his business is "to be carried on a Parmer's Mills." This is probably Palmer's Mills, a whistle-stop at milepost 23 between Kingston Springs and Pegram. But being a merchant did not work out for William. In the census of 1880 and every later census, his profession is listed as "farmer."  

William W Deal's IRS Tax Receipt, dated May 1, 1873 for a license to sell retail liquor
and manufactured tobacco at Parmer's Mills, which was a railroad stop or depot, located between Pegram and Kingston Springs 

William's granddaughter Dorothy Deal Miller said she always had the impression that her grandfather was "kind of lazy." When asked what she meant, she said, "Well, I just never heard about him doing much."  

William farmed enough to get by, though. The 1880 agricultural census shows that while William Deal did not own his own place, he rented his farm for a fixed sum of money – he was not a sharecropper, as some of his neighbors were. William owned one horse, five cows, fourteen pigs, and 24 chickens. In the previous year, he had planted twelve acres of corn and three acres of wheat. Two new calves had been born that year, and he had produced 40 pounds of butter.

William also hunted and fished. William's wife Lou Wynn Deal later told her grandchildren about what a good hunter and fisherman William was, and how he would come home with so many fish that they would have fried fish for breakfast. (Robert Harold Deal recalled this.) Sometimes, William and his son James Henry Deal would go fishing together on Trace Creek. Sometimes this only involved putting out trot lines in the creeks, and coming back the next day to see what they'd caught. (This was the recollection of Dorothy Deal Prowell.)

William did something else, too: around 1884, he started running a sorghum mill.  Sorghum cane had a sweet juice inside the stalks.  The mill was a set of gears that could squeeze out the juice.  The mill was powered by a mule, walking around and around in a circle.  Once the juice was pressed out of the cane, it could be boiled down into syrup, called sorghum molasses. William didn't know it, but he was starting a family tradition of sorghum-making which would run for at least five generations.

The Deals were interviewed about their sorghum mill, and those interviews were auidio recorded. The link below will take you to the audio recordings of interviews with Howard and Margaret Deal.

To listen to these audio files, click on the blue text below to be taken to the Tennessee Virtual Archive's website where the audio recordings are located -

Howard Deal, Margaret Deal, and Earlie Deal - Tennessee State Parks Folklife Project Collection - Tennessee Virtual Archive

Williams's eldest son, James Henry Deal (who was born in 1875), later told his children about helping his father run the sorghum mill. James's son Howard later recalled, "[James Henry Deal] said his daddy run a mill down in Bell's Bend, he could remember back when he was nine years old, so that was in 1884. And he didn't know how long his daddy run the mill, so I just count it from 1884, been in the sorghum business.

James Henry Deal (1875 - 1963) with Ida Victoria Petty (1881 -1956)

On another occasion, James said that he worked at his father's Cheatham County sorghum mill for nine years, that is, until about 1896. Then in the late 1890's, the family moved again – with all ten children, even their married daughter Eliza, who now had children of their own. They moved just few miles west, across the county line into Dickson County, and they settled near White Bluff, where William and Louisa – and most of the children – would live for the rest of their lives.

By the late 1890s, when William Washington Deal and Lou Wynn Deal arrived in White Bluff, the town had a population of around four hundred. By this time William and Lou had ten children: Eliza, James, Louisa, Hattie, Will, Douglas, John, Mamie, Robert, and George.

George Washington Deal (1894 -1958)

At first, the family seems to have lived on Trace Creek, but in March 1899, James Henry Deal, the eldest son, purchased five acres of property on the Charlotte Pike, and he started building a house there for his parents William and Lou, plus a separate cottage for himself.

The house is gone now, but it was fifty or seventy-five feet south of the old Charlotte Pike (and so a little further south of the current road). William and Lou's great-grandson Gerald Miller recalls the place: there was a central hall, with a bedroom on each side. Each bedroom had a small wood stove. Past the two bedrooms, you went down a few steps to the rear area of the house, where there was a kitchen on the left and an unheated storeroom on the right. In back of the house was Jim's cottage, plus a garden, a barn, a henhouse, and an outhouse.

William Washington Deal died on 13 September 1917, after spending a few days in a hospital in Nashville. His widow Louisa later moved in with Douglas, in the house on his farm, which adjoined the Hutton Cemetery. Louisa (Wynn) Deal died on 21 June 1937 and is buried in the Hutton Cemetery in White Bluff, next to her husband William Washington Deal.

William and Lou did not have carved headstones, but a very large fieldstone – large enough that it probably took three or four men to lift – was placed over their graves. Much later on, in the early 2000's, the stone disappeared, and William and Lou's grandchildren Myra Deal and Robert Harold Deal had proper markers carved for their grandparents.

Below are a few more photographs of the Deal family's 

sorghum operation just east of White Bluff.

Louisa "Lou" Wynn Deal

Louisa Wynn was the daughter of James Henry Wynn (1825-1892) and Theodosia Hooper (1834-1889). Lou was the granddaughter of Eleanor Goodrich Hooper, and Lou was the great-granddaughter of Rev. James Goodrich, a Baptist minister who owned an iron furnace on Yellow Creek.

Lou married William Washington Deal in Cheatham County, Tennessee on September 24, 1872. They had ten children. In the late 1890's, the family moved to White Bluff, in Dickson County, where William Washington Deal died in 1917. Lou Wynn Deal survived her husband. Their eldest son, James Henry Deal and his wife Ida moved into the Deal house to live with Lou.

After a while, Lou went to live with her son Douglas, Jim's brother. Robert Harold Deal was one of the sons of Douglas Deal and a grandson of Lou Wynn Deal. Robert Harold Deal later recalled:

"From the time I can remember, I slept in the bed with my grandmother in that house. She was partial to me because took care of her and brought her water. She dipped snuff. She'd sit out on the front porch and spit it out. She and I would go out walking. We'd walk around the garden, or out back to the cornfield we had for eating-corn...She was an independent spirit, and it was probably hard on her to have to be dependent on others. My mother said she was a mean old woman, and she could be ornery sometimes. One day she got off a bus in front of our house – she'd been to Dickson – and she fell and broke her hip. After that she was never able to walk without crutches. This was when I was about five or six. She taught us boys a lot. She taught us how to parch corn and use this as bait in traps we set for foxes. They were called "jump traps." You'd mash the trap down and put a plunger under the trip. Animals liked the parched corn we used for bait, but we never caught a fox.  We thought we would get money for the hides. But mostly we just caught possums, sometimes skunks. My grandmother taught me how to plant potatoes and beans – things my mother didn't know, and my daddy was away. My brother, who was older, used to help with the plowing, but I tried to help out in the garden.

"She told us how wildcats – you know, panthers – used to come through the country, and how the cry of a wildcat was just like a woman's scream. She would tell us about how there were so many chestnuts were before the blight that they used to split rails out of chestnut trees.

"There were still some chestnut trees around when I was a boy and me and my brothers would gather chestnuts and sell them for 75 cents a gallon on the highway. But many of the trees were dying at that time, and some had already turned white."

Around 1935, however, Lou had to move again: Douglas Deal and his wife Ina moved to Kingston Springs, where Douglas took a job with the railroad as a brakeman. So Lou moved in with her son William Andrew Deal and his wife Lydia.  

Every Monday, Lou would get her crutches and walk back down to James and Ida's house. This was Ida's washday. Ida would wash clothes in a big iron kettle in the rear yard, under the walnut tree. Lou would stay for washday dinner and then hobble back to William and Lydia's house. (These were the recollections of Lou's granddaughter Dorothy Deal Prowell.) 

But soon, Lou had to move once more. Will was a railroad employee, and the railroad transferred him to Marietta, Georgia.  So Lou moved back in again with James and Ida.  James and Ida may not have been all that glad to have Lou back: she'd become a difficult old woman. Lou's granddaughter Judy Deal Cox later recalled, "She was mean. I wanted to love her. She was probably in pain, because she'd broken a hip, and in those days, they didn't have the same medicines, they just gave you crutches. And my sisters – they were older than me – always said that Granny Deal was very smart, though I don't know how they would know that."

"A grandmother, though, you want to crawl up in her lap. But I never crawled up in her lap, and I never saw any of my sisters do that, either. If one of us was talking too much at dinner, she would say, 'DO NOT TALK AT THIS TABLE.' If you climbed the apple tree, she would come out and wave her crutch at you like she was going to hurt you and say, 'GET OUT OF THAT TREE YOU ARE GOING TO FALL AND KILL YOURSELF GET OUT OF IT NOW.'  And you'd get out.

Judy Deal Cox also said that later on, if someone in my family was being mean, her sister Christine would say, "You're acting just like Granny Deal."

Granny Deal – Louisa Wynn Deal – died on 21 June 1937. She is buried in the Hutton Cemetery in White Bluff, next to her husband William Washington Deal.

As I stated above, the vast majority of the historical and genealogical information presented in this blog post, as well as most of photographs shown, have all been provided to me by Deal family descendant & family historian, Chris Hanlin. As mentioned before, Chris is a great-grandson of William Washington Deal. Mr. Hanlin has generously given me his permission to share the information and Deal family photographs shown in this blog post. There are a few items in this blog post that I included with the information supplied by Mr. Hanlin, such as images of various US Census records, as well as a few other photos that I had discovered through some research work of my own.