- In his latest book, "Townmania: Marcus Winchester and the Making of Memphis" writer R. Scott Williams tackles the remarkable origin story of the city of Memphis and its growth through the 19th century through the complicated life of the man who became its first mayor.

I'm George Larrimore and this is A Conversation With R. Scott Williams.

Hello, everybody, I'm George Larrimore and this is "A Conversation With..." on WKNO.

Today we're talking about Memphis when it was new.

Our guest is R. Scott Williams and his new book is called "Townmania: Marcus Winchester and the Making of Memphis".

Now, one writer said that when Marcus Winchester moved here, Memphis, or the place was that would be Memphis, was loud, muddy, and lawless.

- That's right.

- What did you get about early Memphis from your research?

- Sure, so first of all, thank you for having me here, George, I appreciate it.

- Glad to have you.

Really been looking forward to talking with you.

- Excellent.

So, Marcus Winchester showed up with William Lawrence, who was a guy who was able to help Marcus get Memphis started, put the lots together and put the town together for the things that would be sold, but when they first arrived, it was a combination of Native Americans, fur trappers, soldiers, you know, about 50 all living in makeshift tipis and cabins, so it was a very rough place when they showed up.

Not a lot of comforts that they were both used to.

- Now, the way you describe it in the book, I hate to sort of minimize it like this, but it was almost like a real estate development.

- Sure.

- It was a place where these people, the founders of Memphis, as we all know if we read the history of this city, were Andrew Jackson, who'd been a president, John Overton and James Winchester, all of which are names you see on city streets and places around Memphis today.

But they were set about to make money.

And they sent Marcus Winchester here, the son of James Winchester, to try to get that ball rolling, is that right?

- That's exactly right, so most folks who are from Memphis know that the three gentlemen that you mentioned, Andrew Jackson, James Winchester, and John Overton were the quote unquote "founders".

But in fact, Andrew Jackson, who would soon be the president, he was still just trying to make money and, of course, he was a soldier and the War of 1812 was over.

So him and John Overton was all about money.

And James Winchester, same thing, all three of them had great houses in what would be the Nashville area.

They certainly didn't want to leave their comfortable mansions and move to the muddy hills of Memphis and so they sent James Winchester's son Marcus.

He had been working with Andrew Jackson, the Treaty of 1818 with the Chickasaw was underway and so Marcus went with Andrew Jackson and while they were having the conversation over the treaty, the Native Americans said, "Hey, how can we trust you?

You were supposed to send us all these goods," called presents back then, "As part of our last treaty, and they were garbage."

So Andrew Jackson says, "Well, I'm gonna find out if you're right or not."

So he sent Marcus Winchester to Memphis to find out and to do an inventory and an inspection of these goods.

And so that's the first time Marcus Winchester actually visited Memphis.

And so it's fascinating for me to read his inventory list, to read what it is that the Native Americans considered valuable enough to trade vast amounts of land for.

Well, they were right.

And so a lot of it was rotten, a lot of it was no good, so that was Marcus Winchester's first encounter with Memphis, and the people that lived on the fourth Chickasaw Bluff.

And then for whatever reason, he agreed to go back and really represent his father, Andrew Jackson, and John Overton, who John Overton only visited a few times, James Winchester maybe once, and then Andrew Jackson probably never even visited and divested himself of the land soon thereafter, making a very big profit.

- Now, one of the many interesting things about Marcus Winchester was that at this time that you're talking about, he was barely out of his teens.

- Right, right.

- And he had been a prisoner of war in the War of 1812.

- Yeah.

- And he's a kid!

- He's a young boy, he was actually, so his family lived right outside of present day Nashville, in a mansion called Cragfont that his father had built.

His father was very much a well-respected soldier and so he put together this land deal and looked towards his son, who was actually home from the War of 1812, where he had been captured as a prisoner of war and thought, who can I trust?

And Marcus Winchester was it.

He had a unique background for a young boy, like you mentioned, he had all these, he was a prisoner of war in 1812 when he was just a young teen.

He came home, tried his hand at law, couldn't really do that, and he was looking for something he could do.

So, he was 22 when he landed.

So while he was young, he still had enough of a broad background that he could come in as a businessman, essentially, and report back.

And he got some support from John Overton.

His dad gave him a little less support than John Overton did, according to the letters, unless some of the letters have been lost.

But John Overton had a very big set of expectations for how Memphis was going to be run and how it was gonna be profitable.

- I wanna talk, obviously more about the things that he did in his life, but before we get to that, I wanna quote something out of your book.

When he died in 1856, someone eulogized him by saying, "There never was a man more esteemed in his community in his life, never a man more revered at his death."

You refer to Marcus Winchester as a one-man Chamber of Commerce.

- Mm-hmm.

- What did he do?

- So, when he arrived, they immediately started doing the surveys and deciding how the town would be laid out.

They laid out a lot of the streets that downtown Memphis, you still see today.

They laid those out, but simultaneously, Marcus Winchester had his eye on profit as well.

So he set up a store and an office that was where the substation is across the street from the Memphis Pyramid now.

So, he set up a store, he started selling things.

In fact, John Overton wrote a letter to Marcus Winchester's father and said, "You need to tell him "to quit focusing so much on making money in the store and focus more on selling the lots."

And so, you know, westward expansion was a big deal.

Then the fourth Chickasaw Bluff was in just the beginnings of development.

But Marcus Winchester really did become the first real estate agent.

He became the first store owner, he immediately began working on the ferry that would take people across the Wolf River or across the Mississippi over to what would become Arkansas.

He was very much about the roads and trying to get the roads from Nashville and from the different areas.

So, he was transportation, he was real estate, he was sales.

- He was the first postmaster.

- He was the first postmaster, he was the first mayor.

But then he really liked the postmaster job better so at first he was both, but then they realized there was a law that said that the mayor could not also hold a position with government that paid.

And so the postmaster job paid, and so he took that one.

So, he stayed the postmaster most of his life in Memphis.

He really saw it go from nothing to what it was shortly before the Civil War.

So, he was instrumental in every single thing that happened in Memphis in those early years.

- The way you describe him in the book was a charismatic individual, and apparently a good-looking individual as well, that people would often remark on how how he carried himself, how he presented himself.

- Yeah, and you know, I got that from the quotes.

From the people that wrote letters later after they visited, or from people that wrote books or pamphlets about their experience in Memphis.

And he was, apparently the clothing style that he developed when he was in Baltimore where he went to school, he carried that with him into Memphis.

He dressed very fashionably.

He had family who lived in New Orleans, who still lived in Baltimore, and in Nashville.

He visited all of those cities frequently enough to where he would buy clothing.

And so everyone comments on how this was a person who you wouldn't expect to find in a town like this.

And, you know, probably one visitor that he made the biggest impression on was David Crockett.

Everybody's heard of David Crockett.

Well, you know, it's one of my favorite stories, and that's actually how I discovered Marcus Winchester, was working on a biography of David Crockett.

And David Crockett had this great idea when he had lost his campaign, so he needed to fund another campaign for congressman so he cut down a lot of trees to make barrel staves and his plan was to take them on a flat boat down to New Orleans.

Well, they hit a group of mud islands called Paddy's Hen and Chickens, crashed his boat.

It fell to the bottom of the Mississippi putting him, obviously he now, not only was he not gonna make a profit, now he was deep in debt.

So he was sitting on this island of mud, it had torn all of his clothes off and a steamboat came by and took him to Memphis and he essentially said, "Take me to your leader."

And they took him to Marcus Winchester and him and Marcus Winchester became great friends and David Crockett actually wrote about Marcus Winchester and how impressive he was.

Now secretly, Marcus Winchester began funding David Crockett's campaign.

Now, here's this guy who's- - And alienated Andrew Jackson in the process.

- Well yeah, he got a letter from John Overton said, "If you're doing this, you better cut it out."

You know, 'cause we do not support David Crockett, but he continued to, and actually David Crockett's last person he spent time with before he headed to Texas was Marcus Winchester.

And there's a lot of people like that in the Antebellum South who touched Marcus Winchester in one way or the other.

And so it was really interesting to me, his life is a really interesting way to look at the cultural things that were going on during that time.

- There's so many great characters in this book, but one of the most remarkable, and I know she was to you, is Amarante Loiselle who was Marcus Winchester's wife.

And oddly, she was a free woman of color from St.

Louis originally, which again, from reading what you've written, it was not unusual at the time for a Caucasian man to live with a free woman of color.

It was however unusual for them to marry.

But they married, had eight children.

Talk to me about her, if you would, a little bit and the situation that this marriage put them in in Memphis in those days.

And again, what year would that have been?

- Well, she died in the late 1830s, and they were married long enough to have- - For 16 years.

- And I can't remember the year they got married, so yeah, but they were married for a very long time.

And so, you know, the interesting thing is, so she was, as you mentioned, she was a free woman of color but we don't know exactly, we know who her parents were.

And they were probably a combination of French Canadian, Creole, Native American, but they were from St.

Louis and her father or stepfather was a fur trader.

So, back then, you know, the fur traders all up and down the Mississippi River were connected with all the Native Americans and everybody that was hunting for fur, it was a big business back then.

So somewhere along the way, Marcus Winchester made her acquaintance.

According to family history it was on a steamboat and they were possibly going down to New Orleans, and anyway, so she and he married and they were very wealthy, and she was by all accounts, by what few accounts you can find, you know, a respectable person who worked to help the sick, you know.

But because she was not white and the country was becoming increasingly polarized over slavery and over how free black people, free people of any color were gonna be treated.

Of course, the more that black people learned how to read, the more slaves learned how to read, the more independent they would become and that was against what those enslavers and those who wanted to make sure the laws of the land, you know, allowed them to continue slavery.

And so it became more and more difficult for them to live.

And finally it became impossible when they passed a law saying no one could "keep" a black wife in the city limits.

So, here's this guy who really was instrumental in starting everything up, and suddenly he had to move his wife and his children and himself outside the city limits.

Of course, now that's midtown, you know, but back then that was outside the city limits and so I guess he was one of the first midtowners as well, you could say, so.

- He had political trouble later in his life.

Political trouble, financial trouble later in his life and it sounds like from what you've written, that those were connected with the people who were essentially his political rivals who were not okay with him being married to a free woman of color.

- And it was difficult, it was difficult to research because a lot of that, you know, when you're researching a story like that, you're limited to what you can find.

And so there was not any mention from him about her.

Now, when she did die, and there's a very strong likelihood that she died in New Orleans of childbirth.

So he had family in New Orleans, she had family in New Orleans, so it's very likely although not proven, but he did a couple of years after we think she died, he remarried a Caucasian lady who basically raised his children and remained his wife until his death.

And so, that whole story of her and the impact of her would've been lessened if they didn't have so many kids.

The kids were now a problem.

And so you do see some writing between politicians.

'Cause his son worked for him at the post office, and that raised a lot of problems.

At the same time, you know, there was a lot of land speculation.

You could make a lot of money, but you could also lose a lot of money.

And so he lost a lot of money and then he would make money, and he bought a lot of land over in what is now West Memphis, well, it's now under the water but it's closest to West Memphis.

But he speculated in a town called Hopefield that, when you drive over the Mississippi River bridge now when you're on the Arkansas side, you're driving across the land that Marcus Winchester bought and developed and tried to resell, so.

Anyway, the fact that he had an African-American wife was a big problem for a lot of people and it did lead to, I think him being mostly forgotten because he became a story that people would tell, here's what happens when you marry someone who's not white.

- Right.

- You know?

They would say, "It will ruin your life."

And so a lot of it was propaganda and stories that they would tell each other to keep other people from doing the same thing.

- Yeah, sometimes history that's not convenient for some people just has a way of disappearing.

- Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

- This is also, just to remind our audience, we're talking about the city of Memphis founded in 1819.

The Civil War, which brought the end of slavery in America was more than 20 years later, but also at this time, there is flux in the world of the Native people who lived here before anyone else did.

And again, if you drive around Memphis or you drive around north Mississippi or any part of Mississippi, or West Tennessee or Arkansas, Native names of counties, Native names of cities, Native names of parks, et cetera, in this community.

Tell me his relationship with the Native people, because he was a businessman at the same time as all the other things that he did.

- Sure, so, you know, trading was a big deal back then and what the Native Americans could bring into his stores could make a lot of money and so early on he worked with them a great deal.

You know, I wouldn't propose to know what he thought beyond what I can find actually written down, and I couldn't find any reference to him talking about Native Americans beyond them camping outside and trading with him and a little writing here and there after that.

But he was actually physically there.

You know, Andrew Jackson broke with David Crockett when David Crockett didn't vote in favor of Jackson's Native American Bill that he put into effect, that ultimately led to the Trail of Tears.

And so David Crockett, you know, was actually there and saw, or I'm sorry, Marcus Winchester was actually there and saw a group of Native Americans that crossed the Mississippi River as part of the Trail of Tears.

So I can't say exactly what or how he felt, but looking at the entirety of the work that he did, I'm sure it's not something he was proud of.

- Right.

And if you, again, landmarks in Memphis for people who live here or visit here, there are markers for the Trail of Tears on Poplar Avenue where it goes right down to the river where they, I presume, got on ferries and crossed over.

- Yeah, one of my favorite places- - For the west.

- One of my favorite places in Memphis is the old Ornamental Metal Museum, you know, that's moving, but where it's former location, there's the big mound there, where the Native Americans, the Mound Builders from years and years and years earlier, you can still see that.

So it's a great spot to really connect with the people from hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years ago.

- What do you think he would think, some of the work that he did was moving marketable material, moving products from place to place whether it was on the ferry or through the store that he owned in town, do you think he would, how do you think he would respond to seeing Memphis as a hub of the global marketplace today?

Because it seemed like that was in a way what he was thinking about.

- Yeah, I think based on what I've read, what he wrote, and based on the actions that he took, and especially towards the end of his life, he was really passionate about getting the railroad to Memphis.

You were not gonna be successful without having a railroad.

And Memphis did not have one in his lifetime, It was shortly after he died that the first actual real railroad came.

But I think he would absolutely be thrilled with the fact that Memphis has become, you know, and for many years has been, the transportation hub of America.

I think when you consider rail, road, FedEx, the river still.

You know, you look at that, I think he would see that with a great source of pride.

Anyway, I would hope that he would.

- And you would think that maybe if not predicted it, but you know, could've seen that kind of thing in the future of the city that he was helping to build.

- Well, and especially when you consider the fact that when he stood up there, and based on the things you can read in the letters that he wrote, and there are a lot of letters between him and his father and him and John Overton.

And quite frankly, I went through his, I mean, there are really hundreds of letters, but they're like reading your email or my email, you know?

It's just business, they're not really, they don't shed a lot of light on.

But in some of them you can see, he had a unique way to balance both the needs of the city for it to grow, but also the needs of the individuals, the people that lived there.

So there are letters where he was frustrated with John Overton because it was one of the worst winters that Memphis had ever seen.

And John Overton had a forest, if you would, on the other side of the Wolf River, that people could've used to chop down the trees to burn to keep warm.

And John Overton refused to let them do that.

And that's the harshest letter I could find where he was angry about that, that they couldn't do that.

And so that's when several of the hotels and wooden restaurants that were along the river got torn down and used as firewood that winter.

But the other thing is, there was a, there were a lot of sicknesses back then, obviously, as there would be, you know, in the years going forward.

But there's letters where he's trying to get vaccines for the people of Memphis and he was worried about the health, he was worried about every aspect of the lives of the people of Memphis.

- We've got a couple of minutes left, but there are a couple of things I wanted to ask you about.

There have been some, I guess you'd call them revelations about his ancestors recently.

And it was learned that he may have been the great-great grandson of a black man named Gideon Gibson, Sr.

from south Carolina.

And also that what happened to, I asked you the other day, what happened to him?

Where was he buried?

If you would tell us that story?

- Sure, so, Gideon Gibson, Sr.

The irony, you know, as pointed out by his descendants many of whom live in Memphis still and Arkansas, and a few in Texas.

But you know, how ironic is it that Marcus Winchester and his mixed race wife got such grief over her when in fact he was mixed race as well?

And in fact, most of the people who were feeling that way were also.

So, it deserves more research by somebody and I know they're doing blood tests and DNA and things, but, so Marcus Winchester, when his father died, he selected a piece of land.

His father was buried in at their home, Cragfont, but Marcus Winchester set up some land in Memphis to be the burial site for anyone who died in Memphis.

And so people were buried there, that is where some of Memphis's biggest leaders, the editors of the newspaper, the bankers, the mayors, they were buried there in the Winchester burial ground.

Fast forward, people started moving further east and as did the cemeteries.

And so there weren't as many people being buried there and eventually no one was buried there and it fell into disrepair.

And there were many campaigns to try to bring it back.

Marcus Winchester was buried there but his grave wasn't marked and so the city garage was built on top of where we think he was buried now.

Fast forward, different generations tried their best to try to resurrect it and take care of it, protect it.

But eventually the city dug a street through, which opened coffins up, and another mayor came along and had all of the headstones ground down into dust, and it was turned into a city park.

For many, many years it sat empty as a park, then to keep vagrants out it was fenced up and there's a historic marker up there, but it is now gone and all of the history that potentially could've been learned from the headstones, you know, that's all gone now and it will soon be a parking garage for St.

Jude Children's Research Hospital.

And most of those people, some of the people were moved to Elmwood, but for the most part they are dust under the ground.

- R. Scott Williams, we appreciate you being here today.

- Thank you for having me, that went way too fast.

- It was wonderful.

It was wonderful.

The book is "Townmania", and if you read the book, you'll find out why it's called "Townmania", which is an interesting story too.

"Marcus Winchester and the Making of Memphis", we appreciate you being here.

We appreciate you being here watching the show today.

We thank WKNO for doing it.

And study history, one thing he notes at the end of the book is to thank the people who preserve our history.

And if we all enjoy it and digest it, there'll be more people interested in preserving it.

Thank you very much, I'm George Larrimore, good to be here.

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