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Notes for THOMAS M. CAMPBELL:
THOMAS M. CAMPBELL was born in Smith County, Tennessee, in the year 1837. He was the youngest of three known sons, born to Hugh and Sarah Hearn Campbell. By the time Thomas was thirteen, his family had relocated their homeplace three times. He had experienced much and was probably learning the skills of farming and shoemaking. Also living in Rural Hill was the large family of Benjamin Dobson, whose granddaughter, Sarah Ann, Thomas was to meet and marry in 1856. If we can believe the federal census dates, Sarah was only 15 at the time.
Thomas and Sarah began their large family, only to be interrupted by the Civil War. Being a young man, Thomas was caught up in the fervour; whether by choice or force we will never know. He became a member of the 38th Tennessee Infantry, Company H and was promoted to corporal. His outfit fought gallantly at the bloody battle of Shiloh, TN, and soon became part of the infamous, Army of Tennessee, under General Braxton Bragg. He was accompanied by two of his brother-in-laws, William Jerome and Thomas Dobson; William being the company cook. The army eventually marched into Mississippi, across Alabama, north to Kentucky, where they participated in various skirmishes culminating in the battle at Perryville. After this, the army retreated back to Tennessee and eventually into Georgia. A major epidemic of measles had attacked the army and Thomas was one of those who became critically ill. As recorded in his application for Confederate Pension, some fifty years later, he had become so incapacitated by his illness, that the southern army was forced to give him a discharge from active servive. This all came about when the south was in dire need of fighting men, thus indicates how very sick Thomas was. After the war, Thomas was unable to keep up the farm and sold his prosperity in land.
Like many others after the Civil War, Thomas took his growing family west. Blossom, Texas was home for a few years and when things apparently didn't work out, Thomas brought his family back to Tennessee. They sold the land Sarah had inherited from her aunt, Jane Dobson Curry and moved finally to Nashville where Thomas became a grocer, then shoe-repairer, and did what he could to support his family; which by now had grown to nine. From the records it appears that Thomas and Sarah did what they could to raise their family; attended the Tulip Street Methodist Church and took life in stride. Their children grew up and went out on their own, though it seems that a few of them continued to live near by.
Sarah died in 1914 at the age of 72, Thomas at the age of 79, in 1916. They are both now resting in the historic, Spring Hill Cemetery, north of Nashville, across the Cumberland River, in Tennessee.
-sjc 1996
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