James Ewing, my second great-grandfather, was a solid citizen of Wilson County, Tennessee, for all of his life. Courthouse records show that he was executor for wills, administrator for sales and inventories, and witness to many legal documents. At least fifteen deeds show him as involved in the buying and selling of tracts of land around Smith's Fork in Wilson County. He deeded three acres of his land, on which his farming operation seems to have been very successful, to the Prosperity Baptist Church for its construction. The third version of that that church still stands today on that same land. My second great-grandmother Malinda, James's second wife, was active in the life of the church, and the church records show James and Malinda as charter members.

James Ewing was nothing if not prolific. My great-grandfather Gustavus H. Ewing was the nineteenth and last of his children, born when James was 63 years of age. Most of his children had the opportunity to enjoy the comfortable life with which their father provided them, although Gussie (as he was called) was quite young when the world of James Ewing and countless other thousands in both the North and the South changed forever.

James was 69 years old when the Civil War began with Confederate artillery opening fire on Fort Sumpter on April 10, 1861. He was to see numerous of his sons and friends and neighbors join the fray. He would see far too many of them maimed, taken prisoner, or killed in action. In 1865, when the War was over, James was too old to adjust to the new way of life, and he also suffered much at the hands of marauding Union soldiers and scavengers. He died in 1866, no doubt a saddened man--certainly a man with few worldly goods--who passed from a Tennessee quite different from the one he had known and a country permanently altered by "The Late Unpleasantness." His great-grandfather Alexander, his grandfather John, and his father Alexander of Nashville had left wills providing well for their families upon their deaths. James left no will; he had little left to give.