Jemison Family
Priscilla Cherokee Jemison, wife of Robert Jemison, Jr.
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Cherokee Jemison Hargrove as a child with her dog, Scissors
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The Cherokee Legend
Priscilla Cherokee Taylor Jemison, wife of Robert Jemison, Jr., was the daughter of Greenberry and Elizabeth Taylor, who settled around 1810 in Cherokee Indian territory in what is now northwestern Alabama. According to family history, the Taylors befriended the Cherokees and when the chief’s daughter fell ill and tribal medicine failed, the chief asked Elizabeth to nurse the girl back to health. The daughter survived, and the chief later returned the favor by taking the Taylors into his village when the Choctaws went on a rampage.
The grateful Taylor family asked the chief how they could thank him for saving their lives. By naming their first daughter "Cherokee," he replied. The Taylor's first daughter had already been baptized Elizabeth, but when their second daughter was born in 1812, they named her Priscilla Cherokee.
After the Choctaw scare, the family moved to a more densely populated area in what is now Clarke County. Priscilla was educated at a female academy in Tuscaloosa, the city where she met her future husband, Robert Jemison, Jr. Sadly, Priscilla’s father was killed and her mother was injured in an accident prior to their daughter’s wedding.
True to family tradition, Priscilla and Robert Jemison named their daughter Cherokee, and the name has now passed down through six generations.
Camille Maxwell Elebash, “The Jemison Mansion Family Histories,” Alabama Heritage (Fall 1992), VII, 37.
The grateful Taylor family asked the chief how they could thank him for saving their lives. By naming their first daughter "Cherokee," he replied. The Taylor's first daughter had already been baptized Elizabeth, but when their second daughter was born in 1812, they named her Priscilla Cherokee.
After the Choctaw scare, the family moved to a more densely populated area in what is now Clarke County. Priscilla was educated at a female academy in Tuscaloosa, the city where she met her future husband, Robert Jemison, Jr. Sadly, Priscilla’s father was killed and her mother was injured in an accident prior to their daughter’s wedding.
True to family tradition, Priscilla and Robert Jemison named their daughter Cherokee, and the name has now passed down through six generations.
Camille Maxwell Elebash, “The Jemison Mansion Family Histories,” Alabama Heritage (Fall 1992), VII, 37.
Elizabeth Taylor, mother of Priscilla Cherokee Taylor Jemison
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Andrew Coleman Hargrove (1837-1895)
Husband of Cherokee Jemison, Only daughter of Robert Jemison, Jr.
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Coleman-Hargrove
On December 5, 1865, several months after the Civil War ended, Jemison’s daughter Cherokee married Andrew Coleman Hargrove, a young lawyer from Tuscaloosa. A large wedding reception was held in the basement ballroom of the Jemison Mansion.
Coleman Hargrove, an 1856 graduate of the University of Alabama and an 1859 graduate of Harvard School of Law, had just begun practicing in Tuscaloosa when the war broke out. As Jemison pointed out in one of his letters, Hargrove had “entered the service & continued until the last gun was fired. He had a very handsome estate in the beginning but it is all gone.”
Nearly destitute himself, Robert Jemison was not concerned about his new son-in-law’s financial problems.” “His habits are good,” said Jemison, “and I have no fears as to her being provided for if he lives.”
Jemison had cause for concern regarding Hargrove’s health, for the young lawyer had sustained a devastating series of injuries to his head during the war. As an officer in a Tuscaloosa unit, Lumsden’s Battery. Hargrove narrowly escaped serious injury when a bullet whistled by his head in May 1864 during the Atlanta campaign. He was not so lucky two months later when Confederates were attempting to prevent Union forces from crossing the Chattahoochee River, near Atlanta. James Maxwell, a fellow soldier, recorded the incident in his diary:
I remarked, “They are firing at us, Lieutenant.”
Said he, “They got me.”
I turned to him, squatting there with both hands to his forehead, and blood rushing out between his fingers and over his hands.
Said I, “Let’s see.”
He took down his hands, and I spread open the long perpendicular gash to his forehead some three inches long. The blood flowed off, showing the bone of his forehead without a fracture.
I said, “Lieutenant, it’s only cut to the bone, your skull is not cracked.”
“It makes me feel rather sick,” said he.
Sent to a hospital and then for a short stay in Tuscaloosa, Hargrove recovered, but he was marked for life with a blue perpendicular scar on his forehead.
In December 1864 during the battle of Nashville, Hargrove was involved in another close encounter with a Union soldier. James Maxwell also recorded this event in his diary:
One horseman, having fired all loads from his pistol, headed off Lieut. Coleman Hargrove, ordering him to surrender. Hargrove picked up a cut sapling to defend himself when the Yank whacked down on his head with a saber. Hargrove caught most of the force of the blow on his stick, but it was beaten down, so part of the blow reached his head, and the lieutenant said it “hurt like everything,” but was dull and did not cut.
A third incident, the most serious of all, occurred in the last month of the war, April 1865, at Spanish Fort, Alabama, where Hargrove was wounded, almost fatally. According to Maxwell, a bullet struck him “just in front of the orifice of the ear and ranged backward around his head remaining there, where it was never found.” The next day Maxwell was present “when surgeons attempted uselessly to find the bullet in Hargrove’s head by probing and every way they could think of. It was not on the outside of the skull, and he finally recovered, but after the close of the war.”
For thirty years, Coleman Hargrove carried a minie ball in his head, enduring incurable headaches. Despite the pain, he distinguished himself as a lawyer, a member of the Alabama constitutional convention (1875), a state senator (1876-1884), president of the senate (1888-92), land commissioner for the University of Alabama (1884-95), and professor of law at that institution (1885-95).
On December 6, 1895, still in terrible pain, Hargrove shot himself in the library of the Jemison Mansion. Cherokee Jemison Hargrove never recovered from her husband’s death. In January 1900, her son-in-law wrote, “Mrs. Hargrove is in the depth of depression that is simply painful to see.” Nine months later, he wrote, “Mrs. Hargrove [has] gone into a decline… wild with hysteria…worried over small things of no real importance.” On May 4, 1903, Cherokee Hargrove died, a victim, like her husband, of a war that her father had fought so hard to avoid.
Camille Maxwell Elebash, The Jemison Mansion Family Histories, Alabama Heritage (Fall 1992), VII, 41-42.
Coleman Hargrove, an 1856 graduate of the University of Alabama and an 1859 graduate of Harvard School of Law, had just begun practicing in Tuscaloosa when the war broke out. As Jemison pointed out in one of his letters, Hargrove had “entered the service & continued until the last gun was fired. He had a very handsome estate in the beginning but it is all gone.”
Nearly destitute himself, Robert Jemison was not concerned about his new son-in-law’s financial problems.” “His habits are good,” said Jemison, “and I have no fears as to her being provided for if he lives.”
Jemison had cause for concern regarding Hargrove’s health, for the young lawyer had sustained a devastating series of injuries to his head during the war. As an officer in a Tuscaloosa unit, Lumsden’s Battery. Hargrove narrowly escaped serious injury when a bullet whistled by his head in May 1864 during the Atlanta campaign. He was not so lucky two months later when Confederates were attempting to prevent Union forces from crossing the Chattahoochee River, near Atlanta. James Maxwell, a fellow soldier, recorded the incident in his diary:
I remarked, “They are firing at us, Lieutenant.”
Said he, “They got me.”
I turned to him, squatting there with both hands to his forehead, and blood rushing out between his fingers and over his hands.
Said I, “Let’s see.”
He took down his hands, and I spread open the long perpendicular gash to his forehead some three inches long. The blood flowed off, showing the bone of his forehead without a fracture.
I said, “Lieutenant, it’s only cut to the bone, your skull is not cracked.”
“It makes me feel rather sick,” said he.
Sent to a hospital and then for a short stay in Tuscaloosa, Hargrove recovered, but he was marked for life with a blue perpendicular scar on his forehead.
In December 1864 during the battle of Nashville, Hargrove was involved in another close encounter with a Union soldier. James Maxwell also recorded this event in his diary:
One horseman, having fired all loads from his pistol, headed off Lieut. Coleman Hargrove, ordering him to surrender. Hargrove picked up a cut sapling to defend himself when the Yank whacked down on his head with a saber. Hargrove caught most of the force of the blow on his stick, but it was beaten down, so part of the blow reached his head, and the lieutenant said it “hurt like everything,” but was dull and did not cut.
A third incident, the most serious of all, occurred in the last month of the war, April 1865, at Spanish Fort, Alabama, where Hargrove was wounded, almost fatally. According to Maxwell, a bullet struck him “just in front of the orifice of the ear and ranged backward around his head remaining there, where it was never found.” The next day Maxwell was present “when surgeons attempted uselessly to find the bullet in Hargrove’s head by probing and every way they could think of. It was not on the outside of the skull, and he finally recovered, but after the close of the war.”
For thirty years, Coleman Hargrove carried a minie ball in his head, enduring incurable headaches. Despite the pain, he distinguished himself as a lawyer, a member of the Alabama constitutional convention (1875), a state senator (1876-1884), president of the senate (1888-92), land commissioner for the University of Alabama (1884-95), and professor of law at that institution (1885-95).
On December 6, 1895, still in terrible pain, Hargrove shot himself in the library of the Jemison Mansion. Cherokee Jemison Hargrove never recovered from her husband’s death. In January 1900, her son-in-law wrote, “Mrs. Hargrove is in the depth of depression that is simply painful to see.” Nine months later, he wrote, “Mrs. Hargrove [has] gone into a decline… wild with hysteria…worried over small things of no real importance.” On May 4, 1903, Cherokee Hargrove died, a victim, like her husband, of a war that her father had fought so hard to avoid.
Camille Maxwell Elebash, The Jemison Mansion Family Histories, Alabama Heritage (Fall 1992), VII, 41-42.
