WILLIAM TURNER: A LOOK AT HIS LIFETIME AND FAMILY
WILLIAM TURNER:
A LOOK AT HIS LIFETIME AND FAMILY ©

by Holly Timm
[originally published 13 January 1988
Harlan Daily Enterprise Penny Pincher]

One of the most prominent men in 19th century Harlan County was William Turner. He was born in the summer of 1812 on Clover Fork, the son of William Turner, Sr., and his wife Susannah.

William Turner, Sr. came to the Kentucky mountains in 1798, he married a daughter of Carr and Mary Bailey, another early family in the area.

William and Susannah had six children besides William survive to adulthood: James who married Elizabeth Clay; Joannah who married Thomas Sewall; Polly who married Bales Shumate; Nancy who married John Cawood; Sally who married Walter Middleton and Lucy who married Acles Wynn.

Polly Turner Shumate drowned crossing the Clover Fork in 1828 and her husband took their children west to Arkansas and Missouri. Joanna Turner Sewall and her family moved to Breathitt County. The rest of William and Susannah's children remained in southeast Kentucky with many of their descendants living still on Clover Fork.

Their son William began as a farmer, gradually acquiring land. By 1844, he was established as a merchant. Like many merchants doing business in an area without banks, Turner loaned money at interest, secured by personal notes or by mortgages for land or other types of property.

He continued to acquire land and by his death Oct. 22, 1881, owned about 33,000 acres in Harlan County, most of it on Clover Fork. Before his death, he donated what was then only a cornfield for the building of a new courthouse on the site where the present courthouse now stands.

Like his father before him, he owned many slaves prior to the Civil War and was understandably believed to have held Rebel sympathies. In September of 1865, Hezekiah Jennings charged Turner for damages stemming from the theft of two horses and the destruction of a wagon by Confederate troops.

Jennings stated that in the spring of 1863, a force of Confederate cavalry invaded Harlan County and that William Turner gave voluntary aid and assistance to the regiment and by so doing was responsible for the wrongs and injuries committed by them.

Turner denied the charges, stating that when Humphrey Marshall invaded Harlan County with his army, they held him prisoner while the army subsisted on the county and that said Marshall kept his headquarters at his house and subsisted his army upon the considerable extent, against the defendant's will.

Turner swore that he "could not help himself and he had to make a virtue of necessity and submit as many other of his neighbors had to do." He then stated that the rebel army tore down his buildings, burned his fences, killed his property and took 11 of his horses, five of which he never did get back.

He continued, stating that he himself was injured more than any other citizen in the county and under the circumstances tried to wield an influence with Marshall for the benefit of his neighbors and himself. The court record does not note the outcome of the case.

Turner served as administrator of his uncle James Turner's estate and in a settlement after the war carefully accounted for the loss of a considerable amount of the value of the estate due to a large portion of the assets being in Southern Bank money, worthless after the war.

Turner married first, in 1835, to Elizabeth Anne Brittain, daughter of George Brittain and his second wife Nancy Posey. Elizabeth Anne was born in 1817 and died March 13, 1837, three days after the birth of their son, George B. Turner.

In 1851, William married Minerva, daughter of Chadwell and Sally Brittain and thus a double cousin of his first wife. Of their numerous children only five lived to see the turn of the century.

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