n
be remembered by some of the men and women now living in Pall Mall, who
knew him as the most influential man of his time in the section, the
owner of the river-bottom farm land, vast acres of hardwood timber, a
general store and a flour mill worked by his slaves--a man grown to such
enormous size and weight that in his last days he went about his farm
and to oversee his workers in a two-wheeled cart pulled by oxen.

Those of the valley who now remember him were children when he died, for
he was born on March 16, 1766, and his death occurred on October 14,
1849.

He saw his valley home changed from a part of the State of Franklin to a
part of the State of Kentucky, then to Tennessee, and the abstracts to
the deeds for land he owned show that Pall Mall was first in Granger
county, later in Overton and finally in Fentress county as the State of
Tennessee developed. Pall Mall is but seven miles from the Kentucky
line, and for many years Coonrod thought he had taken up his residence
within the Kentucky border.

Settlers of those days in leaving the Carolinas and Virginia traveled
usually due west in search for a new home. It was this belief that he
had settled in Kentucky that has led many to the opinion that Coonrod's
former home was in Virginia. Others, without more definite knowledge for
foundation, maintain that as he settled in Tennessee he had lived in
North Carolina. The written word was rarely used and the stories of the
earlier days in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" are
tradition.

In a newly settled territory a man's birthplace and antecedents are
facts immaterial to the community's welfare and many incidents
historical in nature concerning Old Coonrod have been lost in the
waste-basket of forgetfulness and no one now at Pall Mall has "heard
tell of jes' where he come from." Yet some readily say that he came from
"over yonder," and they point back across the mountains toward North
Carolina.

In the first map of Tennessee, made by Daniel Smith, there is a dip in
the northern boundary of the state line where Fentress county is
located. But this was found to be an error of survey and later
corrected. The surveyors of those days were men of courtesy and
accommodation, for in the establishment of the Tennessee-Virginia line
they surveyed around the southern boundary of the farm of a hospitable
host and left his lands in Virginia because the old fellow maintained he
had never had any health except i