Jackson Purchase Historical Society

SONG OF THE NEW YEAR

I heard the bells at midnight

Ring in the dawning year;

And above the clanging chorus

Of the song, I seemed to hear

A choir of mystic voices

Flinging echoes, ringing clear,

From a band of angels winging

Through the haunted atmosphere;

“Ring out the shame and sorrow,

And the misery and sin,

That the dawning of the morrow

May in peace be ushered in.”

- James  Whitcomb Riley

(The Complete Poetical Works of James Whitcomb Riley, Indiana University Press,  1993)

AMEN

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!

“Three or four years ago tryouts were being conducted for parts in the Nativity Play to be staged by the children of the Second Presbyterian Church.  There was brisk competition for all the roles except that of the innkeeper who told Mary and Joseph that he didn’t have room for them.

For some reason the kids seemed to think the innkeeper was a sort of bad guy and no one wanted to be saddled with the part.

‘But he wasn’t really mean,’ one of the teachers explained to the four-year-old boy chosen for the role.  ‘All the rooms in the inn were taken and he just didn’t have a place for Mary and Joseph to stay.”

That appeased the boy somewhat, but when the play was staged he felt constrained to underscore the innkeeper’s innocence by ad-libbing his lines just a trifle.

‘I’m sorry I don’t have room for you, I’m really sorry,’ he said when Mary and Jospeh stopped by, ‘ but won’t you come in and have a drink?’”

(Excerpt from the book Crossroads and Coffee Trees, a Legacy of Joe Creason, 1975, The Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times,  page 21.  Joe Creason was born in Benton, Kentucky in 1918, and wrote “Joe Creason’s Kentucky”, a popular local column in the Courier-Journal, Louisville, KY, from 1963 until his death in 1974.)

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

John Christmas McLemore, Christmasville, TN

Well, his name anyway.  Our Marvin Downing is the historical consultant for a PBS segment on Christmasville, TN and John Christmas McLemore.  Marvin says that means “a person might catch my name when the credits are run”!

The segment will air on Christmas Eve and again on the following Sunday morning after Christmas.  If you don’t have access to Nashville Public Television, after the segment airs, it will be on the website a few weeks via You Tube and you can check it out at  www.tennesseecrossroads.org.

John Christmas McLemore was one of the founding fathers of Memphis, TN.  He also lent his name to a town, created by an act of the Tennessee legislature, to be founded on the north side of the South Fork of the Obion River in the vicinity of “McLemore’s Bluff.”

Marvin wrote an article for the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture on McLemore and also an article, Old Christmasville (Tennessee): Its Lure and Lore” published in the JPHS Journal, Vol. VII, June 1979.