Excerpts form
The Burning of Bowling Green
by Stella M. and James N. Pitts
Judge Edward McGehee ( 1786- 1880 ) Owner of Bowlin Green
Plantation. Bowling Green Plantation Home was burned in October,
1864, by a troop of Northern soldiers. Judge McGehee, 78, the
county's wealthiest and most prominent citizen, was having breakfast with
his wife Mary and two of their daughters, Mary Louisa and Augusta
Eugenia. Also in the house at the time were their young Grandson
George Stewart, and his mother Caroline Stewart remained bedridden, she
was expecting another child with in days.
Judge McGehee was a native of Georgia, and was born in 1786. At
the age of 21, his father Micajah McGehee gave him $5.000 and money
to buy slaves and supplies. The next year Edward headed out
for Wheeling, Virginia where he bought a horse, a flatboat, his seven
slaved, flour and other supplies. He then put everything on the
flat boat and headed down the Ohio River and then down the
Mississippi. Edward landed at Fort Adams, in the Mississippi
Territory. Edward traveled inland, and admired what he
he saw in this lush forested wilderness and bought land on Thompson's
Creek.
Two years later he returned to Georgia, married Peggy Louisa Cosby, and
returned with her to his tiny cabin on Thompson's Creek. He also
brought with him a small library. Before her death in 1821 at the
age of 33, Peggy Louisa had given birth to five children. Two years
later Edward married again; his second wife, Harriet Ann Goodrich, had
three children before dying in 1827 at the age of 25. Life was hard
indeed for women in the wilderness: condition were primitive, infants
often died at birth, or within a few weeks of their births, and the
mothers themselves frequently succumbed, worn out by too many pregnancies
an suffering form woefully inadequate medical care.
During these years, Edward McGehee had steadily increased his land
holdings, and he eventually established his residence on a tract he named
Bowling Green. It was located about two miles form the flourishing
village o Woodville, which had been incorporated in 1811 when the
region was still the Mississippi Territory, six years before Mississippi
was made a state. With his third wife Mary Burruss, whom he would
have 11 children, he built a frame house at Bowling Green. By 1831,
increasingly wealthy and desiring a handsome residence for his growing
family, he replaced it with a three story brick mansion, fronted by four
high columns and surrounded by lush gardens.
A second Bowling Green Mansion served as the home of several
generations of the McGehee family until it, too, was destroyed by fire,
which began in the attic on a Sunday morning in 1941.... Because the fire
moved so slowly, the throng of friends and neighbors who came to help the
family were able to remove nearly all of the contents of the house,
including the piano form the original house. One family member
recalled seeing tow burly men carrying a glass-fronted china cabinet
across the lawn and placing it gently on the grass, all of its fragile
contents still inside and unbroken.
Today (2000) Mary Magruder McGehee, the great-great-granddaughter of
Judge McGehee, is the last remaining descendant of that name in
Woodville. She and here sister, Elizabeth McGehee Watt (who lives in
nearby Baton Rouge, Louisiana), still own what is left of the Bowling
Green property. They maintain the old grove, its surrounding acreage
and the nearby family cemetery with reverent tenderness and enormous
pride.
