The Seven Sisters
Having spent a decade growing a family and amassing his fortune as a tobacco trader on Turkey Creek, Jesse West in the winter of 1830 moved his wife, children and livestock 10 miles farther north, above the Cumberland River in Smith County, Tennessee.
Clearly not a superstitious man, Jesse had paid $860 for 300 acres west of Defeated Creek within proximity of Difficult, a town so-called when postal officials determined its residents’ preferred name was “too difficult.”
Five years later, as his slaves cut timber on that property, a falling tree knocked a limb from another tree, striking and killing Jesse, age 40. He was buried on a section of his land, becoming the first resident of the West Cemetery, in Difficult, Tennessee.
Jesse lay alone in the graveyard for 22 years; in 1857, granddaughter #1 Julia Ann West joined him. She had lived one year, 9 months and 15 days.
A century after Jesse’s death, the West Cemetery population had grown to include Jesse’s wife, as well as the parents of little Julia. All six of Julia’s sisters also rested there.
And so, the serviceable but scarcely romantic West Cemetery came to be known by another name, something more suitable, a bit haunting.
It was called The Seven Sisters Cemetery.
Captain Claiborne Wright West was seven — and a long way from attaining his rank — when his parents, Jesse and Elizabeth, brought him to the farm on Defeated Creek. Twelve when his father had the unfortunate encounter with the tree limb, he and his two older brothers took on the responsibility of the family farm and tobacco business.
At age 20, he went courting. Fannie Williams told descendants she would wait on her father’s front porch Sunday afternoons to spot him riding across the creek at Big Spring. “His white shirt bosom would be visible as he crossed the creek,” she said. “He always wore the cleanest white shirts.”
The couple married in 1844, and they settled into a comfortable life on the farm. In 1860, they owned at least two slaves: an18-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy. Claiborne was the local tax collector that year; his estate was valued at $17,000 (about half a million in today’s dollars).
By the time Claiborne enlisted in the Confederate Army in the fall of 1861, his seven daughters had been born…and little Julia had been buried near her grandfather. Having survived the Battle of Shiloh, Captain Claiborne left off fighting Yankees in the spring of 1862. He had been home five months when, on October 23, daughter #2 Lucy Jane West died. She was 17 years old.
Almost two decades later, the first sister to leave behind a widower — and a child — took her place in Jesse West’s cemetery. #3 Rutha Ann West died in August 1881, 10 days before the third anniversary of her marriage to George W. Sanford, a Confederate veteran like her father, and two days before their son turned two. Rutha, 23, likely died in childbirth. Her husband remarried and lived 87 years; her son became a successful Nashville businessman.
When her husband died of consumption in the summer of 1879, #4 Sarah Elizabeth West Huddleston, 32, was too ill to embrace her duties as executrix of his will. With four small children to tend, she turned to her father. Captain Claiborne arranged a sale of horses, heifers, buckets and books that brought in $329.39 in cash (about $8,000 today); he also ensured there were enough provisions — 200 pounds of bacon, 10 hogs, a barrel of salt, 30 bushels of wheat— to last the widow a full year.
When Sarah died four years after her husband, Captain Claiborne and Fannie took in three of their grandchildren; the older boy went to his paternal grandparents. Instead of lying alongside her husband, Henry Gilford, in the Huddleston family cemetery, Sarah chose to be buried near her three sisters.
Inevitably, #5 Millicent Frances West would do the same. Born almost exactly two years after Sarah, Millie married Wade Hampton Huddleston nine months after Sarah had married his brother. The couple had six children; when Millie died at 43, the oldest was 23, the youngest 5. The widower never remarried; he lived to be 81, residing with a daughter in old age.
#6 Amanda Susan West and her younger sister, #7 Caltha Sophronia West, were born within three years of each other and, like Sarah and Millie, they married men with the same last name — and with middle names honoring U.S. presidents. Despite this, the Kemp husbands weren’t brothers.
Like all the West girls, Amanda lived in Smith County cradle to grave; unlike her sisters, Amanda became a city mouse. Husband Newton Jefferson “Babe” Kemp worked in the insurance business and held public office in the county seat of Carthage; by 1910, the Kemps had moved to town. Of Amanda’s three children, only her son, who died at 18, is buried in the Seven Sisters Cemetery. Husband Babe is also there, having arrived six years before his wife. When Amanda died in 1925, she was 74, by far the longest-lived of the five sisters who preceded her.
Sister Caltha Sophronia broke Amanda’s longevity record in1933. That’s also when she made the family cemetery’s name possible by becoming the seventh West girl to take her place among her sisters.
At 18, Caltha married farmer Cyrus Jackson Kemp, 29; they had two children and a marriage that endured 52 years. Like his Kemp brother-in-law, Cyrus chose burial in his wife’s family cemetery.
Caltha lived another decade; the 1930 Smith County census identifies her as a farmer living alone. Three years later, Caltha, 80, died of stomach cancer. On July 8, 1933, her son Henry Kemp saw to it that her body was transported from Carthage and buried on the land her grandfather Jesse West had purchased 103 years earlier.
Jesse West couldn’t have known when he left Turkey Creek in 1830 how many of his descendants would find eternal rest on the property he purchased. If he imagined a family cemetery with his name on it, that’s what he got for more than a century.
When others took over the imagining, they looked at the overgrown graveyard lying west of Defeated Creek near a town called Difficult — the one with all the pretty markers engraved with girls’ names — and they did the right thing by it.
There are dozens of West cemeteries in Tennessee, but there is only one called The Seven Sisters.
NOTES: The anecdote about Claiborne’s white shirts comes from Hoke Holland West’s 1970 history of the West family, What’s In a Name?
Claiborne Wright West’s name is spelled numerous ways in the West history mentioned above, on census reports, and the like. I chose the spelling that appeared most often in the documents I found.
The four family portraits were found on ancestry.com and/or Findagrave.com. Thanks to the descendants for sharing them with the rest of us.
