Jacob Mayton & Mary Jane Delaney

MARY JANE DELANEY, one of two daughters of Daniel Delaney and Manerva Alexander, was born 02 December 1859 in Tennessee, probably in either Monroe or Blount County.

She married JACOB MAYTON on 31 December 1873 in Rockwood, Tennessee, in a ceremony performed by Dr. Broker and witnessed by her mother and Mrs. Broker. Her place of residence was Rockwood; Jacob's was Kingston. Both towns are located in Roane Co., TN.

Jacob was the son of ANDREW MAYTON and ELIZABETH DUGLASS, and was born 19 February 1852 in Carter Co. Tenn. He was 11 when the Civil War broke out. His daughter Maude Mayton told me that Jacob's father A.W. (Witt) served in the Civil War and that Jacob "as a boy, stood with the wagons at the Battle of Chickamauga."

If true, he witnessed one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, called a "River of Death" by Confederate Gen. William Bates. The Union lost 16,000 men out of 58,000 on the field. The Confederates lost more than 18,000 out of 66,000.

In the 1880 census, Jacob and Mary Jane were living in the 14th District in Roane, probably near Jonesville where my grandmother was born. They were there as of 1891 when Jake appeared in the 1891 Tennessee Voters List.

In the fall of 2002, when I visited Tennessee, my uncle and cousin helped me locate the place where Jacob and Mary Jane used to live. My grandmother had told my father that it was "about 200 yards back off the road near Jonesville in a little holler." The man who owned the property confirmed that Jacob Mayton had indeed lived back there and was kind enough to let me walk into his property a little ways and take photos of the terrain.

Ties to Petros

The 1880 census indicates that Jacob "Jake" Mayton was a farmer, as does his death certificate. Family stories say that he at one time worked at Brushy Mountain Prison in Petros, about 25 miles from Jonesville.

Jake certainly had some kind of ties to Petros, because I uncovered two newspaper stories of the June 1898 explosion at the Petros rail depot, in which Jake was seriously injured with a broken back. Additionally, in 1915 Jake was the informant for his mother-in-law's death certificate in Petros. Was he working in Petros then? IN 1915, he would have been in his sixties.

My father said the story was that Jacob worked at Brushy Mountain Penitentiary, about 25 miles away. This story also is told elsewhere in the family but the Penitentiary does not to this day release information on those who have worked there. Daddy's guess was that Jake would have worked there during the workweek and then come home on weekends. My uncle Leonard Hacker, who lived in the area all his life, said that it would have been possible for Jake to catch a train out of Petros to Oakdale and then switch lines to come down toward Jonesville. Perhaps that's how he did it. Otherwise, it would have been a long dark walk over the hills.

Home and Family

Jacob and Mary Jane raised 10 children who lived to be adults. Mary Jane was an industrious woman, who plucked goosefeathers from her own geese and had a spinning wheel and "knew how to use it" as told to my father.

When WWI came, my grandmother was the only one left at home to help out, as all the boys had gone off to war. Her sister Etta Minerva had married George Fink in 1910 and died in 1916. Grandma told my cousin that she took the money from working one harvest at that time and "put it all on her back" buying clothes. This picture, courtesy of cousin Sandra Pride, shows my grandmother during that time in front of Jake's bee hives. My grandmother's notation on the back of the original said "Going hunting. Ha!"

My grandmother wrote to me that she was in fifth grade when her mother Mary Jane suffered a stroke. She said that she had to quit school and stay home and nurse her mother because she could not walk for a while. She also wrote that Mary Jane had a bad heart. This would have been about 1909 or 1910. At any rate, Mary Jane lived until 1920, when she died on February 27. She is buried at Jonesville Cemetery, Roane Co.,Tennessee, next to her brother C.B. (Columbus B.) Alexander. The age on his tombstone is wrong, but my grandmother confirmed that he rested there.

Jake's faith was a great comfort to him. In 1920, he wrote some biographical information for my grandmother. It says that he joined the Mount Zion Baptist Church (later the George Jones Memorial church in Wheat) in October 1868. In the same document he wrote that he looked forward to seeing all all his children again "in the sweet fields of Eaden (sic)."

Jake lived at Jonesville until around 1927 or 1928, when he moved to be with his son Jim. He died 27 August 1933 and was buried at Sugar Grove Cemetery in Roane County.

©Alexis Hacker Scholz 2002-2014.