Keenest regret over the farm bell that belonged to Jefferson Davis’s father?
By a “man of sublime purposes and noble instincts.”
“A man of sublime purposes and noble instincts.
He led a life illuminated by truth and love.
As a father he was entirely devoted and his
keenest regret at death was loving his children.”
A decade after his family’s participation (as Tories) in the Battle of Ramsour’s Mill and four years after his father (my 5th great-grandfather) was sentenced to help “lay off a road from Beaties Ford to Lincolnton” as punishment for his participation in the battle, Abraham Keener Jr. (1752–1835) left Lincoln County, North Carolina and moved to Christian County, Kentucky. The Lincoln County court record documenting the sale of his belongings quote him as saying, simply, “Me leaving here.”
One of Jr.’s descendants, Andrew Jackson Kenner (1814–1884), would somehow acquire ownership of the Jefferson Davis homestead in Fairview, Kentucky after the Davis family left town in the early 1800s. Davis is believed to have stayed with the Kenner family when he visited his childhood home after the War of the Southern Rebellion, according to an email correspondence with another genealogy researcher directly descended from Kenner.
Kenner ran a tavern on the property in the 1870s and owned a large farm bell that was said to have been the property of the father of Jefferson Davis. “The bell, hung in a framework in front of the tavern, announced the approach of stage coaches, the hour of rising, and the time of meals” according to the Courier-Journal in Louisville in 1917. The bell was found that year in “an excellent state of preservation, about the size of a water bucket, and gives out a clear, silvery tone,” by workmen excavating the foundation for a new Davis monument on the grounds, which was completed in 1924.
According to the local paper: “There was a dispute among the Kenner heirs as to which one should inherit the bell. One night it mysteriously disappeared and was not seen again until uncovered by the workmen” in 1917. Kenner and his wife are buried nearby at the Kenner Family Cemetery, located next to the gift shop and visitors’ center. His “keenest regret at death was loving his children,” according to the epitaph engraved on his headstone (the opening quote for this post).
For more Keener family history, check out my book. You may also enjoy my first-edition eBook on the history of the so-called Christian flag, in which I document why it resembles the “Stainless Banner” of Davis’s so-called Confederacy.
