John Dabney Terrell, Sr.

John Dabney Terrell Sr. (1775–1850), surveyor and planter, was born in Bedford County, Va., and died in Marion County, Ala. He is the son of Revolutionary War veteran, Captain Harry Terrell, and the grandson of Joel Terrell from Richmond, Virginia, a man of Quaker ancestry.

John's father, Captain Harry of Hanover Court House, Va., served in the Continental army, worked the land as a planter and bought enslaved persons of African descent. He eventually moved with his family from Virginia into North-Carolina, and after a short stint in Lower Sauratown, an abandoned Indian village on the Dan River in northeastern Rockingham County, he moved to Pendleton District (now Pickens and Anderson Counties), South Carolina, where he settled and farmed a plot of ground along the Big Eastatoe Creek. Being a veteran of the Revolutionary War, he was entitled to land grants, but it wasn't until after Harry's death in 1798 that some of his children applied for a land bounty for his service in the Revolutionary Army. After the death of John's father, John D. Terrell uprooted thence and moved with his family into Franklin County, Georgia, and after failed business ventures there, he moved with his family in ca. 1814 into Marion County, Alabama, (then known as Tuscaloosa County) in what was then the Alabama Territory, where he built a plantation near the Military Ford along the Buttahatchee River, immediately south of present-day Hamilton, Ala. (formerly called Toll Gate), and seven miles north of Pikeville. In 1813, John Dabney Terrell Sr. had been given Power of Attorney to apply for a land warrant on behalf of himself and his siblings. In 1817, they were allotted 5,333 acres of land, twenty-three hundred of which was in the State of Ohio, and was sold by them for fifty cents per acre. It is said that after the War of 1812 Terrell accommodated the troops of General Andrew Jackson while he was constructing the military road from Natchez to Nashville and had camped at the Military Ford of the Buttahatchee River, a place along the route. This place afforded travelers with a rock and sand bottom for easy crossing.

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