History
Before there was a house.
The log house on Wolfpack Way was raised in the 1790’s by Charles Latimer, on ground his father had given him. The father is the reason the family was in Sumner County to give anything at all, and his record is worth setting down.
New London
Four generations in, and a Mayflower line.
Jonathan Latimer was born in New London, Connecticut, on May 27, 1724. He was the fourth generation of his family in the New World. His great grandfather Robert had come into Boston aboard the Hopewell in 1636. Through his mother, Borodell Denison, the line ran back to Elder William Brewster, who came on the Mayflower in 1620.
He followed his father into the Connecticut militia, and stayed in it, in one rank or another, for most of thirty years.
The first war
Lake George, a sloop, and a winter spent sick.
His service first appears in the campaign of 1755, as a private in the 1st Company, 2nd Regiment. That regiment fought at Lake George. On September 8, 1755, marching between Lake George and Fort Edward, the column was ambushed by French troops and their Native allies. The survivors fell back to Sir William Johnson’s camp, the French pressed the attack, and the line held until men from New Hampshire struck the French rear and turned it.
In June 1756 he boarded a sloop at Gardiner’s Wharf, bound for Fort Carillon. The Earl of Loudon went into winter quarters early and the attack never came. Many of the men sickened before they were dismissed. Jonathan was among those listed sick.
By 1757 he was a captain in the 5th Company, sent to relieve the survivors of Fort William Henry. Around this time the British began trying to replace colonial officers with their own. The Connecticut troops refused, and insisted on serving under the men they had chosen. That is early, and it is worth noticing.
He was commissioned captain a second time in March 1758, serving at Fort Edward alongside Israel Putnam and Richard Rogers, in an army raised to invade Canada. There is no record he ever went. Fighting ended in 1759 and the treaty came in 1763. After that the record thins to signatures on payrolls, and he went home to Chesterfield, near New London.
The schoolmaster
Nathan Hale boarded with the family.
In 1774 a young teacher named Nathan Hale came to New London and lodged with the Latimers. He taught thirty two students. Ten of them were Latimer children. In the opening years of the Revolution he served as a lieutenant under Jonathan.
The Revolution
Five sons, and a horse stolen at Winter Hill.
After Lexington and Concord in April 1775, riders went out for volunteers. Seventy men answered from New London, Jonathan and his brother Daniel among them. That September, Washington asked the Connecticut Council for troops at Boston. Jonathan’s men arrived on the first of October and were placed under General Sullivan’s brigade at Winter Hill.
Winter set in and men began to desert. One of them left with Jonathan’s horse. He advertised a ten dollar reward for it in the Connecticut Gazette on October 27, 1775, which is a small and very human thing to find in a military record.
Four of his sons served with him: Jonathan III, Witheral, Charles and George. His younger son Robert went as a fifer.
When the British left Boston in March 1776 and made for New York, Jonathan went too, as lieutenant colonel of the 4th Battalion in Samuel Selden’s regiment. They held the Brooklyn front at the Battle of Long Island on August 27, and he saw action at Long Island, White Plains and Harlem Heights. Retreating from Manhattan, the Connecticut men were caught at a crossroads by advancing Hessians and had to fight their way clear. Selden, his friend and commander, was taken prisoner and died weeks later in a British prison. Jonathan was made colonel of the regiment in his place.
Saratoga
A spent ball in a folded commission.
His most consequential service came at Saratoga in 1777, under General Enoch Poor. The Connecticut battalion held the line and counterattacked at Freeman’s Farm and Bemis Heights. Washington later called them two especially fine groups of militia.
He carried his new commission folded in the pocket of his long coat. A soldier remembered seeing him slap his hand against his leg in the middle of the fighting. Back at quarters a spent ball dropped out of his boot. It had lodged in the papers.
Benedict Arnold was at Saratoga too, and had been sent back to his tent after arguing with his superiors. When he heard the guns he took a horse and rode for the front. Passing a body of troops, he asked whose they were, and was told.
“Tell my old friend I will see him at the front.”
Benedict Arnold, on being told he was passing Colonel Jonathan Latimer’s men at Saratoga, 1777
Arnold helped lead those troops to victory that day. Saratoga is the battle that convinced the French the Americans could win, and brought them into the war.
New London
The same man, four years later.
Jonathan was later given command of the defense of New London. The harbor sheltered revolutionary privateers, and in September 1781 the British sent a general to put a stop to it. They sent Arnold.
He had grown up there. He knew the people, he had served with men from the town, and he knew the signals that would let ships into the harbor unchallenged. He gave them, and landed without opposition. He killed the defenders of Fort Griswold and set New London alight. Riding through the town, he stopped at the cemetery and looked at the grave of Jonathan Latimer Senior, the father of his good friend.
Jonathan’s second in command, Major Harris, told his men he had a terrible headache and went home. He never sent word that the British had landed. By the time Jonathan understood what was happening he had nowhere near the force to meet it, and could only harry the invaders back to their ships while the town burned, and many Latimer properties with it.
The town wanted to know how it had been allowed to happen. The commanding officers were censured and tried before a military tribunal. Jonathan was acquitted with honor.
Why they came west
Nine sons, two daughters, and not enough land to divide.
There is more than one account of why a prominent and comfortable family left Connecticut for the Tennessee frontier. Hard feelings after the burning is one. Arithmetic is another. Jonathan had nine sons and two daughters, and however much land a man holds, it does not divide eleven ways.
Two sons and a son in law came ahead in the late 1780’s to look at the country. The rest of the family followed by ox cart in 1790. Some stayed behind. Jonathan bought 640 acres along Station Camp Creek for two hundred pounds, and the family held land in Robertson, Rutherford and Davidson counties as well.
The land was cheap because it was dangerous.
The cost
What the frontier took from them.
Nathaniel, the youngest, rode with a militia unit under Lieutenant Samuel Snoddy pursuing a raiding party. He was killed in an ambush at Rock Island alongside David Scoby. By some accounts the ball passed through Nathaniel and struck his brother, spent, and did him no harm.
Robert died suddenly, and it is thought he never recovered from wounds.
Witheral was inside Buchanan’s Station on September 30, 1792, when a combined force of some three hundred Cherokee, Shawnee and Creek fighters came against it, sent to destroy the settlement at Nashville. A night of hard fighting turned them back.
The land to Charles
Which is how this house comes to exist.
Jonathan gave land to his son Charles. Charles cut the timber on that ground and raised the house in the 1790’s, and it is still standing.
Colonel Jonathan Latimer died in 1806, at eighty two. He never seems to have sought much recognition for any of it. He turned up when he was called, which he was, repeatedly, for fifty years.
Sources
Where this comes from.
This account was researched and written by Jim Latimer, a direct descendant of the family that built this house and a member of the committee that worked to save it.
For the raid on New London, see Matthew Reardon, The Traitor’s Homecoming: Benedict Arnold’s Raid on New London, Connecticut, September 4 to 13, 1781. For Jonathan himself, see John Wilson, Colonel Jonathan: An American Story.