It is Women’s History Month and a time to celebrate some women that are part of Blount County history. Many endured unknown emotional and physical hardships. One is Mary Elizabeth Gardiner Burchfield. Her tale is twisty, often sad, but it is a story of a woman with courage and determination.
Mary Elizabeth Gardiner was born in Glascow, Scotland in 1832. Her family immigrated to the United States in the mid-1840s due to the extreme famine in Scotland. Mary Elizabeth retained her Irish brogue, likely because she was almost grown when her family came here.
The family settled in the Chilhowee/Old Piney area. Mary’s father was a wool carder in Scotland and continued that in Blount County.
John Palmer Burchfield was the son of Moses Yates Burchfield and Ruthia Palmer. They were former residents of Cades Cove. Moses and Ruthia also moved to the Chilhowee/Old Piney area.
In 1853 Mary Gardiner married John Palmer Burchfield. In the next years they had two children, Elizabeth Jane, and John Glascow. Mary Elizabeth Gardiner Burchfield was pregnant with her third child in 1858. John Palmer Burchfield was deputized at some point. He was to guard a local man who was charged with stabbing another man. Instead of bringing the man to the Justice of the Peace, John Palmer Burchfield and some others began drinking. Some other men arrived, and the prisoner escaped.
John Palmer Burchfield left immediately on March 18, 1858, to get out of Tennessee himself. He went to Illinois where his sister resided. His third child, Agnus Caledonia was born a few weeks later.
John Burchfield continued to write to his wife to inquire if it was safe to come home. Months later he tells her not to write back that he will try to make some money to come home.
All this time Mary stayed home and tried to make enough money to raise her three children. She opened her home to boarders. In 1861 John Palmer Burchfield joined the Union Army. He married again. Months later John Palmer Burchfield was listed on the death count at Shiloh.
Mary may have known of what John Palmer Burchfield did after he left Blount County but feeding her children was likely her priority. In 1863 she gave birth to her fourth child, Margaret Isabella. Her fifth child, William Thomas, a son, was born in 1866.
That same year she applied for and received a Civil War widow’s pension of eight dollars a month and two dollars per each minor child. She received back pay and with that she purchased a 60 acre farm on Miller’s Cove Road for $480. She was teaching and keeping boarders. In 1867 she lost her pension for “alleged immoral conduct and disloyalty to her country”. Evidently some neighbors had reported that she had children after her husband’s death, one of mixed race.
Mary obtained a teaching certificate in 1868. As a widow Mary qualified as she was unmarried. She had to remain unmarried to teach. She appealed the pension loss and others of her neighbors testified to her as being a hard working woman who had instructed their children.
Mary Elizabeth Gardiner had her last child, James Richard, in 1871. A few years later her pension and that of John Palmer Burchfield’s three children was reinstated. Mary Elizabeth Gardiner Burchfield continued to work as a teacher and sustenance farmer and to raise her six children alone. The parentage of her last three children is unknown.
Recently a headstone containing a thistle, the symbol of Scotland honoring her was placed at Old Piney Grove Cemetery by her second great granddaughter, Carol Martin Satterfield, another courageous woman, who provided the researched information for this story.
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