John Buchanan

Major John Buchanan (January 12, 1759 – November 7, 1832) was an American frontiersman and one of the founders of present-day Nashville, Tennessee. He is best known for defending his fort, Buchanan's Station, from an attack by a combined force of roughly 300 Chickamauga Cherokee, Muscogee Creek, and Shawnee warriors on September 30, 1792. The defenders of the stockade included fifteen gunmen and his wife, Sally Buchanan, (his second) who was heavily pregnant with their first child.

Settlement in Cumberland Twenty-year-old John Buchanan and his family arrived at the future Nashville during the unusually cold winter of 1779–1780, ahead of James Robertson's founding party according to several historians. After losing his brother Alexander at Ft. Nashborough's 1781 "Battle of the Bluff," Buchanan wrote Nashville's first book, John Buchanan's Book of Arithmetic.

After living approximately four years at Fort Nashborough, Buchanan and his family moved a few miles east and established Buchanan's Station on Mill Creek, at today's Elm Hill Pike and Massman Drive in Nashville. Around 1786, Buchanan married Margaret Kennedy, who died after giving birth to their first and only child, John Buchanan III, born on May 15, 1787. His second wife, Sarah Ridley, bore thirteen children: George, Alexander, Elizabeth, Samuel, William, Jane T., James B., Moses R., Sarah V., Charles B., Richard G., Henry R., and Nancy M.

As G.R. McGee writes in A History of Tennessee from 1663 to 1905, "n the summer of 1780 the Indians began to kill the settlers and hunters that they found alone or in small parties, and this was kept up all the season. There was no open attacks upon the settlements, but if a man went out to gather corn, to hunt, to feed his stock, or to visit a neighbor he was in constant danger of being shot by an Indian hidden away in a thicket or canebrake."

Attack on Buchanan's Station

On September 30, 1792, during the height of the Cherokee–American wars, approximately twenty defenders at Buchanan's Station held off several hundred Native Americans seeking to destroy all the Cumberland settlements. Buchanan and his compatriots stopped them—without the loss of a single stationer—before they could move on to attack the remainder of area settlements. Nineteenth-century historian J.G.M. Ramsey called this victory "a feat of bravery which has scarcely been surpassed in all the annals of border warfare."

Buchanan's Station was located on Mill Creek and consisted of a few buildings surrounded by a picket stockade and a blockhouse at the front gate overlooking the creek some four miles south of the infant settlement of Nashville. For most of the 19th century, Buchanan's Station was widely remembered as a symbol of the determination that created the State of Tennessee. Sally Buchanan was heralded in magazines and newspapers as well as listed in at least two national encyclopedias of biography (Appleton's and Herringshaw's).

Additional Information History of Nashville, Tennessee